Nancy Morejohn Author: PL
The ghost of Joseph McCarthy haunts Paris. Glide over the chestnut trees of Place Saint-Sulpice, Delacroix’s paintings housed in the church of the same name, and the literary salons where the French Enlightenment was born. He perched on the shoulders of the organizers of the literary festival Poetry Market (Marché de la Poésie), the largest gathering of poets, publishers and the public in France, the protagonist of a scandal that would have made a senator and vice-president of the Committee’s activities proud anti-communists.
Under political pressure from the most vicious of the right, and with an umbilical cord in Miami, the Poetry Market, which began in the Place Saint-Sulpice, has withdrawn the honorary presidency given to Cuban poet Nancy Morejon, Chevalier of the Order of French Arts and Letters since 2013. Pretext: his commitment to the Cuban revolution. The real reason: the inquisitorial persecution of the “imbedded Reds”, as in the 50s of the last century in the USA, when the McCarthy spirit unleashed a real round-up of “communists”, accusing, relentlessly harassing, publicly discrediting and politically intellectuals, artists and writers.
Nancy’s ban (Havana, 1944) takes place in the context of the increasingly frequent persecution of Cuban authors presenting their work abroad. It just happened in Spain with the popular duo “Buena Fe”, made up of singer-songwriters Israel Rojas and Yoel Martinez, who were harassed, ridiculed and suspended from previously scheduled public performances due to the sin of living in Cuba.
Musician and poet Silvio Rodriguez, who has also suffered media boycotts and lynchings against his concerts, reacted on his personal blog: “Apparently the Buena Fe aggressors don’t bother to listen to their songs. Isn’t it convenient for them to know the unruly questions that the duo throw into the air, song after song, Here on Cuban soil? Maybe some enjoy the respectable right to leave, but hate those who stay to fight for a better country? Is it really out of shame for themselves that they ask for invasions and blockades of their own people?
In Madrid, tropical McCarthyism received support from Vox. In Paris, the French branch of PEN is in alliance with Miami’s so-called Cuban PEN. In fact, the news of Nancy Morejon’s dispossession was released by Radio Martí – the United States government station for Cuba – before the official Poetry Market note. She reacted from Paris: “I regret that hatred has finally been imposed on art.”
It’s not just a tragedy that these things happen in a political context that encourages them; this is cowardice. McCarthyism cannot rob Nancy Morejon, Cuba’s national literature prize and one of the first black women to graduate from the University of Havana, of what she has earned through her own merit: being one of Latin’s great poets. America and an authority on the literary studies of the Caribbean, a region steeped in folklore and fragmented by colonial action.
In the prologue, Richard was brought his flute and other poems, an anthology edited and foreworded by Mario Benedetti, the Uruguayan claims that Nancy “is not only one of the most original poetic voices in post-1959 Cuba, but also, thanks to her important contribution to cultural organizations, became an inevitable figure in modern Cuban literature. Nicolás Guillén, the Cuban national poet who did not give gratuitous praise, wrote: “I think his poetry is as black as his skin when we take it in its innermost and lunatic essence. He is also Cuban (for this very reason), his roots go very deep until he appears on the other side of the planet.
Nancy, who said of herself that “I am no more black than a woman; I am no more a woman than a Cuban, I am no more black than a Cuban. I am a brief combustion of these factors” has been attacked for having a social conscience in addition to elevating it. More now, because the spirit of Joseph McCarthy is on the loose with his strange mixture of opportunism and anti-communism, puritanism and xenophobia; with his innate dislike for everything that smacks of culture. Shame on Place Saint-Sulpice.
(Originally published in La Jornada, Mexico)
Source: Juventud Rebelde