Havana and Other Missing Fathers. Mia Leonin. Arizona. 192 pages. $16.95 in paper.

A quick troll through the memoir shelves of bookstores can reveal a lot of tragedy. If written by a woman, the stories tend to winnow to the following: once I was fat and made fun of; once I drank enough to float my eyeballs out of my head; once I had a really horrible husband, mother, childhood, wardrobe.

Some of these writs to the past are heart rending, others comical. But all too many have become familiar in their accounts of transgressions committed and overcome. So I was delighted at the arrival of Mia Leonin's singular and beautifully written memoir. Leonin is a poet, dance and theater critic and creative writing instructor at the University of Miami, and her fine arts and journalistic skills are on full display as she recalls the discovery of her father and her ethnicity through travel, romantic love and the charged meanings behind the everyday speak of English and Spanish.

``Spanish has fourteen verb tenses, English has six. My father and I speak in only one -- the present.'' This assertion is more than a study of linguistics Leonin offers upon first meeting her father -- whom she had believed dead -- at the airport when she was 20. This is the armature of her book: how language is expansive in its uses. It can hold memory and possibility; it is the way we understand not only what is said but also what is felt.

``We walk from the gate past a man holding a cardboard sign that reads `Royal Caribbean Here.' That's how I've carried my `Cubanness' up until now -- like a stark cardboard sign, a piece of information my mother conveyed to me with little explanation when I was sixteen.''

Unlike most authors, Leonin opens her memoir from the point of view of her mother, Norma, a 35-year-old slipping out of her parents' house at night to escape the chicken coops and pickup trucks of her life in the suburbs of Louisville, Ky.

Norma is pregnant and takes a job as a nurse in a rural town in Missouri. As a child, Leonin hears puzzling takes on her origins. Her mother once danced in satin at supper clubs. Her father was a psychiatrist or a surgeon. He was a ``good angel,'' or he was selfish and cold. Eventually her mother tells her the truth. Leonin's father was not her mother's late husband but someone else. He is alive. He is Cuban.

Leonin churns through her first 16 years in four short pages. Somehow this reads as the right amount of time to spend on her beginnings, probably because she is masterful at settings. She is able to convey the longings of her girlhood by precisely remembering its objects: a scorched yard, an aluminum screen door, a powder blue velvet chair. Later on, she renders a Southern funeral in a few strokes: ``[W]hite lilies and black stockings . . . second and third cousins wandering like sleepwalkers in and out of the labyrinth of cushioned parlors.''

She is equally deft with the way she moves through time. While dancing with Manny, her first Cuban lover, she is also in her childhood home, standing before a mirror and practicing her own solitary steps. Waiting for Manny to return to her Miami Beach studio, Leonin is once again at the airport meeting with her father, trying hard to speak his native tongue.

These scenes, and sundry others, dissolve into the past without the crutches of ``I remember'' or ``This reminds me of . . .'' Because Leonin has written this slim memoir in present tense, what has already happened and what is unfolding in the moment reads as seamless, giving the reader a sense that time is not a finite line but more of a constellation, contracting and expanding, happening all at once.

This trope works well when she travels to Bogota and, finally, to Havana, where she lives at first as a dabbling visitor and later as a survivor. Throughout, Leonin considers the nuances of the friends she has made there and the contradictions of the Cuban media, as well as the more familiar emigre understanding of the Mariel boatlift, Elián González and the hardships and rhetoric evoked by the island's regime.

But she disperses this information with grace; her reportage appears naturally within the arc of her own story and never eclipses it. We see the Yoruba ritual of cleansing because Leonin is its focus. We learn of the drudgery of life in Havana because she is living there. Her writing is lyric and imagistic -- at times longer paragraphs read as prose poems -- but it is also grounded in the realities of scrounging for clean water and a sliver of privacy.

Toward the end of her sojourn, Leonin writes: ``In Spanish, you don't `play' an instrument, you touch it -- tocar. . . . You pick it up, turn it on its side, and rest it in your lap.'' She is speaking of the African bata, a double-headed drum played in Cuban timba and sacred ceremonies. But her words also reveal her perception of memory -- how it is tactile, a three-dimensional entity, one that keeps time and also marks its passage.

Emma Trelles is an arts writer in South Florida.

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