Who is achy obejas

NBC: Your work is fearless about examining sex and sexuality. The stories are edgy and compelling, provocative and thought provoking. How do you gauge this masterful dance between the sensuality of the characters and the fraught environments they inhabit? Risk adds another element of excitement, of provocation.

Both stories have their roots in reality. When I was in college in Bloomington, Ind. It colored every step on a dark night going home from work or the bars.

But eventually, after the revolution, he vanished into thin air. No one knows what happened to him, and so that served as a basis for the story. NBC: Though you have published consistently in different genres since the s, your previous story collection was published 23 years ago.

How do you see yourself changed as a writer with "The Tower of the Antilles? These stories are more metaphorical, experiment a little more. Chicago — a city I love but which I left four years ago — only makes a cameo.

The characters are generally older, more experienced. This is also a much more curated collection. I loved my first book so much, but this one makes me proud in a different way. Can you speak to the way these stories took shape and why you chose them to bracket the book? The story starts with an interrogation. In this way, she conjures the boats, which begin to drift up on the shore, creating a tower for the natives to scale.

Refugees from Cuba and Haiti are quite creative. So he basically stacked them everywhere he could store them. Author, journalist, and activist Achy Obejas was born in Havana, Cuba, on June 28, , and has lived in the United States since she was six years old.

Obejas lives at the intersection of multiple identifies, but she has repeatedly asserted that her Cuban birth has been a central defining circumstance of her life. These connections have increasingly informed her writing over the years and helped shape the multiple and multidirectional trajectories that she explores personally and professionally. Her first novel, Memory Mambo , took these themes even further: the story traces the ups and downs of a female couple, one Puerto Rican and one Cuban, unpacking the contours of their cultural and political differences, how they relate to one another, and how they seek to re define their sexuality and their identifies over the course of the novel.

Her connection with Jewish literature emerged with her next novel, Days of Awe As in many other languages, Spanish surnames closely associated with trades and professions often signaled Jewish roots; when required by state authorities or officials to register both a first and last name, it was common for Jews to adopt a name closely associated with a place or occupation.

When this possibility was suggested to Achy, she became intrigued and began to research her family history. According to Obejas, her family had interactions with the synagogue and local Jewish community when she was a child, yet she was not aware of any direct ties to the Jewish community at that time. At one point, she discovered a Four-cornered prayer shawl with fringes z i z it at each corner.

Following an extensive conversation with Judith Wachs, of the Descendants of the Jews who lived in Spain and Portugal before the explusion of ; primarily Jews of N. Africa, Italy, the Middle East and the Balkans.

Sephardic music group Voice of the Turtle, about anusim Jews who were forced by the Spanish Inquisition to convert to Catholicism and the history of Sephardic Jews, Obejas began to explore the family history more actively. A cousin who lived in Madrid was particularly helpful, and she was unearthed a complex set of ancestral connections with Judaism and the Inquisition.

This process led her to write Days of Awe in which Wachs is acknowledged , which is not strictly autobiographical but incorporates many details from her own experiences and what she learned about both her family and Sephardic Jewish history more generally. She also began to identify more as Jewish as a result of these experiences, incorporating Jewish rituals and practices into her life, raising her children as Jewish, and even joining a local synagogue in California.

The protagonist of Days of Awe embarks on a similar journey, unearthing her Jewish roots as part of her journey of self-discovery. The protagonist, Ale, was born in Cuba and raised in the United States. Of course, the novel takes its title from the cycle of self-examination, repentance, and renewal associated with the Jewish New Year. The journey of self-discovery and the reinterpretation of childhood memories depicted in the novel is also a familiar narrative for many Cuban Jews and other groups with crypto- or repressed Jewish roots.

Members of the Jewish community in Havana often share anecdotes—whether their own or as related to them by others—about childhood memories for which the religious significance was only understood later, after the Jewish roots had been discovered i. The novel is also part of a trend within contemporary Cuban literature and culture that highlights groups that had been marginalized in the mid-twentieth century and re asserts their roles in Cuban culture and society.

Ruins follows the rather small-scale—geographically speaking—odyssey of Usnavy and his valiant attempts to provide for his family. If true, the prized object s would command a small fortune that could liberate Usnavy and his family from the daily struggles and perils they face during an era of increased scarcity and precarity in Cuba following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Tower of the Antilles represents a return to the short story genre for Obejas. It is a collection of closely connected sometimes intertextually linked pieces that move among Cuba, the United States, and the Maldives and weave together narrative prose, abstract pieces with a more poetic style, and texts comprised of a series of vignettes framed by the auditory perceptions of a character who is progressively losing her hearing.

In this work, the decaying edifices of Havana from Ruins are interwoven with remote sites on distant shores. Ruins was written following a period during which Obejas lived and worked in Cuba for extended periods, and the contents of the novel reflect a rich understanding of the trials and tribulations of daily life in Havana — a portrait that can be extremely hard to truly apprehend as an occasional visitor.

According to the author, both the form and content of Tower of the Antilles are marked by developments in her professional and personal life: the characters and settings have broadened to explore greater movement and connections across diverse groups and contexts, and the return to the short story form reflects—among other things—the ways in which her writing needed to adapt to the demands of other professional commitments and, in particular, motherhood.

Through all of these works, Obejas weaves together stories about marginalized or unsettled characters who experience a moment of discovery or self-realization. She brings together disparate elements—whether within a single character or setting or across several—that defy conventional labels and simple categorizations, creating complicated layers of identification that often remain provocatively unresolved.

Along with this corpus of prose, throughout her career Obejas has also written poetry in Spanish and English that explores some of these same major themes, offering moving glimpses of longing, desire, aimlessness, loss, isolation, pleasure, and joy. Readers of her prose will undoubtedly find her poetic voice familiar; at times, the poems almost seem to linger in some of the more evocative moments from her novels and short stories.

Obejas has won numerous literary awards and accolades over the years, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Studs Terkel Prize, and two Lambda Literary awards, along with several appointments as a visiting profession or writer in residence at various colleges and universities. She also works with Netflix on global projects. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her children.

Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, Co-editor, with Megan Bayles. Immigrant Voices: 21st Century Stories. Chicago: Great Books Foundation, The Tower of the Antilles.

Brooklyn, New York: Akashic Books, Bajini, Irina.