Q&A with Rebe Huntman

 

Photo by Lac Hoang

 

Rebe Huntman is the author of the new book My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle. She is also a dancer, teacher, and poet, and she lives in Delaware, Ohio, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

 

Q: What inspired you to write this memoir?

 

A: When my mother died, I was 19. Conventional U.S. wisdom suggested I compartmentalize my grief, stop thinking about my mother, and move on.

 

But eventually all that moving on caught up with me. By the 30th anniversary of my mother’s death, I’d become such a master of emotional distance that I could no longer remember the sound of her voice or the feel of her skin. And yet I longed for her more than ever.

 

The shape of that longing had something to do with the fact that I was nearing the age she’d been when she died. By now, I’d expected to feel that same sense of largesse I imagined a grown woman should possess.

 

But the truth was that I still felt like the 19-year-old version of myself who had lost her mother, a child still waiting for someone to show me the way.

 

I wasn’t alone. My whole country seemed to have lost our way. We were surrounded by images of the feminine—pop icons and underwear models, feminists and porn stars, soccer moms and saints—all of them flashing large but pointing in different directions, unglued from whatever architecture might give them a coherent narrative.

 

I needed a better mirror. And, at the age of 49, I traveled to Cuba to find it among the Afro-Cuban traditions that celebrate the divine feminine and their larger spiritual view of the Mother.

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: The title gets at one of the great mysteries of this memoir. My mother had been dead 30 years when I began writing this book. Neither she nor I were Cuban. And yet, I felt an invisible thread pulling me to the island.

 

Nine years earlier, I’d traveled to Havana in my professional role as a Latin dancer and choreographer. And it had been there, among the dances that pay tribute to the Afro-Cuban gods, that I was introduced to Ochún, the West African river deity of love and fertility, and her Catholic counterpart, Our Lady of Charity.

 

A decade later, I was returning to Cuba. I wanted to know how these divine matriarchs—one, a river deity of love and seduction and the other a chaste Madonna—could be held as if they were cut from the same cloth.

 

Why were these twin mothers calling to me? What did they, and the Afro-Cuban religions that hold the dead close—have to teach me about connecting with my own mother?

 

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 biological mother among their gods and ghosts and mother saints—for that geometry to click into place.

 

Because yes, My Mother in Havana is a book about a woman’s search for her biological mother, but it is also an examination of why I needed to leave my own country in order to find her.

 

It is an interrogation of why the mother has been lost—not just to one grieving daughter—but to a broader culture that has pushed her to the margins.

 

It is an excavation of the sacred feminine as viewed through the spiritual mothers of Cuba; and it is an inquiry into how we might resurrect her, no matter where we live.

 

Q: The writer Maggie Smith said of the book, “I closed this book believing more than ever that the people we love, including the people we’ve been, never really leave us.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: When friends in Cuba say they are going to talk to their deceased mother, they don’t say, “I’m going to talk to the spirit of my mother.” They say, “I’m going to talk to my mother,” a custom that traces back to when the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria buried their ancestors under the floorboards of the house.

 

It is this spirit of keeping the dead close that drew me to Cuba, and it was there, through Afro-Cuban spiritual practices like Santería and Spiritism, that I discovered that our loved ones never leave us. They are alongside us, guiding and protecting us, whispering in our ear, like an inner voice.

 

I learned that my mother had been with me all along—that it was I who had severed the connection. And that the way back to her was as simple as lighting a candle and speaking her name.

 

My Mother in Havana is an invitation to everyone who longs to connect with their own lost beloved; to know themselves, not as solitary beings making their way alone in the world but as part of a web of ancestors who accompany us at every step of the way.

 

To understand ourselves and the world—like the batá drums that call the gods and ancestors back to earth—not as static but alive: teeming with the voices of those who’ve come before us and thrumming with miracle.

Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope people take away from it?

 

A: There is a story I share in the book about a 17th century enslaved girl named Apolonia. Grief-stricken from the loss of her mother, the girl climbs the hill where her mother used to work. She hopes, against all logic, to find her mother waiting at the top. But when she reaches the summit, she finds only bare rock.

 

It is then that Cuba’s patron saint, Our Lady of Charity, appears before the girl, sweeping her up in her great arms. And when the girl climbs back down the mountain, she does so no longer filled with the grief of losing her biological mother but with the joy of having found her spiritual root.

 

It took me seven years to write My Mother in Havana, and in that time I returned multiple times to Cuba—following the hills that once led Apolonia to her spiritual mother so often that the priests and nuns who are charged with caring for Our Lady’s sanctuary took me under their wing. Immersing myself in the sacred dances and sacrifices that pay tribute to Ochún.

 

In 2017 I was invited to share my manuscript-in-progress at Santiago de Cuba’s International Colloquium on Popular Religions. And in 2018, my partner, Rick, and I married on the farm outside El Cobre where I stayed during my first pilgrimage, with Our Lady’s sanctuary in plain view through the trees of their property.

 

All of which is to say that I am not the same person who traveled to Cuba in search of her mother. I have learned to view the world through the eyes of magic and miracle. I have learned to talk—unapologetically—with the spirits, setting out an ancestral altar where I communicate regularly not only with my mother but with all the ancestors.

 

Most miraculous of all, I have travelled down my own metaphorical hill, illuminated by the understanding that we are not alone but held by a wondrous force—dare we call her Mother—who is capacious enough to transcend life and death.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I have a couple of projects that I’m excited to start in on—novels based on the stories of my grandmothers. A work of fiction that dives into the worlds of the Nordic gods. But first, I have a poetry collection that is almost ready to find a publisher.

 

Like My Mother in Havana, the poems are a cinematic exploration of the forces that collaborate in the shaping of what it is to be woman.

 

Unlike My Mother in Havana, the settings of that inquiry widen to include a kaleidoscopic catalog of Midwestern bowling alleys and 1950s burlesque clubs, mermaid meet and greets, a dead mother’s tour through 1980s Russia, and of course the mother saints and goddesses of Cuba.

 

Tentatively titled Zinnias in My Mother’s Vase, the collection is both a container for wildness and a portal between generations—an invitation to join the author as she and the concentric circles that bloom from that central eye—ancestors, role models, and ultimately that ineffable, unnamable force that animates life itself—weigh in on the feminine body.

 

Is it object? Is it vessel? Or is it a cosmos both contained by and too vast to be contained by any vessel?

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I tried to write to about my mother soon after she died, but I was too close to my grief and all I could do was bleed (psychically and emotionally) all over the page. Still, those early writings were therapeutic in the way that writing in a diary is therapeutic.

 

And while they could not be considered art, I wish I’d written more. I wish I’d written down the exact shade of lipstick she wore and the names of flowers she planted in her garden. I wish I’d written down her pet names and favorite words and phrases, the movies and songs she liked best. I wish I’d recreated every conversation. Because these are the things I’ve lost with time.

 

Paradoxically, it was my forgetting that prompted the biggest questions for this book: If we have all but forgotten the lost beloved—the precise tenor of their laugh, the temperature of their skin—then what is it that we are missing? And how can we connect with that?

 

We need distance from our grief in order to tackle those kinds of big questions. And that is what I’ve gained over time: the ability to shape those bits that remain of my mother into a narrative that I hope will offer, both to myself and to my reader, understanding and healing.

 

The result is a love letter—to the 19 year-old version of myself who lost her mother. And to the 50-year-old version who, after spending decades trying to move past that grief, found herself missing her mother more than ever.

 

My Mother in Havana is a love letter to Cuba, an island that reached out—inexplicably! Insistently!—to mother me.

 

It’s a love letter to anyone who longs to connect with their own lost beloved. 

 

It’s for anyone who is curious about what lies beyond the five senses—who yearns to claim a more mythic life, a larger version of the self just waiting for you to fill its contours.

 

My Mother in Havana is a love letter to anyone who longs to connect with the deep and long story of the ancestors. Chase those ancient rhythms of conga and shekere into a world of séance and pilgrimage, sacrifice and sacred dance.

 

It’s a love letter to anyone who’s ready for a guide to show you the way: a wide-lapped mother both as real as the woman sitting next to you on the bus, and as mysterious and vast as the deepest river of your being: A feminine path to the divine that has been largely buried in today’s rush toward materialism and consumption. A soft voice in your ear reassuring you that everything IS going to be all right.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb