In Memoriam: Nara Araújo, 1945–2009

The Cuban professor, essayist, and literary critic Nara Araújo passed away in the early hours of Wednesday, January 14, 2009. Fittingly, she was alone at the hour of her untimely death. Nara had a unique innate elegance that permeated her demeanor and literary style—she was too coquettish to allow anyone to see her die.

Nara Araújo was a true scholar. She studied pedagogy and French literature and linguistics at the University of Havana, attended graduate courses at La Sorbonne, and obtained a Ph.D. in philology from the University of Moscow. Araújo was a professor of the Facultad de Artes y Letras of the University of Havana. As a visiting professor, she taught in France, Brazil, and Mexico, where she resided for several years.

Her curriculum vitae reveals a long list of magisterial classes, journal articles, book reviews, lectures, and presentations at international conferences. Nara published more than a half dozen books and countless articles in journals around the world on comparative literature, literary theory, cultural studies, Caribbean and Cuban literature, travel diaries, and gender studies. Her work offered a perfect balance between an always up-to-date theoretical framework and an almost poetic insight.

At Florida International University, we were fortunate to have her as a Rockefeller Fellow in 1998 and as a speaker at many of the Cuban Research Institute Conferences on Cuban and Cuban American Studies. For the Cuban Research Institute, it was a unique opportunity to showcase in Miami a representative of the best of Cuba’s academia. Personally, it allowed me to get to know her well. I will always treasure the time we spent together in Miami, Mexico, Havana, Montreal, and other cities, and I am particularly grateful for her advice and support when I was writing my novel Memoria del silencio and for her presentation at the book’s launching in Guadalajara in 2002.

When the news of her death spread throughout the academic world, there was a sincere sense of loss, for Nara had a lot to live for professionally and personally. At the time of her passing, she was working on a novel and happily awaiting the birth of her first granddaughter.

On a trip to Havana shortly after her death, I visited her grave, next to her husband’s, the Cuban writer Lisandro Otero, who passed away just a year before Nara. They are buried in the Gardens of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, adjacent to the Convent of San Francisco. The gardens, adorned with beautiful sculptures and flowers, are flanked by a Greek Orthodox chapel and the muted sounds of the Avenida del Puerto. The waters of the Havana harbor are so close one can almost feel the salt water on one’s lips. Family, friends, colleagues, and students accompanied her ashes to her resting place. As a representative for Nara’s many friends in the diaspora, I placed flowers on her grave in tribute to a brilliant academic, a personal friend, an elegant lady, and a woman who, quietly and with integrity, helped build bridges among her countrymen.