Rio Martin Perez
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Just when I'm about to lose a language I see the river of Martín Pérez, diminutive trickle: I'd love to lie postrate before it and greet the steady winds that blow in from the ocean; but first come hard times and more hard times, and there are bikes and vans and buses embroidered with the mud that forms a republican lace and a city bus with colorful ribbons like the smokestacks of Luyanó, howling against the vampire clouds of the highway. Río Martín Pérez, I look at you again to reclaim your bit of water from a past when that was all you were: water that comes and goes. The herb sellers walk by in their peaked straw hats, hats worn thin by the light of the sun, hats woven from yarey stripped of roots. The ñañigos walk by with gigantic sacks filled with wild greens, potherbs, palo vencedor, nightshade, and orange jessamine. The evening star falls across their black bodies, black as the night that draws near. About to go mad next to you I am smelling the fire that a beggar has set in the heart of the swamp like an ill-timed curtsey in the midst of so much clarity, of so much shallow water, [End Page 928] covering everything and giving us nothing in return, sweeping away as it flows the fragile grains of corn, the hollowed skulls of sheep, the feathers from a peacock's tail, the eyes of a widowed cock and the potions that fall from the sky. Río Martín Pérez, you who appear on no cartographer's map, on no mapamundi anywhere; river of my liquid poverty, river of my solid fortune and of my tongue cut in two; river of my family, sweatstained and devastated, river of our hungers and of our restlessness. Río Martín Pérez, let me cross. Let me get to Vertemati, to the Yoruba palace that scarcely has a roof or walls, only ferns transpiring in the humidity on high. There I will need the laughter of all your black men and all your black women, the wounds of Antonio Maceo, the scarlet flower of Toussaint Louverture in the Fort de Joux, and even the umbrella under the arm of Juan Gualberto Gómez. I need your other bank, where surely all my dreams will be fulfilled; river of my sorrows and my pains, river tiny as the tales of güijes no bigger than my pinkie. River without a drop of water, you appear in none of Durnford's prints, but certain stars smile down on you, and all the planets. A guinea hen is taking flight across a clearing. [End Page 929]
Nancy Morejón—poet, literary critic, and translator—is author of a number of volumes of poems, including Richard trajo se flauta, Cuarderno de Granada, and Elogio de la danza. Her critical essays are Lengua de P‡jaro, Recopilaci—n de textos sobre Nicol‡s Guill n, and Naci—n y mestizaje en Nicol‡s Guill n. Morejón, who majored in French as an undergraduate student, is the first black Cuban to graduate from the University of Havana in Cuba.
David Frye is Program Associate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan. He has translated ten books from Spanish into English, including most recently Fern‡ndez de Lizardi's The Mangy Parrot(Hackett Publishing, 2004) and The Mangy Parrot, Abridged (Hackett Publishing, 2005). He translated the selected poems in Nancy Morejón's With Eyes and Soul: Images of Cuba (with photographs by Milton Rogovin).
Notes
Río Martín Pérez: a small river that borders the working class neighborhood of Martín Pérez, near Luyanó, in the south of Havana.
Yarey: a native Cuban palm; the fronds are woven into the characteristic sombrero de yarey or palm hat.
Ñañigo: a member of an Afrocuban secret brotherhood.
Palo vencedor: a species of prickly ash, collected in the wild for medicinal uses, as...
