Click the logo to download the Festival Author Booklet including excerpts and biographies.Click the logo to download the Festival Author Booklet including excerpts and biographies.
Memories come in the form of my favorite objects: clothes and handwritten yellow manuscripts, which have always been my only indispensable companions. In those clothes, I dressed my skin to flesh out the characters on call. In those papers, I’ve named, described, and proclaimed my territories. I have become my memories, after all, in the languid form of words (…).
I am five years old. I’m in the Santiago de Cuba Carnival, one of the best carnivals in the world. I remembered being taken into Grandma’s arms when I was about three years old, and Mom, disobeying my dad, had traveled to Santiago de Cuba to let Grandma bless me. I am vibrating with the sound of those ardent drums, the violins, and the Chinese trumpet that made its way into the Cuban cultural identity. Waves of harmoniously contrasting rhythms: the chino-cubano, the Afro-Cuban, the European—the altogether. The all-in-one. We are a real melting pot, at least in my world, in my multiethnic family reencountering itself during Carnival time. I remember the colors, colors that were always reinforced by my mother.
And the conga, that multiplicity of gestures and hip acrobatics…we couldn’t talk; we would just sing along to the songs. Some made sense, some didn’t. Improvisations. Sparks of the moment. A thousand people dance. The ancestral hoarding instinct bringing us together, since there was a prohibition concerning the gathering of people. No, we didn’t have the freedom to congregate that we take for granted in America. But I can still taste the sweat coming down Grandma’s big boobs like golden melons under a full moon. She would just twirl, carrying me in her arms, as in the waves of the ocean where she was from. Daughter of Yemayá.
***
I’ve been looking for water lilies on the pavement
for a diamond’s shine in the eyes of city walkers
Oh, village boy
beware of the promise of an endless night
under the bridges
Life is also a blue port
setting the trap for the sailor
And I will walk away
And I will raise umbrellas against the rainstorm
And I will ask the strangers
not for the loss
but for the return of my rainbow
Where is my rainbow?
Are there rainbows in New York after the storm?
***
About Orlando Ferrand
Ferrand was born in Cuba and emmigrated to the US in 1992. He is the award-winning author of La otra isla, (Linden Lane Press, 2011) and Citywalker (Publish America, 2010), two collections of poetry. He is a graduate of the American Language Program at Columbia University, where he met his mentor, the professor and writer Robert F. Cohen.
Ferrand has also studied creative writing, comparative literature and English Literature at City College of the City University of New York. He’s been an Artist In Residence at Princeton University, Pratt Institute, and has also been enrolled, since 2006, at the School of Professional Studies at Parson’s the New School of Design and Pratt Institute in NYC. He has an Advanced Certificate in Decorative Arts and spent many years studying Theater Arts in Cuba before leaving. He lives in New York City.
