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.