Parallels: A Guest Post by Mirta Ojito
From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Mirta Ojito comes a moving story of families and unspoken truths. When one woman uncovers a past secret, she begins to question everything she thought she knew about where she came from. Read on for an exclusive essay from Mirta Ojito on writing Deeper than the Ocean.
Hardcover $28.99
Deeper than the Ocean
Deeper than the Ocean
By Mirta Ojito
In Stock Online
Hardcover $28.99
A moving multigenerational novel about the enduring power of a mother’s love, the ripple effect of secrets, and the strength of family bonds from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
A moving multigenerational novel about the enduring power of a mother’s love, the ripple effect of secrets, and the strength of family bonds from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
In May of 2006, I bought a coffee table book for $10 at a shop in Key West about a shipwreck off the coast of Key West in 1919. The ship was supposed to deliver immigrants from Spain to Havana but lost its way during a devastating hurricane. Almost 500 passengers and crew members died in the wreck; their bodies were never found.
The parallels were not lost to me. I was in Key West promoting my first book -a memoir of my journey from Cuba to the U.S. aboard a boat named Mañana. Though we didn’t face a hurricane, the 16-hour trip was harrowing with waves crashing against the ship as my sister and I held on to my mother on the darkest night I had ever seen.
I looked at the sea the day I bought the book and wondered about all those people who lost their lives in the pursuit of a dream. Who were they? And how come they were never found? I was drawn to the mystery of it and to the immense tragedy, but I was particularly interested because no one I knew had ever heard about it; yet, everyone knows about the Titanic. In fact, some people refer to the shipwreck of the Valbanera as the “poor man’s Titanic.” I’d like to think of it as the “forgotten Titanic.”
When I finished the book, the first image I saw in my mind was that of a woman running in an old ship, desperately looking for her daughter. She had flowing red curly hair, a mauve dress, and no shoes. Her naked feet made a sucking sound on the wide plank wooden floors that echoed in my mind almost as a command to write. I don’t know where she came from, but I knew she had arrived to stay. Immediately, I knew I would give her my maternal grandmother’s name, Catalina Quintana.
I never knew my grandmother; she died when my own mother was sixteen, but I know she was very much a presence in my mother’s life and, therefore, in mine.
My mother died in November 2021, shortly after I had finished the first draft of the novel. She never read it, but she knew what I was working on and in the last months of her life, almost as if she sensed the end, she regaled me with stories of her mother and of her own childhood in a rural hamlet in Cuba. Those stories found their way into Deeper than the Ocean, making it more real, more tactile, better.
It is through the writing of this book that I’ve finally come to terms with my mother’s life and personality: her fears, her pessimism, her mistrust and superstitions. She had been through a great deal of pain, mostly inherited, like the shape of her face and the tone of her skin, from her mother. All of it, it’s in my novel -ultimately, a tribute to her and to her own mother, and to all women who lead hard and loving lives in the service of their families.