The Golden Chair

Abstract

The Golden Chair Nancy Morejón (bio) I am a faceless little woman sitting on the tip of a rock towards the bottom half of a landscape where a river meets two seas. I cannot cease to contemplate them: one river for two seas, two seas for one river; until the cry of the pelican flying high above the clouds awakes them. I cannot speak. I have no hands. A whip has slowly lashed them from me, since time beyond recall. I scarcely recognize the new words I have learned. Scarcely have a tongue to say good morning and good night. All about me is immensity. All is immense, like my hurricane hair and the beastliness of my grandparents: My grandmother Brígida, drowning in the notaries' ink, but unbeatable, murmuring, and small; tattooed in the memory of quail, off there, in Ciego de Ávila; fixed in the fury of the turbines where Felipe Morejón Noyola made his home; fixed in the memory of Aida Santana, with her honey ax; fixed in my own heart. My grandmother Ángela, battered and singing, devastated by twenty-four childbirths, down in the tenements with her sad song, down in the dogs, down in the death, too soon arriving and too undeserved, like all deaths that arrive too soon, but singing a nameless song [End Page 917] in her rocking chair, alongside María Teresa, "with her fascinating verses that I would love to learn." The deaths of my grandmothers whom I never got to meet. The deaths of my predatory grandfathers whom too I never met. The willow leaves soothe my restlessness. The birds are chirping. Sitting before this sea spray, I am spattered by memories of the Colegio Academia Laplace: The best student in the fourth grade, I am playing a mischievous black hatchling whose brothers and sisters are all yellow chicks, but the black chick is the willful one, the transgressor, perhaps the one who is truly to blame. That very same student —prevented from studying in the Sorbonne due to certain adversities, wisely concealed, but above all due to the tricks of cheats who wanted to prove it inappropriate for a black chick to dare set foot in Paris— could never cease to be, never did cease to be, that little black hatchling. I am a faceless little woman. The winds of July blew in. For me, they had set aside a very old broom and a frying pan, the last place on line, a muzzle, and the most mindless submission. They hit me hard. I, too, was beaten. Blessed be the old broom and the pan, the last place on line, the muzzle, and the seeming submission. I am a faceless little woman sitting on the tip of a rock, and the güijes are howling at night, shuddering at the winds of July. I am who I am, on a golden chair. Nancy Morejón 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. Copyright © 2005 Charles H. Rowell