Inside and Outside the Sacred(Re)Elaborations of African Practices and Myths in the Narrative of Lydia Cabrera

The object of analysis of this study is the literary work of the storyteller and ethnologist Lydia Cabrera (Havana 1900-Miami 1991) apropos the African legacy in Cuba. I intend in particular to read the presence and reworking of religious practices and African myths in the author’s narrative work as a range of variations in the experience of the original sacred that refers to the excess of meaning that characterizes the numinous; that is, paraphrasing Otto (Lo Santo 152), the experience of the sacred, which has not yet been penetrated and saturated completely with rational, personal, and moral elements, is recovered and narratively dramatized. To this effect, it will be necessary to rely on the formulation of the mysterium tremendum to understand the oscillation of the religious experience presented by Cabrera between fascination and repulsion, as well as to comprehend the thematic and formal heterogeneity that constitutes it as a reflection of “the ‘wholly other’” that, according to Otto, characterizes the numinous (The Idea 29). At the same time, following the aforementioned, the mysterium tremendum is reworked here as a complexio oppositorum since it is characterized by bringing together elements that, in a natural context, would be considered irreconcilable and, therefore, as an experience of the sacred that is not codified or codifiable. In spite of the fact that writing is a form of codification and organization of that which by its nature is not, and despite constructing most of her texts based on mythical narratives, it will be evident how the different expressive strategies – irony, lyricism, and the feísmo of surrealist and popular origin – that Lydia Cabrera employs to (re)formulate ancestral mythical-religious stories of African origin restore to the reader an experience of the sacred that precedes and, therefore, surpasses pragmatic frames of reference, such as systematized mythologies. Finally, it will be highlighted how, contrary to Eliade’s postulate, Lydia Cabrera creates a narrative space that emerges from the naturalization of the sacred and the re-sacralization of the profane, that is, a space where characters move between the sacred and the profane without a break in continuity.