The nefelibatas

The Nefelibatas

By: Cristiana Guevara-Mena

Up and up, but be

careful, Nefelibata,

that among the clouds

you can also mess up.

-Antonio Machado

Nefelibata. What a strange word, right? It’s a Spanish word that refers to people living in dreamy clouds. It was formed from the Greek words Nephèle (cloud) and bates (he who walks). Rubén Darío, who was the first to use it, used it in his poem Epistle, which was written in honor of the wife of Leopoldo Lugones, a poet, essayist, journalist, and an Argentinean politician. This curious word is widely used among highly educated people to refer to poets, who are always living in the clouds and do not like living their own reality.

Having understood the meaning of this strange word, let's talk a little about the poets in general. For as long as mankind has existed, man has interpreted his reality through figures and songs, the drama of his own reality. In the Greek world, there were authors like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who were the three great tragic poets of ancient Greece, who by their stories of love and fights told stories of the conflicts in Greek society. The troubadours of the Middle Ages brought the truth to life for people through songs, dances, and epic romantic poems. Let us move now to America. In Cuba, the famous Cuban poet José Martí, was consistent with what he wrote. He was a fighter for the freedom of his country and gave his life on the battlefield. In Nicaragua, Ruben Dario in Ode to Roosevelt described the international relations between the U.S. and Nicaragua, a relationship that is still a dramatic situation. Also, authors and political actors, such as Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Carlos Fonseca Amador, used their writings to reflect their ideological thinking and the vision of reality that surrounded them.

We cannot deny that our country is going through a dark, sad, and dramatic moment. Here, the truth is forged, and the values ‌‌are suffocated by a totalitarian and mediocre propaganda spread throughout the country. This is intended to hijack the imagination of all Nicaraguans, intimidating outstanding personalities by forcing them to commit intellectual suicide through voluntary self-censorship. Let us know that this behavior is promoted by the person responsible for the diffusion of culture and government.

The generation to which I belong, who were born in the eighties, note and criticize our parents’ generation for being incompetent, corrupt, ignorant, and arrogant, which has led us to the sad situation we are in today. My generation wants to find in local poets and writers the expression of what we live, and the protest and resistance to the intellectual kidnapping. We do not accept or allow the current poets to live a Nefelibata, to write only about their confessions or their toxic world of depressions that they carry as a banner, because it would be a dishonest betrayal of the need for freedom of our people. We want to find in the poets and writers of our generation who publish in the XXI century, new ideas that fit the current situation. We want them to manifest, without fear and with much patriotism, their action in solidarity with the rest of the population, under the various artistic and cultural expressions. It would not be the first time that it is done in our poetic history of Nicaragua.

It is through these words, not as an author, but as a citizen born in the years of the "dark night", that I ask the poets of my generation to turn their eyes towards our reality full of anguish, fear, outrage, etc. that all Nicaraguans share (with the exception of those who are loyal and obedient to the current government). I demand them, as one more of this generation, to express courageously and with beautiful poetry the reality that our people live in, to assume their role and their responsibility. Because if they don‘t, the absence of this expression should be understood as a cowardly complicity by their voluntary self-censorship, and they will go down in history as the Nefelibata poets living in silence. As Octavio Paz says in the preface to his work Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz or the traps of faith: "Ignoring the relationship between society and poetry would be a mistake as serious as ignoring the relationship between the writer's life and work".