Nancy Morejón
Island poet shares a universal soul

Evan Wilder/Adelante

Excerpts from “Looking Within/Mirar Adentro,” by Nancy Morejón, edited by Juanamaría Cordones-Cook

“...I write because I must; the impulse to write is irrational....”

By Olivia Doerge
Adelante staff writer

NANCY MOREJón Nancy Morejón, Poetry Reading and Book Presentation 7 p.m. April 24, Stotler Lounge, Free admission www.adelanteonline.com

The fingers of sunrays stretch toward the earth but always point back toward their radiant origin. Nancy Morejón is a sun; the facets of her character as an Afro-Cuban female poet and artist stretch toward all of humanity, each ray distinct and poignant, but always pointing back toward the common human experience.
She will return to Columbia to share that experience this month. The internationally-known poet returns to Missouri for a presentation of her new anthology, edited by MU professor and longtime friend Juanamaría Cordones-Cook. The anthology, released earlier this year, brings together her reflections from the course of nearly half a century.
Morejón was born in 1944 in the old district of Havana, and she grew up during the height of the Cuban Revolution. Her mother, who was part Chinese, was a tobacco worker and a dressmaker before her only child, Nancy, was born. Morejón’s father was a sailor who worked in the port of Havana.
Her essence is reflected in a simple reverence for the commonplace, working class symbols of everyday life and the people who live it, memorialized in poems like “Supper:”

“papa comes in later on/ with his dark arms and calloused hands/ wiping off the sweat on his plain shirt… we see that a fearless star/ detaches itself/ from the napkins from the cups from the ladles/ from the smell of onion/from all the attentive sad watchfulness of my mother/ breaking bread inaugurating the evening.”

But her work is far from simple. Morejón is a product of the revolution. It gave her educational opportunities that she wouldn’t otherwise have had to develop an intellect that has encompassed literature, culture and politics. The revolution did not end discrimination in Cuba, but it did give some Afro-Cubans a chance to radiate.
Nancy Morejón is considered one of the world’s leading Afro-Latina voices. She illuminated the way for Afro-Latina women throughout the hemisphere, winning the Cuban Literary Prize in 2001. Her work goes beyond poetry; she is an essayist, an artist, a literary critic and a journalist. Morejón has also dipped her hand into music, dance, playwrights and art and has been inspired by a lively community of people who share these passions.
She began writing her first poems at age 9. Morejón is multi-faceted, looking at the world through the eyes of a woman, an African descendant, an intellectual and working-class Cuban, and a human being.
“She can swim in all kinds of waters,” says Cordones-Cook. She records these as layers and subtleties in her poetry, says Cordones-Cook. “Her strength is that she has the power of empathy with the human soul.”
One of her most powerful poems, “Black Woman,” came to her one night in a dream in the voice of a woman who came to her bedroom window: “This is the land where I suffered mouth-in-the-dust and the lash./ I rode the length of all its rivers./ Under its sun I planted seeds, brought in the crops,/ but never ate those harvests.”
In the morning Morejón awoke and began to write the poem she had received.
Other poems, such as “Requiem for the Left Hand,” reflect the breadth of her global experience:

“on a map you could trace all the lines/horizontal vertical diagonal/from the Greenwich meridian to the Gulf of Mexico/that more or less/belong to our idiosyncracy… but today I suspect that the tiniest map/microscopic/sketched on school notebook paper/would be big enough for the whole history/all of it”

Her travels have taken her across the United States and Europe and retraced her African roots, sharing the suffering of black South Africans under apartheid.
“This is a very sensitive person for whom loyalty is a fundamental ingredient in the way she relates to people,” says Cordones-Cook. “She is a very compassionate human being.”
While she is not a member of the Communist Party, she remains deeply loyal to the revolution. Poems like “Black Woman” show her great hope for the future:

“I came down from the Sierra/to put an end to capital and usurer/ to generals and to bourgeois. Now I exist: only today do we own, do we create. Nothing is foreign to us. The land is ours. Ours the sea and the sky, the magic and the vision. My equals, here I see you dance/around the tree we are planting for communism. Its prodigal wood resounds.”