By Mauricio Mendoza (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – Karina was the first person who showed me Legna’s work back in mid-2017. She told me about a poem, from which I remember the image of a curious girl who pulls on a thread coming out of a vagina with her mouth until a tampon comes out that stains her face with menstrual blood. Legna manages to put in a couple of verses what would take a million sentences for me to describe. Remembering the image from that poem six years ago, I think it’s amazing.
I only know Legna from what she posts on social media, her columns for different independent Cuban outlets where she writes her truth, where she vents and survives to pay another month of rent. Legna who first migrated from Camaguey to Havana and then arrived in Miami one day. Carrying a duffel bag full of books without knowing much about Miami or the US, like most of us arrive. Years later, she talks about her migrant adventures with the poetry that Miami lacks, and she reads children’s stories to her son that came with her from Cuba.
I don’t know Legna in person, that’s why I say I imagine her, although we have spoken on WhatsApp and this interview came about. A group of Cuban emigres is captured in her work. The bohemians, the dreamers, the ones that aren’t “normal” and they had to leave to build a new nest in other trees.
How does a writer raise her son in Miami, the city where breaking your back to work to pay the bills takes up your reading time? That’s been the question that’s intrigued me the most. No matter what, money is important, and you can’t pay at supermarkets with pages from a novel, but with the sales of a novel, with the articles that sometimes newspapers take their time to pay out, with an extra that appears at the last minute as a lifesaver. Maybe the strength to overcome obstacles comes from her Sagittarian fire, that puts art and a McDonald’s kitchen on two extremes of the scale. Just like her, many generations of artists and writers have left Cuba to be reborn in other places. Some manage to keep their creation alive after the daze. Others create while working a part-time job at a bar, but the most ill-fated stop pursuing their talents.
Every now and again, Legna and Cemi appear on social media, and they appear like mother and son sometimes, but other times they just look like two happy children. The little one’s smile in each photo is proof that you can be a mother, migrant and writer.
However, this time, I’m not talking to the writer – who describes herself as a person who “writes more than she speaks”, but with the migrant mother who is taking a chance on keeping her creative streak alive.
How did motherhood come into your life?
KARINA: Having a child was my specific plan ever since I went to live in Havana alone. I tried with my friend Rogelio Orizondo in 2015, but I wasn’t ovulating and it didn’t work. Otherwise there’d be a little 8-year-old Orizondo in Miami.
Legna, it must be normal for you to know that journalists work with gossip because it gives us an idea. Cuba is a great source of these ideas. I’ve heard your son was born from an agreement with a friend, but I never looked into it. I’ll ask you about it, as it seems like an interesting story, from a journalistic and personal point of view, if you don’t mind telling it of course.
I’ve spoken about this in many of my columns. I wrote a book when I was pregnant that talks about this experience. The most important thing is that I didn’t want my son to be the result of a medical procedure. I didn’t want to be inseminated in a hospital, and much less have to buy a sample of a stranger’s semen. So, I talked to my friend Jose Portela, who lives here in Miami, to see if he wanted to be a donor, and to do it in the most natural and human way possible. Jose Portela accepted. We tried twice and I fell pregnant both times. My son is the result of the second attempt, because I miscarried the first time about five weeks into the pregnancy. It’s something that can happen to first-time moms, but I didn’t know that and I was really upset. Two months after the miscarriage, I had my period, I ovulated and I got pregnant. On September 15, 2017, six days after Hurricane Irma hit. Miami was a sea of fallen trees.
What’s it like to raise a child with two mothers in a society full of preconceptions, where children repeat the bullying they sometimes inherit from their parents’ backward thinking?
My son sees all of this as completely normal. I was living with a woman when I fell pregnant and the boy was born there. I was honest and shared my maternity with her, on a legal level, which is irreversible in this country. I’d recommend other migrant women who want to have a child and be mothers to study the laws of this country first before taking any legal steps, because social environments have nothing to do with the law. It’s a victory won in the legal system. By making two women equals as mothers, giving them equal rights, you void their differences. Ideological hypocrisy, banality of evil. In short, nothing that we are going to change. My son has never been bullied or mocked, that I know of, up until now.
Your son was born in Miami, but he has Cuban roots. What’s it like when you’re not 100% from the US but you’re not Cuban either?
I don’t fully know. It’s a phenomenon that flows like language, like emotions. He is a perceptive boy and sometimes, he says he’s from Camaguey or Cuban, but he’s definitely from the US. He likes the Cuban flag more than the other, for now, but it must be because there are so many stars in a small space in the other. Anyway, we know that a flag only represents what you want it to represent.
What’s it like to raise a child in Miami, a society full of guns and drugs that are within a child’s and teenager’s reach?
It’s a suppressed concern, a concern that you have stuck in your throat. I write more than I speak, but I’ve changed that dynamic with my son, and my friends. The only thing you can do to counter this is to talk about it, say it, know that it exists and that it is a truth as real as flowers. I’ve also learned to “do what needs doing.” Love and protect, talk and protect.
How does a writer manage to get by and support a child in Miami?
I don’t know either. People live here as a couple to share expenses and complain that it isn’t enough. There are lots of people who live together just to share bills. I live alone with my son. The job I found after the pandemic is to distribute books, literally. It isn’t enough. So, I write for online magazines (which are also trying to get by) to make up my wages. That’s why I write so honestly. Because at the end of the day, there isn’t any energy or thoughts left for anything else. My writing is my sustenance.
Does your son ask you about Cuba? If he does, what do you tell him?
I took my son to my house when he was four months old. I don’t have a passport and that’s why I haven’t gone back. Cemi knows all about Cuba, everything that interests a five-year-old boy anyway. He knows that there is a guava tree and a plum tree at my house, and that my mother collects guavas and puts them away for him in a basket. That one day we’ll go and have a lot of fun.
What advantages are there in Miami to raising and educating a child nowadays, compared to in Cuba?
I’m a little tired and the advantages are becoming twisted. I immediately thought back to his birth, his food and his bronchial tubes, that get narrow like mine and he needs some milligrams of Salbutamol and Budesonide every day.
What values from Cuba were you raised with that you’d like to instill in your child?
Honesty and hygiene. Which doesn’t come from any Cuba. It comes from my family.
What do you miss about Cuba?
Almost everything. Smells and sleeping. How I’d like to go and sleep. Peacefully and calmly.
Your son is from the pandemic generation, which is the name for children born in this period, and we still don’t know what it was exactly, but it changed our lives. What were your lives like during that time? Raising a child at home and transitioning to a new reality where sometimes it seems there wasn’t a pandemic, because they weren’t really talking about it in the media?
Cemi still hadn’t turned two when the pandemic began. It didn’t feel so different for me, or him I guess, because I was still looking after him at home. I still hadn’t separated and hadn’t gone to live with him on my own. We were together the entire time. It was beautiful.
Would you have had your child in Cuba?
I would have had my child anywhere in the world.
With technologic breakthroughs today, children are reading less and less. I guess yours still doesn’t read yet, but how would you instill reading in him later, given the fact you’re a writer and in this society, I believe, it’s the ones that think that survive, as systems spit out mediocre and manipulable people.
My son has been surrounded by books ever since he was a wish and a drop of blood. I worked in a bookstore before I fell pregnant and I bought books thinking about him. I bought what I didn’t have that I thought was important: Tove Jansson, the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, some by Nöstlinger, a small edition of Alicia, and many more; because my essential children’s books came with me from Havana. I love children’s books and I continue to buy them for him, I’ve even stolen books for him (don’t tell him that!) At work, sometimes book donations are made for children in Spanish and I find treasures. We’ve read a lot, ever since he was born. My son knows that his mom is a writer or, at least, that writing is what I like doing the most. In addition to the bed, table, chairs and the shelf with plates, we have two more pieces of furniture that we need: a bookshelf for me and a bookshelf for him. Sometimes, he tells me he’s going to be a writer and my eyes light up.
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