By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on June 8, 2023
Nancy Morjon
The ghost of Joseph McCarthy wanders through Paris. It hovers over the chestnut trees of the Saint-Sulpice square, the Delacroix paintings kept in the church of the same name and the literary salons where the French Enlightenment was born. It has rested on the shoulders of the organizers of the literary festival Poetry Market (Marché de la Poésie), the largest gathering of poets, publishers and public in France, protagonist of a scandal that would have made the senator and vice-president of the Anti-Communist Activities Committee proud.
Under political pressure from the most rancid right wing and with its umbilical cord in Miami, the Poetry Market, which opened yesterday at the Saint-Sulpice Square, withdrew the honorary presidency it had granted to the Cuban poet Nancy Morejon, Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres françaises since 2013. The pretext: her adherence to the Cuban revolution. The real cause: an inquisitorial persecution against “infiltrated Reds”, as in the 1950s in the United States, when the McCarthyist spirit unleashed a veritable roundup of “communists”, accusing without evidence, relentlessly harassing, publicly and politically disqualifying intellectuals, artists and writers.
The veto against Nancy (Havana, 1944) occurs in a context in which persecution against Cuban creators who present their works abroad is becoming more and more frequent. It has just happened in Spain with the popular duo Buena Fe, made up by singer-songwriters Israel Rojas and Yoel Martinez, who were harassed, mocked and segregated from previously scheduled public presentations for the sin of living in Cuba.
The musician and poet Silvio Rodriguez, who has also suffered attempts to boycott his concerts and media lynchings, reacted in his personal blog: “Apparently Buena Fe’s harassers do not bother to listen to their songs. Could it be that it is not convenient for them to know the in docile questions that the duo launches into the air, track after track, here, on Cuban soil? Could it be that some make use of a respectable right to leave, but cannot stand those who stay to fight for a better country? Could it be out of shame of themselves, those who call for invasions and blockades against their own people?”
In Madrid, tropical McCarthyism has had the support of Vox. In Paris, from the French branch of the Pen Club, in alliance with the so-called “Cuban Pen Club” of Miami. As a matter of fact, the news of Nancy Morejon’s disinvitation was heard by Radio Marti -the U.S. governmental radio station for Cuba-, before the formal note from the Poetry Market appeared. She reacted from Paris: “I regret that hatred ended up imposing itself on art”.
It is not only a tragedy that these things happen in a political context that encourages them; it is cowardice. Nancy Morejon, winner of Cuba’s National Prize for Literature and one of the first black women to graduate from the University of Havana, cannot be taken away from her by McCarthyism what she has earned on her own merit: to be one of the great poets of Latin America and an authority in the literary studies of the Caribbean, a region folklorized and fragmented by colonial action.
In the prologue to Richard Brought His Flute and Other Poems, an anthology edited and prefaced by Mario Benedetti, the Uruguayan states that Nancy “is not only one of the most original poetic voices of post-1959 Cuba, but, due to her important contribution to cultural organizations, she has become an unavoidable figure of the current Cuban literature”. Nicolás Guillén, the Cuban National Poet, who did not bestow gratuitous praise, wrote: “I think that her poetry is as black as her skin, when we take it in its intimate and somnambulant essence. It is also Cuban (for that very reason) with its roots buried deep down until it comes out on the other side of the planet”.
Nancy, who has said of herself that “I am not more black than woman; I am not more woman than Cuban, I am not more black than Cuban. I am a brief combustion of those factors”, has been attacked for having, in addition, a social conscience that exalts her. Now even more so, because the spirit of Joseph McCarthy is on the loose with his strange amalgam of opportunism and anti-communism, of puritanism and xenophobia; with his congenital animosity towards everything that smells of culture. Shame on the Saint-Sulpice Square.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English