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In the
novel In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, the story of
General Raphael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship from 1930 to 1961 in the
Dominican Republic is told through a fictionalized story of four famous
sisters. At the age of 10, Alvarez and her family in 1960 were exiled
from the Dominican Republic and fled to New York City. Her father had
participated in an underground plot to overthrow the dictator and the SIM
secret police. Shortly after her family escaped, the famed Mirabal
sisters, leaders of the revolution and better known throughout the
Dominican Republic as “las mariposas”, were reported murdered on a
deserted mountain road. Alvarez, as a young girl, could never get the
story of the mariposas out of her mind. How could these ladies find the
courage to begin an underground plot to overthrow the tyrant and restore
their beautiful country to peace and prosperity?
Lonely and secluded by language and culture
differences in New York, Alvarez sought refuge in literature and began to
write about her mariposas. However, even with several trips back to the
Dominican Republic for research, Alvarez was unable to gather enough
information to adequately retell their biography. She decided instead to
take several liberties to loosely retell the story through fiction, by
changing dates, by reconstructing events, and by breaking down characters
or incidents. She has created a poetically tragic story that immerses the
reader in an epoch in the life of the Dominican Republic where four
beautiful and brave sisters each tell of their individual struggles. Each
describes in detail the atrocities of Trujillo, their loss of property,
their house arrest, their imprisonment as well as their husbands. The
incredible strength and courage of one family is exquisitely told. In her
postscript Alvarez writes that she hopes that this book will deepen North
America’s understanding of the nightmare suffered by the Dominicans and
hopes to inspire women to fight against injustices of all kinds.
On November 2, 1999, Alvarez was invited to
speak to the students at St. Albans Upper School to help give them a
better global perspective. She called herself an “American writer with a
Latin soul”. In her speech that day, she described the importance of
“becoming a butterfly” in hopes of encouraging students to achieve their
goals and realize their dreams while becoming ethnic people. She
presented three steps to becoming a butterfly or developing one’s soul.
The first step, she said, is simply being a caterpillar. The second step
is to always remember where one is going. After spending time as a
caterpillar and not losing sight of one’s dream, the third step in
Alvarez’s philosophy is to spread one’s wings and fly. The purpose of the
metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly is to pass on what one has
learned in the hopes of freeing someone else. These three steps are
imperative to becoming an individual and concluded with these words: “I
wish you big dreams and the wings of a thousand butterflies…. Sing your
song, dance your dance….Pass them on.”
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The Global Forum |
Reviewed by
Jane
Zeiser
SCC Foreign Languages
Associate Professor
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