For outsiders, the Latin American reality can seem like something out of a novel. We are presented with an exotic world where nothing is what it seems, and where reality is the unreal. So, how can we separate the real from the unreal, the fantastic from the possible? And how can we put that into academic writing? These are some of the dilemmas that Lydia Cabrera had to face when she encountered the stories of Calixta Morales in 1930’s Cuba. Lydia Cabrera, one of Cuba’s first women writers, is hailed as one of the founding members of the literary movement that later was labeled “magic realism.” Her work is also part of the canon in Latin American literature. Cabrera wrote novels, stories, and ethnographies, and recorded ritual music. She has also been recognized as an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. For some scholars, one of her greatest achievements was to blend her writing skills and imagination with traditional Cuban folklore motifs. This blend gave birth to the magical-real world of Afro-Cuban tales.
Published in France in 1936, Les Contes nègres de Cuba was later translated into Spanish as Cuentos Negros de Cuba (1940), and almost seventy years later it made its way into English. Afro-Cuban Tales is a compilation of stories that take you on a journey through the magical realm of Yoruba religion in Cuba. Although this work is identified as fiction and literature, in the narrative we can find the motifs that color other narrative traditions from around the world. Stories about tricksters, of how the world became as it is, and of supernatural beings living with humans are just some of the themes present in the book. In this sense, this is also a compilation of Cuban folk narratives.
To make this work more accessible, the translators included the original introduction from the Spanish version by Fernando Ortiz. In his introduction, Ortiz locates the stories in the Cuban reality of her time, a Cuba where the division between race and class was well marked and where women where not supposed to write. He also points out that, although Cabrera may have taken some poetic license with the stories, they remain embedded in an African ancestry. Ortiz also addresses the difficult task that Cabrera had in front of her: the translation of stories told in Afro-Spanish for a Spanish audience. He attributes the exoticism of the form and content of the stories to Cabrera’s attempt to maintain the poetic rhythm of her informant.
Isabel Castellanos, a prominent Cabrera scholar and personal friend, wrote the introduction to the English version. Castellanos locates Cabrera in a wider and richer dialogue than does Ortiz. She also traces Cabrera’s intellectual growth and how she partook in conversations about religion, literature, and art with the wider literary and artistic community of her time. One of the principal arguments that Castellanos makes in her introduction concerns the creative element in Afro-Cuban Tales. Cabrera not only transcribed and translated the stories told by Calixta, but also created some of her own stories and it is hard to tell which of these are hers.
In general, this book has the ability to convert itself into whatever the reader wants it to be. It can be a book of children’s folktales in the vein of Aesop or the Brothers Grimm, a literary masterpiece that opened the doors to the magic realism boom in later years, or an ethnographic compilation of stories by Calixta Morales as retold by Lydia Cabrera. For some, this book may seem like an “exoticization” of Cuba and of the Yoruba pantheon. But on a closer look, this work wishes to package this tradition for a wider audience. These stories are not just works of fiction; they aim to portray a worldview, an Afro-Cuban worldview. It is easy to label as fiction something hard to believe. Labeled as literature, Cabrera’s world, where animals are kings and marry humans, is made palatable for a Western audience. But as a lived religious tradition this work presents a world that may be considered uncanny. Nonetheless, I remain doubtful that Cabrera’s work should be taken a piece of fiction. All students of Afro-Cuban religion, literature, and culture must reference the vast and important work of Cabrera. As other reviewers of this work have said, we can hope that this book is just the first of many translations of the work of Lydia Cabrera.
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[Review length: 732 words • Review posted on March 1, 2007]