Some trees continue to grow in the land from which they were uprooted. They grow inward, in the shelterless expanse of those who carry them. In NOCTURNAS, the royal palm leaves the landscape and inhabits that territory without soil: a homeland that persists in the body when the body can no longer inhabit it. Gëlico unearths the emblem and lays bare its wound.
The palm, Cuba’s national tree, loses the steadfastness with which it once presided over the horizon; broken, suspended or bound, it retains a verticality that can no longer find anything to sustain it. Its trunk bears the fracture of belonging. Where the root should sink into the earth, the white opens an absence: an entire land fits inside that missing place. These palms float under the weight of what has been lost. The air receives them without offering rest; the ropes lend them a support that also holds them captive. Something restrains them when everything seems to have let them go. In their broken bodies, distance takes on fibre, bark, stump.
Uprooting has ceased to be a word: it has the shape of a tree that still remembers the ground. Birds cross that memory like visitors to a vanished house. At times they alight where longing needs a body; at others they leave behind the small devastation of flight. They carry fragments of a horizon that never quite recedes. Beneath their wings, the island returns for a moment, then withdraws again. Nor has the wind been left behind. It travels within the exile, lifts the rooms of a life, shakes what had seemed secure. In distance, the hurricane finds another way to endure: it circles an absence, bends the present towards what has been lost, keeps the storm awake beneath a foreign sky. Each palm seems still to hear the gale that uprooted it and continues searching for its leaves.
Charcoal gives that exposure a substance of mourning. Its black settles like a night that had to be touched with bare hands; it thickens, crumbles, leaves dust where a form once stood. Sorrow enters the paper through friction. Every shadow holds something spent; every light preserves the trace of what no longer occupies its place. Across that surface, Gëlico’s hand seems to raise a body and keep vigil over it at once. In NOCTURNAS, the self-portrait has surrendered its face to the palm. The soul retains the architecture of what once sustained it: even broken, it reaches for height; even suspended, it carries the memory of its roots. From the Cuban wound, its branches reach into the exposure of other exiles. And in that forest without soil, where no fall ever quite comes to an end, the homeland remains hanging in the air. Then the palms will always be brides who wait…
