I had invited Milena to a café to chat informally about her writing experience. It was a new café, near my apartment in El Vedado, in a colonial, single-story, brick and stucco house. The café, which occupied the first large room of the house, had giant windows that opened onto the large veranda facing the quiet, leafy street. It was only a partial occupant of the building. The house, although not large, had been split in two, with families living in the adjacent part. There was also a passageway through the centre of the house, the dividing line between the house and café, which led back to what was once the garden, and now was an entryway to even more housing. As we walked up the veranda to the door of the café, children ran and played in the street in front of their homes, and neighbours sat haphazardly, throwing a leg over the veranda wall, catching up with those passing by and watching the street.
The café, La Casa de La Bombilla Verde, although in some senses shutting out the life of a typical Havana neighbourhood, participated in constructed Cuban culture. The oft-memorialised urban decay was used here for style, as tables and chairs are upcycled and the fan, which had attempted to move the hot, summer air through the long room, caught fire during our chat due to age and overuse. The café, owned and designed by a Spanish expat, played upon that which pleases the tourists in Cuba most: the post-capitalist, decaying Americana mixed with late socialist, Soviet nostalgia. It communicated an idea of Cuba to the patrons and what it communicated depends upon who the patron is.
The name of the café is something that resonated with Milena but did not for me. As we walked in, she began to sing a line from a famous Cuban trova: ‘Monologo’, by Silvio Rodriguez. He is one of the most famous Cuban writers and singers and we often sang his songs at post-workshop
24 The quotes in this section come from a recorded conversation on 8 July 2016. The details of the interaction come from fieldnotes of the same interaction. If there are other quotes from other sources, they are noted with citations of interview dates or fieldnote entries.
gatherings. ‘Vi luz en las ventanas y oí voces cantando y, sin querer, ya estaba soñando. Vivo en le vieja de la bombilla verde. Si por allí pasaran, recuerden’25, she sang along to the melody in her head. Fittingly, it
seemed to speak of the unintended lapse of reality into imagination: the provocative nature of Cuban light, sounds and liveliness to unintentionally start the wanderer dreaming.
Sitting with Milena in the café, surrounded by so many types of cubanidad, we started to discuss her ideas and how she comes across them. Milena reiterated to me that she finds topics and themes to write about all around. ‘I find ideas everywhere… and I write everything down in my notebook’. She shuffled in her bag to find her notebook, flipping through, she encountered a page with the title, ‘Ideas’. ‘Mira,’ she said, ‘these are ideas for future stories’. She told me that just the other day someone told her not to eat the berries on a common tree found throughout the city because they are poisonous, but she noted that those trees have the most amazing trunks. She continued, ‘that made me think of a story and I wrote it down. It turned into a sort of poem’. The discussion of ideas stemming from interactions, whether those are in the talleres or in the daily life of the writers, is quite common, although Milena is unique in translating an idea into a poem and then into a story.
As she says, she collects ideas for stories and poetry from around her environment, a combination, in this case, of a conversation she had with a friend and the recollection of a memory of that conversation provoked by an interaction with her surroundings while walking. Her
dependence on these ‘real’ experiences does not limit her to writing in the style of the genre of realism. She, as not only a student of creative writing and narrative fiction, but also as an instructor of Cuban literature, is aware that the predominant style of fiction in Cuba today is realismo sucio or dirty realism. This is a style that developed during the modern period – ‘from 1920 something to 1950 something’, she says – and which has recently returned to popularity. She described this as a type of ‘city perspective, from the darkest places of the city’ or as another writer explained it to me, stories about ‘the poor, the prostitutes and the gays, the part of society you don’t normally hear about’. She explains to me that she writes realismo-aburdismo or aburdist realism, which, knowing
25 I saw light in the windows and I heard voices singing and, without wanting to, I was already dreaming. I live in the old house with the green light bulb. If they pass that way, remember.’
her work and her goals, I would describe as some sort of hybrid between realismo maravilloso or the marvellous real, coined by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, and dirty realism. Her subject matter is gritty, dark and often describes urban relationships and moments. Yet it also depicts extreme plots, where ‘realities’ are pushed to, and often past, rational ends. In his essay ‘On the Marvellous Real in America’, Carpentier (1995 [1949]) attempts to categorize the movement of translating reality to story for writers of realismo maravilloso. He writes:
the marvellous begins to be unmistakably marvellous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality, an unaccustomed insight that is singularly favoured by the unexpected richness of reality or an amplification of the scale and categories of reality, perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state (estado límite) (Carpentier 1995 [1949]: 86).
Milena similarly tried to convey to me how she makes that transition. ‘If I have to place my way of writing – I am in trouble because I prefer absurdism, but I do it from a realistic point of view. I am always trying to convey something from reality, maybe not my reality, but an imagined reality that is similar to my reality’. As she is talking, her hands are waving wildly in the air, as if she is grabbing thoughts that only she can see, painstakingly explaining something to me that seems to elude verbal communication. Her eyes are wide, but she sits straighter and clarifies to me her central point on the matter. She continues, in summation, ‘My dream is to write as much as I need. And next it is to write as well as I can. Meaning, I want to write as I imagine [como me imagino]. And that is a really challenging desire’. For her, there is a divide between seeking ideas in reality – the tree with the poisonous berries or the gritty stories of gender relations in Havana – that she mentions she finds everywhere as she walks through the city, and a story that she imagines, stemming from those ideas.
To take from reality is integral to the process for Milena, yet to move from idea to story, it takes a sort of extrapolation from that reality. For Carpentier, for instance, there is a similar movement, but he interestingly places the writer’s ability to write the ‘marvellous’ as stemming from their unique position to imagine within ‘reality’. He writes: ‘Those who do not believe in saints cannot cure themselves with the miracles of saints, nor can those who are not Don
Quixotes enter, body, soul, and possessions, into the world of Amadís of Gaul or Tirant le Blanc’ (Carpentier 1995 [1949]: 86). Writing begins with being a part of the world you hope to create and seeing within it that which makes it interesting, marvellous or even just relevant. Milena goes on to explain to me that there is a difference between having an idea – which she encounters all around her – and moving to write a story. She explains: ‘When you have a story, for me, I have the idea first. Maybe I don’t have a character, I have just the idea, and I write it down because I don’t want to lose it. And when the idea is strong enough to chase me in my dreams, and in my thoughts, and in my quotidian life, I have to dedicate time to being in it.’
While she attributes volitional agency to finding and keeping ideas, like the leaf, her notion of control seems to shift when her ideas begin to chase her. I believe this has to do with the
different categorisations of ideas: idea being that which she encounters outside of herself, in the city as she walks for instance, and the idea of a story which is building inside of her. The idea comes to her as she moves through her environment. When she has an idea, she writes it down. However, the story does not immediately come. The story comes when the idea is ‘strong enough to chase’ her and then she dedicates ‘time to being in it’, developing a plot and constructing the world. Knowing an idea worthy of keeping is different to having a story worthy of writing. It is a different process.