Nancy Morejón offers preview of her memoirs in the USA

May 12, 2024

Cuban poet and writer Nancy Morejón concluded her visit to the capital of the United States this Saturday, but before leaving she revealed that she is writing her memoirs in two parts with the titles: Sweet Wire and Spotted Rooster.

The intellectual told Prensa Latina exclusively that after her return to Cuba her neurons will not rest because "I am working on my memoirs, it is supposed that the Icaic Publishing House will publish them, it is already arranged, and I am the one who has to finish them".

She commented that these memoirs are around 500 pages, "we may need to reduce them", she joked and expressed that "the first part will be called Sweet Wire", a title she chose "because of a Cuban music theme, by Félix Chappottín (1907-1983), which was specifically in the air of the neighborhood where I was born: Los Sitios; and that is the essence".

Then other things come, when I enter to study at the University of Havana in the intellectual world of the '60s and many other details of our civil life that are interesting, said the 2001 National Literature Prize winner.

The second part —she emphasized— would be precisely beyond my roots, all of my university life and the world of literary learning of the French language, my specialization in the French language and how Cuba looks out at what is known today as the Afro-Asian balcony.

For this part, the also journalist, literary and theater critic, and translator anticipated that the title corresponds to our "Spotted Rooster and the Nicaraguan dish, which is our version of congrí that was born in Alicante", which later became integrated into Cuban identity. "There is no better congrí than eastern congrí", she emphasized.

"These are exclusives, I have never talked about it in Havana or anywhere else, not in San Francisco, not in Chicago, only now, here", she added in affirming that her memoirs will be summed up in only two parts, because "they are the fundamental worlds of Nancy Morejón".

"Later with my 70s there are things that are indeed included, but not everything, because everything is already written", she noted.

A graduate in French Language and Literature from the University of Havana in 1966, and a full member of the Cuban Academy of Language since 1999, Nancy Morejón traveled to the United States invited to an academic event at the University of Missouri, and to a poetry festival in Chicago, Illinois.

Additionally, she participated in other intellectual gatherings in San Francisco, California, and New York, the final stage of her journey.

During her stay in Washington, D.C., Nancy gave readings of her poems; visited Howard University and went to Morgan State, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Likewise, she recorded 12 of her compositions that enriched the collection of 21 of her poems already existing since 1979 in the Hispanic Literature Archive on Tape at the Library of Congress of the United States.