And God made me a woman: Nicaraguan author Gioconda Belli intertwines the erotic, the poetic, and the political with a non-conformist feminine voice.

• Author: Herrera, Adriana

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The fact that the 2008 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award went to Infinity in the Palm of her Hand (El infinito en la palma de la mano) , a novel by Gioconda Belli, is a fitting recognition of the affinity between the seventeenth-century nun and the Nicaraguan author. Sor Juana was the greatest poet of the Americas at a time when ouly men had access to studies. Gioconda Belli passed through her own fires of social censure in the 1970s and carne through the storms, scandals, and exile with resilient power.

Earlier this decade, Belli published an autobiography, The Country Under my Skin (El país bajo mi piel) , about her intense life journey. The subtitle gives you an idea: Memoirs of Love and War .

In those fateful days when poets like Leonel Rugama and Ricardo Morales Avilés were losing their lives in the struggle against the Somoza dictatorship, Gioconda Belli--who had studied with nuns in Spain and in the United States and had married too young at age eighteen--was discovering the taboo of forbidden love and the shaky sands on which her comfortable social universe was resting. She burst into public life in a country where every man wanted to be Rubén Darío, but no one expected a woman to write transcendent verse--much less words of dissent--with poems that were an insurrection in themselves.

As a nun in Mexico, Juana de Asbaje (the last name that Sor Juana used when she entered the court of Vicereine Leonor Carreto) wrote incomparable verses about love that dared to challenge sexual inequality and double standards. (Who shall bear the heavier blame, when remorse the twain enthralls, she, who for the asking, falls, or he who, asking, brings to shame? ) She was eventually forced to go before Church inqulsitors to defend her inalienable right to think and to create. Gioconda Belli, for her part, advocated for her right to express herself openly using erotic language, as only men seemed to be allowed to do even at the end of the twentieth century. Some of her poems have the fiery joyful sensuality of "Y Dios me hizo mujer" [And God Made me a Woman] in which she celebrates the thousand and one things that make me a woman every day / that make me wake up proud / every morning / and I bless my sex . Others are verses like "Rebelión," defying the absolute powers of her time: God said: Love your neighbor as yourself./ In my country, people who love their neighbors are risking their lives .

"My poems were not explicit, much less...