00:05:49.720And then, above all, there is El Monte.
00:05:53.760A book of plants and places, remedies and spirits, where the sacred forest itself is the protagonist, the hero, the heroine, or actually those metaphors don't work, do they?
00:06:09.160because the monte is multiple medicine and poison the source of curses and divinities and stories
00:06:16.420and blessings and songs and shade and sunlight and the birth of deities troubled and trickster
00:06:27.140though they may be a living limitless archive of what is possible quote al monte lists more than
00:06:36.260500 herbs, the ailments that they are alleged to cure, the spirits that preside over their healing
00:06:42.060powers, and the creolized Yoruba, Kikongo, and Ejachem words that name the leaves in Afro-Cuban
00:06:50.020terms. In addition, we find whole legends associated with certain leaves, miniature narrations,
00:06:57.540truths that can be rendered in a dissociated moment, Susan Sontag points out, however significant or
00:07:03.200decisive, have a very narrow relation to the needs of understanding. Only that which narrates can
00:07:10.260make us understand. And in fact, El Monte is a miracle of narration, brought into being by a
00:07:16.760woman who uniquely combined the powers of a painter, an interior designer, a sculptor, a writer, a
00:07:23.700linguist, and a passionate student of the folkways of Black people. End quote.
00:07:29.360she followed the folkways even when she couldn't go home cabrera died in miami in exile in 1991
00:07:40.700her vast archive of field notes recordings secret symbols and whispered cures and correspondences
00:07:48.540are now housed at the university of miami and the archive spills and vines out of that
00:07:55.440temperature-controlled, indexed embrace. It lives wherever plants and spirits are treated as kin.
00:15:09.360In Almonte, Lydia writes, quoting one of her teachers, Catalino.
00:15:13.640wherever you see a little bit of grass that's where you find a remedy he said for the health
00:15:23.140of his body and soul every black person will resort to el monte it's an instinct says catalino
00:15:29.280we're herbalists we're pulled to el monte but the reader should not think that this word monte or
00:15:36.400bush here we never say forest is only used to designate an expanse of uncultivated land
00:15:42.820populated by trees. In Havana, any empty field covered in plants is considered a monte, even a
00:15:50.440savanna, just as an aguacate, avocado, or laurel tree is called a plant. An uncultivated parcel of
00:15:58.000land in a solar of the most meager proportions is categorized as a maningua, wilderness, bush,
00:16:06.080by virtue of wild plants sprouting in it, and it will be referred to simply as a monte or maningua.
00:16:12.820Every space where leaves grow dense is suitable for depositing an Ebo,
00:16:20.020the usual offering in the Regla de Oca intended for a santo that is not from the water.
00:16:27.760Offerings for those that personify the river or ocean like Oshun and Yamaya
00:16:32.060are generally taken to the bank of the river or the seashore.
00:16:36.380That way, black people living in the capital do not need to walk very far to find a monte.
00:16:42.820The majority of plants that are used constantly for bathing and cleansing oneself of bad influences, washing the floor of a home, burning as incense, or simple homemade remedies abound in these miniature montes, which are so accessible and no less worthy of respect.
00:17:00.280It is precisely the most common plants that have the most prophylactic value.
00:17:07.000They are the most indispensable for what we might call their daily preventative magic.
00:17:12.380They protect us throughout our whole lives, which are constantly threatened by exceedingly subtle dangers.
00:20:08.800They carry laughter, subversion, and continuity.1.00
00:20:12.360They kept Black Cuban cosmologies alive and wove them into a pantheon that slavery couldn't sever.0.90
00:20:19.500Lydia grew up in a home full of art and intellectuals,0.58
00:20:22.540and people working to free their country from dictatorship.
00:20:25.980But still, her vision and language don't quite escape the colonial racist discourse
00:20:31.120that soaked the streets and colored the air.
00:20:33.860Still, her attention and lifelong dedication to valuing, honoring, preserving Black knowledge and philosophy and culture was completely radical.
00:20:45.360And part of what powered that radical openness was that Lydia's perspective was queer.
00:20:52.100The first major love affair we get hints of in the introduction to Almonte, quote,
00:20:57.780Lydia had met Teresa de la Parra in Havana in 1924.
00:21:02.120Their friendship was rekindled in Paris in 1927, and it lasted until Parra's death in Madrid in 1936, end quote.
00:21:13.160That's the extent of the mention in the body of the text, but the footnote reads,
00:21:18.820quote, Cabrera and Parra had an intense relationship that lasted nine years, 1927 to 1936.
00:21:25.880During those years, Cabrera was between 27 and 35 years of age, while Parra was between 38 and 46.
00:21:34.400The impact of Parra's untimely death is not discussed in detail here,
00:21:39.300presumably to avoid dwelling on a very intimate and painful subject.
00:21:48.460This intense relationship, this love between one of Venezuela's best-known novelists
00:21:55.040and Cuba's most important urban ethnographer feels like it probably wouldn't have been too0.70
00:22:00.080intimate to make part of the story if it wasn't a queer story, a lesbian story, a story about women
00:22:06.100who defied machismo culture to create and describe worlds beyond. Before Pada's death, before Cabrera
00:22:14.560returned to Havana to begin the deep listening that would shape her life, she was inside a queer0.51
00:22:19.080love story marked by illness. Pada's tuberculosis set the tempo, where they traveled, how they spent0.79
00:22:26.700their days. It must have pressed on their nights. Later, Susan Sontag would write that tuberculosis
00:22:34.560and cancer are never just diseases. They become metaphors, romanticized, blamed, shrouded in shame.
00:22:42.460the person disappears behind the idea of the illness the beloved dissolves into symbol
00:22:49.300and this is still happening when my neighbor was diagnosed with cancer
00:22:53.400the first thing her well-meaning spiritual friends asked was what haven't you processed
00:22:58.440what are you repressing this is the cruel biting end of all that manifesting talk the ugly truth0.99
00:23:07.720behind the secret it's victim blaming bullshit and it's bad magic which is we need to root into0.98
00:23:16.660the painful deep reality that our bodies exist in systems that make us stressed sell us poison0.98
00:23:23.660fill the air with microplastics and sometimes we get sick and eventually we all die that's not a
00:23:32.220failure of will. That's the ground beneath our feet. That's the world we live in.
00:23:40.900And Lydia Cabrera knew something about living with what the world prefers to repress.
00:23:47.660She once dedicated a work of hers to Maria Teresa de Rojas with the phrase,
00:23:54.100quote, those who deem themselves intelligent find that admitting to the reality of the unreal
00:23:59.380is detrimental to their prestige, end quote.
00:24:04.900And if you've lived inside illness, as Pada did, as Sontag did,
00:24:11.120she wrote illness as metaphor while going through breast cancer treatment,
00:24:15.640you can start to see what was hidden before.
00:24:19.440You can get glimpses of the scaffolding of ableism,
00:24:23.660the way doorways, sidewalks, conversations, even intimacies
00:24:28.360are built for a fantasy of health, compulsory vitality. And just like the heteronormative
00:24:35.880white imperialist construction of normal, this too masks the lives lived at the edge,0.51
00:24:43.600the reality of the unreal to whom, the reality of queer love hidden in plain sight,0.61
00:24:50.940the reality of illness reduced to metaphor. Cabrera's Almonte doesn't give us the hallmark
00:24:56.800version of magic. It's not all light and white dresses. It's also fear and hexes and survival
00:25:02.700in a dangerous, unequal world. You can feel the pulse of resistance in it.
00:25:10.520Spells that protect against the plantation owners, charms that call down justice.
00:25:17.800But I can also see outlines of the way magical thinking can be sharpened by desperation.
00:25:26.800by paranoia even, by the endless violence of colonialism.
00:25:31.960And I think that's still a risk for us,
00:25:35.480which is we know magic can be a weapon, a shield, a bomb,
00:25:39.380but it can also slip into what our friend, grief worker, diviner Zoe Flowers
00:25:44.440calls spiritual psychosis, a way of dissociating from reality,
00:25:51.080drowning in superstition or conspiracies instead of meeting the hard, holy work.
00:25:56.800of life and justice and peacemaking. The lesson isn't to abandon the magical.
00:26:04.120It's to remember that magic is always bound up with the world we live in.
00:26:08.100It can rot or it can nourish. It can isolate or it can connect. Every curse, every charm in El
00:26:15.900Monte testifies to that tension. And for us, the call is to keep turning back toward reality,
00:26:22.160toward each other, to make every moment, even the painful, even the mundane, into an altar.0.95
00:26:34.260Queer love, illness, trauma, El Monte, all of these demand that we learn to see what0.79
00:26:43.140is right here, but hidden by the stories power prefers to tell.
00:26:52.160In Havana, Cabrera would find herself living in another threshold.
00:27:01.640With Maria Teresa de Rojas, she restored a home.
00:27:05.800Across the street, El Monte stretched its tangled roots and branches
00:27:09.220through a neighborhood alive in Afro-Cuban spirits, stories, medicines, resistance.0.73
00:27:16.000Inside their walls, queer domesticity, care as revolution,0.69
00:27:20.320a sanctuary for two women who chose each other.0.95
00:27:26.020Cabrera and De Rojas remind us resistance is not only in the forest,
00:27:31.120not only in the magical realm, but also in the kitchen, the bedroom, the garden, the archives.
00:27:40.020For Lydia and Maria Teresa, their home became an extension of their care,
00:27:43.880a site of restoration, a sanctuary for their shared work.
00:27:48.020Lydia and Titina attacked the work of reconstruction and decoration enthusiastically.
00:27:56.660They replaced destroyed doors with others salvaged from mansions being demolished in Havana.
00:28:02.960They repaired the roof of the lean-to in the garden with antique wood.
00:28:07.220The coffered ceiling from the Santo Domingo convent, which would later become the headquarters for the University of Havana, was saved from demolition and installed in the tower.
00:28:18.020They repaired the original iron gates and fences, and they installed others from the ancient Havana jail.
00:28:27.060Fortunately, the magnificent red, yellow, white, and blue stained-glass windows had been preserved.
00:28:33.780They decorated the hallways with colonial-era tiles.
00:28:38.000Finally, they furnished La Quinta with carefully chosen items, despite being a true museum of antiques and craftwork.
00:28:44.860photographs show an inviting Creole interior
00:28:48.740as well as a marvelous informal courtyard
00:29:43.860One of Cabrera's most daring moves was to write about the Abacua secret society, a brotherhood with roots in the Ekpe leopard societies of the Cross River Basin in West Africa.
00:29:55.660In Cuba, Abacua became both feared and powerful, binding dock workers and traders into mutual protectiona, or complex geometric figures that carry power, membership, memory.
00:30:08.780They look like crossroads, constellations, beves, sigils. Cabrera published them,
00:30:18.500allowing them to come into conversation with magical symbol systems from around the world.
00:32:49.180The collection consists of 14 LP discs containing over 11 hours of audio recordings, along with liner notes and photos.
00:33:03.280Given its scope and quality, the collection is arguably the single most robust multimedia archive of Afro-Cuban musical traditions in the mid-20th century.
00:33:19.180The only recordings Cabrera ever made.
00:33:49.180If her books risked distorting what she was told, these recordings are something else.
00:33:55.940Breath and vibration, words dissolving into rhythm, the sound of a priest's tongue striking the air.
00:34:04.960Cabrera said she wanted to avoid, quote, the dangerous filter of interpretation, end quote.
00:34:12.220And here she finally did, becoming a medium for sound itself.
00:37:15.480In the trees waving and moss weaving, I can imagine an archive of another kind, El Monte.
00:37:23.640When writing this episode, I dipped into these great books with reverence, sometimes with the feeling like I was trespassing.
00:37:38.420These are closed practices, Santeria, Lukumi, Paolo, Regla de Oca, traditions held and tended by communities who decide what may be spoken and what must remain within the initiated.
00:37:53.640Lidia Cabrera was permitted to record, to write, to publish.
00:37:58.840She was trusted with sacred stories, medicines, chants.
00:38:03.460But whiteness, exile, and power imbalances inevitably shaped her gaze, and distortion lingers in the record.
00:38:12.280At the threshold of this work, as the door swings open, and we hear the city and the wild thicket, all interpolated with each other, calling us, I want to honor those who chose to share their knowledge with her, with Lydia.