Book Review: Afro-Cuban Tales by Lydia Cabrera
Title: Afro-Cuban Tales
Author: Lydia Cabrera
Translated by Alberto Hernandez-Chiroldes and Lauren Yoder
Genre: Folktales, Mythology
Originally published: 2005
Publisher: University of Nebraska
Pages: 170
This read was for the 2012 Around the World in 12 Books Reading Challenge hosted by Shannon at Giraffe Days (May: Cuba)
As much a storyteller as an ethnographer, Lydia Cabrera was captivated by a strange and magical new world revealed to her by her Afro-Cuban friends in early twentieth-century Havana. In Afro-Cuban Tales this world comes to teeming life, introducing English-speaking readers to a realm of tenuous boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, deities and mortals, the spiritual and the seemingly inanimate. Here readers will find a vibrant, imaginative record of African culture transplanted to Cuba and transformed over time, a passionate and subversive alternative to the dominant Western culture of the Americas. In this charmed realm of myth and legend, imaginative flights, and hard realities, Cabrera shows us a world turned upside down. In this domain guinea hens can make dour Asturians and the king of Spain dance; little fat cooking pots might prepare their own meals; the pope can send encyclicals about pumpkins; and officials can be defeated by the shrewdness of turtles. The first English translation of one of the most important writers on African culture in the Americas, the collection provides a fascinating view of how African traditions, myths, stories, and religions traveled to the New World-of how, in their tales, Africans in the Americas created a New World all their own. Lydia Cabrera (1899-1991) was a legendary Cuban ethnographer of Afro-Cuban culture and the author of many books, including El Monte and Vocabulario Congo. Alberto Hernández-Chiroldes is a professor and chair of the Spanish department at Davidson College. Lauren Yoder is James Sprunt Professor of French at Davidson College. Isabel Castellanos is one of the foremost scholars on Afro-Cuban culture.
When I initially started researching Cuban literature for this reading challenge, I didn't expect to encounter so many well known and acclaimed authors. Despite having grown up in the Caribbean, I have never actually been to Cuba and in fact know very little about its culture, particularly its literature. Slightly overwhelmed by the number of authors both historical and contemporary to choose from (note to self: never be deceived by the size of a country!), I decided to focus on women writers... surely that would cut it down? While it helped a little, it actually made it very hard for me to choose among all those wonderful writers! I had to come up with a shortlist which included The Fear of Losing Eurydice by Julieta Campos, Remembering Ché by Aleida March, One Woman and Four Others by Mireya Robles, Ghost Heart by Cecilia Samartin, Karla Suarez and Zoe Valdes's works in general.
The plan was to read in the original Spanish edition but lack of time and organization on my part unfortunately didn't make this possible. So, pretty much by default, I started looking for English translations of these novels. I soon realized that the choice was much larger if I decided to look for French translations instead. While this really shouldn't have surprised me as it's a well known fact that Anglo-Saxon publishers translate very little (supposedly because translated fiction doesn't sell well), I guess I didn't expect fort his to include Spanish, especially when it came to Cuba, a country so close to the US. But then, given the history between these two countries, perhaps it's not that surprising.
The point of this very long introduction is: go check out these wonderful Cuban women writers! There are so many to choose from, so many celebrated novels, that are waiting there right under our noses.
I personally decided to go for something a bit different, something that I hoped would fill a gap in my Caribbean culture and one that I've been particularly aware of since reviewing Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord and listening to her talk with Nalo Hopkinson. I've grown up in the Caribbean but my bedtime stories were the same as that of any child on the French mainland. My mother is French-Iranian so what did she know about traditional Caribbean folk tales and my father simply didn't have the time. But then I don't really know how much my cousins who were born and bred in the Caribbean with two Caribbean parents actually know about these tales. Perhaps not much more than I do... What the talk between Karen Lord and Nalo Hopkinson made clear is that while some tales differ from one island to the next, there are similarities, characters and patterns that are repeated so Cuba sounded as good a place to start as any!
Before I get into the heart of the matter, I'd like to say a few words on the author and the English edition of the work which contains two introductions, that of the English edition but also that of the Spanish edition. While I wasn't aware of this when I first purchased the book, Afro-Cuban Tales was first published in French in 1936 under the title Les Contes Nègres de Cuba. Lydia Cabrera was born in May 1899 in Havana and settled in Paris in 1927. While she originally wrote the book in Spanish, she first translated and published it in French. That being said, I'm quite pleased to have read the English edition because the translators have clearly worked from both the French and Spanish editions and included several notes where these two differed. I felt this gave readers a much broader view and you could sometimes question why Cabrera decided to rewrite certain passages in the French translation.
All the tales collected here were told to Cabrera by some of her Afro-Cuban friends. She put them into writing but the reader can clearly see that some tales need to be read out loud and even sang. As it is often the case in African tales, rhythm and rimes are essential.Cabrera's work is not merely that of transcription as Isabel Castellanos explains in her introduction: in some cases, the author has modified stories by adding incidents and characters while others are clearly stories based on old Afro-Cuban songs and in those cases, music is central to the stories. These are not merely legends and tales collected by an anthropologist, it is clearly part of a creative process. It's fiction that incorporates Afro-Cuban traditions and folklore.
A lot of the stories are of Yoruba origin and the translators have done a wonderful job at giving the reader as much context as possible without ending up with half pages long footnotes. The unfamiliar reader (like me!) will get to learn more about Yoruba saints and divinities and in fact, the way they interact and interfere in human affairs really reminded of Greek mythology.
Cabrera's Afro-Cuban Tales are not fairy tales and in the beginning I was somewhat put off by the fact that in some stories, the bad guy wins and an innocent gets punished for no reason at all. Morality is not what you expect or what westerners are used to, but once you've grasped this, you're only beginning to see the richness of the world in which Cabrera's tales are set.
Boundaries are not where we would expect them to be: some protagonists are animals, others plants, gods and humans and all interact with one another, talking to one another, marrying one another regardless of whether they are man, woman, tree, turtle or earthworm. And yet, everything is solidly anchored into the real world as some stories refer to mulattoes, black people and white people, others refer to slavery and to the class system it left once after its abolition. Some religious practices are carefully detailed, some characters express themselves in creole and others Cuban vernacular. While this is fiction, there's no doubt that it is also thoroughly researched and aims at authenticity.
This strange and delicate balance between reality, authenticity and fiction, magic and folktale is at the heart of Afro-Cuban Tales. As Isabel Castellanos explains is in her introduction "What is unreal becomes real, and what is real, unreal" or in Cabrera's own words "the reality of unreality". And in that regard, it appears that Cabrera's work can be interpreted as a forerunner of magic realism.
Afro-Cuban Tales is a rich and seminal piece of fiction that mixes anthropology, history and ethnography, one that I would recommend to readers of speculative fiction and those interested in Cuban and African cultures alike.
