"Mi Carne, Mi Sangre, Mis Ilusiones": The Collision of Words and Worlds in Milcha Sanchez-Scott's the Cuban Swimmer (Critical Essay‪)‬

In the spring of 2009, when I was floundering at learning Spanish while teaching a course in magical realism with my university's study abroad program in Montevideo, Uruguay, a colleague sent me The Cuban Swimmer, a bilingual play with magical realist elements by Hispanic playwright Milcha Sanchez-Scott. I chose to think of the appearance of that type of play in my email inbox at just that time as more than a coincidence--though not exactly magical--and I set about reading it with my Spanish-English dictionary close at hand. There's something about living and teaching in another country and attempting to speak another language that makes one realize how little one truly understands, and I thought that reading the play might possibly help me work through some of my own marginalized feelings. I was right. The Cuban Swimmer is a boisterous, tightly-wound play, harrowing and energetic enough to take on the waves and splash of a mystical story set at sea. Additionally, it's heavy on the realism and light on the magic until the final montage, and Sanchez-Scott does well in capturing the musical and discordant notes in the language and actions of a family of Cuban immigrants who place their hopes for the family's future on their daughter Margarita, a long-distance ocean swimmer. The back of the playbook itself describes the main plot of the story as one of transcendence: "As they bicker and exhort her, she begins to weary and stray off course--until a spiritual and magical intervention reinvigorates her and she resolves to 'dive into the Milky Way and wash [her] hands in the stars.'" The more poetic images collide with the salt and sun and waves of the material world and help us believe that miracles just might be possible.