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:
“The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man ... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)
“Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist—the only thing he’s good for—is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. Even if it’s only his view of a meaning. That’s what he’s for—to give his view of life.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)