Writing and reading and traveling...an outer and an inner journey...space to be free, observe, drift, explore, discover, absorb...my writing evolves from what I am absorbing even when I don't know what I'm absorbing...
And so it was a relief to hit my deadline: a first draft of my experimental book, done. Before the Easter break. Phew!!! The work had been very intense; I was getting to the point where I felt I'd created Frankenstein's monster.
So, 24th March, I packed a stash of books to read, notebooks, pencils, blah di blah, and was off. To Cuba. Somewhere I've been wanting to travel around for some time.
Leaving the hotel next morning for Gatwick airport, I noticed a sign:'We'll Miss you" Yuk!!! And Gatwick airport, like most airports, was a glitter of signs, images, adverts, saturated with things to buy, vulgar displays of wealth. And Cuba wasn't. That was the first thing that struck me leaving Havana airport. No signs, images, adverts, very little to buy, no vulgar displays of wealth. Indeed, people struggle to find eggs and potatoes, often living on a diet of beans and rice for weeks. The buildings are art deco, 50s, so on and so on, such grandeur, such opulence, but they are crumbling, decaying, and people are dying. Indeed, in an apartment block near where I was staying, a family had been killed as they slept by falling debris.
Castro's dream has become a nightmare...?!
It seems the people have so little access to the outside world. (Although the pope made a speech 28.3.12-the day I moved on to the city of Trinidad. 'And the people rose to their feet and clapped and clapped and clapped.' So a German woman told me, when we shared a taxi in Trinidad) It was weird. Hard to get a handle on. I felt like a foolish foreigner asking foolish questions. And I was. But the guide who took me round Hemingway's pad (It was incongruous; Hemingway owned 50 cats!!! but had sooo many trophies from his hunting on the walls) told me if he could get to the USA, they would allow him to have an apartment free of rent for a year. Yep. Sure?! 'We are waiting for change,' he told me. And I remember reading somewhere or was it a conversation I over heard? (Nothing is quite what it seems in Cuba) 'Everywhere changes: Russia, East Germany, even North Korea. Not here.' So when will change happen for the Cubans? When the Castro bros join the charismatic 'Che' in the sky? Who knows? Italo Calvino? 'Futures not achieved are only branches of the past...dead branches.' Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan in Invisible Cities. (Calvino was born in Cuba. 'His magical realist stories are, like the history of Cuba itself, often brief and apparently fragmentary.' Zoe Bran. That's how it seemed to me too. And often surreal. Like stepping into a Jack Veffriano painting or is it Edward Hopper and is that how you spell their names? And was that a hot-pink, open-top Cadillac, a turquoise Chevrolet, a horse and cart, I passed? As I was thinking everything changes...
And now I am back on the second draft of my book; I'm hoping to crack a second by September. We'll see, cos I've got an idea percolating. But that's another story...
PS Fav books I read on this trip: Breath by Micheal Symmons Roberts,The Tree House by Kathleen Jamie & All Is Song by Samantha Harvey
