| Abstract: | The following text is an extract from Nightgowns from Cuba, a novel-in-progress. The novel is a mix of autobiography, ethnography, and fiction. It examines the lives of three generations of women in a Jewish-Cuban family as seen from the perspective of an Afro-Cuban woman who was employed by the family as a domestic worker in the years before the Cuban revolution of 1959. The extract focuses on the delicate relationship that developed between Regla, the maid, and her employer Naomi, a Jewish immigrant and socialist from Poland, as the two women encountered each other in a small rural town in Cuba in the late 1930s. In the last section, Regla comments on the return to Cuba, in the 1990s, of Fanny, the granddaughter of Naomi, who is in search of her family's history and believes that Regla has access to memories that no one in her own family can pass on to her. The theme of the narrative is the transcultural exchange of stories between women and how memory travels and is conserved in strange and unexpected ways. The religion of Santeria is the cosmological setting of the story and the deity of Olokun, who inhabits the depths of the ocean and cannot be represented in visual form, haunts the narrative, which ties together Jewish-Cuban and Afro-Cuban histories and desires. |
