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Loosing my Espanish, by H.G. Carrillo
H.G. Carrillo lived most of his adult life as a Cuban-American novelist who fled Havana as a child – then his recent death from COVID-19 revealed his origin story was one of his greatest fictions.
The author, assistant professor at George Washington University and chairman of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation died from coronavirus April 20 in Washington, D.C., at the age of 59.
His initial obituary published Friday by the Washington Post included a detailed interview with his husband and claimed Carrillo “fled Fidel Castro’s island in 1967.”
The story caught the eye of Carrillo’s Michigan-based sister and niece, who reached out to the newspaper to set the record straight.
They said Carrillo, known as Hache to his friends, was actually born Herman Glenn Carroll in Detroit and had no Latino heritage.
According to the relatives, Carrillo formed the fictitious identity that defined his later years after teaching himself Spanish, becoming a writer and publishing his 2004 debut novel, “Loosing My Espanish.”
“My brother was very talented,” sister Susan Carroll told The Post. “He could see something, watch something, hear something, and do it.”
She described her sibling as “always eccentric” and said their mother had a hard time when he gained prominence as a writer and disowned his true backstory.
“She was really, really hurt by the whole facade, and I confronted him about it,” Carroll recalled. “Our mother was thinking: ‘What did we do wrong? Did he have such a horrible childhood?’ But he said nothing much back to me. He said he loved me and always would.”
Niece Jessica Webley said her uncle excelled at keeping his “family and social life separate.”
Carrillo’s husband Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a professor of entomology at the University of Maryland, told The Post his spouse of the last five years “was always a hard guy to know.”
Learning the truth about his husband’s early life from Carroll, whom he barely knows, was hard to process, but he’s since come to accept and appreciate it.
“At first, I was just so downcast,” he told The Post over the weekend. “I’ve only met his family by text. I never understood why he would never introduce me. Now I do.”
He said his husband found his calling in literary fiction, and his imagination was what made him special.
“I’ve been on a long walk this morning, and I’ve come to peace with this," he told The Post in their updated obituary.
"I think that in any other century, there were storytellers, like jesters, and in African culture, and in First Nations cultures, and when they told stories, people never expected the truth to be the reality, you know? There was another truth there. And I think that speaks to Hache,” he said.
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thats divisve" like nikka, so all that shyttalking on certain segments of ADOS people aint divisive?
