The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey

123 Pages·2008·0.9 MB·English

by  Salman Rushdie

Praise for
The Jaguar Smile
“Written with a novelist’s eye for irony and metaphor … [Rushdie] is
able to make us see that the factual reality of this country already verges
on the surreal.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“To say of The Jaguar Smile that it is a work of art is to take full note of
its literary allusions, its uncompromising sensitivity to death and
destruction, its ready political eye for the funny and grotesque, and
above all its understated and gripping eloquence.”
—E W. S
DWARD AID
“A look at intelligence struggling, with limited success, not to be entirely
extinguished in the service of faith … an account of the confusion any
one of us might feel if we visited Nicaragua and gave it a chance to
affect us, because it is an inescapably affecting land, crashing through
abrupt change that escapes the easy categories of ideologues … good
reading.”
—The New York Times
“The account that emerges … is, as one would expect, quickened by a
novelist’s eye.… Compelling.”
—Time
ALSO BY SALMAN RUSHDIE
FICTION
Grimus
Midnight’s Children
Shame
The Satanic Verses
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
East, West
The Moor’s Last Sigh
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Fury
Shalimar the Clown
NONFICTION
Imaginary Homelands
The Wizard of Oz
Step Across This Line
SCREENPLAY
Midnight’s Children
ANTHOLOGY
Mirrorwork (co-editor)

2008 Random House Trade Paperback Edition Copyright © 1987, 1997 by Salman Rushdie All
rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random
House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Viking, a division of Penguin Group
(USA), Inc., and in London by Pan Books in 1987.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Marxist Educational Press for permission to reprint the
English translations of the poems that appear on this page–this page, this page–this page, this
page, this page–this page, and this page. All translations were originally published in Nicaragua
in Revolution: The Poets Speak, edited by Brigit Aldaracia, Edward Baker, Ileana Rodriguez, and
Marc Zimmerman (Minneapolis, MN: Marxist Educational Press, 1980). Reprinted by permission
of Marxist Educational Press.
eISBN: 978-0-30778666-1
www.atrandom.com
v3.1
For Robbie
There was a young girl of Nic’ragua
Who smiled as she rode on a jaguar.
They returned from the ride
With the young girl inside
And the smile on the face of the jaguar.
A
NON
Map of Nicaragua
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Preface to the 1997 Edition
Hope: A Prologue
1 Sandino’s Hat
2 The Road to Camoapa
3 Poets on the Day of Joy
4 Madame Somoza’s Bathroom
5 Estelí
6 The Word
7 Eating the Eggs of Love
8 Abortion, Adulthood and God
9 On Catharsis
10 Market Day
11 El Señor Presidente
12 The Other Side
13 Doña Violeta’s Version
14 Miss Nicaragua and the Jaguar
Silvia: An Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
PREFACE TO THE 1997 EDITION
t’s ten years since The Jaguar Smile was published. It was my first
I
nonfiction book, and I well remember the shock of emerging, for the
first time, from the (relatively) polite world of literature into the rough-
and-tumble of the political arena. In the United States, then deeply
involved in the ‘low-intensity’ proxy war against Nicaragua, the
tumbling was particularly rough. After my publication party in New
York, I found myself at dinner at a wealthy uptown address, surrounded
by the bien-pensant liberal élite. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on hearing that
I’d written a book about Nicaragua, embarking on a debunking of the
Sandinistas that focused wittily on their mode of dress and lack of good
society manners. This was a warning sign. If American liberals were so
casually dismissive, conservatives were bound to be worse.
And so it proved. A prominent radio interviewer, in a live broadcast,
greeted me with the question: ‘Mr Rushdie, to what extent are you a
Communist stooge?’ The New Republic gave the book an immensely long
and rude review, perhaps the most vitriolic I’d ever received. It turned
out to have been written by one of the most important figures in the
Contra leadership. I was inexperienced enough, in those days, to be
genuinely surprised that a respectable journal should so brazenly
abandon the principle of critical objectivity for the sake of some
controversial copy. I am more worldly now.
In the last ten years, the world has changed so dramatically that The
Jaguar Smile now reads like a period piece, a fairy tale of one of the
hotter moments in the Cold War. ‘The Soviet Union’ and ‘Cuba’ are
bogeymen that have long since lost their power to scare us. And in
Nicaragua, the Contra war finally took its toll. A war-weary electorate
voted out the FSLN, electing, instead, the same Doña Violeta Chamorro
whom I had rather caustically described in my pages. Daniel Ortega
surprised, even impressed, many of his international opponents by