Eve Wasn't Evil
Pilar R. Veiga - EFE
Mar 03, 2008
Madrid -- Writer Gioconda Belli never believed that Eve was "the evil" in the Garden of Eden, and that is why she has recreated a poetic and different version of the story in "El infinito en la palma de la mano," the novel that won the most recent Biblioteca Breve de Seix Barral Prize.
The Nicaraguan author is currently in Spain, where she has published her book and said in an interview with Efe that she is feeling the same feeling as "when a child comes into the world."
With an extensive body of poetry to her credit, she selected the title for her new work from lines by William Blake:
To see a world in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
She admits to not being religious and hopes that the Catholic Church does not feel offended by her book, because what she has done was to "reread" the story of Adam and Eve from another perspective, especially denying "Eve's guilt."
Belli's fascination with Adam's companion motivated her - even as early as the 1970s - to sign opinion pieces she wrote with the pseudonym Eva Salvatierra, and in the '80s she published a book of poems she entitled "De la costilla de Eva" (From Eve's rib).
Now she has written about Paradise after "coming across" apocryphal texts and different versions of the Old and New Testaments.
The various texts and versions of the Bible came together in her imagination and in the author's poetic vein, and the process resulted in the current version of the life of Adam and Eve told as "a philosophical game," she said.
She locates the Garden of Eden between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers - dedicating the book to the innocent victims of the war in Iraq, which she calls "a terrible crime" - and she changes the prohibited fruit from an apple into a fig.
"The apple is from the Middle Ages, and painters chose it because it was more esthetic," she said, adding that she presents the serpent as a much more "entertaining and close" character than God.
Another of the themes that Belli introduces as a novelty in the book is that Cain and Abel each were born with a twin sister, as the Apocrypha recounts.
The softspoken author said that Cain fell in love with his twin sister and did not want her to become involved with Abel, and this jealousy led him to kill his brother, a version that she said "is more logical than what the Bible says."
Good and evil are aspects of the same reality, Belli said, adding that "the constant confrontation that we human being have between using our talents for good or for evil has been one of the greatest dichotomies of the species."
The author, who said she does not understand the concept of eternity, explained that "what I wanted to show in the novel is that in the face of every human need one has to decide what to do with one's freedom."
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