Black Woman

I still smell the foam of the sea they made me cross.
The night, I can't remember it.
The ocean itself could not remember that.
But I can't forget the first gull I made out in the distance.
High, the clouds, like innocent eye-witnesses.
Perhaps I haven't forgotten my lost coast,
nor my ancestral language.
They left me here and here I've lived.
And, because I worked like an animal,
here I came to be born.
How many Mandinga epics did I look to for strength.
I rebelled.
His Worship bought me in a public square.
I embroidered His Worship's coat and bore him a male child.
My son had no name.
And His Worship died at the hands of an impeccable English lord.
I walked.
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.
A slave barracks was my house,
built with stones that I hauled myself.
While I sang to the pure beat of native birds.
I rose up.
In this same land I touched the fresh blood and decayed bones of many others, brought to this land or not, the same as I. I no longer dreamt of the road to Guinea. Was it to Guinea? Benin?
To Madagascar? Or Cape Verde7

I worked on and on.
I strengthened the foundations of my millenary song and of my hope.
I left for the hills.

My real independence was the free slave fort
and I rode with the troops of Maceo.
Only a century later,
together with my descendants,
from a blue mountain
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.
Compañeros, here I see you dance
around the tree we are planting for communism.
Its prodigal wood resounds.



I Love My Master

I love my master.
I gather firewood to light his daily fire.
I love his clear eyes.
Tame as any lamb,
I scatter drops of honey on his ears.
I love his hands
which laid me down on a bed of grass:
My master bites, subjugates.
He tells me secret stories while
I fan his whole body, full of sores and bullet wounds,
of days in the sun and plunderous war.
I love his feet, which buccaneered and wandered round
in foreign lands.
I massage them with the finest powders,
which I found one morning
while leaving the tobacco field.
He strummed his guitar and from his throat came
sonorous verses, as if born from the throat of Manrique.

I wished I had heard a marнmbula play.
I love his delicate red mouth,
from which spill words
that I cannot quite decipher
yet. My tongue for him is no longer his own.

And the silk of time in tatters.

Hearing the old field guards talking, I learned
that my love
gives lashings in the cauldrons of the sugar mill,
steaming like some Hell, the Hell of that Lord God
he used to talk to me about unendingly.
What could he tell me?
Why am I living in a lodging perfect for a bat?
Why must I serve him?
Where could he go in his splendid carriage,
drawn by horses happier than I?
My love is like the weeds that cover the dowry,
the only possession he cannot take from me.

I curse

this muslin robe he has imposed on me;
these vain lace dresses he forced on me without pity;
these chores of mine in the sunflowerless afternoon;
this baroquely hostile tongue I can’t get between my teeth;
these stone breasts that can’t even suckle him;
this womb, raked by his immemorial lashings;
this accursed heart.

I love my master, but every night
when I cross the flowery pathway to the cane fields
where we have surreptitiously made love,
I can see myself with knife in hand, butchering him like
innocent cattle.

Deafening drumbeats no longer let me
hear neither his sorrows, nor his complaints.
The tolling bells call me...

(Translated by David Frye)


Persona

Which of these women is me? 
Or am I not the one who's talking 
behind the thick bars of a nondescript window 
that looks out on the abundance of all these eras? 
Might I be the tall, black woman 
who runs, who nearly flies, 
who sets astronomical records, 
with her dark celestial legs 
spiralling her like moons? 
Which of her muscles reflects my face, 
fixed there like an imported line of poetry 
from a land where snow is forbidden? 
I'm at the window 
and there goes la mujer de Antonio, 
la vecinita de enfrente, crossing a shapeless street; 
la madre--negra Paula Valdйs--. 
Which is the young Andalusian don who antes up for  
her clothes and her vittles 
and the smell of vetiver root she scatters as she walks? 
What's left in me of this woman? 
What holds the two of us together? What separates us? 
Or might I be the "early morning wanderer" 
who takes taxis on the night of jaguars 
like a heron fallen to the pavement 
after being hunted 
and wasted 
and resold 
around the Quinta de los Molinos 
and the piers of the port? 
Who are they, these women? Or are they me? 
Who are they, who look so much like me 
not only in the color of their bodies 
but in the devastating smoke 
that rises from our animal hides, branded 
by a strange, unceasing fire? 
Why am I me? Why are they them? 
Who is that woman, 
the one in us all fleeing from us all, 
fleeing her enigma and her long origin 
with an incredulous prayer on her lips, 
or singing a hymn 
after a battle always being refought? 
My bones: are they all mine? 
Whose are all these bones? 
Did they buy them for me  
in that far-off plaza in Gorйe? 
Is all my skin my own, 
or did they trade it to me 
for the skin and bones of another woman 
whose womb once marked another horizon, 
another self, other beings, another god? 
I'm at the window. 
I know someone's there. 
I know there's a woman flaunting my bones and my flesh; 
know she's looked for me in her worn-out breast 
and has found me, miserable and straying. 
Night is rooted in our skin. 
Wise night rebuilds her bones and mine. 
A bird from the sky has transposed its light into our eyes. 

Translated by David L. Frye