or, on Earth, Trujillo, in Heaven, the Mirabals
[The following are a copy of remarks I gave at the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh for the event “Gender And Resistance in The Time of the Butterflies” on Tuesday, March 19, 2019. The event featured small presentations and then a panel discussion with Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder and Ricardo Vila-Roger.]
“And ironically, by making them myth, we lost the Mirabals once more, dismissing the challenge of their courage as impossible for us, ordinary men and women.” —In the Time of Butterflies
Chapter two of Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of Butterflies begins with Minerva declaring “I don’t know who talked Papá into sending us away to school.” She then considers how she and her sisters had to ask permission for everything. And quickly, she turns to the rabbits she kept. One time, opening a cage to free a rabbit, Minerva ends up slapping the creature in desperation, until the animal “started whimpering like a scared child. [Minerva] was the one hurting [the rabbit], insisting she be free.”
The metaphor is obvious. Minerva is not the rabbit—every occasion that she gets, she opts for freedom. Freedom from life on the farm, freedom from the confines and rules of school, freedom from the patriarchy, and, eventually, freedom from Trujillo. The rabbit, one can argue, is everyone else—her family and the people of her country, who do not yet realize their cage.
But it’s clear that Minerva, to this point, is not conscious of living under dictatorship. Much like the bunny, Minerva had no idea she wasn’t free.
How does that happen? Well, dictators are complicated people. Even as Trujillo quietly disappeared his political opposition, he also invested in infrastructure, helped the country escape tariffs and customs oversight, and played on the fears stoked by the US occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1916-1924. A strongman willing to invest in the military and financial independence looks good after a yankee invasion.
The problem, of course, is that a dictator quickly becomes addicted to the power he wields. Even when there is no opposition, an electoral mandate of 99% of the population reelecting a candidate is suspicious. But a dictator courting international support needs the optics as much as the strong arm. And in eliminating any other political party or dissenter, Trujillo began to amass stories and corpses. He tossed the corpses into the Caribbean sea, so even now, scholars debate the number dead (“did 30,000 die in the Parsley massacre or was it only 1,000?”). The science of mass grave sites is uncertain. Another type of cage, I suppose, even after death.
Trujillo tried to stop the telling of stories. By killing more people. But also with awards, plays, theater, parades, statues, and culture. How can one be a dictator when two thousand students and professors pay tribute? How can one be a bad guy when the narrative is dominated by the good, by the impressive, by the deification of our dear Benefactor.
But the stories that amassed of violence and bloodlust, those seemed to grow. And soon, stories began to travel, through whisper networks, friendships, and the testimonials of survival.
Minerva, in the novel, first encounters political resistance through her friend Sinta in school. It is in the story that Sinta tells where Minerva finds the first fissure of political resistance. In her heart, “a china-crack of doubt.” But even this crack comes at a cost, for belief in Trujillo is akin to belief in Mary and Jesus. The intertwining of religion and politics is clear throughout the novel, best shown in this chapter and when Patria creates an actual altar to Trujillo by the entrance of their home, much later in the text. But it’s clear that Trujillo has created his own myth through national narrative, a myth that equates him with the divine, and it is only through stories about his humanity and his very human greed for power that resistance is able thrive.
In hearing these stories, Minerva has a physiological reaction to each part. From that crack in her heart, to the shaking that ensues, to the image of the story as blood, spilling from “a cut,” a cut, by the way, that is attributed to no one, so perhaps belongs to everyone, a cut that foretells of her own menstrual “complications,” that begin the night after she hears that Trujillo is a bad man. In this regard, Alvarez takes the act of political resistance from the imagination into the body, Minerva bleeds as the story bled, as the men in Sinta’s story bled, as her nation bleeds. Minerva Mirabal becomes a woman, unable to return to her innocence, in some ways deflowered by Trujillo’s violence before she ever meets him.
The story of Lina Lovaton, which soon follows, functions as both cautionary tale and myth. Here is Trujillo as God and Lover, Zeus whose capricious moods can create and destroy lives. Lovaton, la pobrecita, is a fool and poorer for her love of the dictator, someone who never noticed her cage, and who ran into it willingly, and ended up alone, pregnant, and in a far off land.
When Minerva tells Mate, her younger sister, that she wants Mate to “grow up in a free country,” Mate immediately feels her chest “getting all tight…one of [her] asthma attacks coming on.” Again, the reaction to truth, which comes from story, is grounded in the body. Minerva, after unraveling the myth of Trujillo for her sister, grabs Mate’s hands, as if they “were getting ready to jump together into a deep spot in the lagoon of Ojo de Agua,” a big plunge indeed. And “slowly and deeply” Mate falls.
Her world is instantly different. People look different. She considers whether or not she loves the President, and would she, she thinks, still love her father even he did something wrong?
Here, Alvarez reenforces the connection between political resistance and the revolutionary body. But in connecting Trujillo with Papa Mirabal, Alvarez has also finalized a sort of patriarchal triptych: Trujillo as father, Trujillo as God, and Trujillo as Lover.
Patria, on the other hand, experiences a different kind of awakening. Hers comes from confronting the truth of the violence firsthand. She is not told the story of Trujillo’s badness, she has no intellectual startling, hers is entirely grounded in the body. After seeing a boy killed in the mountain, and realizing he could be her son, Patria has an epiphany, one that she likens to the feeling of her stillborn child. The dead kid on the mountain becomes her son, her issue, from her. Alvarez again hearkens to God and the Father, and in the darkness of the violence, Patria cannot see God, she is blinded by Trujillo.
In keeping the sister’s narratives in first person, Alvarez creates the illusion that the reader is being told what happened, a testimonial (echoing the tenets of Testimonio in nonfiction writing).
Minerva and Mate’s chapters feel written as if in a diary, with Mate’s explicitly referencing its own written quality, but Patria, the most maternal of the sisters, simply tells her stories. The audience she addresses is unclear, but irrelevant. Alvarez’s characters provide witness to living under dictatorship, testifying to the truth of resistance, in a way that the actual and true Mirabal sisters never could by virtue of their deaths.
Consider the chapter that chronicle Mate’s time in prison. She explains that her sister has asked her write what happened as an act of therapy, one that will allow her to grieve the torture Mate endured at the hands of the SIM. Eventually, though, Mate notes that her sister has asked her to tear out the pages from her journal to give to the Organization of American States Committee investigating human rights abuses. Mate resists. Hiding the pages. Wanting them to disappear. Until she chooses to include them at the end of her diary with information redacted, although the reader can understand who everyone is. There’s the story that’s told, the one that isn’t told, and the one that needs to be told.
This is when a personal story turns into myth, when it is needed for a larger cause, and when the act of witnessing terror is greater than the shame of what has happened to the body.
Dede is the interesting one. She is the one sister that survives, the one that references being interviewed by the writer, the one that Alvarez actually met and used to assemble the text. Yet, Dede exists in the novel in third person. Alvarez creates distance from the character she would have had the most information about and access to.
There’s a clue as to the why in the postscript: Alvarez offers that the “deification [of the sisters] was dangerous, the same god-making impulse that had created our tyrant.” Perhaps because Dede had a lifetime to tell her story, to let her truth be known, there was no need to create an inner life, or to challenge “legend, wrapped in superlatives and ascended into myth.” In removing the sisters from their legends within Dominican culture and history, Alvarez considers the idea that only in fiction can the truth of what happened really be understood.
In the novel, we find women, with bodies, with desires, with doubts. The revolutionary figure, when mythologized, is not human, but political desire made manifest. In complicating the Mirabal sisters, in letting them tell their stories, imagined or real, one can argue that Alvarez rescues them from their own myth.
And as we consider our own terrible times, it’s something to consider. The making of story, the making of myth—how can we separate the two, and when we can’t, how can we find the deeper truths buried within the story? I’m not sure. But Alvarez offers us a solution: fiction, poetry, art.
And perhaps it’s up to us to listen to the stories, with our bodies, with our hearts, with every breath, until we start to see the world differently, perhaps for what it is, and know when to leave when someone finally opens the cage.