Latest news with #MyMotherinHavana
Yahoo
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Writing as Architecture: Notes on Building vs. Writing Your Memoir
Before I began writing, I imagined every writer began at the beginning and laid down the tracks of their story in one clean take. And perhaps there are writers out there who do just that. But I have personally found the writing process to be more physical than intellectual. (9 Things I've Learned Writing a Memoir.) In the beginning, we are surveying the land of possibility, searching for firm ground that might support the story we want to tell. We start digging trenches to test that ground. Perhaps a question rises from the sea of possible questions. It grabs hold of us and doesn't let go. The first question that grabbed me as I was writing my memoir, My Mother in Havana, was why, at age 49—30 years after I'd lost my mother—I missed her more than ever. And why that missing was calling me to Cuba—a country neither she nor I were from. The lines and angles that connected my story with the island's felt both impossible and inevitable. It would take the writing of My Mother in Havana—a memoir about traveling to Cuba to find my mother among their gods and ghosts and mother saints—for that geometry to click into place. And that writing process felt more akin to building than it did to writing. We are sensory creatures, taking in the world around us and translating those bits of sensory experience into meaning, which means that when we write we are constantly deconstructing and reconstructing the world in a way that makes meaning both for us and for our reader. As I found my way into the architecture of My Mother in Havana, I studied memoirs like Cheryl Strayed's Wild and Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk that seemed to adhere to this building principle. I was particularly interested in the way Strayed structured her book so that each chapter begins on the Appalachian Trail, a decision that creates the foundation upon which the reader moves along the narrative of that arduous hike while allowing Strayed to set the posts that frame its themes of grief and loss, motherhood, and survival. Similarly, all but one chapter of My Mother in Havana begins on my pilgrimage to Cuba. I poured that foundation in a mad fever, laying down the narrative that led me from sacred dance to séance, sacrifice to pilgrimage. But there were also multiple layers of backstory I needed to introduce my reader to: who my mother had been; why her death had plagued me for so long; how my grief over her loss had morphed over the years. And why I was looking for answers in a country and spiritual experience so far from my own. Click to continue. As I wrote my way into those themes, I scoured family letters for backstory; puzzled over how and where to insert memories of my mother into the more linear narrative of my trip to Cuba. Devoured books about the mythology and practices of Santería and the Afro-Cuban gods known as the oricha. I made numerous trips to Cuba to scour archives and deepen my understanding of the rituals that lie at the heart of this book. I laid down these materials like a brick layer lays down bricks, or a teacher lays down transparencies—with each new layer illuminating and building upon what lies beneath it. An Incomplete List of Materials to Try as You Build Your Memoir: Memory Photographs Letters Genealogy & family lore Timelines Interviews Archival research Immersion into your subject matter Image & Motifs Narrative Lyricism Inquiry & Speculation We live in times that privilege speed and efficiency, doing vs. being. But there is a beauty, even a subversiveness, in allowing ourselves to take our time. As we try out different materials, we trust that the ways they'll find their way to one another will lead much deeper than the surface of any single narrative. And it is often only after the writer turns off the conscious part of their writing brain—say to take a nap or go for a walk—that the new arrangement comes. At first our manuscript looks like a big mess, and perhaps this is one of the most challenging aspects of writing—to resist simplification. Turn off the part of our brain that craves instant results and lean into the mess, climb the ladders of our scaffolding to survey our work in progress, move or add walls and plumbing as necessary. Make room for the process to take as long as it needs to take. What keeps our work from staying a mess are the foundation and walls we've put in place, and the patterns and repetitions that emerge from and support that framework. And so, once we've waded into the mess of possibility that is our manuscript comes the time to seek pattern and connection, and prune away any element that detracts from those patterns. The first drafts of My Mother in Havana resembled a cross between a Pinterest and a forensic murder board. I wrote themes and images on index cards and Post-It notes. Arranged and rearranged them across pinboards and floors. With each revision, I found myself making choices—saying yes to images I believed were central to the architecture of the writing, and no to those that led the reader away from that center. There is something intuitive and dare I say magical about this process. You must trust that all those carefully placed note cards and Post-Its are leading somewhere. Because, at the end of the day, the beauty of building vs. writing is the element of surprise. Whether it's a poem or a book-length memoir, both the writer and the reader enter the piece not knowing how these seemingly-competing materials and patterns will resolve themselves. And then, if you're lucky, somehow, both impossibly and inevitably, they do. Check out Rebe Huntman's here: Bookshop | Amazon (WD uses affiliate links)
Yahoo
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How Cuban culture filled a void after 30 years of longing
Rebe Huntman was 10 years old when her family holidayed in Oaxaca, Mexico. She and Mimi, her mother, played in the water just off the Puerto Angel beach, but rip tides carried them out into deep water. 'Beneath those waves the world slows,' she writes in 'My Mother in Havana.' 'Our legs and arms glimmer pale and strangely illuminated, as if they no longer belong to us. And then we burst to the surface where everything is churning — the waves darker, all sound coming as if from the other side of a tunnel. My mother's chest presses into my back. Her arms wrap around my waist. Both of us are coughing salt water in exchange for air. We don't die that day. Either way, though, she's not letting go.' Mimi is forced to let go by cancer, when Huntman is 19. After struggling with her mother's death, the author pushes herself into a series of notable accomplishments. Chief among them is her success as a dancer and serving as the director of Chicago's Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art & Music. She marries, has a child, divorces and finds new love. And then, in 2013, on the cusp of turning 50 and the 30-year anniversary of Mimi's death, Huntman resurfaces in churning waters of grief, writing that she 'longed for her. Deeply. Desperately. Shamefully. If I could barely remember her, if so much of her was lost, then what was I longing for?' How can she grieve a woman whom she realizes she barely knew? Her most accessible memory is the one in which her mother protected her when they were drowning. As she moves into the long-delayed work of grieving, Huntman recovers other details, including her mother's passion for dance, which she practiced in their living room. Who was this woman, who loved to tango and performed fiery pasos dobles? Huntman is similarly drawn to the rhythms of the South American and Caribbean dances, especially Afro-Cuban culture. But at her center is disconnection. Her white, Midwestern parents flirted with different flavors of Christianity, but Huntman finds no comfort within a theological framework of body-spirit duality. Grief is physical. Huntman misses the bodily comfort of a mother's touch. She also finds that Christianity's division between spirit and body, and further binaries that split humanity by biological sex, denigrate the female body. She is drawn to Yoruba theology, the religion held by large numbers of enslaved Africans forcibly brought to the Caribbean. Among its deities, the Orisha, is Oshun. Oshun is the feminine spirit of fertility, and of water, the giver of all life. In Cuba, Yoruba theology is contained within Vodú, a variant of Santeria in which dance is incorporated into rituals. Side by side with Santeria in Cuba is Catholicism. The island's patron saint is another mother who had clutched her child as they rode the ocean waves. Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre had her origin stories in the 1600s. A wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, holding her infant in her arms, was rescued from the ocean. Brought back to the land, this Black Madonna became a source of miracles, and her shrine draws pilgrims to seek her blessings. Huntman devotes herself to studies of these representations of a divine feminine, seeking a religious epiphany that will allow her to erase the boundaries created by death. But she also seeks to reintegrate her own mind-body division, to understand herself as a whole being in which her woman's body is connected to a sacred feminine. And so Huntman makes a pilgrimage to Cuba. Her parents had once taken a trip to Cuba in the 1950s, and Huntman uses details from that trip to imagine Mimi as a young woman, a chance to know who Mimi was before children and the changes brought by experiences and time. Huntman learns new dances from a santera, who teaches her how to dance during ceremonies. And she studies with other santeros, readying herself for initiation into Santeria. At these rituals, for which she has obtained informed consent from other participants, she intimately details her initiation. But in writing down the experiences, she veers dangerously close to becoming the participant-observer now infamous from another era's anthropological writings. Perhaps this is the perpetual problem of explaining the mysteries of the spiritual realm to others. Can a constructed language describe the sublime, or the religious ecstasy that lies beyond the rational? Huntman recognizes that magic and mystery that transcend the accepted boundaries of reality can be interpreted as madness by those outside the experiences. Huntman isn't so much interested in dismantling gender and biological sex as a binary; she seeks a space for the veneration of the divine mother. And although she finds in the worship of the sacred feminine a counter to patriarchal conceptions in monotheism, at times, such a conception of femaleness and its inseparability from the maternal chafed. It maintained a duality, one in which fertility was essential to her understanding of such a spirit. How do we make meaning out of tragedy? For Huntman, it is a spiritual journey, one that she chronicles as a devoted daughter. In Our Lady and Oshun, Huntman finds connection to the whole person who was her mother. Still, I wondered whether Mimi might have recognized herself in this tale. She is a woman rescued from the waves, a wooden icon, who by the power of belief, becomes the mother her daughter can venerate and adore. Lorraine Berry is a writer and critic in Oregon. @ If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
How Cuban culture filled a void after 30 years of longing
Rebe Huntman was 10 years old when her family holidayed in Oaxaca, Mexico. She and Mimi, her mother, played in the water just off the Puerto Angel beach, but rip tides carried them out into deep water. 'Beneath those waves the world slows,' she writes in 'My Mother in Havana.' 'Our legs and arms glimmer pale and strangely illuminated, as if they no longer belong to us. And then we burst to the surface where everything is churning — the waves darker, all sound coming as if from the other side of a tunnel. My mother's chest presses into my back. Her arms wrap around my waist. Both of us are coughing salt water in exchange for air. We don't die that day. Either way, though, she's not letting go.' Mimi is forced to let go by cancer, when Huntman is 19. After struggling with her mother's death, the author pushes herself into a series of notable accomplishments. Chief among them is her success as a dancer and serving as the director of Chicago's Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art & Music. She marries, has a child, divorces and finds new love. And then, in 2013, on the cusp of turning 50 and the 30-year anniversary of Mimi's death, Huntman resurfaces in churning waters of grief, writing that she 'longed for her. Deeply. Desperately. Shamefully. If I could barely remember her, if so much of her was lost, then what was I longing for?' How can she grieve a woman whom she realizes she barely knew? Her most accessible memory is the one in which her mother protected her when they were drowning. As she moves into the long-delayed work of grieving, Huntman recovers other details, including her mother's passion for dance, which she practiced in their living room. Who was this woman, who loved to tango and performed fiery pasos dobles? Huntman is similarly drawn to the rhythms of the South American and Caribbean dances, especially Afro-Cuban culture. But at her center is disconnection. Her white, Midwestern parents flirted with different flavors of Christianity, but Huntman finds no comfort within a theological framework of body-spirit duality. Grief is physical. Huntman misses the bodily comfort of a mother's touch. She also finds that Christianity's division between spirit and body, and further binaries that split humanity by biological sex, denigrate the female body. She is drawn to Yoruba theology, the religion held by large numbers of enslaved Africans forcibly brought to the Caribbean. Among its deities, the Orisha, is Oshun. Oshun is the feminine spirit of fertility, and of water, the giver of all life. In Cuba, Yoruba theology is contained within Vodú, a variant of Santeria in which dance is incorporated into rituals. Side by side with Santeria in Cuba is Catholicism. The island's patron saint is another mother who had clutched her child as they rode the ocean waves. Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre had her origin stories in the 1600s. A wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, holding her infant in her arms, was rescued from the ocean. Brought back to the land, this Black Madonna became a source of miracles, and her shrine draws pilgrims to seek her blessings. Huntman devotes herself to studies of these representations of a divine feminine, seeking a religious epiphany that will allow her to erase the boundaries created by death. But she also seeks to reintegrate her own mind-body division, to understand herself as a whole being in which her woman's body is connected to a sacred feminine. And so Huntman makes a pilgrimage to Cuba. Her parents had once taken a trip to Cuba in the 1950s, and Huntman uses details from that trip to imagine Mimi as a young woman, a chance to know who Mimi was before children and the changes brought by experiences and time. Huntman learns new dances from a santera, who teaches her how to dance during ceremonies. And she studies with other santeros, readying herself for initiation into Santeria. At these rituals, for which she has obtained informed consent from other participants, she intimately details her initiation. But in writing down the experiences, she veers dangerously close to becoming the participant-observer now infamous from another era's anthropological writings. Perhaps this is the perpetual problem of explaining the mysteries of the spiritual realm to others. Can a constructed language describe the sublime, or the religious ecstasy that lies beyond the rational? Huntman recognizes that magic and mystery that transcend the accepted boundaries of reality can be interpreted as madness by those outside the experiences. Huntman isn't so much interested in dismantling gender and biological sex as a binary; she seeks a space for the veneration of the divine mother. And although she finds in the worship of the sacred feminine a counter to patriarchal conceptions in monotheism, at times, such a conception of femaleness and its inseparability from the maternal chafed. It maintained a duality, one in which fertility was essential to her understanding of such a spirit. How do we make meaning out of tragedy? For Huntman, it is a spiritual journey, one that she chronicles as a devoted daughter. In Our Lady and Oshun, Huntman finds connection to the whole person who was her mother. Still, I wondered whether Mimi might have recognized herself in this tale. She is a woman rescued from the waves, a wooden icon, who by the power of belief, becomes the mother her daughter can venerate and adore. Lorraine Berry is a writer and critic in Oregon. @
