Dianne Walta Hart has woven together lengthy interviews with a Nicaraguan family to provide an intimate account of what the country’s celebrated revolution meant for everyday folk in their daily life. The interviews began with the author’s chance encounter with an engaging and politicized woman in the northwestern city of Estelí. Their conversations, which stretched over four years, extended to include the woman’s mother, sister, and brother.
The saga of the family is captured in a simple declarative sentence by the family matriarch: “My life is a sad story” (p. 32). Although the interviews take place between 1984 and 1987, the apex of the Sandinistas’ attempted transformation of society and the counterrevolution’s bid to overthrow the Sandinistas, much of the family’s material and emotional difficulties can be traced to poverty and the clash of personalities. Stable and remunerative employment is, and always has been, elusive. Equally tragic, aspirations of marriage and family are continually frustrated by petty conflicts and infidelity.
The revolution appears as an intrusive backdrop to family life. Although there are sporadic gifts of hope and dignity, more often it complicates the search for a livelihood and the effort at family felicity. The not-so-distant war between the government and the counterrevolution generates deep fears, and the inflation that accompanied Sandinista rule becomes a thief in the larder.
Particularly for a university press publication, this book is unusual. It reads more like a novel (albeit one without a plot) than scholarship. In the introduction Hart sets her work in the tradition of oral history, and she does recount, through interviews, the story of a family at a vexing place and time in history. Perhaps that achievement is enough. However, maybe more should be asked of such an endeavor, either that some parallels be drawn or some conclusions reached. Are the particular and the ordinary of interest if not linked to the general and the extraordinary? I have reservations.
