Black and Female

Nancy Morejón, born in Havana and publishing poetry since 1962 until date, is the black female poet par excellence in the Spanish Americas. Her work has been translated into many languages and analyzed in an already solid body of literary criticism, in which her “black” and gender qualities are emphasized. Morejón is the subject of special issues of professional journals such as Callaloo (2005) and the Revista Iberoamericana (2011), both edited by Juanamaría Cordones-Cook, among others. However, in addition to these studies, it is also important to pay attention to the political dimension of her poetry. Seen from a European viewpoint, for instance, it is striking that Morejón lives in a socialist country, because this political system is not particularly well-known for having focused on “black” problems. We don't know of any translation into Russian, German, Polish or other East European languages before 1989 of one of Morejón's famous poems, “Mujer negra” (Black Woman, 1975) pub-lished in the bimonthly Casa de las Américas. This poem is contemporary with black women's writing in the United States. The Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, after having published The Bluest Eyes (1970) and Sula (1974), had her breakthrough with the Song of Solomon (1977). And the enormous international success of the book and film The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker documented the growing interest in problems related to gender and color. So, Morejón's poem was at the forefront of the rise of African American female literature, except that she writes in Spanish.

On the other hand, Astrid Roemer, born in Paramaribo, Suriname, is Morejón's three-year junior and the outstanding “black” female writer in the Dutch language at this time. She received the P. C. Hooft Prize, the most important literary prize in the Netherlands, in 2016, and was awarded the Prize of the Dutch Language Union (Nederlandse Taalunie) for the Dutch-speaking countries in 2021. Roemer started to publish in Suriname at the beginning of the 1970s. After moving to the Netherlands, she became famous with Over de gekte van een vrouw. Een fragmentarische biografie (About the madness of a woman. A fragmentary biography, 1982), a cult book read in Feminist and Gender studies (Phaf 1985, 202).