In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

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.