Main Work Themes
Her career spanned decades before the Revolution, as well as many years after the Revolution took over Cuba. Although she was never schooled in anthropology, she takes a very anthropological approach to studying her subject matter. The main theme in her work is to bring focus to the once-marginalized Afro-Cubans giving them a respectable identity. Through the use of imagery and storytelling throughout her work she seeks to retell the history of the Cuban people through the Afro-Cuban lens. Generally, her work blurs the line as what society has deemed as "fact" or "fiction." She attempts to pose ideas and theories that force people to question what they have been told.In Afro-Cuban Tales = Cuentos Negros De Cuba, She writes, “They dance when they're born, they dance when they die, they dance for killings. They celebrate everything!” (Cabrera 67). Here, she is connecting Afro-Cuban tales with African rituals because it is import to celebrate birth, passage to adulthood, marriage, and death.
Read more about this topic: Lydia Cabrera
Famous quotes containing the words main, work and/or themes:
“Whether or not his newspaper and a set of senses reduced to five are the main sources of the so-called real life of the so- called average man, one thing is fortunately certain: namely, that the average man himself is but a piece of fiction, a tissue of statistics.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (18991977)
“Work is a sovereign remedy for all ills, and a man who loves to work will never be unhappy.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (18421911)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)