Interview with Mirta Ojito

Novelists, journalists, and historians all tell tales about the past, including at times tales that have deep personal meaning for the storyteller, but as a rule, the three groups approach the art of crafting and relating a narrative in very different ways, and transitioning from one approach to another takes time and effort. In Deeper Than the Ocean, Mirta Ojito, a journalist by profession, does a wonderful job of peopling the history of migration from Spain to the Canary Islands to Cuba, then the United States, and back to Europe—mingling stories and characters from her own family but bringing them to life with a novelist’s precision. In this interview with the author, we explore some of the ways in which Ojito accomplishes that feat.

You mention in your author’s note that this is not your story, but it could have been. What can you tell us about your modern-day protagonist, Mara Denis, and why did you decide to fictionalize your story into hers?

It is said that your first novel is autobiographical, and, yes, there is a lot of my own story in Mara’s. First, I gave Mara my profession—journalist; my love stories—several combined into one; my fear of the ocean; my relationship with my mother, loving but complicated; and my love affair with Spain. Crucially, I also made her a mother. I have three sons, but I’ve written about all of them though Dylan, Mara’s only son. As to why? I suppose I did it because I wanted to explore what it would have been like for me to have a back story like Mara’s. That’s what I meant when I said her life wasn’t mine, but it could have been. I wish I knew my ancestors. I wish I had undertaken a journey of self discovery, like Mara, when my parents and grandparents were still alive. I still might one day. For now, I’m living vicariously through this character I created.

And what sets Mara on her path to discover the truth of her own family?

A call from her mother, which, given the dynamic of their relationship, is a marching order. Mara’s mother, Lila, wants her to find the birth certificate of her grandmother, who, she is certain, was born somewhere in the Canary Islands. Lila wants the certificate to apply for Spanish citizenship. She’s almost eighty, but, even at that age, she thinks that two passports are better than one. She used to live in Cuba, and for years she felt imprisoned in her own country. The idea of widening her horizons by claiming not one but two countries as hers is very appealing to her.

From Mara’s present (2019) we move to the Canary Islands in February 1888. What brings Inés María Cabazas there, and how does her life intersect with that of José Angel Quintana?

Inés gets to the Canary Islands by accident. She was on her way to Cuba with her parents, but her father suffered a heart attack and died on the ship. When the ship made a scheduled stop in Tenerife, one of the islands in the Canarian archipelago, they decided to disembark. At the port, during a sandstorm from the Sahara, she meets José. They marry quickly and have three daughters. One of them is Catalina Quintana, the second protagonist of the book.

José decides to plant mulberry trees and breed silkworms. Where did that idea come from?

At the time, the Canary Islands, and La Palma especially, were important producers of silk, primarily, for the clergy. That’s no longer the case, and it hasn’t been for a long time. However, to this day, the tradition of raising worms and weaving silk by hand remains. There is a wonderful museum in La Palma, which I visited, where you can see weavers working on wooden looms and using natural and colorful dyes, exactly the way they used to do it in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The main focus of your past-tense narrative, however, is Catalina de la Candelaria Quintana Cabaza. What should we know about her?

Catalina Quintana was the name of my maternal grandmother. She died at forty, the day after my mother turned sixteen, but she was very much a presence in my life. With this story, I tried to rescue her from the abyss of history and forgetting. She was a strong, entrepreneurial woman who suffered much in her life but kept at it, hoping, always hoping. She was also a respected healer in her community, and a loving but emotionally distant mother. All of this is true both of the character and of my grandmother. I have only one picture of my grandmother, which I found, almost by accident, when I visited Cuba in 1998. In it, you can see her rounded face and sad eyes. That was the face that followed me during the years I worked in the book, and the eyes that forced me to dig deep to find the humanity of my characters and the sorrows that afflicted them all.

The love of Catalina’s life is Juan Cruz, yet she ends up marrying Antonio López. Why is that, and what can you tell us about them?

Juan Cruz was very poor and came from a family with a bad reputation for reasons that readers will discover in the book. At the time, the ultimate aspiration of a family was to send at least one member of the family abroad, to the Americas, to open the way for others to follow. Catalina, being the oldest, had to assume that role in her family. And her parents saw in Antonio an older, wealthy man who could take care of her and, by extension, of them. It’s an old story, and it didn’t just happen in Spain. There are thousands of stories like theirs; sadly, even today.

Until I read your novel, I had no idea so many people went from the Canary Islands to Cuba. Was that a surprise to you, too?

It was not. I’ve always known that thousands of people from the Canary Islands moved to Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Cubans have specific words and cook certain meals that come from the islands, and not from peninsular Spain. Growing up, when I heard the term “islander,” I knew we were referring not to Cuba but to the other, ancestral islands.

When I began working on the book, I had an inkling that my family had been part of that migration, but I wasn’t sure who or how. After I had finished the book, and after my mother’s death, I was searching some of the documents she left behind and found that her maternal grandfather, Antonio Quintana, was indeed from the Canary Islands. So, I think that this story was encoded in my DNA and I didn’t even know it. Something drew me to it, something primal. And I’m so glad the story of the Valbanera fell on my lap when it did, sparking the rest of the story in my imagination.

Catalina, Antonio, and Juan end up sailing to Cuba on a boat called the SS Valbanera, a ship that really did cross the Atlantic from the Canary Islands in 1919. Why did you send your characters to the New World on that particular boat?

The story of that doomed ship is the reason the book exists. Almost twenty years ago, I found a book in Key West about the shipwreck of the Valbanera, a Spanish ship that left Spain carrying about twelve hundred people, mostly poor immigrants searching for a better life. The ship had three scheduled stops. The first in San Juan, Puerto Rico; the second in Santiago de Cuba, on the eastern end of the island; and the third was to be Havana, the capital. But sometime between Santiago de Cuba and Havana a devastating hurricane developed and the ship was lost. When it was finally found, in mid-September 1919, the ship was buried in the ocean off the coast of Key West and the bodies had disappeared. Luckily, only 488 people remained on board. Though that’s a huge loss of life, it would have been a higher number if all who had tickets to Havana had remained on board, but, curiously, many opted for disembarking the moment the ship touched land in Santiago, thereby saving their lives. It was that disparity that sparked my imagination: what if a passenger had wanted to disappear? That idea took hold and remained with me for years until, finally, in 2021, the whole story came pouring out of me, mostly in one month, but it had been in me for a long, long time.

There are several themes running through this novel—relationships among women, the immigrant experience, inherited trauma. But the title, Deeper Than the Ocean, seems to refer most fundamentally to love. What can you say about that?

Yes and no. The title was always the same and it came to me pretty early in the process, because it can be interpreted in so many ways. First, clearly, the love story. Juan tells Catalina that there are no limits to his love for her, and that, in fact, his love for her is deeper than the ocean. But it is also a reference to the way the ship was found, buried in quicksand, or to the threads that connect generations across time and oceans, or to the importance of genes and generational trauma. I think we are deeply connected to those who came before us in mysterious and profound ways, ways that sometimes run deeper than the ocean.

Mirta Ojito, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of two nonfiction books, Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus and Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town. Deeper Than the Ocean is her first novel.