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.

Tags: Cuba, short stories

This entry was posted on Friday, October 8th, 2010 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Leila Segal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.