The poem asks a devastating question: What is my real name?
Many years later, when I was already a man, I remembered that scene. And I understood that the search for that Black man was not only his own. It was the search of an entire people. A people without a last name. A people without a history written in the books of the powerful. But a people with a deep voice, a voice of drums and chains, of sugarcane and sweat, a voice that no one could erase. el apellido nicolas guillen english translation
The 10-line question sequence builds a ritualistic, almost religious longing. In English, the repeated “Will it return from…” becomes an incantation. The final line introduces as a possible womb – a powerful, unresolved ending. The poem asks a devastating question: What is my real name