337. How Culture Influences Memoir with Rebe Huntman

Choreographer and author Rebe Huntman discusses her memoir, how Afro-Cuban culture influenced her worldview, and how that translates into her writing.

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Visit Rebe's website:
https://www.rebehuntman.com/

Grab a copy of My Mother in Havana:
https://www.rebehuntman.com/mymotherinhavana

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https://www.instagram.com/rebehuntman/
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Transcript

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Jennia: Hello, I'm Jennia D'Lima. Welcome to Writing and Editing, the author-focused podcast that takes a whole-person approach to everything related to both writing and editing. Creativity is influenced by our other interests, our observations, and our life experiences. This can shape the language we use and how we use it. And sometimes that may make the wording itself feel as if it is alive and moving. Rebe Huntman's writing has been described in just such a way and I'm pleased to have her on today to talk about the connection between culture, movement, and memoir.

Jennia: Well, first, thank you so much for being here!

Rebe Huntman: Thank you, Jennia! What a beautiful introduction. I love it!

Jennia: Aww, thank you! So I know that dance is a major part of your life and I'd like to have you start by sharing a little bit about how that creative medium has impacted your writing.

Rebe Huntman: Yeah! So I was a professional Latin dancer and choreographer for a number of years and had a World Dance studio and World Dance company that operated outside of Chicago. And even before that, as a child, I played piano—

Jennia: Mmm.

Rebe Huntman: —So I feel like music and musicality—My mother was an operatic singer. Her father was a musician who played every instrument in the orchestra, so—And my father on the other side was a self-taught jitterbug dancer extraordinaire—

Jennia: Oh fun! (laughs)

Rebe Huntman: (laughs) So I feel like all of these different streams of rhythm and musicality have really shaped and influenced my life.

Jennia: Yes!

Rebe Huntman: When it comes to dance . . . Particularly so because it was Latin dance that led me to writing my recent memoir, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic and Miracle. And that book came about in large part because of dance, because it was my career as a dancer and choreographer that first took me to Cuba 20 years ago—

Jennia: Mhm.

Rebe Huntman: —and introduced me to the dances in the Afro-Cuban traditions, like Santería, that are more than just—You know, I've been trained to think about dance as being performative—

Jennia: Ohh.

Rebe Huntman: —and something you master. And we've got mirrors in the studio. You always wanna make sure everything is perfect and right in terms of spectacle and showmanship. And what I encountered in Cuba was that these dances that I was performing and teaching, these Latin dances had their origins in dances that are designed to summon the gods and bring the gods to Earth to dance with us and communicate with us and communicate through us. And that was a real turning point in my career as a dancer and my time here as a human being in terms—

Jennia: Yeah!

Rebe Huntman: —of really seeing how spiritual our movements are, our dances are. Everything that we do can be seen—

Jennia: Mhm.

Rebe Huntman: —if one [audio cuts out] find, as an invitation to communicate with other people, obviously, but with other realms. Right? With the spirit world, with—And it's a really powerful act when we put something on the page or we dance a step. So there's a real physicality for me in language that's reminiscent of dance. Yeah, so thank you for that question!

Jennia: Yes! So my mom was a dance teacher, so I also grew up dancing from the time I was 2 years old. And just thinking about all the famous ballets and how we use that as a way of storytelling, just the same way we use language as storytelling. And I like that you said we learn that it's performative with the mirrors in the studio because you are looking at muscle extension and movement, and is your skeleton aligned properly? How straight is your spine during certain ballet steps? And that sort of thing. And, yeah, you can so easily see how that translates into language. But not just those styles of dances, but the others you were talking about where we're not looking at performative now so much as a way of communication or a way of inspiring or bringing about action.

Rebe Huntman: Yeah. You know, we're talking about both writing and movement. And, especially today, in these times, but always I'm thinking about, what is it that I'm putting out in the world, right? What words am I choosing? What things am I writing about? Because there's a real power in that. There's a real power in saying, "Hey, world," (both laugh), "here's something I find interesting, important, beautiful. Will you notice it alongside me?" And I think it's where we as humans have incredible power and agency, and maybe some of the listeners aren't writers or dancers, but in every single action we put out into the world, right? It's a creative act and an offering.

Jennia: Yes! And I know some of the reviewers have said that your writing feels very poetic or lyrical, and that also feels like movement because we hear sometimes people saying, well, how can a flat word on a page be musical or lyrical? But all you have to do is think about just even iambic petameter or something where you almost automatically can feel, like, that wave going up and down and up and down. It doesn't just feel like words. You feel that movement and just the way the syllables move you along or the stress beats.

Rebe Huntman: Yeah! I'm a big fan of a lot of poets. I think poetry is one of the most beautiful and potent forms of expression. And one of my favorite poems is Annie Finch, and she's such a fan of meter and rhyme, which we've lost in our modern age. We've kind of lost that. It's like it's not cool, but it's actually a chanting, right? It's a form of chanting and an invocation and it gets back to that more spiritual nature of what we're doing, right? (laughs)

Jennia: Mhm! I never thought about it like that, but it is. And I'm sure you've experienced this, too, where as you start reading in some sort of meter, you just feel it kind of wilting along with everything you say, and you almost change what you were going to say so it still fits that pre-established meter that you've now become accustomed to for whatever reason.

Rebe Huntman: Yeah, perfect.

Jennia: And I think, again, like, dance is the same way. And so, yeah. But, so besides how dance has impacted it, did it impact not just how you wrote, but also what you wrote about?

Rebe Huntman: Yes! I've written my whole life, but I dedicated several decades to really primarily focusing on dance. And when that dance career ended, I was really bereft and there was a grieving process and so I wrote a lot about dance. I also did this crazy thing where I—"fun, crazy—

Jennia: Let's go with fun (laughs).

Rebe Huntman: Let's go fun! I took my dance costumes, which were really fabulous, and one of the things as I retired from dance was, well, who am I without these costumes?

Jennia: Ahh.

Rebe Huntman: Who am I if I'm not the woman on stage, who's perform—again, goes back to that performative thing.

Jennia: Mhm.

Rebe Huntman: And I took my dance costumes all around Chicago, which is where I was living at the time, and I would drape them over tombstones or I would take them into dressing rooms and prop them up as if they were like a person.

Jennia: Oh!

Rebe Huntman: And so I had this whole series of photographs that I took of the empty dress. And the question I was sorting through at that time was, who am I without the dress? Who's the dress without the woman?

Jennia: Mmm.

Rebe Huntman: What is this thing called—

Jennia: Oh beautiful!

Rebe Huntman: —woman? Which then is a question that really showed up around the same time in my writing. I would say two things have really profoundly impacted me as an artist and as a human, and one is my career in dance. But the other is that I lost my mother when I was 19.

Jennia: Mmm.

Rebe Huntman: And it was such a huge loss. I think, everyone listening, it's inescapable. We all came into this world with a mother, right? And regardless of what kind of relationship we have with our mother, which can be very different—some of us have absentee relationships with our mothers, some are very close, some of us have lost our mothers, some of our mothers get on our nerves, right? We have all kinds of relationships with our mother, but it's such a central relationship. And when I lost my mother at 19, I felt very adrift. And conventional wisdom told me just to keep moving and—

Jennia: Mhm.

Rebe Huntman: —make something of myself and kind of put the memory of my mother behind me. And all that caught up, eventually. I followed that advice very diligently. But when I was about to turn 50, about the same time I was carting around those empty dance dresses and photographing them and wondering about this question of, like, who am I? Right? Who am I without this outer shell of performance and of these beautiful dresses? And I was really missing my mother. And it's just now that we're talking about the two things at once, I'm realizing how related they were—

Jennia: Uh-huh.

Rebe Huntman: —Because I was aching for a mother that I barely remembered anymore. She'd been gone for 30 years—I couldn't have picked her voice out of a lineup. But I ached for her. And I think I was aching for someone to show me the way. I think my whole life I'd thought, "By the time you turn 50, you know who you are. You feel your sense of power in the world, and you move through the world purposefully, and you never question yourself." And that was what I thought 50 would feel like. And then it felt so different. And I found myself really questioning, "All right, I'm looking for this role model. Where do I find it? I'm looking to connect with my mother. Where do I find it?" And because of my career in dance, because of those years I had spent traveling to Cuba—

Jennia: Mhm.

Rebe Huntman: —working with choreographers there, I knew a couple things about Cuba. I knew one, they have a real sense of who the mother is, what the mother is.

Jennia: Mhm.

Rebe Huntman: They have some very strong spiritual mothers as really powerful role models. Unlike the role models I found in my own country. They also have these spiritual traditions that really keep the door open between the living and the dead. And so, my background in dance took me once again to Cuba to look for answers to these unanswerable questions I was asking. One, if my mother's been gone for 30 years, and I miss her so much, I ache for her, but I don't really remember her, then what is it that I'm missing? What is this thing called "mother"? And where does one go to find that and connect with that in a meaningful way? I'd felt in my own country, I was surrounded by role models, right?

Jennia: Mhm

Rebe Huntman: Pop icons, and underwear models, and porn stars—

Jennia: I don't know—(laughs)

Rebe Huntman: —you know, on and on and on, right? So many different models for how to be a woman, but none of them felt like the kind of woman I wanted to be. Right?

Jennia: Right, yes.

Rebe Huntman: —[I wanted] something much more powerful. So that was one of my questions is, how do we connect with that sense of womanhood and motherhood? And also how do I connect with my mother? I realized I'd done grief wrong—wrong sounds really judgy. Wrong for me. Right?

Jennia: Mmm.

Rebe Huntman: And that served me to turn my back on her for so long. And I did it with all the right intentions of making myself into something. But I went to Cuba where I knew, again, that the ideas about life and death and talking with the dead and keeping the dead close were very different. And so dance took me to Cuba.

Jennia: Mhm.

Rebe Huntman: Those things I was experiencing, took me to Cuba. And those were the seeds of my book, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic and Miracle, which is about my search to connect with my mother in Cuba through those Afro-Cuban traditions that keep the dead close. Through seances and pilgrimages, working with a spiritist in the small mountain town of El Cobre, joining tens of thousands of people in celebration of the mother. Working with Santería priests and priestesses through dance, again, and other forms to really communicate with the spirits. And it was just this really beautiful door that opened that ended up leading to this book.

Jennia: Yeah! And then, like you said, the word "connection" or "reconnection." So I'd love for you to share a little bit more about that. Not just what reconnection means to you, but who and what you connected or reconnect with.

Rebe Huntman: Ahh. So (laughs) it's interesting, I was talking about the book to a group of people recently, and there was a Cuban American man in the front seat who had read my book already before coming—

Jennia: Mhm.

Rebe Huntman: —[audio cuts out] and I was going through a whole long-winded explanation of that answer, of what I connected with. And he raised his hand, he said, "You went to Cuba to find your mother and you found yourself." And—(laughs)

Jennia: That's a tagline right there (laughs). He just came up with marketing material (Rebe laughs).

Rebe Huntman: I can't do—But, I mean, I can explain more fully than that. But that's really that in a nutshell. And isn't that like what every good quest is? You go off looking for something. You've got this deep—I like to use the word "unanswerable"—question. 'Cause I think that these really big questions that we can inch toward answers, but they're too big to ever really fully grasp, are the most interesting ones. Right?

Jennia: Mhm.

Rebe Huntman: And so I went to Cuba, in this case, looking to connect with the spirit of my mother. But what I ended up doing was connecting with a whole 'nother way of seeing the world and living in the world and communicating with really all that is. So to demystify that a little bit, some of the spiritual traditions I was working with and invited to work with while I was in Cuba, the Afro-Cuban traditions like Santería, that we have a very skewed—We get very little information about those religions here in the U.S., at least in my experience. And when we do they're very skewed. So I don't think that we understand them properly. But there are these beautiful earth-based religions where the idea's that we are all interconnected. There's one god named Olodumare, who is so vast, we can't comprehend such vastness. And so that one god comes to us through all these intermediary gods, who watch over us and guide us and show us the way. And we each have a personal—we have one orisha in particular that's our guardian orisha and that watches over us in particular and really shows us the way. So right there in terms of being connected, right?

Jennia: Mhm.

Rebe Huntman: Not just me out in the world, but me with my own guardian spirit. And in my case it's Oshun, the river goddess, who's mighty and powerful and fast and comes to us in all these different guises. So she can be the flirtatious young, beautiful dancer, or she can be the vulture that picks at the bones of the dead, and she can be a weaver, and she can be a diviner, can foretell the future, and she can do all of these things. So what a tremendous role model, right, to have the permission to move into all those different guises and shapes. So that's one thing in terms of relationship was a relationship with the spirit world. That, again, these orishas or intermediary gods are so human-like in many ways. They're not perfect, they have their own struggles and—So they're highly relatable. The other thing in terms of relationship is the idea that we are related in a very vital and important way to everyone who's come before us and everyone who will come after us.

Jennia: Mmm.

Rebe Huntman: So the idea of ancestral worship, when I think about my 19-year-old self who lost her mother and the guidance that I was given by a guidance counselor, "Keep moving. Make your mother proud by keep moving forward. Don't really think about her." In Cuba, it's a very different idea. The idea is that we're linked in an ancestral chain and that those who came before us are still with us and they're guiding us with their wisdom and they're whispering in our ear. So the idea that I could put my mother be—should, here, with the wisdom that I received, put her memory aside so I could make something of myself. It's completely contrary to the idea in Cuba, which is, how could you possibly move forward without bringing your mother with you? Because she's the one that's gonna say, "Hey, this is the way! Go this way," right? "Watch out for that pothole over there!" You know—

Jennia: What a different way of looking at it too. But I can see in that idea of—that you're not alone, even when you might think you were before then, whether it's by seen or unseen, just being able to recognize that and to make that part of your worldview and how that has to be such a paradigm shift.

Rebe Huntman: It's a huge paradigm shift, right? If we think about how many people are in our lineage and all the people we have in our camp. If we choose to open that door that says, "Yes, my ancestors are with me," then I have a pretty powerful army of benefactors, right, who are all on my side that I can ask for things, that I can talk to. It creates an incredible depth in terms of one's life experience—

Jennia: Mmm.

Rebe Huntman: —And I think it also really changes how you then view your life and your responsibility. So in these traditions, which are based in a Yoruba, West African worldview, it's that we have a responsibility, we have to earn our place as an ancestor. Like, it's no small thing to be an ancestor that's going to be whispering in future generations' ears. So you need to gain your own wisdom. You need to do your life right so that you can then be a good ancestor to those who come.

Jennia: Yeah!

Rebe Huntman: When we talk about relationship, it's just so beautiful all the different ways that we're braided together. And the last thing I'll say and this is, I think, an important—It's not a blatant tenet of My Mother in Havana, but it's very much in there as the idea that as human beings we have very complicated relationships and we look at them from a historical, in-the-moment point of view. But if we go back generations and generations, we find ourselves with a single ancestor, or a single mother—

Jennia: Yeah!

Rebe Huntman: —and that's a reminder that we're all related.

Jennia: Yeah! And it also pulls you out of the self a little bit and has that broader perspective of thinking about others or people who will come after, not just yourself in the moment and what you need and how you feel. And it's very forward thinking, too, you know, you're not just—Again, it's—There's like an extra layer of mindfulness to it because I think mindfulness includes thinking again about those broader circles, not just the self.

Rebe Huntman: Yeah, beautifully said. Yes, absolutely! (laughs)

Jennia: Well, so going back to a little bit to writing, how did you portray the development of this reconnection when you were bringing that across on the page?

Rebe Huntman: Yeah. So I think it's interesting, as writers, no one teaches you how to write a book. You kind of have to figure it out (laughs) yourself. And one of the things that I was really intent on figuring out and had a lot of fun figur[ing] out was, how would I bring all this to a reader who would fall into one of many camps? But, broadly, on one side, the book is called My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic and Miracle. And I knew setting out that some of my readers would be all about magic and miracle. Right?

Jennia: Mmm.

Rebe Huntman: Like, "I'm in," right? Those are words that resonate with me. And that there are others that are really allergic to that kind of language and that kind of thought. And I have many a friends who fall in that camp. And so I wanted to write a book that would invite everybody to enter this world that was, for me, very different when I entered it. And so I didn't wanna just come across as, "Hey, I found out all this stuff. Here it is."

Jennia: Right (laughs)

Rebe Huntman: So I think one of the beauties of writing a memoir is getting to relive through the writing all of my own questions. Right? Like, starting out as someone who didn't feel connected.

Jennia: Ahh.

Rebe Huntman: Starting out as someone who felt really lonely, and filled with grief, and filled with questions that felt so vast and unanswerable. And then to remember that and put that on the page before you even start on a quest. Like, where is my beginning place? So that you'll remember it because you learn things and then sometimes you forget where you started out. So part of what I wanted to do was carry my reader on my shoulders as we kind of—

Jennia: Mmm.

Rebe Huntman: —go through these different experiences and knock on different doors and be like, "Hey, is there anything valid in here? Is there? Is magic real? Is miracle real? Can we talk with the dead?" Right. And so to just recreate each of those scenes in really vivid detail and allow myself to be vulnerable and questioning at every step. Not the person who knows everything, but the person who is frightened as I go along and fearful and doubting and asking constantly, "Is this real?" Right?

Jennia: Yes.

Rebe Huntman: Am I making this up or is this really happening? So.

Jennia: Well, have you ever gone back and done a different series of photographs of the dresses now that you've gone through these experiences?

Rebe Huntman: Oh, I love that you asked that! I haven't, but I've thought about those dresses recently. And it's funny, 'cause I actually got rid of the actual dresses after I did that—

Jennia: Ahh.

Rebe Huntman: —series of photographs. But that notion still really interests me because art can point at different things and different questions and photographs and visual art differently than writing because you don't have all the words. But just that image of the dress without the body in it, but where the dress is animated somehow, it interests me.

Jennia: How do you think your styling of those photos would differ now than it did from (Rebe laughs) when you first took them?

Rebe Huntman: Wow. I think that I would feel more joyful about it.

Jennia: Mhm.

Rebe Huntman: I think there'd be more of a joy and a playfulness in it. There was so much grief when I first did it. And now I think I would like to just see those dresses kind of dance.

Jennia: Yes!

Rebe Huntman: Just the movement itself. The beauty of being in the world, however briefly, that we have this moment to flutter gracefully or . . . Or fall to the ground (Jennia laughs)—

Jennia: I think I would prefer flutter gracefully. That sounds like the better of the two (both laugh).

Rebe Huntman: —and everything in between. Right?

Jennia: Yes.

Rebe Huntman: Yeah.

Jennia: Well, for the last question, just as something that hopefully is a little bit fun. If My Mother in Havana was a style of dance, what style would it be and why?

Rebe Huntman: Mmm. So thank you for that. I actually had the opportunity to do a playlist for Largehearted Boy, and it has this song on it by these French singers. Their name is Ibeji, which means twins—

Jennia: Mhm.

Rebe Huntman: —in Yoruba. And the song is "River." And it's a mix of African and Afro-Cuban beats. But it's a little more modern and it's very mysterious. And it calls you just like the river calls you its invitation.

Jennia: Ohh.

Rebe Huntman: And its invitation to find yourself in the river. The river that carries you, it flows into another river or another body of water, but it changes with every bend. Right?

Jennia: Yes!

Rebe Huntman: So this invitation to try oneself out as all different kinds of currents and movements.

Jennia: Yeah, I love that. Especially because we think of water as being life giving and even just all the different civilizations and societies throughout time that have set up their encampment or their area where they're going to live along that body of water. But it reinforces that theme of connection and interconnection because that water is constantly moving to other bodies of water and through us and then through, again, going back to ancestors, those people who come from us years and years later.

Rebe Huntman: Absolutely! Absolutely.

Jennia: Well, thank you for this very lovely conversation!

Rebe Huntman: Thank you so much! Thank you for having me. It's been such a pleasure!

Jennia: It has! I've enjoyed it immensely.

Jennia: And then thank you for listening. And be sure to check out this show not for additional information, including all of Rebe's links. And if you enjoyed today's episode please share the link with a friend. Thanks again!