New novel by Marta Rojas

Pedro de la Hoz

• FROM El columpio de Rey Spencer (Rey Spencer’s Swing) to Inglesa por un año (English for One Year), readers have discovered in our colleague Marta Rojas an exceptional storyteller in her novels. At "Readings by the Sea," a literature promotion event that ended the summer festival on Avenida de la Puerta, her most recent book, El equipage amarillo (Yellow Luggage) from the Letras Cubanas publishing house, made its appearance. She tells us about it in her own voice.

I felt that in my project on the essential elements that make up Cuban nationality one was missing – in my judgement, a very important one – which should not be overlooked: the Chinese one. But I denied myself covering it in a simple way, such as recounting customs, or stuck in a neighborhood, our Chinatown. I wanted to approach it in more depth, approaching the complex integration of a very rooted and ancient culture, of 6,000 years at least, compared to ours of barely five centuries. Wifredo Lam, Eduardo Heras León and Flora Fong came constantly to my mind. They are Cubans and there is a component of that culture in them. It wasn’t an inspiration, but a need to search. Finally, I discovered how to grab the bull by the horns. I found the track of one of the many purchasing agents of human flesh who, in an illicit business, brought hundreds of thousands of Chinese to the Americas and to Cuba in particular. In that way I set up the plot, through the commercial agent. The fact of having visited Beijing and some other Chinese cities for very short periods, but more than once, on stopovers to Vietnam during the war, helped me to visualize the human and physical landscape of that immense country. That acted as a kind of aesthetic magnet or component of the East-West chemistry. Moreover, I spent around one year reading Confucius. And the reading of his moral precepts greatly helped me to construct Fan Ni, the dealer’s enigmatic Chinese servant, who is my most beloved character in the novel.

I have already mentioned the first, the Chinese form part of the Cuban nationality. But, moreover, the Chinese coolie was a slave, with the appearance of a freely "contracted" man. And another of the communicating vessels is the runaway slave Brunilda. Wasn’t Brunilda the most rebellious concubine of Don Esteban in El harén de Oviedo (Oviedo’s Harem), the one who fled from his side? Well, in El equipaje Amarillo, Brunilda is doing her own thing as a positive character and she is also the Brunilda del Anillo of the Ring of the Nibelung, but with a powerful palenque; there is water rather than fire around her person. Another re-incidence that has to do with eroticism.

Flora doesn’t know it, but in addition to her condition of being the product of a Cuban ethnic mix, she gave me conversation keys in order to reproduce the cadence of the protagonist’s speech and made me see the marvel of the strokes of Chinese characters. That served to design form in the narration. It’s difficult to explain because you know that imagination transforms things and this novel is perhaps the most imaginative in my narrative. The editor, Daniel Garcia Santos, defines what I aspired to write very well in his statement on the back cover that dreams and reality are indistinguishable.

Yes, there will be, because I still have something more to say about the slaves of the Gremio del Rey (????), who didn’t allow themselves to be whipped, and freed themselves on their own account, or never really were slaves and how this island, little mentioned in the 15th and 16th centuries, came to be part of the World Bank and its speculators took that into account. As I never put a time on the writing of fiction, I have no idea what I’m still missing, but mentally I am heading for an unsuspected path. It possibly begins in Ambères, Flanders. In other words, literally, I try to bring off a coup in Flanders, let’s see if the arrow from the crossbow finds its target at that distance in time. •