Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas

ISSN: 0890-5762 (Print) 1743-0666 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrev20

Conversation with Julia Alvarez

Heather Rosario‐Sievert

To cite this article: Heather Rosario‐Sievert (1997) Conversation with Julia Alvarez, Review:
Literature and Arts of the Americas, 30:54, 31-38, DOI: 10.1080/08905769708594508
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Conversation with
Julia Alvarez

Heather Rosario-Sievert

Heather Rosario-Sievert is Associate Professor at Hostos Community College, City University of New
York. She is currently working on an extensive translation project on the work of Nancy Morejón.
Her book of poems, Honor My Father, was recently published by Edwin Mellen Press.

31
 When and where did you start to write?
I was young. I didn't really know what I was saying when I said I wanted to write. It began when
we immigrated to the United States. I would never have written if I had never left the Dominican
Republic and kept speaking only Spanish. I probably would have become a story teller—I've
always loved a good story. But who knows what I would have done with it?

So ft wasn't just a place or a language but a change of places and languages?

Yes, my intense interest in language developed because of being suddenly transposed to this lan-
guage, to this place, and suddenly having to learn a language intentionally. It's something that
happens to all writers even in their own language, but I was ten years old and listening to what
people were saying, wondering why they used one word instead of another, why they phrased
something this way instead of that way. And I also realized it was power. We—my family—just
didn't have the language. I saw how important having skill in language was. For instance, my
father had a thick accent and couldn't be understood, my mother had an accent, too: It meant we
were treated in a certain way. Because they couldn't express themselves, they couldn't maneuver
or find their way through situations.

The fact that your parents lacked English made you see them in a different way?
Absolutely: suddenly they were powerless, when they had always been powerful. I saw that words
were power, and that made me listen carefully to language and learn it in a deliberate way. Not
the way we learn our native language—drinking it in your mother's milk.

And that prepared you for being a writer?

When you become a writer, you have to go back and become an apprentice to your own native
language. But that happened to me at ten.

But not everything was gain. You also lost something.

I lost almost everything: a homeland, a language, family connections, a way of understanding, a
warmth. But the experience threw me back onto my own resources.

So you turned inward?

Where I found a portable homeland, the world of the imagination and it was in that world where
I really set down roots. I left the Dominican Republic and landed not in the United States but in
either the English language or the world of the imagination.

You started in the United States? You never wrote anything in the Dominican
Republic?
Never. Spanish was my oral language. My mother claims that if she recited a poem twice to me in
Spanish I would know it by heart. And then, when company came over and all of us would put on
a little performance, one of the things I did was recite a poem. But writing and even reading were
totally foreign things. We didn't do things like that in my family.

Have you ever written in Spanish?

Never. I even wrote a story about that, about the experience of never having written in Spanish.
This surprises people, but you can know something in a language and not be a writer in it. My stu-
dents always feel that English is their language and they're all writers. But writing requires an
apprenticeship because it's a craft, and I never went through that apprenticeship in Spanish.

In Butterflies, there are moments when you seem to be simultaneously

translating from Spanish and creating in English. I wonder if you ever

32
 consciously think in Spanish while you write in English?
People always ask me what language I think and dream in. I don't understand the question
because if Papi appears in a dream, he speaks Spanish, but my chairman invariably speaks
English. But, sure, there are moments of transference: At one point, I have a character say,
"You've been working hard grinding yucca." A Dominican would say "guayando la yucca,"
which means "working hard." Probably I hear a cadence and go with it.

To me it sounded as if you were retelling a story that was told to you in

Spanish and translating it into English.
Well, I think our world is becoming a place with shifting borders, where nations form and
reform. But what we're really creating are new languages. There are so many hyphenated peo-
ple, combination people who hear musical cadences in one language that come from another.

So you don't think of yourself necessarily as a Dominican writer?

I'm not a Dominican writer. I can't pretend to be a Dominican. But by the same token, when
people ask me if I'm an American writer, I have to say I don't think of myself as being in the
same tradition as Melville or Hawthorne. I'm a hyphenated person interested in the music that
comes out of a language that hears both languages. My stories come out of being in worlds
that sometimes clash and sometimes combine.

Does the hyphenated idea include being a Latina writer?

I'm a writer who is Latina not a Latina who is a writer. What I want to do with language is what
Joseph Conrad meant when he said: "To render the highest possible justice to the visible uni-
verse."

Putting the writing first takes us back to your idea of apprenticeship, but the
Latina part seems to be more about subject.
Yes, but that's the writer's task. To see a subject clearly—let's say the Latina experience—but,
above all, to be a writer. But because I am Latina, there are certain themes, concerns, ways of
focusing subjects to which I gravitate.

You sound like a camera.

It's true. I'm like a special lens. I want to write, and I am what I am. But I don't want to be
hemmed in by a label even if what I produce derives from the experiences and the concerns
that are in my being.

Has being a Dominican woman made your creative life easier or harder?
Let me invert the terms again and set the Dominican part aside: I think being female makes
being a writer harder.

But does the Dominican part weigh on being a woman writer?

Sometimes being a Dominican woman who writes has made it hard within the Dominican con-
text. I was raised when women didn't really have a profession, and to measure where you were
going by this absolute passion for an art instead of having a nice family—I messed up on all
fronts—was hard for me. And to think of myself as a female who could have a voice, well, it
was always men who had opinions. Women catered to them and kept their mouths shut, and I
was brought up with some of that.

Ybu're not exactly docile.

I have very powerful women in my family, the mothers. People often talk about how so many

33
black families are mother-oriented. In Dominican families, the men went off, so it was the
women who were around. They were great story tellers, but even so I had a hard time being
female and being a writer. I caught a lot of family flack when my first book The Garcia Girls
came out.

You revealed too much.

Apparently. At the same time, I think that in this culture at that moment it wasn't easy to be a
Dominican woman who was writing out of what was considered a minority culture. You didn't
see our stories in The New Yorker. That was before multicultural studies and even before
women's studies. Imagine that!

So you lacked role models.

The models I found in school were white European or white American males. So to write in
English, I thought I would either have to translate my characters or get them a green card.

Who are your favorite writers in English or Spanish now?

There are too many to list. Toni Morrison is a real hero for me, as is Alice Munro, the Canadian
short-story writer. I admire Louise Erdrich a great deal, and Leslie Marmen Silko, the Native
American writer. These are all people I'm currently reading. Joy Kawawa, a Canadian Japanese
writer; William Trevor, an Irish writer—he has a beautiful book called Two Lives. I guess I have
favorite books rather than favorite writers. I love The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, the
Stone Diaries by Karen Shields, a Canadian writer. Let's see. I can't leave out Cien años de
soledad. And then there's poetry. I think of myself as having started as a poet, not as a fiction
writer. I have a journal where I write down all the books that I've read and what I've loved
about them. There are authors I always go back to, Tolstoy, for instance, especially when I'm
doing crowd scenes or when I have a big dinner party in a novel. Certain writers help me to do
things I'm not good at or that I'm not well versed in. But the list would just go on and on, from
Dante to Pablo Neruda and back again.

Can you think of a book or author that changed your life?

Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior. It blew my mind. I kept saying, "You're Chinese but
this is true," and she gave me a kind of permission that wasn't out there. I'm still very wary
because sometimes you feel maybe you're being accepted but it could be because of tokenism.

/ don't think so. It sounds to me as if you're talking about the self-doubt all
artists have.
Tell that to my husband. I was just telling him how hard a time I'm having with a story, how I'm
grieving because I can't get these characters alive and growing. He tells me I've written so
many others that succeeded, and I say but I don't care about any of the others, I care about the
ones I'm working on right now, and they're not working.

Just push the button and it'll work! Right?

Exactly. But I'm haunted: maybe I've lost it! Maybe I can't do it!

Maxine Hong Kingston opened your eyes, but are there other writers who
had a similar effect on you, above and beyond the authors who have
provided you with techniques for handling specific literary problems?
Writers like Sandra Cisneros, because through them I found out that Latinas existed. There was
an anthology of stories by Latinas, a very uneven but very important book. I realized there
were other people struggling. So books like that influenced me, even if they were never my

34
favorite books. The poet Marilyn Hacker, for instance, was really helpful because she was a
woman and a poet, writing about our experiences as women. She had a magazine, and even if
she didn't print my poems, she would read them and comment on them.

Did writing about what you know give you a head start?
Of course. A lot of The Garcia Girls was based on my own experience—first novels usually are.
But there is a lot of fictionalizing, using the material of your life but being primarily interested
in making a good story. It's the combining, the exaggeration, the redoing, the adding on, that
makes it original rather than autobiographical.

Your family, I take it, didn't see the fictional part.

It was very hard to get our wonderful tías and other family members to understand that
because there was just enough truth in it to make them ask why I was lying. Though I must say
I wasn't always lying about certain things they couldn't know about—all those things I'd done
myself! I think our old culture says if it's in a book and it's a story it must be true.

The way Don Quijote thinks books about knights in armor are factual: if it's in
print, it's true.
People thought I was just trying to, as we say in the Dominican Republic, hide the sun with a
finger. I kept telling them that it was just fiction; they would say, "But don't you have three sis-
ters?" The really funny thing is that people only remember what's in the book.

Truth becomes fiction and fiction truth. But did you write about the Mirabal
sisters because of their mythical stature or because in some ways they
paralleled the Garcia Girls and your own life?
I have a lecture about this called "Chasing the Butterflies." I explain that the Mirabal sisters
have always haunted me because they started the underground. My father was also a member
of the underground, but we escaped. Four months later, the sisters were murdered on a coun-
try road. It's as if our escape, our story in America started when theirs ended.

They were real but charged with mythic power.

I was constantly telling North Americans about the Mirabal sisters, surprised that even my well-
informed friends had never heard about them. So the desire to tell the story was there from
the very beginning. The hard part was that they had become legends: they had become such
mythical characters that they had been robbed of their humanity, you know, and I was afraid to
make them real.

It sounds like desecration.

As a matter of fact a friend from the Dominican Republic, Chiqui, said "Careful Julia. You're
touching the icon." And that's what it was: They were robbed of the dignity of being real
human beings and robbed of the dignity of what that sacrifice meant. So in part I shied away
from the story because of that. But then something incredible happened to me. I discovered
there weren't three sisters but four, and that one of them, Dede, was alive. Meeting her was
such a blessing, because it brought the others into reality for me.

It also gave you a narrative focus.

Exactly, the second sister, the survivor, lives to tell the story. Besides, I'm the second of four sis-
ters in my family, so I was being given a story to write. I had to write it.

35
 Are there any plans to film In the Time of the Butterflies?
Well, it's being read by film people, but I don't know what will come of it. I think it would
make a wonderful movie. Marlon Brando would be a great Trujillo.

You've talked about the role of language in your writing, but what about
place and setting? Do reality and imagination fuse here, too?
I think "The island" is a real place. Remember, when I was 10 years old, "The island" went com-
pletely into my head. The word was so luminous and so resonant because I internalized it. But
at the same time, interesting things happened when I go back to the real place. Sparks jump
between that place and the place in my head.

It unleashes your imagination.

I'll give you an example. I was moping around after a two-and-a-half-month book tour—being
out on the road.

You crashed.
CRASH! Writing seemed so far away after being so close. So we went to the Dominican
Republic for about a week, and within a month of coming back I had written three stories. It
happens like this: my husband Bill and I will be driving around the island, and I just see some-
thing and it affects me, gets me going as a writer.

Well, what if you were to move to Santo Domingo? How would that affect
you?
I think living a rural, solitary life style here in Vermont makes it much easier to get work done
than if I were in the Dominican Republic. As a matter of fact, I won a residency down there. I
was at Altos de Chavón for three months. Parsons School of Design has a program whereby five
people are granted a three month residency and given an apartment. It's wonderful. I got one,
went down there, and couldn't get any work done.

What happened?
Well just imagine: you're in this little apartment, the windows all open, you hear people talk-
ing outside, you smell something being cooked, and a chivo goes by. I'd look out the window
and see a little village at the bottom of the mountain, so I'd hike down there and get involved
in village projects including building a school. I did no writing. It's more a social and community
place, but it reminds you how precious a thing it is to be a writer because of all the things the
village needed.

How much does culture affect what you write? And, in that context, do you
actually think of yourself as una gringa dominicana? If so, how much of each
gringa/dominicana is operative when you write?
The mixture is often a clash. It creates confusion and conflict that get worked into the writing,
but my eye sees certain things because I'm that mixture. And the things that I see, that I'm
caught by, are what I'll write about. I think a lot of the way I see the world has to do with
being that combination, feeling slightly marginal in each place. So the things I observe—my
consciousness of class or race—certainly come out of the fact that I'm the person that I am.

How do you see the future of the Dominican Republic?

That's a hard question. If you look at the end of The Butterflies, you find a negative prognosis,
but I also have a sense of expectancy and hope. The old men are dying off and will be replaced
by the generación perdida people talk about, the "lost generation," the generation of our par-

36
ents. But so many talented men and women were lost, either because they stayed and were
killed or because they stayed and were stifled, or because they fled to the United States and
elsewhere. But people my age and even younger are coming up, so maybe things will begin to
change politically.

What about the island itself?

Well, I see a whole coast becoming a playground for richer nations. I'm not sure that's great for
a culture. It's worrisome, and it's already happened. It's like being in a race knowing you're
probably not going to win, but yet you really hope you will. There is something about the
Dominican spirit. This is what the sisters had for sure, and that you see when you're down there
talking to a campesino. There's something Dominican that is so optimistic, that has such charm
and sass and a sense of humor, and you say, of course, that will defeat this history and this
social structure. But then you remember how sad our history is.

What kind of work are you currently involved in?

I published a book of poetry last June with Dutton, The Other Side/El Otro Lado. The title
comes from a long poem about a Dominican village. The Dominican artist Germán Pérez did
the cover. But I'm working on stories now.

How did you react when you found out you were nominated for the National
Book Award?
I didn't know about it until I read it in the local paper. It said "Vermont writer nominated for
National Book Critic's Award." I wondered who got nominated. It wasn't a very good article,
because it wasn't until the third paragraph that I found the name Julia Alvarez. Then the
phone started ringing. When you've been writing for 20 years, you do it because you have to.
I'd been at it for so long without receiving much affirmation or confirmation that I can call
myself a survivor. But it does feel good to win a prize. The Americans are finally saying you did
it. When the kids in the playground would make fun of something I said, I swore I would learn
their language so well, I would whup them with it. I remember teaching in a school, and a par-
ent called up to ask why a Spanish woman was teaching the kids English. That stoked the fire in
me. So I had a great sense of feeling affirmed. I used to think I was crazy for doing this. Maybe
I am.

Books by Julia Alvarez

Homecoming
(Grove Press, 1984)

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

(Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991)

In the Time of the Butterflies

(Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1994)

The Other Side/El otro lado (Dutton, 1995)

37
 Años continuos, 1994-95
Photo sandblasting on glass, 40 x 40 feet
Located at Miami International A rport,
Atrium, Concourse D
Metro-Dade Art in Public Places Csmmission
Photograph by Carlos Domenech

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