Interview with Olga Karman Reader Views welcomes Olga Karman, author of the memoir “Scatter My Ashes Over Havana.” Olga is being interviewed by Juanita Watson, Assistant Editor of Reader Views. Juanita: Thanks for talking with Reader Views today Olga. We are excited to hear more about your poignant memoir, “Scatter My Ashes Over Havana.” Would you start by telling us what your book is about?
My only way out was a career. I attended Connecticut College part-time and earned a scholarship for graduate work at Harvard University. A Ph.D, affection for the United States, the beginning of an academic career did not assuage my sense of estrangement. Who was I? Cuban? Cuban-American? Hispanic? American? If I could only touch the person I’d been in Havana, she’d give me the answer. In 1997, I flew to Havana to make myself whole before I ran out of time. In that coral city by the sea, in those narrow streets that had watched me grow up, I found what I needed. Juanita: What inspired you to write about your life experience? Olga: The idea was born in 1997 after I returned to Havana for the first time in over thirty-six years. The trip back was earth shattering for me even before my flight landed at José Martí Airport. Days before leaving for Cuba, I dreamt of the names of Havana streets and of myself as a little girl in a pretty dress seated on the Malecón sea wall, waving me home. I vowed that I would keep a detailed journal of my days in Havana so that not one single experience would to slip away from me after I returned to the United States. I promised myself I’d stay in my hotel room every night of my two-week visit to Havana and write what I’d experienced each day. When I returned to Buffalo and read my notes I was overcome by this certainty: I had a story to tell, and no one could tell it for me. I will add that while I was visiting Havana in 1997 and in 1998 I’d felt I wanted to write about my life and the life of my generation to save it from oblivion. I quote from Scatter My Ashes over Havana: I realized that my past—our collective past—was just about gone, erased. It was up to me to give a voice to that past before it was too late. Juanita: Olga, would you tell us more about your professional background and how it ties into your passion for writing and literature? Olga: You’d think I had arranged my professional life with the foreknowledge that I’d be writing Scatter My Ashes over Havana. My college and my graduate studies made me an avid reader of literature. My doctoral thesis was about José Lezama Lima, a Cuban author who adored Havana. The novel I studied was his Paradiso, a thoroughly Cuban work. For about five years at Harvard I was immersed in the past I had left behind. Books, magazines, microfilm—it was all Cuba. This was both satisfying and tantalizing. My years as a poet—two decades or more—prepared me for writing Scatter My Ashes over Havana. I acquired the habit of writing. For me, that means sitting down first thing in the morning and working straight on for about three or four hours. It also means reading a lot, thinking, going for walks to allow the work to settle, to “cool off” until the next day. It means weighing every word the way a poet does. My professional life and my work as a writer are in harmony. Juanita: You’ve published two volumes of poetry, as well as appearing in numerous poetry anthologies, why did you decide to depart from your favored format, and write prose? Olga: The decision was made for me. When I returned from my trip to Havana in 1997, I was eager to read the journal I had kept because I thought I’d “find” poems in there—material for poems, inspiration mostly. In that spirit, I began to read those pages. What I found was a story—a story only I could tell from my point of view. Juanita: What was happening in Cuba during the time you left? Why did you decide to leave? Olga: I decided to leave because I was engaged to an American whom I would marry days after my ship arrived in New York Harbor. At the time I left, many of my friends had already left or were getting ready to leave. I recall going home after a party at dawn once and seeing the long queue in front of the American embassy already forming. As I mention in the book, Mother and I went to a few stores before we could find one that still had suitcases left to sell. Many Cubans saw clearly the type of government that was ruling and would rule Cuba for the foreseeable future, and they wanted to escape while there was still a chance. Almost fifty years later, Cubans are fleeing in inner tubes, makeshift rafts. I met few people in Cuba who did not have family living in New York, Texas, California, New Jersey. The exodus has been part of our sad history since 1959. Juanita: What did the promise of America mean to you at twenty years of age? Olga: It meant a happy marriage, the fulfillment of a love story that had begun when I was a guest student in New York years before. I had fallen in love then. I carried my trousseau in my suitcases. This was exile for love. The United States, however, had meant many important things long before the love story. As a teenager I had wanted to come to camp in the United States. Badly. I collected the ads that appeared in the magazine section of the Sunday New York Times, which Mother sometimes bought in Havana. Like many Latin Americans, I had grown up thinking the United States meant BIGGER and BETTER. Juanita: Was life in America what you had expected? Where did your determination come from to work hard for a better life for yourself and your children? What kept you going? Olga: Life in the United States was NOT at all what I had expected—not my life anyway. It was SMALLER and in some ways WORSE than in Havana. My husband moved us to a rural middle-of-nowhere place in Connecticut, away from everything I had known and loved: life on the streets, shops, bookstores, 7 daily newspapers, live theater, live concerts, a ballet company, dozens of movie theaters. That was Havana. I moved into solitary confinement in a house surrounded by frozen fields. My determination to succeed was a matter of survival. Literally. Cubans can’t go back if things go wrong here. It’s “sink or swim.” I came very close to “sink,” and touching bottom propelled me upwards towards life. The only way I could imagine surviving if I left my husband was to prepare myself to make a living. That meant college. I had to go back to school to become financially capable of supporting myself and the baby daughter we had borne. Returning to college, although most frightening, helped me in two crucial ways: I recaptured a sense of my own strength as a person, and I began to find a way to become employable (make a living). My surprising success at Connecticut College simply gave me back the strength I thought I had forfeited. The financial independence was second in importance. First: the awakening to my own strengths. My years at Harvard reinforced all that. Juanita: What did your return visit to Cuba, after a 37-year exile, mean to you? Was Cuba what you’d expected? How had it changed? Olga: Returning meant getting my identities integrated into one identity. You could say I became whole although I think that’s a vague kind of metaphor. It’s as if Havana had allowed me to be who I had been + who I was now. In my book, the moment when that happens is clearly expressed. Yes, Cuba was more or less what I expected. I had talked to persons who had returned, and I knew to some extent what I’d find. However, I was still overcome by SEEING what I saw instead of listening to others’ stories. It had changed, oh my, in so many ways. Dollar stores and “people’s markets,” Rapid Response Brigades visible here and there, people sitting limply on the stoops of their houses, people trying to sell you anything (powdered milk, cleansing powder) at a whisper right in the middle of the street, people locking and double locking the hoods of their cars so that no one could steal the batteries. I could go on. Juanita: How do you see yourself or your life experience differently after that trip? Do you think you’d ever live in Cuba once again? Olga: I see myself as a person without painful yearnings! I have little nostalgia for Cuba now, although it’s my “mother earth.” If I lived in Cuba again, and I’d like to, it would be part-time. Buffalo is home. My children and grandchildren live in the Northeast. Juanita: What can you tell us about Havana and your relationship to this beautiful city? Olga: When I was in my thirties I went to Paris and to Rome for the first time. Walking along the boulevards and the narrow streets, sitting in cafés, enjoying the street vitality in those cities I suddenly and repeatedly realized THAT WAS HAVANA. How could you not be in love with a city like that? Especially if you rode city buses, drove a car during your teenage years, worked in the OLD section of the city? This is the kind of city that becomes as much a part of your life as your family. Juanita: Olga, you have resided in the U.S. for many years. How does it feel having the dual identities of Cuban immigrant, and American? Olga: Since returning to Cuba, the “dual” or even “triple” (Cuban immigrant, American, Latina) identity really does not give me much thought. I am who I am. There’s work to be done to make this country stronger, and I’m doing it with my teaching, my community work, and—I hope—with my writing. Of course, I work mostly with the Hispanic community, but we are so many now that…what’s good for us is good for ALL of us. Juanita: Olga, what are your thoughts on the influx of immigration from Latin America to the U.S., and the ensuing controversy regarding this issue? Olga: The immigration of Latinos is probably unstoppable. If Europe were separated from Africa by a river, African immigration would be unstoppable. I see the issue this way: what can Latino immigration contribute to life in the United States? A workforce with the work-ethic of the immigrant who has risked his/her life to make a better life, a sense of family less diluted than ours has become here, closer ties with church life, a clear idea of what freedom means, what the LOSS of human rights means, what the right to vote represents. Hispanics in Latin America sometimes risk their lives to vote. In other words, immigration has many positives. Juanita: Olga, what does the experience of ‘living in exile’ afford you in terms of the way you see the world around you? Olga: It depends which decade you’re in as far as being “in exile.” In the beginning, the world around you is frightening and alien. You’re always behind, catching up. What did that s/he say, s/he spoke so fast? What did s/he mean? Later, much later, you sometimes feel that being an exile or an immigrant allows you to love the United States a different way. I, for one, find it painful to criticize this country severely. I mean…compared to WHAT? This country gave us a home. Yes, there’s a history, a “bad” history of U.S. presence in Latin America. But it’s not all or even most “bad.” When 9/11 happened, I got a good sense of my loyalty to the U.S. If this house goes down…who will pay the piper? Juanita: What has your life experience taught you about identity? Olga: For many years, “who am I” was a burning question. I found that only by returning “home” to Cuba could I integrate the several identities I had formed AND valued: mother, Ph.D., Latina, community activist, professor. Integrating means, for me, finding peace with your varied portraits, varied selves. It means finding a center that binds what once seemed a hodge-podge of good things! Juanita: What is the meaning of your title, “Scatter My Ashes Over Havana”? Olga: I mention in the book that I’d ask my grown children to do just that, scatter my ashes over Havana, if I died without going back to Cuba. I wanted to return, dead or alive. Juanita: How long did it take to write your memoir? What was the writing process like for you? Olga: Because I wrote while I was teaching and because I wrote poetry for many years, the writing was slow. Every page must have had 10 versions. It took me 7 years. The writing process for me, fortunately, means simply this: early morning, coffee and breakfast. Get paper and pencil, sit down, and begin. Think, write, say it out loud, cross it out, start again, crumple the sheet and throw it on the floor because you’ve found a better way of saying what was on that sheet. Work for 4 or 5 hours. Stop. Have lunch. Go for a walk. Don’t look at what you wrote until the next morning. Juanita: Olga, what is your underlying message in “Scatter My Ashes Over Havana”? Olga: I don’t have an underlying message. That is to say, I did not write with a message in mind. I wrote my story. The message is for each reader to find. It is, probably, the combination of my words and your mind or soul. Juanita: What are your children’s thoughts about your memoir? How do you think their lives are affected by your exile experience? Olga: My children are proud, but they don’t say much. I think that if my mother had written that book I’d be pretty stunned. I think they know me in a way they didn’t before they read the memoir. My grandchildren (the oldest ones) go to my readings and cheer me on. Juanita: How can readers find out more about you and your endeavors? Olga: By all means, go to my website: olgakarman.net. The cousin of one of the characters in my book built the webpage. She is Cuban, and I have known her since we lived in Havana in the 1950’s. What a gift. Juanita: Olga, we have thoroughly enjoyed hearing about you and your new book “Scatter My Ashes over Havana.” We encourage readers to look for your book at local and online bookstores. Do you have any last thought you’d like to share today? Olga: When you read my book, you will live my life with me—both in Havana and in New England, Buffalo. You will know what it meant for a Cuban to uproot herself and, against all odds, make a life for her in this amazing country. I hope you will find courage in my journey. Listen to interview on Inside Scoop Live |
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