Another month with 30 days and I’ll be prompting for the 30/30 crew (a group of poets working to write 30 poems in 30 days) every Monday, posting some of the result here and also posting up the prompts I set for anyone that wants to join in.

As I write this it’s Halloween — or the Pagan ‘New Year’ festival Samhain (literally meaning ‘the end of summer’). Bonfires were lit all over the country, pumpkins and gourds were harvested, and it marked the passage from the season of ‘day’ (summer) to that of ‘night’ (winter).

Photo courtesy of Naomi Woddis

It was also seen as a time when the veil between the living and the spirit world was at its thinnest. This festival is reiterated all over the world in different forms, from All Saints Day in Eastern Europe to the Day of the Dead in Latin America.

It is  a time of divination, when we honour our ancestors, meditate on the past, think forward into the future and contemplate the cycle of birth, death and renewal. I’ve been thinking about the idea of poetry being an attempt to influence the future…as a ‘spell’ that is cast, momentarily, over the reader.

Write a poem that tells us of an event that will happen in the future…it could be an event that HAS happened in the past, but is written in the future tense, or a poem that intuits the future, as a prophecy…

I’m completing a short story collection set in Cuba.
I recently returned to the island after an absence of five years. Here is an extract from my notebook, where the stories start.

Part of what I wrote in my notebook that day

La Habana, Friday 2pm.

We walked through Vedado, down Calle 8 to 23 where the bank was. I sat down in a green office chair outside. There were a few people there clustering under the shade. L— asked who was last in line. It was a middle-aged woman with bleached hair not done very well – a bit orange and patchy. I can’t remember what she was wearing except that it was orangey-red – trousers, I think, and a top pulled down to cover her belly. She was nothing like the lithe stalk girls – younger ones, before children came, perhaps before they stopped caring.

But I know that she said a nice thing to me, and I wanted to touch her arm – I did touch her arm. I jumped because a man had dropped ash on my toes in my white sandals, which already left my feet raw and chewed.

Chewed feet from sandals and walking and walking last night, along the Malecon por el dia, then hours in Centro Habana after dark, where smelly pools of water encircled by cats made me jump, as if they might have been rats, not half-starved domestic beasts.

Street in Centro Habana

And we walked to Giolvis in Cohimar and I remembered how it was here – the feeling of being cut off – the voices voices, everywhere human voices sobre todo – people just there, in the street, on the sides, on walls, talking, wandering… Loud music pounding from open houses; rock n roll; an old woman in a pink housecoat rocks, staring fixedly at her past as she listens to the Righteous Brothers: Oh – my love – my darling – I’ve hungered for your touch – a long, lonely time … but the music’s not from her house, but it doesn’t matter, it just plays…

And we walked down roads full of puddles and smashed paving stones and shacks that ate the street, and no one knew what the numbers were. Every house was 26. People were tired and broken and unhealthy – misshapen, protruding bellies, little stick legs and shriveled skin – a lot of raggaton. Loud loud. Who are these people? What do they do?

I remembered how it was to be so far from home – and not know who to be – how to be. Speaking Spanish like a clipped dinner party guest as we sat at Giolvis’ table eating rice and frankfurters, all chopped up – it might have been pork but I ate it anyway – it was all there was in a big pot, and salty beans with a side dish of platano, and Eric, an angel, Giolvis’ new boyfriend whose eyes and mine spoke.

Eric at Giolvis' house in Cohimar

I wanted to be here – this far away and strange, where people kept water in drums because sometimes it just stopped coming – you never knew when, like the light. The street lights stopped two weeks ago and no one knew why – anyway, nobody would come to mend them until who knew when.

The Cuban economy was fucked, said Giolvis. No one wanted to work in el campo any more – the work was hard and boring, without protection of conditions. Everyone was educated – they all wanted to go to university  – but there was no one to grow the coffee, or the sugar now. Cuba was fucked – even God did not know what was going to happen to Cuba now.

Vivan Fidel y Raúl — 'Long live Fidel and Raúl' (Pinar del Río street)

Outside the bank I jumped and the hot ash burnt me and I said in English, ‘Ow – that hurt, he dropped his cigarette on my foot!’ No one knew what I was saying but they all understood, and the orangey woman rolled her eyes, annoyed for me, and a few of the crowd moved at me sympathetically.

An old woman with one crutch came over. She loped from side to side, and had a boy with her of about four. He was eating something.

Her face was craggy and sweating. I let her sit down and the boy crouched into her, holding the top of the white plastic crutch. He had had enough of the crumbly thing
– cake or bread – that he was eating. He pushed it at her. ‘Finished?’ she asked.

‘Sí’

‘Are you sure?’

He nodded.

She bit out a part, I think with jam in, and threw the rest into the flower bed, then screwed up the paper it was in and tossed it behind her.

The boy, in a white vest and checked cotton shorts, lolled in the seat next to me.

The woman’s face was bluish, or reddish, and she kept looking into the distance, not paying attention to the boy. I looked at him. He was a hard little boy and I did not feel especially sympathetic. He looked back at me in an expressionless way. I thought of L— as a boy – a hard little boy who got beaten with a belt, whose father beat his beautiful kind mother whom everyone loved, and who died at 40 from an aneurism.

But then the boy smiled just a tiny bit; I gazed and was kind. He was, after all, just a boy. He looked at his grandmother, then back at me, and she said: ‘There – you see!’ and her face filled up with light.

Venceremos! - We will overcome! (Cuban revolutionary slogan on The Malecon, walkway along the Havana coast)

I was in Cuba again to gather material for my stories, face to face with her contradictions, five years on.

The confrontation with memory forced a jarred leap across the gap of years and understanding. What was a memory? What was real? Could I see without memory shadowing every step? Time sped up as if none had intervened – every friendship here preserved in stone. They began again with me as if I’d left only days before.

In contrast to the flat planes of my London life, Cuba jumped at me upon my return. Writing became more vivid through a long absence; maturity; other lenses I have ground and now see through. For the last year I had worked with notebooks from my original trips to the island, which began almost a decade ago, and now I wrote with a better understanding of what raw material was useful – and with greater awareness of my methods. Distance had shown me why I was drawn to Cuba – the emotional resonance of this place. Now I could concentrate on developing work about that.

I wrote as much as I could from first impressions, visual and visceral, without thought. Emotional, uninhibited. This was the kind of work I most liked in the original notebooks, which I now knew would be the most valuable for making the stories.

The second part of this post will be a notebook extract, with which I hope to share how I gather material for stories in which I am emotionally present. As to the why of writing – it is for survival, and this trip, a difficult one, showed me that more than ever before. I write from what I know, have felt and lived – watching its meaning unfold as I put words down on the page.

Mostly, I don’t photograph. I find that photographing gets in the way of observation – the inner recording of an event, a kind of dialogue with things as they happen around you – how is this situation making me feel? What do I think? But sometimes if I’m tired or distracted and don’t have peace of mind enough to be present and observe, using a camera allows me to connect to my experience again.

Other times, especially with friends, when I want to participate in an experience rather than be at the writer’s one remove, I photograph as I go along – my personal connection and interaction recorded in these images, which allow me to return later to events I’ve participated in rather than witnessed, and to think of them again in terms of my writing.

This time in Cuba, I knew better how to be present in the work. I have gained confidence in my voice over the intervening years. Reading the original notebooks, I realised that it was the writing with a strong, uninhibited voice that made the stories interesting. As a younger writer, I had shied away from the ‘I’ – edited the ‘I’ out – but now I knew that viewpoint – mine – was interesting and essential in the creation of this, a collection of work about being outside.

Now I understood that I could never write about Cuba in any other way; I would always write across a culture gap – could see only from its far side. This was painful. Naïveté had led me to believe that what separated me from life in Cuba was superficial. I saw now that it was not. It was embedded and I could love only from the island of my difference.