Interview by Karla Cordero
PILGRIMAGE, HEALING & SELF-DISCOVERY: A CONVERSATION WITH REBE HUNTMAN, AUTHOR OF MY MOTHER IN HAVANA: A MEMOIR OF MAGIC & MIRACLE (Monkfish Book Publishing)

In My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle author Rebe Huntman invites us to lift the veil between the living and the dead as she journeys to Cuba to resurrect her deceased mother, 30 years after her death, from among the island’s gods, ghosts, and saints.

The memoir opens with a visit to Madelaine, a Spiritist in the small mountain town of El Cobre who talks, with the help of African and Catholic gods, to the dead. It is there that Rebe utters the request that has brought her to Cuba: “I want to talk to my mother.” She is instructed to write her mother’s name, Mimi Meyers Huntman, on a sheet of paper, and the ritual continues with a goblet filled with water, a lit candle, cologne water for protection, and the singing of  hymns to bring forth Mimi’s spirit. 

As we wait to discover if Madelaine can summon any kind of spirit willing to listen, Rebe invites us into another kind of supernatural: the haunting memories of the past. Through rich and evocative prose, Rebe resurrects an upbringing in which her mother’s beauty, charisma, and high expectations infuse her own dreams and ambitions. But the greatest hauntings begin at age nineteen, when Mimi’s death leaves Rebe filled with a triad of  phantoms––an absent mother, a child hiding behind her mother’s shadow, and a grieving daughter longing to connect with her mother’s spirit.

Through Rebe’s memories, we learn that her mother lived a life of complexity and contradiction. A dancer and singer, dressed always in a dress and heels, she was caught between being an independent woman prepared to divorce her unfaithful husband and a loyal wife who stayed to raise his children and maintain a suburban household. “This is the mother I find myself not only wanting to recover but to set free,” Rebe writes. “Give her a do-over, let her live again, this time in the mythic realm.”

It is this longing for a do-over that draws Rebe to Cuba’s landscape of séance and pilgrimage, sacrifice and sacred dance, and the Afro Cuban gods and goddesses who not only help the author resurrect her mother, but ultimately bring her face to face with a larger version of herself. 

Rebe’s journey is a stunning confrontation with grief and identity, inviting readers to reflect on our relationships with our own mothers, with the world of spirit, and ultimately with ourselves. “I’m trying to convince you, dear reader, that there is…something in the life of a mother that might stand in for yours as well,” Rebe writes. And: “Perhaps it is this, more than anything else, that drew me to Cuba. To find a larger story that might hold” us all. 

In the following interview, the poet Karla Cordero engages Rebe Huntman in a deeper conversation around the themes and writing process for this memoir. 

Karla Cordero: Rebe, you and I met at the Macondo Writers’ Conference, a home for writers founded by Sandra Cisneros, where we were in a workshop with Presidential Inaugural Poet, Richard Blanco. Richard has offered an intriguing blurb for your memoir, writing that “My Mother in Havana invites us to understand ourselves not as solitary beings making our way alone in the world, but as part of a greater web of ancestors who watch over us and are always a breath away.” I’m wondering: in what ways did you find that writing this memoir—a process typically thought to be an act of solitude, a confessional, and an exploration of self—allowed you to invoke community, with both the living and the dead?

Rebe Huntman: Writing—however solitary the day-to-day practice of it may feel—is also an act of great communion. It is an act of saying: ‘This is what I find beautiful. Important. Worth paying attention to.’ In writing My Mother in Havana, I wanted to share those things that have lived in my heart and bones: the Afro-Cuban religions of Santería and folk Catholicism and Spiritism and the power of those spiritual practices to help us find our way back both to our dead and to ourselves. The result is an invitation to anyone who longs to connect with their own lost beloved—to know themselves, as Blanco suggests, 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.

Karla: Another great poet, Maggie Smith, calls My Mother in Havana “a remarkable journey” in which “the veil between the spirit world and this world, between past and present, between who we were and who we are—‘the thin scrim that separates this moment from what’s to come’—nearly dissolves before our eyes.” As we look at this question of writing as both a form of solitude and healing, how might the act of writing give life not only to scenes and characters but also to parts of ourselves we long to either uncover or recover?

Rebe: There is a story I share in the book that echoes my own healing process. Grief stricken from the loss of her mother, a 17th-century enslaved girl named Apolonia 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 divine mother, Our Lady of Charity, appears before the girl, sweeping her up in her great arms. And when the girl climbs back down the hill, 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 seven years to write My Mother in Havana, and in that time I returned multiple times to Cuba—dipping my toe again and again into the waters of séance and pilgrimage, initiation and sacred dance, 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. All of which is to say that I am not the same person who travelled to Cuba in search of her mother. I have learned to talk—unapologetically—with the spirits. And in so doing, I have travelled 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.

Karla: I was struck by the way you render every scene of My Mother in Havana with exacting detail, from the landscape to the individual characters, even though some of those scenes took place as much as three decades ago. Can you discuss your process for re-creating the past in those instances when your memories weren’t complete? What tools do you reach for to fill in the gaps of memory? And how does this concrete anchoring of time, place, and character contribute to what I think of as one of your memoir’s greatest strengths: its ability to plant the reader in a world of magic and miracle in a way that never feels inaccessible or woo woo, but rather fully grounded and inevitable?

Rebe: My goal was to write about Cuba in such a way that my reader would feel like they were there alongside me, riding on my shoulders as I open each door along my pilgrimage: drumbeats and dances that invoke the gods and the animal sacrifices that feed them; ancestral altars and séances that bridge the living and the dead; pilgrimages—ten thousand strong—that honor and celebrate Cuba’s spiritual mothers, Ochún, and Our Lady of Charity. I took copious notes and voice recordings of interviews and ceremonies. I leaned on those records to recreate scenes and dialogue I might not have remembered as accurately from memory, and I returned numerous times to test my facts and deepen my understanding of the rites and rituals that are at the heart of the book. But it wasn’t just my experiences in Cuba that I needed to recreate; I wanted my readers to see and know my mother, Mimi Meyers Huntman, who had been dead 30 years. I asked family members to corroborate memories, scoured letters and home movies. Tucked inside a family album, I discovered a handful of photographs taken during my parents’ 1951 trip to Cuba. Those photographs invited me to be in conversation with the 21-year-old version of my mother whose footsteps I was now following, to examine each of my experiences both through my eyes and hers.

Karla: In your memoir, the protagonist is called on a quest to find the mother she lost 30 years before. Reading along, I couldn’t help but think of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. Can you discuss how your heroine’s quest, which feels decidedly lyric and feminine, aligns or differentiates itself from Joseph Campbell’s traditional (and perhaps more masculine) model for the hero’s quest?

Rebe: Yes! My Mother in Havana certainly follows the structure of the classical quest, in that the protagonist (me) leaves the familiar to find something she is unable to access at home. But, unlike many of the more classical (and male-oriented) quests, my pilgrimage does not involve fighting dragons or other external enemies. Mine is a more circular journey; each step I travel into the world of séance and sacrifice, pilgrimage and sacred dance, not only resurrects the mother I’ve come to find, but brings me face to face with a larger version of myself.

Karla: I appreciate how rigorously you interrogate your position as an outsider in Cuba throughout the memoir. I’d love to hear what you discovered as you navigated that delicate line between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation. Do you have advice for other writers who are grappling with similar concerns?

Rebe: My Mother in Havana is a book about magic and miracle—about leaning into intuition and trusting that if we allow ourselves to be messy and vulnerable we will lean into our greatest strength. I hope my readers will feel that invitation. We are living in messy times, and we are grappling with big questions. Among those questions is this very important question of how we talk about one another in a way that is filled with love and curiosity rather than exploitation. My curiosity about Cuba began as a child, when I first decided to learn Spanish, and continued through a decades-long love affair with Latin and Afro-Cuban dance and spirituality. As an outsider to Cuban culture, I wanted to ensure that that love and curiosity saturated every bit of my text, and I wanted to make sure that I rendered the rites and rituals I’d been entrusted with as accurately as possible. To write through the lens of a pilgrim, not a tourist, became my mantra. And so, as I wrote My Mother in Havana, I returned numerous times to Cuba to explore archives, deepen my initiation into the Afro-Cuban dances and religions that lie at the heart of the book, and take part in the annual pilgrimages to Our Lady of Charity’s sanctuary in El Cobre. Along the way, I forged deep friendships with Cuban scholars and artists, writers and spiritual practitioners. In 2017, I was invited to present my manuscript at Santiago de Cuba’s International Colloquium on Popular Religions, where I received feedback from leading Afro Cuban scholars. And in 2018, my partner Rick, who figures prominently in the book, and I married on a farm overlooking Our Lady’s sanctuary.

Karla: For ten years you directed Chicago’s award-winning Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art & Music and its resident dance company, One World Dance Theater, and it was that life in Latin dance that originally called you to Cuba. As a movement artist (both on the stage and the page), how is the process of choreographing a dance similar or dissimilar to the process of putting together a memoir?

Rebe: The first drafts of My Mother in Havana resembled a cross between a Pinterest and a forensic murder board. I wrote themes and images on index cards and Post-it notes, arranged and rearranged them across pinboards and floors. The process was reminiscent of the way I’d worked as a choreographer, waking in the night with an idea whose movements I worked out by moving slips of paper across the floor of my studio. There is something intuitive and dare I say magical about this process. You must trust that all those carefully placed cards and Post-its are leading somewhere because, at the end of the day, the beauty of creating something is the element of surprise. Whether it’s a dance or a memoir, both artist and audience enter the piece not knowing how its materials and patterns will resolve themselves. And then, if you’re lucky, somehow, both impossibly and inevitably, they do.

Karla: The words magic and miracle live side by side in your subtitle. Can you talk about how these words operate as their own individual entities and in what ways they intersect? As you traveled through Cuba, experiencing and then writing about the rites and lore of Santeria and Spiritism and folk Catholicism, were you surprised by any of the places where you discovered magic and miracle?

When I think of magic, I think of Afro-Cuban drummers and dancers who summon the gods to Earth. I think of the El Cobre Spiritist I called on to summon my mother’s spirit who has dedicated his life to learn to communicate with the dead. I think of the many ways that we as humans strive to tune ourselves to the frequencies of the spirit world, whether that be through incantation, the lighting of candles, or even prayer. The word miracle, on the other hand, suggests an unseen hand at work behind the scenes. It can be seen in the sightings of Cuba’s patron saint, Our Lady of Charity, who appears out of thin air to help those in need. In my own experience, miracle presents as a trail of bread crumbs pulling me—quite insistently at times—toward a future not yet visible to me. As we were heading to press, my editor sent me a package with a miniature plastic pony and a card with a quote from Rilke: “Let everything happen to you/ Beauty and terror/ Just keep going/ No feeling is final.” In her handwritten note, she reminded me that, amidst the frenzy of putting a book out into the world, she hoped I’d take time to enjoy the ride. I keep my good luck pony near my writing chair—its mane and tail blowing in an invisible wind, a reminder of the winds that have shaped my creative life: the inexplicable tug to learn Spanish as a child; the early loss of my mother; the seeds for my becoming a Latin dancer and choreographer that she planted just as I was losing her. It’s only years later that I see the way losing my mother at such a young age pushed me to make something from that loss. Or how my career as a Latin dancer led me to Cuba, where I found a way to not only make sense of my grief but to heal from it. Or the ways that writing my story invites the reader to shine new light on their own search for meaning and wholeness, magic and miracle.

Karla: Hanif Abdurraqib has referred to grief as an emotion knocking on the door of memory, asking us not just to bury our dead but to celebrate them. As you return again and again to the memory of your mother throughout the book, how does her ghost transform from a haunting presence to one of gratitude, reverence, and even joy?

Rebe: I tried to write 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 recorded the names of flowers she planted in her garden, 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—and, yes, joy!

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 everyone who is curious about what lies beyond the five senses, who yearns to connect with the deep and long story of our lives. 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 them 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.⁣

Karla Cordero is a descendant of the Chichimeca peoples of northern Mexico, a Chicana poet, educator, and author of the poetry collection, How To Pull Apart The Earth (Not A Cult), a 2019 San Diego Book Award winner and awarding-winning finalist for the International Latino Book Award and the International Book Award. Her work has appeared on NPR, Academy of American Poets, O-Oprah Magazine, Split This Rock, PANK, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4 LatiNext Anthology, among other publications. Karla is a recipient of the 2021 California Arts Fellowship; in addition, she is a Macondo, VONA, CantoMundo, Tin House, Pink Door Writing Retreat, and Community of Writers Fellow. Karla is the Executive Director for the nonprofit Glassless Minds and a professor in composition and creative writing at MiraCosta College and San Diego City College. 

Rebe Huntman is the author of My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle, a memoir that traces her search to connect with her mother—30 years after her death—among the gods and saints of Cuba. A former professional Latin and Afro-Cuban dancer and choreographer, for more than a decade Rebe directed Chicago’s award-winning Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art & Music and its resident dance company, One World Dance Theater. She collaborates with native artists in Cuba and South America and has been featured in LATINA Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune, and on Fox and ABC. Rebe’s essays, stories, and poems appear or are forthcoming in such places as Lit Hub, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review, and the PINCH, and have earned her an Ohio Individual Excellence Award as well as fellowships from the Macondo Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, PLAYA Residency, Hambidge Center, and Brush Creek Foundation. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from The Ohio State University and lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and Delaware, Ohio. Both e’s in her name are long. Find her at www.rebehuntman.com and on Instagram at @rebehuntman.  (Photo credit: Kate Sweeney)