Nicaraguan Contradictions

WHEN ASKED by friend to describe his visit to Nicaragua, Indian novelist Salman Rushdie replied, "I've been taking snapshots....There's not much more one can do in a few weeks." He was right. In The Jaguar Smile, the result of his three week stay in the embattled country last summer, Rushdie attempts to bring reality to a controversy too often plagued by abstraction. But while his two-dimensional snapshots do not make for a convincing political argument, Rushdie does succeed in injecting a startling dose reality into the otherwise hollow debate over U.S. Central American policy.

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey

By Salman Rushdie

Viking; 171 pp.; $12.95.

As an observer rather than critic, Rushdie performs brilliantly, transforming a spot on a map into a sweating, struggling panorama of life. He shows us a Nicaragua whose leaders use poetry as a shield against death, in which "liberation" theology challanges traditional Vatican primacy and Bruce Springsteen blares above the cries of sunbronzed street vendors.

A product of triumphant Indian revolution against the British, Rushdie should bring a fresh viewpoint to the Central' American debate, using his uncommon background to comment insightfully from a vantage point few Western critics can claim:

When the Reagan administration began its war against Nicaragua, I recognized a deeper affinity with that small country in a continent upon which I had never set foor....[A]fter all, I was myself the child of a successful revolt against a great power [and had] at least some knowledge of what weakness is like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and of how it felt to be there, on the bottom, looking up at the descending heel.

Unfortunately Rushdie rests his case on banal political rhetoric; what little analysis The Jaguar Smile does offer makes a Big Mac look like a cordon bleu original.

TIME AFTER time, Rushdie asks his Sandinista hosts a valid political question, to which, time after time, the Nicaraguan leaders respond predictably. And, time after time after time, Rushdie accepts their response with no follow-up and no evaluation. The book is a jungle of dangling assertions.

His lack of analysis undermines Rushdie's credibility from the very first chapter. How can one believe the Sandinistas' statement that the contras pose no real threat while in the same breath they point to devestating damage inflicted by the US-backed rebels? Rushdie is trapped by contradictions that he never even sees. In a country of boy soldiers who are "already so familiar with death that they have lost respect for it," in a country that has lost the equivalent of an entire year's production to war the causes of conflict beg to be addressed.

As President Ortega tells Rushdie, la Cia is responsible for most of the contras' strength. Popular support for the Managua regime is demonstrated by the Sandinistas' ability to arm peasants to fight against the contras without fear of an uprising. But why have the Miskito Indians, who live at the heart of the war zone not been similarily armed? This book offers no explanation, despite Rushdie's claim that the Sandinistas and Miskitos have reached a reconciliation.

RUSHDIE GOES farther than simply presenting the straight "party line," however. He comes across as an apologist for Managua. For example, he announces that the Sandinistas can be excused for their past repression of the Miskitos because that tribe, he claims, bullied its neighbors. Yet even the Sandinistas admit their guilt on this matter. Rushdie makes excuses for past Sandinista excesses which now even they find inexcusable.

Although in general The Jaguar Smile ignores the plight of the Nicaraguan middle class, Rushdie does make one anomalous attempt to critically evaluate the closing of La Prensa, Nicaragua's main opposition newspaper. While he does not support this move, Rushdie asserts that the government should not be condemned for it. If we look at the broader picture of the country's civil liberties, he argues, the Sandinistas come off looking not nearly so bad as it is portrayed by the Reagan Administration.

This is a valid, if trite, argument. But again, Rushdie cannot leave well-enough alone. Speaking with Violetta Chamorro, matriarch of the La Prensa "family," he stops believing her the moment he notices that she is wearing jewelry. She is rich and therefore cannot be trusted. His objectivity, as much as hers, is brought into question by such prejudgement. Rushdie claims he went to Nicaragua looking for answers. But he seems to have known all along what he wanted to find.