Lydia Cabrera. Afro-Cuban Tales

African American Review, Summer, 2006 by Kelly Washbourne

Lydia Cabrera. Afro-Cuban Tales. Trans. Alberto Hernandez-Chiroldes and Lauren Yoder. Intro. Isabel Castellanos. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004. 169 pp. $16.95.

This first English translation of one of the defining imaginative works by ethnographer Lydia Cabrera (1899-1991) sheds new light on the multiple currents that informed Io real maravilloso, or the "marvelous reality" literary tradition in Spanish American letters. The animistic universe familiar to readers of magical realism in which everyday events coexist with and are heightened by mythic forces, is here in evidence, though predating--and transcending--the easy formulas undergirding that style. Tales, a collection of 22 short narratives written in the early 1930s, eludes genre. Equal parts of politics (gender, race, and class), religion, superstition, and folklore combine to forge a world authentic to its own laws and logic, complete with (recognizably Surrealist) hyperbolic transformations of understated nature. These forces pass unremarked among the characters, many of whom are slaves. Cabrera herself was a white woman educated in Cuba, and sister-in-law to noted anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, best known for his concept of transculturation. With Cuentos, tales constructed on the basis of unlettered black women informants' oral tellings, Cabrera brought black Cuban culture to the international fore in Paris, and gave folklore more respectability as a high culture literary category.

Cabrera historicizes many folkloric motifs. Among these are the magic object--in "Mambiala Hill," the "good cook pot" that feeds the hungry and in "The Amazing Guinea" the captive natural phenomenon: "Devils were holding Rain prisoner in a big earthen pot, and Madame Misery, sewing strife, swooped down on the land of the rice eaters." The unreality of the tales is adapted, then, to Cuban colonial reality, and often the texts militate against hierarchy, power, and even the genre conventions themselves. The testimonial aspects--these are twice-told tales that Cabrera heard as a child--do not diminish the storytelling; neither does scholarship overwhelm the oral immediacy of the storytelling.

The non-specialist can recognize the conventions of creation myths, animal fables, and cautionary tales, here fleshed out with an assortment of tricksters, seductresses, idlers, slave masters, and jealous kings. In addition, the orishas, or gods, of the Lucumi (Cuban Yoruba) tradition enter human lives dramatically, not only as intended recipients of invocations (many of which are recreated in the texts), but as interacting forces, personalities with human foibles. From the very title we are privy to a syncretic space: Cuentos negros de Cuba is wisely translated "Afro-Cuban Tales," and it is in the hyphen, the symbolic bridge, that we are reminded that the African world has crossed over, forging a unique Cubanness. White and black cultural components come into play inextricably, fusing into what Ortiz imaginatively calls blanquinegra folklore--"white-black" folklore (rendered in this edition as "both black and white Cuban folklore" [xvii]). Moreover, reading these lyrical Tales keeps us always moving between, as if the text itself were in motion, defying genres while embracing the range between the local, the ambiguous, and the idiosyncratic, on the one hand, and the broad, the archetypal, and the parabolic, on the other hand. Scholars often cannot tell where tradition ends and Cabrera begins, tacit testament to a powerful mimetic gift--inventing the personal that only appears to mimic the traditional.

Language is where the book's syncretism is perhaps most salient. The stories are in one sense themselves "translations," or interpretations, from the African--chiefly Yoruban--sensibility; they are then "re-translated" in this scholarly edition into English. Note 6 in "Los Compadres," for example, reports that "In Spanish, "doctor priest" is el brujo, another word for the babalao, who combines the functions of herb doctor, priest, spiritual adviser, and medium." This revealing linguistic and cultural texturing lays bare the texts' origins, and rewards patient attention. These tales were first translated into French (1936) before the Spanish edition was even published (1940). This publishing history compels readers to the prominence given here to the French. A translator's introduction would have been a helpful inclusion for communicating editorial decisions, and shedding light on the degree to which the tales" adopted mother tongue colors them as "French." The implications of this feature on the hybrid language of the texts warrant comment. It is somewhat laborious, at times, to negotiate the footnotes, as their provenance is not always clear; the conventions "Author's note" and "Translator's note," applied strictly, would sort out this ambiguity. To the translators" credit, they respect and inventively recreate the colloquial, oral dimension of song, shout, and prayer: readers are always recognizably in the realm of the human voice, artfully "made strange," or stranger--in translation. Cabrera defies translation perhaps in the very point where much of the power of her stories resides, in their polyphony. This book's success in that dimension, then, is no small contribution toward a wider awareness of Afro-Cuban letters, since orality, a representational quandary multiplied in translation, may ultimately be where this collection most innovates, and may become its defining legacy. Critic Emily Maguire even considers Cabrera's characters' language use an example of what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., calls "Signifyin(g)"--performative, contentious expression--in this case with plots that are resolved through linguistic (oral) negotiation.