Julia Alvarez: A Dominican Chronicler Narrating Traumatic History:

As a writer of a Dominican descent, Julia Alvarez seems to be very

obsessed with her homeland and everything related to it. She has aptly depicted
the terror and horror felt at her homeland during Trujillo's oppressive regime.
Through her fictional accounts of historical events or characters in her
homeland, Alvarez unconsciously helps entrench or document those figures in
the memory of history. It is an attempt to celebrate and commemorate or even
avow her Dominican identity. In most of her novels, Alvarez usually "renders
an emblem of identity which resonates first with a Dominican experience and
then with a larger Caribbean one" (McCallum 96). Through her novels,
Alvarez tries to make the Dominican Republic's history more
prominent. She wants to "enable Dominican history to write
itself out of its repressed position in the U.S. historical
imaginary without becoming exotically or voyeuristically
'othered'" (Socolovsky 9). Alvarez's obsession on the issues of
identity and belonging reveals how much separated and
fragmented she is, and how she wants to be connected to her
people however exiled. It may also be viewed as a search for a
national identity that she has unwillingly lost after immigration.
Thus, through literature readers are informed of past events
and characters. Also, through her literary narratives, Alvarez
attempts to regain a lost memory and identity and resist a
compulsory historical amnesia and a chronic trauma. For

memory is "a personal connection to the past," and if memory

is lost, you also lose your past along with your identity and
humanity (Robbins 69).
Throughout her works, Julia Alvarez has never missed any
opportunity to depict the traumatic history of her homeland
and the horror in which her people used to live during the era
of Trujillo the dictator. One of the main reasons behind
insecurity and terror in the Dominican Republic was the
suppression and injustice of its rulers.
Alvarez seems to be nostalgic to her Dominican self. She wants to renew
the memories of the island and restore her Dominican identity by acquainting
information about the heroines of her country. Like many Dominicans, Alvarez
had experienced a traumatic national history through her parents' involvement in
the underground movement against Trujillo's regime. Her parents have
experienced terror firsthand and through them Alvarez has experienced the same
terror and trauma albeit silenced and hidden. Through fiction, Alvarez narrates the
historical trauma of Dominicans, and how it affected individuals. Thus, by writing
a fictional account of the story of the Mirabal sisters, Alvarez depicts that
traumatic experience that they went through, whether firsthand (the Mirabals) or
second hand (like Alvarez). The need to forget a historical trauma haunts Alvarez
as a Dominican writer. By writing these novels, Alvarez needs to reconcile the
haunting of historical trauma that she lived in the Dominican Republic during
Trujillo era. In order to write or even document it, "she has to rebuild a new Latino

identity based on memories of her past" (De Herron 410). All Dominicans have
lived through a very cruel historical experience which has a bad impact on them.
The first generation who lived in that terror are haunted by it and they convey it to
their children (the second generation). Rebecca Robbins contends that "when a
nation has a traumatic history involving events such as a war, a repressive dictator,
or a holocaust, it affects all of its citizens, albeit in disparate ways, and becomes a
past that haunts the victims" (51).
The problem of identity used to haunt Alvarez since she wrote her first
novel; How the Garca Girls Lost Their Accents. But, in the Butterflies, Alvarez
takes shelter in fiction and narrates the story of the Mirabal sisters in a new
attempt to narrate the trauma of her country and bring back its historical figures.
Gus Puelo suggests that In the Time of the Butterflies tells us more about Alvarez
than about the Mirabal sisters. Puelo thinks that it is "a novelized autobiographical
chronicle in English that deals with recovery, with recapturing a lost past and a
lost self" (13). Alvarez's family fled the Dominican Republic because they were
afraid of the SIM, the secret police of Trujillo. They immigrated to the United
States seeking safety. However, the parents lived there in fear as they were
haunted by their traumatic past. Writing the story of the Butterflies is an attempt
by Alvarez to "understand and decipher her parents' silence as she investigates
how the 'concealed shame, covered-up crimes [and] violent histories' continue to
haunt Dominicans" (Robbins 56). The silenced trauma of Alvarez's parents was
passed down to her because they failed to forget or even reconcile it. However, "in
attempting to silence the trauma by not speaking about it, they only engendered a
different kind of trauma in their children" (57).

In an effort to reconnect herself to her past, her culture and homeland,

Alvarez immersed her alter ego; the gringa Dominicana (the foreigner Dominican)
within the story of the Mirabals. The gringa Dominicana is the interviewer who
met Dede, the surviving sister, to know more about the Mirabal sisters. She is
originally from the Dominican Republic, but she "has lived many years in the
States, for which she is sorry since her Spanish is not so good. The Mirabal sisters
are not known there, for which she is also sorry for it is a crime that they should be
forgotten, these unsung heroines of the underground" (Butterflies 3). She longed to
go back to her homeland and her writing is an attempt to reconcile it. Emily
Robbins believes that Alvarez "transcribes herself into the Mirabal story because
she must unearth her own, the story of the life she lost when her family fled" (69).
Also, through this technique of Self-insertion or Author Surrogate, Alvarez "links
the old with the new" (Stavans 556). She chooses to use the written language to
regain her childhood and to recover a lost history and culture. In this foreign
disguise, Alvarez appears to be ignorant of her own language, culture and heritage.
It helped her give vent to the resentment of being a fragmented human being torn
between two countries. The gringa Dominicana's role in the novel is double. She
represents the alter-ego of Alvarez and simultaneously, reflects the other option of
being ruled by a dictator, because there are two options as Rasmussen clarifies:
"becoming the exiled Dominican-American or staying on the island and becoming
the martyred victims of the dictator's murderous regime" (76-77).
Chun Ink proposes that Alvarez's alter-ego appears to be "an uninformed
westerner" who is a "'typical' American woman,... with mistaken notions of the
Dominican Republic" (9). That ignorance of the Dominican heritage maybe used

to emphasize "how misinformed American conceptions of the Dominican

Republic are" (9). By using an alter-ego, Alvarez has managed to break the
cultural ice between her American readers and her Dominican fellows, therefore,
she introduced the Mirabal sisters through a gringa dominicana who, like some
Americans, does not know Spanish well or a historical Dominican background.
Christina E. Stokes thinks that exiled writers have a significant and
privileged position in depicting their nations' histories because "they do not
directly experience the ongoing effects of Trujillo's dictatorship" (28). Their being
exiled or alienated may help them provide somewhat neutral views of their
homeland and also of the adopted land. However, this cannot allow them to have a
perfect image or reflection of Dominican history as they did not witness the
events. Perhaps they will not be able to fully represent the historical trauma or to
resist the historical amnesia. Their reflections are not considered accurate and
could be regarded as "fragments of history, much like a broken mirror reflects
fragments of a whole" (qtd. in Stokes 28). As an exiled writer and an immigrant
citizen of the Dominican Republic, Julia Alvarez also has depicted the historical
trauma of her country. She attempted to document the era of Trujillo in most of her
works whether willingly or unconsciously relating stories connected in a way or
another with that historical dilemma. She cannot offer her readers a detailed
account of the life of the Mirabal sisters. Alvarez made it clear that not all
Dominicans know the truth as not all of them experience the trauma. She
"explicitly makes this dichotomy between those who grew up away from the terror
and those who lived it in order to acknowledge her separation" (Robbins 59).

Through her works, Alvarez attempts to recover a lost history and culture,
to resurrect her own Dominican identity and self, and to defy the amnesia that had
been their history. She diligently writes to "reconstruct the national memory while
simultaneously connecting herself to the nation" (Robbins 59). The importance of
historical works like, the Butterflies and Salom lies in their ability to connect past
with present. Though those works are telling about historical events and
characters, yet they are not giving the reader pure historical accounts. They were
meant to be literary imaginations of the lives of the Mirabal sisters and Salom
Urea. In the postscript of In the Time of the Butterflies, Alvarez assures that this
is a fictionalized story and that what the readers will find "are not the Mirabal
sisters of fact, or even the Mirabal sisters of legend So what you will find here
are the Mirabals of my creation, made up but, true to the spirit of the real
Mirabals" (324). Alvarez strongly believes that "a novel is not, after all, a
historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart" (324). She
thinks that she writes fiction not to solve the problems depicted in her works but
only to shed light on them. She usually quotes Chekov's words that the task of the
writer is not to solve the problem but to state it correctly.