THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Poetry, Prose, Politics : Feminism and social change will always be major themes in Gioconda Belli’s work. But she’s learning to ignite the passions of others rather than lead their struggles.

A kind of controlled chaos has overtaken Gioconda Belli’s spacious Santa Monica home on a recent Friday afternoon. In an upstairs bedroom, her daughter and another toddler struggle for control of a well-stocked toy box. Across the hallway Belli’s husband, Charlie Castaldi, does some noisy interior decorating while teen-age son Camilo makes several dutiful trips from the garage to the top of the tile stairs.

Gloria Estefan blares from a living room stereo, adding to the cacophony.

Some writers require the peace and solitude of Trappist monks, but Belli thrives on disorder. From her earliest poems, written beneath the clouds of revolution in her native Nicaragua, to her first novel, begun at the height of the U.S.-supported Contra war against Managua, Belli learned to work without the luxury of stability.

So while she makes attempts to blend into her quiet, upscale neighborhood here, the clamor within the house feels as Latin American as the banana tree in the garden.

“I like it because it’s more like me,” she says of Southern California. “Every time I look outside I see the banana leaves, and it’s very comforting. (And) seeing so many people that appear from Central America gives me a sense that I can belong here.”

The transition from Third World to First may have been easy, but Belli’s recent shift from poet to novelist has been a challenge. But then challenge--and contradiction--is what has long defined Gioconda Belli.

Raised on the debutante balls and country club parties of Managua’s upper crust, she grew up to help lead a bloody insurrection on behalf of the poor. Educated in a conservative Catholic school, she went on to write some of the most scandalous poetry ever published in Spanish.

“She’s contributed a lot to the new way women are thinking in Latin America,” says Marjorie Agosin, a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College and a widely acclaimed Chilean poet in her own right. “The poetry she wrote is very important. Her writing celebrates political freedom and the joys of sexuality.”

While her poetry may have been an artistic success, her prose may prove a commercial one. Her first novel, “The Inhabited Woman,” has sold more than 500,000 copies. In Germany, it was honored as the best political novel of 1989. The book has been translated into six languages, including Turkish, Finnish and Greek; the English version, released by Curbstone Press in April, is required reading at four universities.

A second work, “Sofia of the Omens,” is also available in several languages. But Belli wants to keep it off U.S. bookshelves until her novel-in-progress, which she believes will have wider commercial appeal, is published.

She gave little thought to such marketing strategy when she began writing poetry 25 years ago. Although that early work broke important ground, it was largely unknown in the United States except to professors of Spanish literature or women’s studies, or to close followers of the Nicaraguan revolution. Still, Belli says it was her desire to attract a larger audience, not a larger royalty check, that motivated her to tackle prose.

“My poetry, I think, is very intimate,” Belli says. “. . . It is all filtered through my own experience, through my own body, through my own love life. So there came a point when . . . I felt that I could not say in my poetry what I wanted to say about the collective experience.”

Many of Belli’s poems deal with equality--sexual and political. The first of her five collections, released in 1974, dealt largely with society’s hypocrisy toward women. Despite its provocative theme for the time, the book earned Belli a national poetry prize given by Nicaragua’s largest university.

A year later, her focus widened. Her work on behalf of the clandestine Sandinista National Liberation Front had forced her into exile in Mexico, where she felt free to begin addressing politics.

During her first four months there, as she was being tried and convicted in absentia for plotting against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, Belli wrote much of what later became “Linea de Fuego” (“Line of Fire”), a 1978 poetry collection that won the Casa de las Americas prize, the most prestigious award in the Spanish-language literary world.

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Feminism and progressive politics remain the major themes in Belli’s work. In “The Inhabited Women” her protagonist, Laviana, whose adventures largely shadow Belli’s, confronts both the brutal repression of the government and the machismo of the guerrilleros.

Naomi Wolf, meet Che Guevara.

“I think that there is a tendency in feminism and in feminist literature to talk about the ordeal of the woman and the woman as victim,” Belli says. “It’s an ongoing discussion still. (But) what I am trying to do is talk as a woman who is a maker of history and not just an object of history and a subject of history.”

Belli could certainly be considered a maker of history. Before being forced to flee Nicaragua, she helped plan a Christmastime commando raid on the house of Somoza supporter Chema Castillo, holding several prominent Nicaraguans hostage until the government released several political prisoners and paid $1 million in ransom.

During her four years in exile in Mexico and Costa Rica, she played a major role in winning international recognition for the Sandinistas, traveling throughout Europe and South America to drum up support for the rebels and decry the human rights record of the Somoza government. She says she also took part in more dangerous missions, such as providing safehouses for combatants, smuggling arms into Nicaragua and issuing secret communiques.

By the time the rebels took power in July, 1979, Belli was one of just two survivors from her original Sandinista cell of 10. And the insurrection had become known as “The Revolution of Poets” because many prominent writers had helped bring about its triumph. Many of them, including Belli, returned to Managua to help the new government construct its utopian dream.

Daniel Ortega, who would become president, was an accomplished poet, as were future Minister of the Interior Tomas Borge, union leader Rosario Murillo and Daisy Zamora, a vice minister of culture. Future Vice President Sergio Ramirez was a widely acclaimed novelist, and guerrilla hero Omar Cabezas would later become one as well.

“The revolution was a cultural event, just as culture is a revolutionary event,” says the poet Ernesto Cardenal, a Nobel Prize nominee and former minister of culture under the Sandinistas.

For her part, Belli was put to work developing the ruling party’s TV station, and hosting a televised talk show. She later helped run Ortega’s successful 1984 presidential campaign, then became managing director of the government’s advertising and publicity corporation before quitting, in 1986, to concentrate on her writing.

As the combination of romance and self-sacrifice that had symbolized the revolution began to fade, so did the support of the intellectuals. Belli was among the first to rebel, calling for the Nicaraguans to either redefine themselves to reflect the new political and cultural reality or risk becoming irrelevant.

That never happened. So last November, in a lengthy poem published in the Managua newspaper El Nuevo Diario, Belli joined Cardenal and others in formally breaking with the Sandinista party.

“I was very disappointed during the revolution that we were not able to do more. My expectations were bigger,” Belli says now. “And of course we had the (Contra) war . . . but we also made a lot of mistakes . . . .

“When you have so many people that have died for an idea, for a cause, you cannot betray it. Daniel Ortega and all these people now, they only care about power.”

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Within the white and terra-cotta buildings that make up the Government House complex along Managua’s Avenida Bolivar, Belli’s renunciation of the Sandinistas was likely a major topic of conversation. After all, her former next-door neighbor, Violeta Chamorro, is Nicaragua’s current president and her brother, Humberto Belli, is the minister of education.

Appointed to his post after Chamorro unseated the Sandinistas in the 1990 presidential elections, Humberto Belli is the political opposite of his sister. He is so intent on stamping out the ideas long championed by her and her colleagues that he has banned many of the old history textbooks chronicling the revolution.

Politics, however, has not separated the Bellis, long one of Nicaragua’s wealthiest and most prominent families. When Gioconda makes one of her frequent trips back to Managua, where she maintains a house along an exclusive section of the city’s Carretera Sur, party loyalties are left at the door.

Belli’s mother died four years ago. Her father, a successful but politically liberal businessman during the Somoza years, still lives in Managua and closely follows his children’s careers.

“My father used to call my books pornographic,” Gioconda Belli says. “(But) I had a very good sexual education in my home. I remember one of the most wonderful memories of growing up, of my teen-age years, was when my mother sat me down and told me about my period and how my body was changing. She told me how my body was going to start being so powerful that I was going to be able to give birth, to reproduce life.

“And I also remember her talking to me about lovemaking and the relationship between a woman and man and how beautiful it was. It was the ultimate form of communication. So I grew up very uninhibited. I never thought that sex was wrong, sinful, dirty. When you take away the thought of things being dirty or forbidden, then you can really enjoy your sensuality.”

Belli uses poetry to express her most intimate thoughts, and, ironically, also as a vehicle to upbraid her former political colleagues. Those very colleagues, some critics argue, helped make her a force in Latin American literature in the first place.

“Belli is associated with the revolution,” says Claudia Ferman, a professor of Latin American literature at the University of Richmond. “I’m not saying she’s not important. I’m just saying that she was not the only one (writing erotic poetry). The question of Latin American politics has helped in spreading the work of some authors.”

Ferman acknowledges that the attention Belli earned through her political courage opened doors for many lesser poets and helped make feminist writing acceptable, even fashionable, in places where machismo reigns. She recalls the story of one writer who began to fear social gatherings after some men misinterpreted her poetry as a come-on. “Now women can talk about sex the way each of them perceive it,” she says. “Before, they had to be silent.”

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With the sexual revolution in Latin America under way, Belli intends to turn her feminist sensibilities against society’s infatuation with youth.

“I want to put my capacity for words in the service of trying to vindicate that process of becoming a mature person,” she says. “The beauty that there is in reaching this age and reaching maturity and the maturity and the eroticism that continues to be when . . . even if . . . you know how much, how full . . .”

Here Belli gives up the fight and switches quickly to Spanish to complete her thought. On the printed page she has masterly control of language, but conversation frequently frustrates her. When the right word eludes her, she shifts from English to Spanish and back again, searching for the perfect match.

“That’s what we writers do: We are constantly trying to make words express the precise meaning. Because that’s what you are working with,” she says. “If you are putting together a machine and you can’t find the right screw, then the thing doesn’t come together the way it should. You can’t put in a screw that doesn’t fit.”

Belli admits that she may spend an entire day looking for the right “screw” to complete a sentence. That might not seem extravagant for someone working on a 20-line poem, but it sure can hold up a 400-page novel. Trying to reconcile the fastidiousness of a poet with the pace of a novelist is part of the challenge.

When she steps inside the third-floor loft she uses as an office, Belli is very much a woman possessed by her craft. Surrounded by a battery of telephones--each with the ringer turned off and an answering machine turned on--she chain-smokes from a carton of Camels and stares into a laptop computer for as many as six hours a day.

Away from her work, Belli fades comfortably into the background, occasionally adding a laugh or wry comment to the surrounding conversation. Beneath long, curly hair that seems a perpetual bother, she looks much younger than her 46 years.

Despite Southern California’s huge Latino population, Belli’s move to Santa Monica in the winter of 1993 was a quiet one. A legal resident of the United States, she came here to support Castaldi, a former National Public Radio reporter whom she met during the 1984 Nicaraguan elections, in his efforts to start a film production company. Even now she remains anonymous to all but a few neighbors, preferring to spend scant social time with old friends from Managua.

Work is not the only thing cutting into the couple’s free time. There is also 1-year-old Adriana, whom they adopted last spring after she was abandoned near a police station in Managua.

Although Belli has three other children--Maryam, a 27-year-old architect; Melissa, a 20-year-old medical student, and 16-year-old Camilo, a sophomore at a private school in Santa Monica--from previous relationships, only Adriana was represented on the family Christmas card this year.

“It was love at first sight,” Belli says of her first encounter with the infant at a government-sponsored day-care center in Managua. “This baby looked at me with her big eyes and there was this incredible connection. I was completely in love with that child when I came out of that place.”

Adriana’s birth parents are likely among the nearly three-fourths of Nicaraguans who cannot find work--many of them poor campesinos from the countryside who have flooded the capital. These desperately poor people are the ones the revolution was supposed to help.

Belli looks around her home as she recalls the years spent trying to persuade the poor to act on their plight. She could never truly feel their pain, just as they could never fully trust her motives.

“Sometimes I feel guilty about all this,” she says of her wealth. “What I try to do now is write. I think my contribution is going to be through literature. Maybe I don’t dream dreams anymore about ‘the people.’ I think sometimes one harms the people more than benefits them by trying to think for them and trying to do things for them.

“And now what I want to do is accept who I am and use my privileges, try to use my intelligence, try to use my knowledge, my education, to ignite the imagination of people. I think that’s the most I can aspire to.”

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Gioconda Belli Age: 46

Native?: No. Born in Managua, Nicaragua; resides in Santa Monica.

Family: Married to former National Public Radio reporter Charlie Castaldi since 1987. The couple has one adopted daughter, 1-year-old Adriana. Belli also has two daughters, Maryam, 27, and Melissa, 20, and a son, Camilo, 16, from previous relationships.

On writing poetry: “Poetry for me is very easy. It’s like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling and the first line of the poem comes into my head and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.”

On writing novels: “Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk. . . . You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It’s the closest thing to feeling like a God that you can come to.”

On the difference between Spanish and English: “The adjectives in Spanish are richer than in English. There is a wealth in the Spanish language for poetry. . . . the way you express not so much feelings, but sounds. Spanish has incredible words that you just can’t find in English.”

On being a woman: “There is a biological power that is intrinsic to the woman, to the female condition. Because you are able to give life. You are the reproducer of the species. Men feel very weak in front of a woman because a woman is capable of eliciting a number of instincts in a man. And that is what has made men very nervous about women.