Dany Laferriere - The Return

The sea was off limits to the slave.

From the beach, he could dream of Africa.

And a nostalgic slave

isn’t worth much

on a plantation.

He would be killed so his sadness

would not spread to others.

The brilliant sun

in a cloudless sky

and the turquoise sea lined with coconut palms

is just a Northern reverie

for the man trying

to escape the leaden cold of February.

From where I stand I note:

Ferocious beauty.

Eternal summer.

Death under the sun.

We put in at every bay, where various female cousins await the merchandise in noisy marketplaces. We use the stops to pick up the necessities of life. New vendors climb aboard, and the fire in their bodies means they’re members of Erzulie Freda Dahomey’s family. The men watch them sleepily. Start something with one of those women and, at the next bay, a new machete will be waiting in the sun.

Before getting off, a woman wanted to buy my hen to sell it, she said, at the next market. Just to take it off my hands because she’d pay market price for it and wouldn’t make any profit. The lady next to me stepped in. Later, she made me swear never to sell the black hen whatever happened. But I knew that already.

The men are farmers

who work close to their huts.

The women know every one

of the tiny villages where

they sell their vegetables.

Jealous husbands make their wives

stay at the local market.

That gazelle with the slender ankles

accompanies her mother.

Her head down.

A sidelong glance.

She’s studying everything

for the day when it’s her turn

to make the trip alone.

Up ahead, a small group

of people on the shore.

A sign announces “Les Abricots.”

The Indians thought

it was paradise.

I finally get there.

Tall trees whose

branches bend low

to touch the sea.

Big pink fish

still flopping in

the fishermen’s boat.

Kids with navels like flowers

devouring perfumed mangos.

The sweet life before Columbus.

I’m not so sure whether

I am in real time

as I move toward

this dreamed landscape.

I’ve read too many books.

Seen too many paintings.

One day, learn to see things

in their naked beauty.

Always too much hope ahead.

And too much disappointment behind.

Life is a long ribbon

that ceaselessly unfolds

in changing variations

of both.

I go my way

toward a small thatched hut

deep in the banana plantation.

The coffee is prepared

by an Indian princess

with high cheekbones

and the pure breath

of highland women.

In the hammock,

a pre-Columbian invention

that says much

about the degree of refinement

in this society,

you can spend your life

in horizontal meditation.

Three months

to escape the urban intensity

that once gave my life its rhythm.

Three months sleeping

protected by an entire village

that seems to know the source

of that sweet sickness of sleep.

This is not winter.

This is not summer.

This is not the North.

This is not the South.

Life is spherical now.

My former life seems so distant.

That life when I was a journalist, an exile,

a worker, even a writer.

And when I met so many people

for whom now I am no more

than a slowly fading shadow.

Humble houses scattered in the landscape.

Nothing here to recall the Indian genocide

so expertly orchestrated by the Spanish.

His hand on his Alcantara cross

Nicolás de Ovando gave the signal for the massacre

that Arawak memory refuses to forget.

A gentle hand

on my forehead cools my fever.

I doze between dawn and twilight.

And sleep the rest of the time.

Rocked by the music

of the ancient Caribbean wind

I watch the black hen

unearth a worm

that squirms in its beak.

And so I see myself in the jaws of time.

Someone has seen me smile

in my sleep too.

Like the child I was

in the happy times with my grandmother.

A time at long last recovered.

The journey is over.