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A special feature brought to you by
Salon Magazine

Something to declare

Julia Alvarez: Plenty of talent, no pretension

Interview by Dwight Garner
www.salonmagazine.com

Web posted on: Monday, October 05, 1998 4:10:01 PMEDT

(SALON) -- Julia Alvarez was 10 years old when her family was forced to flee the Dominican Republic for the United States. Her father, who had been involved in a coup attempt against dictator Rafael Trujillo, was in grave danger -- within a few months, many of his co-conspirators would be killed. The twin themes of persecution and exile percolate through much of Alvarez's artfully constructed fiction, including the critically acclaimed novels "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents" (1991), "In the Time of Butterflies" (1994) and "Yo!" (1997).

This month Alvarez publishes her first nonfiction book, a collection of essays titled "Something to Declare" (Algonquin). Part memoir and part how-to text for aspiring writers, it's a lucid, light-as-a-butterfly book that pencils in the real stories behind Alvarez's fictions. Alvarez writes here about her large, boisterous and politically active family; her difficult move to the United States and her attempts to learn a new language; her years of bouncing from teaching job to teaching job, wondering if her fiction would ever see the light of day. She also delves into deeper, more personal subjects, like her decision not to have children.

The great thing about Alvarez's fiction has always been this: Even when she's probing difficult themes, she doesn't have a pretentious bone in her body. Her work is rich, funny, full of feeling. Talking to Alvarez, who is now 48 and lives with her husband on their farm in Middlebury, Vt., you feel a similar vibe -- here's a serious woman who refuses to take herself, or anything else, too seriously.

Your new essay collection is largely about cultural differences, so I have to ask: What was the deal with those drinks called engrudos that your parents forced on you and your sisters as a child?

An engrudo is what you get when you take all the food that somebody has left on their plate -- and that somebody was usually me -- and you mix it in with milk and maybe some chocolate powder to disguise the fact that it's all this stuff. Then you put it in a big tall glass and the person has to drink it before they can do anything else.

Yuck!

I knew the word engrudo from my family, but when I looked it up I realized that it means gruel. Gruel, engrudo. Remember in all those horrible fairy tales, where stepmothers make little kids eat their gruel?

Was this punishment -- or just a trick to get you to eat your spinach?

There was nothing appetizing about it. It was what we were threatened with if we didn't eat our vegetables, if we didn't eat our food. It was nothing like, "Here's a little chocolate drink for you!" It was big and it was mighty evil looking.

A more important cultural difference between the United States and the Dominican Republic, where you were born, is the way that each culture views its writers -- particularly its women writers. You've said that after your first novel, "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents," was published, your mother didn't talk to you for several months. Why was that?

I think it was for a variety of reasons. A lot had to do with the fact that I come from a culture in which women were not encouraged to speak up. Maxine Hong Kingston was very helpful to me. She begins "The Woman Warrior" by saying: "My mother told me never, ever to repeat this story." That was such an eye-opener, because that's the way with many of my stories. No "once upon a time" or any of those catch phrases. I come from a culture where women are not encouraged to speak. [Instead, they are encouraged] to keep their mouths shut, to keep things in the family, to be the guardian of the stories and to be very careful who they're released to. It's a way of understanding that stories are powerful. You know, in the world we lived in, people "got disappeared" for saying the wrong thing. What people said mattered. I was raised in that world, and suddenly here I am -- a woman with a voice in another language, one that we're supposed to keep things from, you know, the gringos and the Americans. And I have a voice and I'm saying things about women and women's experience which are not nice. That women have mouths and needs and bodies and problems and breakdowns and all of the stuff that is not nice to admit and certainly not to the [Americans].

Was your mother shocked that you were telling family secrets, or just that you were writing about such intimate things?

I think it's a combination of both. They would say to me when I was little, "Don't think you're a woman, talking like that. What do you know about woman stuff?" It was the way a mother always feels about a child, you know. "How can you talk about those things? People will think things actually happened to you if you write them down." So for my mother, part was just shock that a woman should speak up, and part was "What will people think of us?" And all of what that means when you're an immigrant and you're so prickly about how other people are perceiving you.

Writers clearly need to draw from their own experience. But can they go too far in terms of exposing the people around them?

You can't censor yourself when you're writing or the play -- the real freedom to say and to bear witness -- would shrivel up. But once it's written, once you've got it down on paper, once you haven't curbed it as it's coming out, you revise and you also make decisions about what you will publish. You know, there are certain essays I've written that aren't in the book because I didn't think they were helpful to put out there. You have to be careful to take care of the people in your life at the same time that you have to be careful not to compromise that sense of seeing things clearly and setting them down. I really agree with Conrad, who said it was important to "render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe." You know, to see things clearly and to try as clearly as possible to set that down. But we're also human beings in connection with each other; we know the tender hearts of the people we love. So it's always a balance. What did Faulkner say? You know, kill your grandmothers, it doesn't matter, a good passage of prose is worth anybody's grandmother. Well, I don't think so.

As a novelist writing a collection of personal essays, did you ever worry about frittering away material that you might want to draw on for your fiction?

That's an interesting question. For me, writing is about draining the cup and hoping it'll fill up again. And you can't safeguard that in any way. My experience is that each thing you write, you learn so much that it fills you up for the next thing. And each thing you experience does that, and fills you up for the next thing. Not that I don't go through writer's block, because I do. But I think that's more about needing gestation time and needing to understand and take in, more than it's because I've used up something that I shouldn't have used up.

You mentioned earlier that becoming a writer went against your family's -- or the Dominican Republic's -- conception of what a woman should be. Has your family come to terms with what you are?

I think so. I think one of the things I've learned about being alive -- not just being a writer -- is that it's a process. Just as you're learning things from what you write, the people who are your readers forget they're even your families, finally decide whether or not they have faith in your vision and in your skill and they'll go along with you. With family, too, it's a process for them of trying to understand what it is to have a storyteller in the family -- a storyteller who's gone public with the storytelling. I think that they've learned that judgments are not going to be made about them. "Yo" was about some of this. Part of what happens is that a storyteller tells the story and then people around her story seem somehow circumvented by that story that's gotten the attention. "In the Time of the Butterflies" was really wonderfully received, especially in the Dominican Republic, and the family feared what might be thought about them, and about this kooky woman in their family. But here she was having written something that was getting this kind of national praise, and then they thought, "Well, maybe she's OK." And remember that the country, too, is changing from the country of my childhood or my adolescence.

Continued: Here she comes, Miss America

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