In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

In the Time of the Butterflies

Readers often ask how long it took me to write a certain book. With a historical novel like In the Time of the Butterflies (ITTOTB), they imagine hours spent in libraries, researching the time period and characters. But in the early 1980s when I began contemplating writing down the story of the Mirabal sisters, nothing much had been written about them. All I found was a brief mention in a handful of history books about the dictatorship. But I knew the story firsthand from my father, who had been part of an underground cell loosely connected to the liberation movement started by Minerva Mirabal & her husband, Manolo Tavárez. Our family had managed to escape the country just months before the Mirabal sisters were murdered in November 1960. I was haunted by their story. My three sisters and I had made it to safety, but they had lost their lives. They were my shadow sisters, granted a little older. I couldn't get them out of my head and more importantly my heart. After I wrote my first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, about four sisters who emigrate to the USA, a story loosely based on my own, I wanted to write about the true-life sisters who had stayed behind and lost their lives. With my father’s help and contacts to the underground members who had survived the torture chambers and murders, I began collecting as much information as I could about them. In an oral culture—as the DR still was back then—I had to go to the sources themselves, people who knew the sisters, people who had been members of their movement, fellow inmates in prison. I felt overwhelmed by what seemed a Herculean task of telling their story and doing them justice. But during one of my research trips—I got the “green light.” I had heard only about the three Mirabal sisters who had been killed by the dictator. Noris, the daughter of Patria, invited me to go with her to visit her aunt, Dedé. Until that moment I didn’t know that there were four sisters, one of whom had survived. Dedé was the second of the four sisters, the one who had survived to tell the story of the other three. I, too, was the second of four sisters, the storyteller in the family. The Mariposas were with me! Some stories are addressed generically to Resident, but every once in a while, one comes along with my name on it. This is the one I am meant to write.

Perhaps this is the only way to grieve the big things—in snippets, pinches, little sips of sadness.

I had to check to be sure: Wait! What book are we talking about? This passage might have been lifted out of my most recent novel, Afterlife, coming out in paperback April 2021. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52898645-afterlife My main character, Antonia, has just undergone a sudden, terrible loss. Alone, and not wanting to be a burden to anyone, she keeps to her routines, walking a narrow path through loss. . .occasionally taking “sips of sorrow, afraid the big wave might wash her away.” See what I mean? It turns out that twenty-seven years earlier, my Dedé had the same strategy for enduring her grief: taking little “sips of sadness” at a time. One day at a time, one breath at a time—makes it possible to endure. I once wrote a poem, “Small Portions,” that extends this idea not just to sorrows but to joys and sights and sounds: “The earth is just too big, too beautiful: I like it small, through a window, catching the light at the day’s end.” In any case, it’s not plagiarism—right?—if I’m only plagiarizing myself.

Any Dominican of a certain generation would have jumped at that gunshot sound.

We carry the traumas of the past encoded in our psyches and bodies, passed down generationally—so the research is increasingly showing us. This is certainly true of the Dominican Republic. The thirty-one-year dictatorship ended, but the sights, sounds, smells, memories stay with us. The generation that came of age during the bloody Trujillo years is especially subject to ghosts from that past. In fact, Dominican historians have labeled it “the lost generation,” not only because of the individuals, leaders, writers, artists who lost their lives, but also those who “escaped” and managed to gain amnesty somewhere “safe” (as my family did) are haunted for years afterwards. I recall when I drove my first (used) car, a bright canary yellow VW, home for a visit. My father’s horrified face shocked me. Later, Mami explained that the SIM (the secret police) always traveled in black VWs—just the sound of its motor would strike terror to your heart. I had expected praise and pride with a purchase I had made with “my own money”! Never mind that my VW was a cheerful sunny color. It still was the same make of the dictatorship’s “deathwagons.” We never leave the past completely behind, but as Eduardo Galeano once remarked, “History never says so long. History says see you later.” Sometimes that past returns in a perky little car tooling down our street with your daughter inside.

out. If you multiply by zero, you still get zero, and a thousand heartaches.

Most Dominicans at the time of the dictatorship, myself included, were raised Catholic and would have heard that familiar admonition that whatever we give will be multiplied a hundredfold. I do embrace living with generosity of spirit, but sometimes it’s time to turn off the self-abnegation faucet. Anyone who has been in a bad/abusive/unworkable relationship knows that sometimes no matter how much love and self-sacrifice you throw at it, the best thing you can do for yourself and each other is to move on—otherwise, you will both turn into the smaller versions of yourself. Certainly for Dedé’s mother (Mercedes/Doña Chea) this option was impossible. Divorce was unheard of, forbidden by the church. But she emotionally “divorced” the Enrique who was causing her and others so much grief. Dedé is able to make a different choice and divorce Jaimito. As someone with compromised math skills—my husband insists on being the one who reconciles our checkbook at the end of the month; otherwise, when I’m in charge, we often end up richer or poorer than our balance shows. And so, I feel a certain pride in being able to carry off a math metaphor. But I have so little confidence in my math abilities that I did run this passage by Bill. When he couldn’t believe I didn’t know something “this simple,” I remind him that I flunked every school through fifth grade and had to attend summer school to be passed on to the next grade. By the way, one of the things Dedé shared with me is that her father insisted she be the daughter who managed their country store. Minerva was the reader and poet; Patria the homemaker and caretaker; María Teresa the social butterfly and romantic; and Dedé was good with numbers and kept the books. Every family seems to divvy up roles that underscore each sibling’s strengths, but sometimes this profiling prevents us from exploring new skills. So, I’m throwing this back at my readers: what was your role in the family? And if you were an only child did you feel more leeway to diversify and not be a “monoculture”? Is there a skill or area of expertise you wish you had been encouraged to explore? Is it too late now? Harriet Doerr, whose first novel, Stones for Ibarra, is a favorite, started writing at age seventy-three. Grandma Moses, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Frank McCourt, Annie Proulx (another favorite). In other words, there’s still time!

Words repeated, distorted, words recreated by those who might bear them a grudge, words stitched to words until they are the winding sheet the family will be buried in when their bodies are found dumped in a ditch, their tongues cut off for speaking too much.

This was a hard passage for a writer who loves words to write, a writer who chose as the epigraph for her first book (Homecoming 1984), the Czesław Milosz quote “Language is the only homeland.” The world of the imagination has been my homeland and harbor, since I crashed on the shores of English as an immigrant ten-year-old. But I also recognize that words can be misused. In another quote Milosz remarks that writers of moral imagination need to be vigilant and hope that “good spirits, not evil ones choose us for their instrument.” In the Dominican Republic of the dictatorship, the Secret Police (SIM) had many aiders and abettors and collaborators. Sometimes someone who bore a grudge went to the SIM to report on this enemy. Sometimes someone who was in a tight spot got exonerated by pointing the finger at someone else. The dictator himself used propaganda (distorted language) to create a false reality—at one point even forcing the congress to declare that the country was an officially white nation, though Dominicans are over 80% mixed race. There were many “caliés” on the SIM payroll, private citizens whose job it was to spy and report. You never knew, in a household, if a workman or a maid or gardener or even a relative had their ears perked for any “off comments.” There was even a state-run “servants’ academy,” to train young women not only in household arts, but also espionage. They were to be the loyal ears and eyes of the dictatorship in the most private of places. One story I heard during my interviews—I think it found its way into the novel, but I can’t seem to find it—was of a wily campesino who gave all his sons the same exact name so that if any one of them got in trouble, he could blame it on such-and-such a brother, thus delaying the arrest and giving that brother a chance to escape. So, the Mirabal family had to be careful. A successful farmer and shopkeeper like Enrique Mirabal might incite an envious neighbor to get his competitor out of the way.

The country people around the farm say that until the nail is hit, it doesn’t believe in the hammer.

Because I grew up in a country subject to the censorship of a dictatorship and with a high rate of illiteracy, the most important information was passed on in coded ways. Among the most popular culture form were refranes, short pithy sayings that conveyed luminous little bits of wisdom and advice--our Dominican version of haiku, I suppose. One of my books for young readers in the tía Lola series, How Tía Lola Learned to Teach, starts off each chapter with one of these refranes. Out in the campo you can still meet campesinos who don’t know their “letters” (the alphabet) but have PhDs on taking care of the land and of the soul with their pithy sayings. This one about the hammer was one I heard growing up, a Dominican version of “experience is the best teacher.” Another one, “Nadie aprende en cabeza ajena,” also captures the idea that we can’t learn a lesson unless we live it. Very salt of the earth wisdom. Because the Mirabal family were country people from the interior, our breadbasket of La Vega real—their speech was full of these sayings. The truth of this particular saying about the nail and hammer was borne out throughout the 31-year dictatorship. There are countless stories of families and individuals who colluded with the regime for years. . . It wasn’t until some member of their family, a friend, a daughter, a brother, or they themselves got “hit by the hammer” that they became disenchanted and joined the very underground they had hitherto persecuted. The small group of men who finally carried out the assassination had all been Trujillistas, close friends and collaborators, until the violence and cruelty of the regime hit home. Even the torture prison had a refrán carved on its wall: En boca cerrada no entran moscas, no flies can enter a closed mouth. Perhaps “silence is golden” captures the meaning in English. I first heard the story from a former prisoner who said this refrane was carved above the entry door of the torture prison. But that doesn’t make any sense—wouldn’t the point of a torture prison be to force people to talk? More likely, a previous prisoner had carved this advice on the walls of his cell. Keep your own counsel and your conscience intact. Solitary confinement didn’t come with a lot of reading material—so a prisoner would have a lot of time to ponder this. A buen entendedor, pocas palabras bastan. . .

Minerva says a soul is like a deep longing in you that you can never fill up, but you try. That is why there are stirring poems and brave heroes who die for what is right.

In deciding what form each sister’s voice would take, I chose the diary form for María Teresa’s voice. It captures her youth, her freshness, and importantly, her entries provide the texture of the Mirabals’ daily lives. In order to acquaint myself with the form’s myriad possibilities, I read diaries of children in concentration and detention camps and in hiding during WWII. Of course, Anne Frank’s diary was an inspiration. (Incidentally, all this diary reading led me, a few years later, to write Before We Were Free, about a young girl, Anita, in honor of her literary progenitor, growing up in the Trujillo dictatorship.) While Minerva leaned towards poetry and activism, Patria’s towards liturgy and religion, Dedé toward the larger sweep of her family’s story, someone would have to tell us what they ate for breakfast. What did they wear for this outing or that? Who were the cute boys? What did it smell like after a rainfall? Gossip, recipes, as well as larger quandaries and questions. One of the huge pluses of doing research in situ is you are picking up a lot more than just facts and information. Sights, sounds, little anecdotes you wouldn’t even know to ask about. María Teresa grows up in the course of the novel, and her concerns, as reflected in her diary entries, become more profound. As the baby sister, she tags along her older siblings, especially Minerva. We get a first-hand report of events that would otherwise be scarce or be mere background to her big sisters’ more important adult concerns. Chatty María Teresa fills us in and that helps us see, hear, smell, taste, touch the life she and her sisters are living. In this chapter, María Teresa is readying herself for her first communion, and she is beginning to question what her catechism classes are teaching her. What is a soul? One of my favorite lines in all of Shakespeare from Anthony and Cleopatra where Cleopatra exclaims, “I have immortal longings in me.” That’s why we write poetry and tell stories. The heart fills to the top and spills over onto paper or dance or compassionate solidarity. In an early poem (from my Housekeeping series) I connect this feeling of overflow to ironing! As a young girl being taught the “household arts,” ironing was my favorite: it provided me with “a way to express my excess love on cloth.” Any art, no matter how humble, can provide a space and place for love to go, connecting us to everything and everyone, springs that feed us all.

I asked Minerva why she was doing such a dangerous thing. And then, she said the strangest thing. She wanted me to grow up in a free country.

When you’re a child in a dictatorship, your questions can be dangerous, and often adults give ambiguous answers. I recall not understanding and asking why a certain uncle was suddenly missing from family gatherings. One of those adult/cautionary looks went around the room. Se fue de viaje, was the go-to answer, or, se fue pa’ Nueva York. A euphemism for being arrested or tortured or disappeared. But Minerva refuses to hold back and therefore collude with the dictatorship. In this passage, she is already cultivating a sense of social justice in María Teresa and thereby developing her little sister’s moral imagination. Many of us need that one bold spark to get us started. To ignite our own activism and moral imagination. Sometimes we get that inspiration from something we read, as I think happened to Minerva. One of my favorite children’s books is The Composition by Antonio Skármeta, who, by the way, wrote the script for the Neruda film Il Postino. The picture book is unnerving—it captures completely a child’s feeling that something is awry in his country and beautifully depicts his slow awakening. Often when I do a community Big Read event, and the organizers ask what the young readers should read along with the adult selection of In the Time for the Butterflies, I recommend this Skármeta’s book. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79746.The_Composition Of course, I’m not above self-promotion, and I’ll also urge middle-school readers to pick up Before We Were Free, an Anne Frank-type YA novel that takes place in the Trujillo dictatorship. Goodreads has reviewed that book as well! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17643.Before_We_Were_Free

And suddenly, I was crying in her arms, because I could feel the waters breaking, the pearl of great price slipping out, and I realized I was giving birth to something dead I had been carrying inside me.

At first glance, Patria seems to be the most assured, religious and conventional of the four sisters—eldest child profile? As a young woman, she is certain of her faith and headed for a conventional life for a female of those times: early marriage, motherhood, devoted Catholic, talented homemaker. But in fact, Patria goes through the profound changes. Perhaps, only Dedé, whose transformation happens later, after the deaths of her sisters, goes through such radical changes. Patria suffers many births and rebirths to become the politicized, compassionate and courageous woman she becomes by the end of the novel. This passage is just the beginning. Her miscarriage signals not only the loss of the innocent life inside her but also her own loss of innocence: up to this point, she has been turning a blind eye to the violations of the dictatorship; she has not wanted to face how the church is in colluding with the regime; she yearns for security and safety. But her eyes have been opened and she is losing her faith (the pearl of great price, a Biblical phrase); the old certainties are draining out of her. And because Patria is the most physical of the sisters, her political and spiritual epiphanies almost always come through her body. In writing the novel I was particularly interested in the experience of oppression from a female point of view. Women’s/girl’s bodies were definitely under assault in the dictatorship. El Jefe exercised the “droit de seigneur”/ el derecho del jefe: whatever woman he wanted, whether she was a young daughter or wife or fiancée, had to cede to him or the family would be blacklisted. This impending danger of what amounted to rape was very much a part of the trauma of females in the regime. My mother, an attractive young woman at the time, recounts how Trujillo’s son, Ramfis, spotted her at a party and began making inquiries. After that, she was not allowed to go out to public gatherings. When I was researching the regime for the novel, I remember reading that el Jefe “had” (raped) hundreds of women during his reign, preferring, as he got older, younger and younger girls. But there is no record of him ever hitting on skinny women. I felt such relief thinking that as a lightweight had I been living back then, I would have been “safe.” But what pyrrhic safety if all around me, my sisters and friends were falling prey to violation.

Anyhow, I’ve got to memorize this diagram before we burn the master.

Not so much a passage but a diagram, on this page, of a homemade bomb which María Teresa records in the diary entry for Thursday evening, October 15 [1957]. In order to diagram this bomb I had to do bit of research on homemade explosives–thank goodness there was no Google back then, early 1990s, so I did not leave any electronic tracks the FBI could follow to my door. I also got some help from my husband, Bill, and some of my students who were science majors. I combed diaries and records from underground movements in Latin America and Resistance movements in France during the Nazi occupation. I obviously did a credible job (keep reading this entry!), but please don’t try to build it. I don’t worry too much about you blowing up your house so much as creating a huge mess in your garage. A few years after the novel’s publication in English and in Spanish translation, an ESL teacher in a prison in upstate New York contacted my husband who would sometimes visit the prison to do medical exams. The prison was packed with young Dominicans. Bill would come home and tell me stories. Over time, he gained the trust and affection of these inmates by mentioning that he was married to a Dominicana. At some point he mentioned that I had written the novel, In the Time of the Butterflies. The teacher caught wind of this and asked my publisher if they would donate copies of the novel in English and Spanish. As a culmination of that class segment, the teacher asked if I would visit the prison and give a reading. ¡Por supuesto! I was eager to visit and give ánimo to these young, incarcerated Dominicans. I have never been as thoroughly searched as at the entrance of that huge frightening prison complex. Not even by TSA at airports. Afterwards, I was escorted into a large classroom lined with seats, and a few minutes later, the mostly Dominican prisoners were brought in—many so young, my maternal heart went heavy at the sight of them. Quite a few had drawn small Dominican flags, taped to pencils, which they waved at me as they sat down. After my presentation, during the Q & A, one of the prisoners raised his hand and asked why page 143-144 was missing from the novel. I thought maybe it was one defective copy, but all of them said it was also missing from their copies. My first thought was that my publisher had gotten rid of a bad batch of the novel! Later, the teacher took me aside and explained that the security at the prison had gone through the novel and removed that page as it might encourage prisoners to build explosives in their cells! I thought it was just prison, but in October 2020, the Port Washington (NY) Board of Education met to discuss the issue of teaching In the Time of the Butterflies to tenth graders in the district. The board ruled that the novel should not be on the curriculum. “This is not an issue of censorship, but one of safety,” they ruled. “In today’s climate we have problems with a book that gives out instructions on how to build a bomb.” [Check out The New York Times, Sunday, October 1, 2000, issue, “School Board Questions Fitness of Book Because of Bomb Diagram.” Maybe it’s running through your heads as well: Wait: we allow sales of automatic weapons to individuals who mow down students in schools and shoppers at Walmart, but we can’t let tenth graders see a diagram in a novel that takes place in a bloody dictatorship?

That room was silent with the fury of avenging angels sharpening their radiance before they strike.

Interestingly, in the earlier selected passage (page 52), Patria loses her child just as she is losing her faith in so many things. Here, she is almost about to give birth to Raúl; she is big and bold with a maternal ferocity willing to take on anything that endangers those who are vulnerable creatures and victimized by the dictatorship. A radical Catholic movement was evolving throughout Latin America, as more and more of the clergy became politicized and joined in defense of the poor and oppressed—a “movement,” later known as “liberation theology.” Heretofore, the hierarchy of the church had been in collusion with the regime. In fact, in 1954, Trujillo had entered into a “concordat” with Rome, whereby the regime granted the church certain privileges in exchange for its recognition and blessing. Many felt a growing disenchantment and disillusionment with the Catholic church. Many stopped going to church altogether. But in part due to the movement initiated by meetings such as the one Patria attends, the church changed course. A pastoral letter was read from all the pulpits on Sunday, January 31, 1960, decrying the many arrests, the spilling of blood by the regime, the suffering of so many families who had lost loved ones. The word spread about this episcopal letter, being read at mass. By late morning, every church was packed. The historians say that two things finally brought down the hitherto impregnable regime: the murder of the Mirabal sisters and the opposition (finally) of the Catholic church. Now in 2021 in the midst of protests by the Black Lives Matter movement sweeping the United States we all hearken back to Martin Luther King’s words that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I envision these avenging angels sharpening their weapons of mass creation until they are bright with the radiance of truth and beauty, justice and love. Change happens, sometimes not during our watch, but if we don’t show up, we delay its arrival even further. It happened in the Dominican Republic; it has happened around the world. In Spanish when a woman gives birth, she is said to “dar a luz,” give a child to the light. Like Patria in this passage, we can bring a more beloved community to the light, but it requires hard labor and love, which manifests in small/infant-sized ways, hands to hold and wipe our brows and give us ánimo when our faith fails us and our spirits flag.

Once the goat was a bad memory in our past, that would be the real revolution we would have to fight: forgiving each other for what we had all let come to pass.

The goat was the underground code name for el Jefe. Goats, a popular meat, are often slaughtered and hung on roadside stands—a visual symbol of what would be the fate of the dictator. (Another of his underground nicknames was, Chapita, a slang term for bottle cap. The story is that when he was a boy, Trujillo already showed signs of megalomania and self-aggrandizement. He had his mother puncture two holes on shiny bottle caps and sew these “chapitas” on his shirt to look like medals.) Patria wonders what will happen after the goat is gone? Ours is a “small-town” country, families so interconnected. During the dictatorship, there were those who colluded with the regime, while others in their own extended or even nuclear families were dissidents. Sometimes, even someone not aligned with the regime caved in to avoid torture or a worst fate to himself or to a beloved person. I’ve heard the same thing said about the Civil War in the United States: families, communities were divided. After the dictatorship is toppled, the war is over, the past still has to be addressed. Stories told, grievances aired, reparations made—if not, that trauma remains there, buried and festering. “What happens to a dream deferred?” Langston Hughes asks in his poem, “Harlem.” The last line, “Or does it explode?” is precisely what we’ve seen with the current marches and protests of the Black Lives Matter movement. The Dominican Republic and the United States, and so many countries around the world, are having to face not just “dreams” but haunting nightmares that have long been dismissed and denied, ways of deferring accountability. But along with testimonials, injustices faced and repaired, communities and countries and families will need to forgive each other in order to reach the farther shore. No shortcuts, though. The talk has to be walked, the work has to be done.

A Postscript

When readers tell me that reading In the Time of the Butterflies changed or inspired them in some way, I feel a sense of deep gratitude and also affirmation/confirmation that all those years of struggling to become a writer were worth it. So many discouragements made me lose faith along the way. In those early years, ethnic writers, writers of color, women writers were often dismissed, ignored, turned back from those canonical borders set up by the guardians of Literature, sent to the kitchen of minor writers, as Langston Hughes once wrote in his poem, “I, too.” It was a long, tough road, “abriendo caminos,” that still need to be widened and opened for the next and the next generation of wonderful storytellers from communities historically kept off the shelves of American literature. But I would be misrepresenting my motivation if I tried to make myself out as the lofty, liberating writer who set out to write the Mirabal story. Reader, I needed to write this story down for myself, my sisters, my familia, especially Papi. I was haunted by it. And so I researched it, I wrote it, and rewrote it, with all my heart and passion in it. So possessed was I that when I was done, I had to do a kind of exorcism so I could move on. I gathered all my little talisman objects, my special pens, and such, and on my next trip to the DR, I buried them in the yard of the house where the girls had spent the last days of their life, which now serves as the Museo Hermanas Mirabal. But the Mariposas had taken wing. The novel was translated into over a dozen languages. A film was made. A theatre piece by a women’s dance troupe in San Diego (EVEOKE) which then toured the Dominican Republic, and gave performances in different cities, which Dedé, Minou and other family members attended. Dedé reported that readers would show up at the Museo with a copy of my novel in their hands, wanting to meet her. Every day, it was her habit to go to the Museo and sit in a mecedora on the porch to meet with these surprise visitors as well as with schoolchildren who would be taken there on field trips. Often, she’d shake her head at me, laughing, and say, Ay Julia, you sure have complicated my life. But according to Minou and others, the opportunity to be an oral storyteller—and she was a grand one-- gave her ánimo and life. I kept urging her to write these stories down, and with Minou’s help, she did just that. Her memoir, Vivas en su jardín, was published in 2009. Dedé died on February 1, 2014. I still miss her and stay in touch with the family, especially with Minou and Jacquelín. Dedé lived to see the story of her sisters ignite an international movement, just as their activism had sparked a national resistance movement that brought down the dictatorship. In 1999, the United Nations declared November 25th, the day of their murder, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, in their honor. Back in 1960, who knew this would happen? Three victims in a dictatorship in which thousands upon thousands died, in a world in which millions were dying in many dictatorships and military regimes. But it’s as if this story was working itself through the bloodstream of the imagination. A little change here, a little change there, under the radar, but it builds, reaches a critical point, and then, a sea change happens. The power of stories to transform the world one imagination at a time! Thank you for being a part of this grand transformative movement by being a reader, spreading the stories, joining the Goodreads community whose motto and mission is “The right book in the right hands at the right time can change the world.” I’ll vote for that! Julia Alvarez, March 15-21, 2021