Achy
Obejas

Internationally acclaimed for her activism and writing, Achy Obejas is the author of Days of Awe, Memory Mambo, and We Came all the Way from Cuba to Dress Like This? Born in Havana, she left six years after the Cuban revolution to come with her family to the United States. She spent ten years writing for the Chicago Tribune, covering Pope John Paul II’s historic 1998 visit to Cuba, the arrival of Al-Qaeda prisoners in Guantanamo, the Versace murder, and the aids epidemic. Her awards are numerous, including a Pulitzer Prize for Journalism, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, and the Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is currently the Sor Juana Visiting Writer at DePaul University in Chicago. Her collection of poems, This is What Happened in Our Other Life, and an edited collection of stories, Havana Noir, are forthcoming this fall. This event is co-sponsored and in conjunction with the Department of Languages and Literature.

Days of Awe
Born on the day Castro came to power, Alejandra San Jos comes with her mother and father to the United States when she is two.  There, she and her parents, Nena and Enrique, settle in Chicago, where Enrique works as a literary translator and Nena grows roses and sunflowers. Their neighborhood is predominantly Jewish, and as Ale grows up she picks up on small signs that her family has something in common with its neighbors. It is not until she is an adult, however, working as an interpreter, that she discovers a family secret: that her father is the grandson of a flamboyantly Jewish hero of the Cuban war of independence and her mother, though devoutly Catholic, has Jewish ancestors, as well. On a series of trips to Cuba, Ale comes to know her father's oldest friend, and through him learns about her family's history and contemporary Cuba, and gradually comes to terms with her own identity. The narrative digs deep into questions of sexuality, faith, conversion, nationality and history, exploring philosophical issues in human terms amidst sharp and cleverly observed details that bring Havana and Chicago to life.

Excerpt
I’ve always found it poignant, if not tragic, that Cuba, whose people are constantly seeking escape and entrusting their fortunes to the sea in the most rickety of vessels, should have early on foreseen this fate and projected it onto its sacred benefactor. When her feast day rolls around each eighth of September, devotees like my mother dress in bumblebee yellow and wink knowingly at each other in church. Also known as Ochún, this particularly Cuban madonna is the Yoruba goddess of love, patron saint of sweet water. She’s a beauty, the pearl of paradise, a flirtatious but faithful lover to Changó, the capricious god of thunder.

It’s these very elements, I think, that make my mother’s choice of this vision of Mary—la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre—as my patron a perfect guardian: I am a child not just of revolution but also of exile, both of which have so much to do with love and faith.

Even then, on that gloomy gray dawn in 1961, as my father waited for my mother and paced on the third-floor balcony of our home, there were Cubans leaving the island on anything that would float and looking to the skies for signs of salvation. The Cuban Revolution was two years old then, and already defying expectations.

What fueled those who were leaving was less fear of communism, which Fidel had only hinted at at that point, or shortages of any kind, because the U.S. embargo was still a distant concern, but the persistent rumors of invasions and imminent combat that were sweeping Havana. From the countryside came reports that cane fields were being torched, the flames like red waves. What were thought to be American planes constantly buzzed the city. Weeks before, El Encanto—Havana’s most exquisite department store and perhaps its most conspicuous link to the United States—had burned to the ground. Its destruction had traumatized the city no less than the break of diplomatic relations between Cuba and Washington, D.C., back in January. Not an hour went by without the breathless dispatch: “The yanquis are coming, the yanquis are coming.”