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Nancy Morejón (born August 7, 1944 in Havana) is a Cuban poet, critic, and essayist. She was a recipient of the Struga Poetry Evenings Golden Wreath Award and has been called "the best known and most widely translated woman poet of post-revolutionary Cuba".

Biography

Early life

She was born and raised in a district of old Havana to working-class parents, Angélica Hernández Domínguez and Felipe Morejón Noyola. Her father is of African heritage, and her mother is of African extraction.

Although her mother was Catholic, Nancy Morejón describes her family as nonreligious (Wayne Edison). Though religious images could be found in her home, Morejón only went to church with her mother until she was six or seven years old (Wayne Edison).

She began writing about her thoughts and surroundings at the age of nine, which later evolved into poetry with the encouragement of Prof. Elena López in 1959 (Pérez-Rosario). The Cuban Revolution ended that very same year, to which Morejón credits her opportunity to attend university despite her socioeconomic status (Pérez-Rosario).

Education and career

Nancy Morejón is fluent in French and English. Before she got her high school degree in 1961, Morejón taught English, and she taught French before getting her college degree. In 1966, she graduated with honours from the University of Havana, the first Afro-Cuban to do so, having studied Caribbean and French literature (Paravisini-Gebert). She is a well-regarded translator of French and English into Spanish, particularly Caribbean writers including Edouard Glissant, Jacques Roumain, Aimé Césaire and René Depestre. She has lectured at universities throughout the country and has taught at Wellesley College and the University of Missouri, which, in 1995, conducted a two-day symposium on her work and published the papers in a special issue of the Afro-Hispanic Review. Morejón, as of 2013, is director of Revista Union, the journal of the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba; UNEAC); in 2008, she was elected president of the writer's section of UNEAC.

Writing and awards

She has produced a number of journalistic, critical, and dramatic works. One of them is her book-length treatment of poet Nicolás Guillén. In 1982, she was awarded the Cuban "Premio de la Crítica" (Critic's Prize) for Piedra Pulida, and in 2001, she won Cuba's National Prize for Literature, awarded for the first time to a black woman. This national prize for literature was created in 1983; Nicolás Guillén was the first to receive it. She also won the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings for 2006. She has toured extensively in the United States and in other countries. Morejón's own poetry has been translated into English, German, French, Portuguese, Galician, Russian, Macedonian, and other languages, and is included in the 1992 anthology Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

In 1999, Howard University Press in Washington, D.C., published in 1999, a collection of critical essays on her work: Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejon, compiled and prefaced by Miriam DeCosta-Willis, Ph.D. A collection of her poems entitled Richard trajo su flauta y otros argumentos (Richard brought his flute), edited by Mario Benedetti at Visor Books, was published in Madrid in the spring of 2005.

Relationship with Nicolás Guillén

From the early 1970s until the early ‘80s, Nancy Morejón worked on Nación y mestizaje en Nicolás Guillén under the supervision of Mario Benedetti and Roberto Fernández Retamar, who requested that she her to analyze Guillén’s work (Pérez-Rosario). In the text, she contextualized Nicolás Guillén’s work as she delivered a critique of it, bringing up race, nation, and culture in Cuba before and after the Cuban Revolution (López).

Although Guillén was much older, Morejón describes him as a very close friend with whom she shared interests such as literature and sports (Pérez-Rosario). According to Abilio Estévez, a well- known Cuban, Nicolás Guillén greatly supported her (Gallardo Saborido). He included a tribute to her in one of his pieces called La rueda dentada (Kutzinski).

Literary analysis

Morejón's work explores a range of topics, such as the mythology of the Cuban nation and the relation of the Black people of Cuba within that nation. Her work treats political themes as well as intimate, familial topics. She often expresses an integrationist stance, in which Spanish and African cultures fuse to make a new Cuban identity. Much of her work—and the fact that she has been successful within the Cuban regime—locates her as a supporter of Cuban nationalism and the Cuban Revolution. Her work also treats slavery as an ancestral experience. Critics have noted her playful observations about her own people, her effective use of particularly Cuban forms of humor, and her regular "indulgence" in highly lyrical, intimate, spiritual, or erotic poetry.^{[citation needed]} Through her poetry, Morejón brings forward less known history.She also integrates elements of Yoruba and other African spiritualities into her writing, reflecting Cuba’s religious landscape (V. Williams + Wayne Edison).

Influence of Communism

Like other Cuban writers of her time, Nancy Morejón’s poetry began incorporating political issues after the Cuban Revolution without making it outright propaganda (Claudette Williams). Morejón was fourteen years old when the Cuban Revolution ended (Pérez-Rosario). Although the revolution allowed her to further her education, she did not use her works as propaganda for the revolution’s ideologies, as was common during the 60s and 70s in Cuba (García Chíchester). Nevertheless, the imagery and references in some of her poems, such as the ones from Richard trajo su flauta y otros argumentos, demonstrate the influence of the revolution on her work (García Chíchester). It was during the 70s and 80s that her poetry incorporated more political themes (Claudette Williams). (García Chíchester + Claudette Williams). Overall, her works reflected one of the goals of the revolution, which was to get rid of legal inequality (V. Williams).

Representation of women

Morejón also weaved feminist ideals into some of her poems. Despite feminist ideology not being the catalyst for their creation, those poems are some of her most well known and they break away from the usual portrayal in literature of Afro-Hispanic women as sensual. In addition, she also voices the situation of women within her society, expressing concern for women's experience and for racial equality within the Cuban Revolution; often, black women are the protagonists in her poems, most notably in the widely anthologized Mujer Negra (Black Woman).