We the drama cultures
It stands sometimes without saying that for American values and culture, at least in tech circles where I interact the most, drama is a plot of a streaming service film or show. Drama was not a word we used a lot in Cuba, our daily lives were common for all of us, and swapping stories between friends, seeing my grandma do the same with her friends was the normal while I was growing up in my house. I started to notice our stories when I reached the boarding school I did high school in where I would tell stories and people will find it amusing. Amusing is not very dramatic.
I left Cuba in 2015. My life started to sound to others, differently. I attributed to being an immigrant and having lived outside my home country, and so it was expected in a way. At some point it all started to look to me like anglo cultures look at telenovelas. But let me tell you, the reason telenovelas are the most popular piece of television in South America is not only about the emotional range of the “bad characters” and the pleasure of the ultimate win of the main character after many misfortunes. It’s because it’s simultaneously close and far away from our lives. We can recognize at least one person we closely know in the screen, if not pieces of our own lives. Wealth of some characters aside. I grew up listening to a lot radio novelas, the pose of imagination that the sound only stories required was like candy for my child brain. They’ll emit one episode a day and I will organize my friends meetings around the episode of the ones I like the most. Drama was not a word back then. Granted was the 90s, so while I was pursuing historical figures real or imagined love stories and disarrays my family was bending their backs to bring some food back home.
What I realized when I came to the US is that the pictures, the movies, the stories were real. That they were a way more accurate picture of life here than we would told to expect. That this was not the fantasy world we put in our minds, the one that is not real. All the other sources of information in Cuba growing up painted the US and to some extent their people as the evil place, the enemy. But what I saw was first many countries in one, and is clear that the United is hanging by very thin lines of agreements by Founding Fathers. Going out everyday to get food for the day is not the experience most common to Americans. Planning vacation trips and doing budgets, I’d laugh that budget was even a real thing. And so I could see why my stories seemed so surreal to people here. Why talking about Cuban problems were foreign, why I decided to stop even providing an opening point to the conversation about my home country. Why at one misdirected thought I wanted to lose my accent so I wouldn’t get ask where are you from.
And then this week happened. Cubans in Havana and other provinces went to the streets, in numbers not seen ever possibly in the 60 years the current government has been in power. A fact that has been slightly ignored, particularly by Cuba itself, that catalogued the event as a small revolt by paid, marginal and confused people. And so as a Cuban with Cuban family living abroad this week has been at least unnerving. It became even more disturbing hearing the rhetoric of the Cuban president how this was in those neighborhoods and hear the echo of this sentiment by some of the people I love too much in Cuba. Those neighborhoods are typically black neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods are poor and had taken a blunt fall in all the economic downturn Cuba has been going through for, well, many years. The pandemic exacerbated the situation to the point of collapse on July 11.
I never truly came to terms to the drama word, why would they say that, I took it as one of those American inside jokes I don’t get much, but this week I did, it made sense why it felt wrong.
Julia Cameron says in her international bestseller The Artist Way that people think that art is born from pain, but art can be born from beauty and peace too, pain just forces us to pay attention and art is born from attention. So when I was told this week that there was a lot of drama in all what I have been saying about the Cuban experience both as a resident of the country, and that it just didn’t end as you live the country, an uncomfortable feeling set in within me. What is drama for you is the reality of my life since I was born. And by putting distance to it like you’d do to a plot of a film in our screens, you are also invalidating my own reality and putting distance from me. The modern tech trope of asking people to bring their whole selves to work really get stripped when parts of that self are not common to the American experience. To the approved corporate American experience, quiet, bland, obedient, extremely overworked even when your family is experiencing risk of death.
I’m not sorry, nor will ever be that my life is a drama scene to you. But this is just one of the reasons why bring your whole self to work (or anywhere here) is a myth for many immigrants, black and other underrepresented minorities. This is one of the reasons why to assimilate in this country you are implicitly asked to leave behind who you were, who you inevitably are. I didn’t choose the place I was born the same way I didn’t choose my skin color, or the color of my eyes or my height. The same way we don’t choose our families. Please be careful of how you describe the reality of other people to them, even if it looks like a lot of drama for you. Even if it looks as foreign as movies characters to you. When we say we want inclusion and diverse workers we need to also accept how their live experience will be divert from the ones you are used to. In the words of Brene Brown:
In order to empathize with someone’s experience you must be willing to believe them as they see it and not how you imagine the experience to be.