I met Rebe Huntman last year when we were both in Ohio for the Youngstown Fall Literary Festival. In the months that followed, I read her debut memoir My Mother in Havana, about a fateful trip Huntman made to Cuba. Throughout the book, Huntman asks big questions about belief, mortality, and human connection; throw in an unconventional structure and you have a deeply compelling read. I spoke with Huntman about her book’s origin, her connection to Cuba, and how her experience in other creative fields informed her memoir.
The trip to Cuba that you write about in the memoir was a decade ago. Have you been working on this book the whole time? When you initially visited Cuba, did you do so with the intention of writing about it, or did that come more into focus in the years that followed?
I did not think I was writing a book when I went to Cuba. I thought I was going on an intense pilgrimage to connect with the spirit of my mother. I was a writer, meaning that everything that I experienced in life has potential for writing, right? But it wasn’t my intention to write a book about the experience. I went for an experience.
At the time, I was getting my MFA in creative writing. I did that later in life. And so, I thought at that time that I was working on a collection of essays that would be loosely based on this inquiry about the mother and the importance of the mother, about my own biological mother, but also this idea of the mother. And so, it seemed like it might be possible that this experience might have funneled into one essay in that collection.
I had such a profound experience there that surpassed anything that I had imagined I would experience there. And I came back, and again, I was a writer. So, I started writing about the experience, and started writing essays, and started writing one, and then a second, and then a third. And I thought, oh my gosh, I’ll run out of room. There’s so much to write about. This story is much too large to fit into an essay. And so, that’s when I realized that I wanted to write a book about it. It really took a long time to make that happen.
I wrote the first draft of My Mother in Havana in what I’ll call a fever. I had so much to say, and I wanted to write it down. It was very important that I get the story of my time in Cuba as right as possible in terms of really doing my due diligence and reporting correctly and accurately on everything I’d experienced. I spent six months feverishly writing down that part of the story. And I had taken a lot of notes, and then I also went back. I’ve returned a number of times to Cuba to continue my research. But it took five or six years to figure out how I wanted to tell the larger story of My Mother in Havana.
There’s a very intricate structure to the whole book. How did you find that structure? You’re also writing about dance in the memoir, where rhythms and structures come into play. Did that play a part in how you arranged it?
I find it really difficult to separate out my story as a dancer, and my impulses as a dancer and choreographer, and my impulses as a writer. I ran a dance company called One World Dance Theater out of Chicago. I wasn’t just choreographing single dances, I was choreographing entire programs, because it was my dance company. So there’s this real thought that goes into what the rhythm of that performance is going to be like, right? What’s the opening dance? What are we closing with? What are we moving toward? How are we moving between rhythms and between energies? And I really pulled that into my writing.
It was amazing to me how many parallels there were with the writing, because you’re thinking about where we open this story. Where do we want to introduce the reader to this story that has so many facets to it? I decided to open with the prologue where I’m sitting with Madelaine, the spiritist, and asking him to channel the spirit of my mother, because it introduces the reader to why I’m there and what the stakes are and how desperately I want to connect with my mother. And then there’s a pulling back and going to the question of, who is this mother? Why would the reader care about Mimi Meyers Huntman? And then there was a decision there, too, to introduce her through that scene where she’s dancing with my father.
As you are someone whose knowledge of dance is significantly greater than the average layperson, is there a challenge of writing about certain aspects of that that might be second nature to you, but that someone who is not well-versed in that community, in that art form, would not necessarily pick up on?
I think that that’s the challenge in writing: to take something that our reader might not have familiarity with and find a way to introduce them to it. There was a real intentionality in thinking not just about the dances, but the spiritual traditions of Cuba and the Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions of Santería. I knew they were not going to be commonplace for many of my readers in the U.S. So the thing I really tried to keep in mind was that reader and carrying them on my shoulders, as I myself learned about these things and tried to introduce the reader to that.
Are most of the people who are making the pilgrimage you wrote about from Cuba or is it more of an international thing?
I’m fairly certain I was one of maybe a handful of non-Cubans, if that. It’s really not an experience. People are probably not familiar with these pilgrimages to Our Lady of Charity because U.S. relations with Cuba are so strained and so fraught. There are other pilgrimages to other mother saints throughout the world that I think are much more familiar to people in the U.S. This is something that we just don’t get a glimpse of, and that’s because of this larger political question. So I was really happy to bring that story because it’s really incredible.
It’s not that it’s the only pilgrimage to celebrate the spiritual mother in the world, but it was so powerful to see tens of thousands of people come out to celebrate the mother. How often does that happen?
Did you hit any logistical obstacles in terms of either the journey that you wrote about in the book or subsequent trips to Cuba?
Travel restrictions to Cuba have changed. I’ve been traveling to Cuba since 2004, so long before writing this book. The way I’ve gotten there has really changed and the obstacles I’ve had to overcome at the time of this particular trip to Cuba in 2013, it was before Obama had opened up negotiations and relations. It was much stricter than they are now. And so I leaned on my affiliation with Ohio State University. I had a document prepared that I was going for official research purposes, which then allowed me to travel freely and alone there.
One of the key things in your book is chronicling this shift in your spiritual beliefs. Is this something has that continued in the years since the trip that you described here? Has that deepened? Has that shifted at all?
Everything has deepened. I returned to the manuscript over and over, over a period of years. And during that time, not only did I return to the manuscript, but I returned to Cuba. I had so many questions: If my mother is gone, if I can barely remember her, but I yearn for her so much, how do I connect with that energy? What is that thing called mother and how do we find it? Where does that thing called mother reside?
And then, the second question of trying to figure out how in Cuba, these two figures, Our Lady of Charity and Oshun, who were so seemingly different on the surface for a person like myself growing up in the United States, where you had to choose between being a virgin and being a sensuous river goddess. Exploring this more capacious view of who we can be as human beings, as women, as mothers, but also just as humans. So these two questions were big questions and they were big enough to fuel me for a really long time, probably the rest of my life.
While I feel like I received answers over the years that I worked on this book and, and share those in the book, I feel like those questions and the answers and the returning to Cuba to continue to immerse myself in the rituals and the experiences. Every time I go back, it’s with some questions answered and then new questions to be asked. Also, the relationships I have with the people in the book have really deepened over the years. I mean, I’ll always be an outsider. I’m not Cuban, but my friends and my relationships there are deep and strong, and that has changed me.
And in terms of just very practically, by the things I worked out in this book, in terms of the importance of staying connected for me with my mother and with the deceased. This shift in the perspective that I had as a 19 year old who was told by my college counselor, “Just keep moving, make something of yourself. Your mother’s gone; time to get over it.” She was probably kinder than that, but that was the bottom. That was the subtext of the message, right? And then moving on from that, that thought that really patterned my life for the first 30 years of my adult life, where I just kept moving, kept moving.
I was really challenged by the experiences I had in Cuba and encountering such a different culture in which, rather than it being crazy to talk with the dead, it’s considered the most normal and healthy thing in the world. And so that permission switched the dial for me. It gave me permission to have an ongoing relationship with my mother, to talk with her, to keep her photograph out, to light a candle to her, to talk to her. That’s been really life-changing. It altered the course of my life.
Growing up, I found a lot of sterility in the church in which I was raised. I identify as an agnostic now, so I don’t know if this is just the grass being always greener on the other side, but in reading this book, I can definitely see the appeal of a spiritual practice where there’s more of a direct connection to the sacred.
I’ll go a step further, Toby, and say that I feel that — I never want to proselytize, it’s not my mission of writing this book. But I do think that it’s an important thing to contemplate how the ways in which our culture and then our religion by extension is very sterile, and particularly when it’s fused toward life and death. It’s like, life, beautiful; death, let’s not talk about it, right? The avoidance of death is really the avoidance of life and living fully, and feeling really fully connected to our place in this cycle, right?
That feels politically important right now, right, to see ourselves not just as individuals with this whole mission of collecting the most marbles before we die, but really making some meaning of our time here. One of the beautiful things about the Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions is the notion that you are an ancestor in the making. We’ve got this whole lineage that we’re part of, and we have a responsibility. If you accept that the dead are here, our ancestors are here, whispering in our ear, guiding us, right, then our job is to become wise enough so that we can perform that function for generations to come. It changes your relationship to the world and your goals here.
In your memoir, you discuss the blending of masculine and feminine aspects, which feels very relevant right now. And elsewhere in the book, you wrote about instructors’ bonds with their students being both paternal and maternal. At what point in the writing of this did you start thinking about how the subject related to gender and binaries — or the lack thereof?
The book is so much about piercing that notion of binaries. Afro-Cuban culture really opens the door onto that. And part of it is gender fluidity. The gods of Santería, they appear in both guises. They’re not relegated to male or female. I love that idea. If we think about this thing called mother as this force that holds and nurtures us, the way we cheer each other on as fellow human beings. That’s something I’d like to see us all step into in our roles as mothers. How do we mother one another regardless of whether we’re male or female? I think it’s a really powerful message.