In The Poet Slave of Cuba, Margarita Engle has written a moving and compelling biography of Juan Francisco Manzano, an 18th century slave and poet from Cuba. It is a gorgeous book about the horrific subject of slavery, and the amazing will of a child to survive even the worst cruelties of slavery because deep within he knows his owners "can't hear the stories I tell myself." Engle, a Cuban-American journalist and wonderful poet herself, was haunted by Manzano's autobiography and his poetry. She decided that the only way to adequately write about his life was to use poetry itself. This biography is written in verse (achingly beautiful in places), and is told from shifting points of view: Juan, his anguished mother, his father, the psychotic Marquesa who owned him, the white boy who befriended and tried to save him, even the Overseer who was forced to carry out brutal punishments. The biography is illustrated by Sean Qualls, with starkly beautiful black and white illustrations that reveal Juan's world in its beauty and its horror.
It is a remarkable biography, able to convey the darkness of slavery's hell, the uplifting power of poetry, and the tenacious spirit of a genuis child who would not be broken, nor his voice silenced:
"My mind is a brush made of feathers
painting pictures of words
I remember
all that I see
every syllable
each word a twin of itself
telling two stories
at the same time
one of sorrow
one of hope."
