Dr. Marika Preziuso
Literary Authorship and the Diasporic imagination: Julia Alvarez’s In
the Time of the Butterflies and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life
of Oscar Wao
In The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature Edited by
Michael A. Bucknor, Alison Donnell. Published June 10th 2011 by Routledge – 658
pages
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This article explores two recent examples of novels by Dominican-American writers, in
which literary authorship operates as a trope to rethink the political and rhetorical
authority that lies behind the project of the Caribbean nation. By deconstructing the
nation as constituted by the body of the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983), Junot
Diaz and Julia Alvarez invite a reflection on the complexities inherent in the postcolonial
Caribbean. Hence, their writing is in line with an approach to the Caribbean that is
essentially ‘diasporic’. By ‘diasporic’ I refer here less to the space and identity that stand
outside and even in opposition to the Caribbean nation, both as a project and as a reality,
and more to the many ‘diasporas’ that have sedimented throughout the history of the
region. These diasporas are inherent in Caribbean identity and they mark the physical
displacements, as well as the emotional ruptures and historical dispossessions that make
up the contemporary postcolonial Caribbean. There long presence suggests the need for
a definition of the Caribbean nation through trans-national and super-national
perspectives.
Both Diaz and Alvarez claim a form of literary authorship that is necessarily multiple as it
voices the many narratives that have been either disavowed or marginalised by the
project of the Dominican nation as created by the dictatorship of Rafael Leonida Trujillo
(1930-61). By using authorship as a trope, these authors also imagine the ‘nation’ as a
fictional narrative: a ‘text’ that is both written upon by legal, political and cultural
authority, while at the same time writing upon individual and collective identities by virtue
of selective memory and historical erasure. Foregrounding the fictional aspect of the
Caribbean nation means that it can be re-imagined in ‘diasporic’ terms and be recognised
both for its limits and its possibilities.
Taking as the focal point the Dominican nation under the dictatorship of Rafael
Leonida Trujillo, Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies and Junot Diaz’s The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao navigate the restless waters that connect political authority
– dictatorship - that often uses the rhetoric of ‘the nation’ as a justification for the
exclusive power of one individual, with the authorship in which writers are invested. This
binomy of authorship/authority is especially crucial within a Caribbean context. Suffice to
think of the British Caribbean, where the visibility of West Indian authors has been
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supported by two seemingly opposite historical events: the processes of decolonisation
from the colonial yoke and the production of literature outside the islands, in
metropolitan centres within that same colonial space. In the British West Indies this
phenomenon was especially evident in the 1940s to 1960s, due to cultural dialogues
between London and the emerging Caribbean voices, stretching between the islands and
in the metropole. Many of these same voices, such as those of George Lamming, Edward
Kamau Brathwaite, Samuel Selvon and V.S. Naipaul, forged a sense of contemporary West
Indianness through their very personal journeys to ‘the mother country’ and back. The
migrant experience of these burgeoning writers, translated into literature, wrote the
complexities of metropolitan marginalisation, arguably anticipating the theoretical
insights of postcolonial theory, and a critical re-interpretation of the literary canon.
The literary works of this generation created a ‘West Indianness’ which might be read as
an imaginative parallel to the struggles for nationalism that were being inaugurating
across the region around this time. Their work expanded the Caribbean ‘frontier’ beyond
mere geography and culture, into a burgeoning sense of West-Indianness: ‘No Barbadian,
no Trinidadian, no St. Lucian, no islander from the West Indies sees himself as a West
Indian until he encounters another islander in foreign country…the category West Indian,
formerly understood as a geographic term, now assumes a cultural significance’
(Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 214).
Literature in the ‘diaspora’ also constituted the privileged platform for the development
of a sensibility that would encompass the ‘Caribbean’ as a region sharing the same
historical core events and foundational socio-economical structure. This sensibility
resulted in shared themes and preoccupations in the literature and poetry across the
archipelago, and across several languages, geographical spaces and various ethnicities of
the writers – and of his/her reading publics. Lamming’s admission is instructive here: ‘The
first time I heard of the Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen and the French poet Aimee Cesaire,
was through Eric Williams who was telling me that if you are going to be a writer of and
for the region, you’ve got to make this contact…so that by the time I got to England, this
seed was very firmly planted and then it blossomed there in a way because it was one of
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the ironies of history that here we were separated by imperialism, but it was really at the
metropole at London that we came together, so I first got to know Jamaica and Guyana
and other territories at London and then that was really an extension of that learning to
be a Caribbean person’. (Schwartz ed. P.188)
Inevitably, a specific call for the ‘nation’ developed simultaneously with these dialogues
around West Indianness/Caribbeanness. Writers, whose official language, cultural
references and education were a product of the British imperial ‘order’, voiced the
potential inherent in their own experience of ‘exile’. The freedom it gave to them was not
only related to the metropolitan visibility they received as authors, but also the awareness
of the distance that existed between the island and the ‘mother country’, often on the
ground of the inherent experience of ‘exile’, dislocation, an anxiety of origins that had
been constantly deferred, but now giving birth to the specifics of Caribbean identity. This
Caribbeanness questioned the values of Britishness against which West Indians had
measured themselves. It could no longer be identified with the cultural imports from the
‘mother country’ and it was out of such cultural awareness that a discourse of national
consciousness could be produced.
The fact that literary works imagined by writers physically located outside the Caribbean
space were at the centre of such questioning confirms the embedded interrelation
between the imaginative aspect of the decolonising project of the Caribbean nation, and
the political implications of literature’s capacity to re-imagine the Caribbean nation.
Indeed, by their later questioning of national authority through the foregrounding of
literary authorship, Diaz and Alvarez echo Paul Ricœur, when he argues in Temps et Récit
that the wall between the reality of history and the invention of fiction is not
impenetrable, that fiction is not simply ‘unreal’ but functions as a revelation and as an
agent of transformation. Ricoeur claims that ‘the shock of the possible’ has no less impact
than the ‘shock of the real’ (Paul Ricoeur, 1983).
Moreover, writing as myth-making has always played a relevant role in the political
discourse of the Caribbean. As Jan Carew explains: ‘The Americas of the colonizer came
into being as part of both a literary exercise and one of the most appalling acts of
ethnocide in recorded history’. (1978 453). Colonial discourse and colonial rule, legal
rhetoric and physical geography were necessarily routed through writing, and the latter
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was drenched in myths and fantasies that the Caribbean suggested to those who were
authored these official texts.
Julia Alvarez’s novel In the Time of the Butterflies and Junot Diaz’s Oscar Wao provide
useful textual platforms for a discussion of the ways in which contemporary Caribbean
authors have moved away from the national category, and of how this category has often
reproduced the colonial discourse around an aggressive discourse of the seamless ‘hybrid’
Caribbean. This unitary national discourse claimed the happy coexistence of different
identities, while actually sanctioning forms of racial, ethnic, class and gender exclusion.
The disavowal or marginalisation of uncomfortable realities which threatened to hinder
the vision of the nation was the strategy that was adopted by Trujillo in the Dominican
Republic. Trujillo shaped his ‘Era’ – the ‘Trujillato’ - by modelling the spirit and identity of
the Dominican Republic around his fantasies of dominion, his machismo, his personal
vanity and his obsessions with distancing the neighbouring Haiti. This atmosphere of
terror, which haunted Dominicans for long after the Trujillato officially ended, has
contributed to the very idea of the Dominican nation as a problem. Trujillo’s Dominican
Republic is an example of a contemporary postcolonial nation which was founded on
several colonial ‘tropes’. His vision of the Dominican nation lingered in the past, which
inevitably paralysed any change in socio-cultural structure and any forging of a real
‘postcolonial’ Dominicanness, rather than projecting a future independent from the
colonial trauma. The romanced discourse of the nation as an imagined community of like
souls reproduced the fantasies of the ‘tropics’, and the ‘paradise found’, and other
hallucinations of colonial memory, while at the same time ‘selling’ to Dominicans their
cultural identity as the happy coexistence of Hispanic and Indian heritage. Trujillo
sanctioned the term Indio – referring to the Tainos, the native Indians of the region – to
delineate its people’s mixed-race identity. His plan was above all to offer Dominicans a lineage
that was effective in detaching them from the physical and symbolic ‘blackness’ of their
neighbouring nation, Haiti.
Alvarez and Diaz examine the interstices of Trujillo’s national discourse, the places where
it has been unable to assimilate differences and erase the identities it excluded. Both
novels present such interstices by creating meta-narratives that defy the assumptions on
literary authorship. These narratives, like many realities excluded from the national
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discourse, lie at the same time inside and outside the main narrative of their novels.
Alvarez and Diaz’s reflection on authorship speaks of the complicity between what Irit
Rogoff calls ‘the three models’ of ‘authority’ that have been imposed on the Caribbean:
‘geography; the nation-state and local identity; and the legacies of colonialism that
established a binary opposition with colonial powers’. (Rogoff, 2000, p.5). Both thereby
imagine alternatives to Trujillo’s national ‘fictions’ - of morality, of sexual purity, of
‘monolingualism’.
The authors re-inscribe the Caribbean nation as a crossroads of complex discourses and
imaginaries that can best be captured by a ‘diasporic’ imagination, which is in turn not a
metaphor for, or even an escape from, the historical reality of the nation but an
epistemological tool to interpret it in terms of multiple, syncretic tensions between centre
and margins, and between its ‘fictions’ and their lived resistance by Dominicans. In Diaz
and Alvarez’s case the novels’ paratext challenges the discourse of the nation by showing
the risks in the author’s indiscriminatory use of literary ‘freedom’.
Escaping Trujillo’s persecution, following a failed assassination attempt in which her father
had participated, Julia Alvarez and her family settled in 1960 in Queens, New York. In the
Time of the Butterflies translates into fiction an important page of Dominican history that
bears huge relevance to the shaping of the contemporary Dominican national imaginary:
the lives of the three Dominican heroines who fought against Trujillo – the Mirabal sisters,
also known with their revolutionary code-names las Mariposas (the Butterflies). In this
work Alvarez tries to resolve the dangerous similarities she finds in the dictator’s authority
and the writer’s authorship by retrieving the Mirabal sisters from their representation in
the religious, national, mostly male dominant Dominican discourse. Alvarez’s text can be
read simultaneously as a historical ‘romance’ and a fictional testimonio, with strong
autobiographical implications, all complicated by the frame of a fictional interview: the
author’s persona (a gringa journalist) meets Dédé, the only surviving sister, and this
encounter triggers memories. To Alvarez, the Mirabal sisters were turned after their death
from revolutionary heroines into icons of that peculiarly Caribbean machista vision of
womanhood which carries the legacy of colonialism. Similarly, in the novel, Trujillo’s first
attempt to annihilate the Mirabals is enacted at the level of a machista, colonial and
national rhetoric. He presents himself as a new Columbus, comparing her to a national
treasure: ‘Perhaps I could conquer this jewel as El Conquistador conquered this island’
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(99), confirming the link between resuscitated colonial practices and new Caribbean
‘masters’ in their idealisation of womanhood.
However, it is precisely what exceeds these myths that makes the Mirabals interesting to
Alvarez. Thus, the postscript, and several essays in her collection Something to Declare,
work to support Alvarez’s intent to demythologise the Mirabals, by making them more
‘real in spirit’ than both the national heroines who still serve the national imagining, and
the ‘sisters of fact’, whom she had never known: ‘They became real to my imagination. I
began to invent them’ (323 emphasis added). Despite the work of imagination that
goes into the retrieval of the Mirabals, however, I argue that the ambivalence of
Alvarez’s authorship is also apparent in the postscript of the novel. Alvarez has
argued that the existence of what she calls ‘fiction’ is the legacy of the dictator’s
populist rhetoric, his recurrence to machista romance and gossips. ‘In my
familia’ argues Alvarez in Something to Declare, ‘fiction is a form of fact […] This
fictive cast of mind extends, of course, beyond families and small communities
to politics and government and the wider culture. We had undergone 31 years
of a dictatorship in which the wildest myths had to be accepted as facts on pain
of death’. (Alvarez, 1999 124)
As we gather from Dede’s framing narrative and the postscript, the contemporary
Dominican society is still structured around the fictitious hierarchies, the machista codes
of honour, and the effusive rhetoric directed towards those political and religious
authorities that were the most defining aspects of the Trujillato. Such predisposition for
making myths also illuminates the nation’s complicity with the neo-colonial interests in
the whole Caribbean region. This Dominican fictional time-space has allowed the neocolonialist leverage of the USA, which has turned the island into, in Dédé’s words, ‘the
playground of the Caribbean’ (318). The term ‘playground’ reflects once again the
ambivalence of the postcolonial and post-Trujillo reality of the Dominican nation. It leaves
us in doubt as to whether a real change has taken place in the country, or simply a
passage from one ‘master’ – evidently repressive - to another – more subtle in its use of
tourist discourse and exoticism, but equally ‘colonial’ in its exploitative nature.
It is as a counter-narrative of the dictator’s ‘fiction’ that Alvarez’s novel works. Literature
is the appropriate means to understand the fictional nature of Trujillo’s Dominican nation
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and make sense of its legacy: ‘Though I had researched the facts of the regime […] I
sometimes took some liberties […] for I wanted to immerse my readers in an epoch in the
life of the Dominican Republic that I believe can only finally be understood by fiction, only
finally be redeemed by the imagination’. (Alvarez, ‘A Postscript’)
Diaz and Alvarez’s argument for the fictionality of Trujillo and, as a consequence, of the
Dominican nation, however, echoes with several Caribbean critics’ discussion about the
need to consider the categories of historical multidimensionality and simultaneity. The
category of the ‘imagined’ may usefully encompass that which has been silenced,
marginalised, but yet remains as ruins, fragments and traces, in today’s postcolonial
Caribbean. Edouard Glissant, among others, has argued: ‘the implosion of Caribbean
history of the converging histories of our peoples relieves us of the linear, hierarchical
vision of a single history that would run its unique course. [Caribbean history] is (…)
actually a question of the subterranean convergence of our histories’. (Schwartz ed. 191)
However, denouncing the ‘fictional’ nature of the regime is not the only reason why both
authors go back to this specific historical time.
Conventional history that refutes
imagination is unable to grasp the relationship between the ways in which the regime
infiltrates their private lives, and Dominicans’ ‘opaque’ forms of resistance. As Alvarez
argues, if ‘dictatorships are pantheistic. The dictator manages to plant a little piece of
himself in every one of us’ (1994 311). What she calls the ‘haunting’ of the Mirabals is the
response to such fatalistic view of the ‘Master’, is expressed both in Déde’s narrative and
in the postscript. It also finds articulation in some of the essays in Something to Declare:
‘And so it was that my family’s emigration to the United States at the very time their lives
ended. These three brave sisters and their husbands stood in stark contrast to self-saving
actions of my own family and of other Dominican exiles. Because of this, the Mirabal
sisters haunted me. Indeed they haunted the whole country’ (1999 198).
This haunting is, on the one hand, a reminder of the many forms of colonialism and the
modes by which the latter crosses the borders of private/public, native/foreigner and
complicity/resistance. On the other hand, from the nation that had in many ways
‘produced’ its own master, Alvarez introduces the reader to a ‘diasporic’ nation, whose
neo-colonial status is challenged by its survivors, both those who stayed in the island like
Dédé, and those who left, like Alvarez herself. Their narratives ‘haunt’ the neo-colonial
superpower of the USA, that is eager to reproduce the same discourse of fictionality
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through forms of cultural exoticism that play with the DR as a ‘tropical paradise’ .
Alvarez’s ‘ghostly’ Dominican identity ultimately constitutes the ‘missing link’ between the
imagined community of Trujillo and the neo-colonial reality, reflected through various
markeatable versions of Dominicanness. This is the space in which Alvarez locates her own
Mirabals, a Dominican nation that rocks endlessly between resistance and complicity, the
Caribbean and the USA, the search for an authoritative ‘master’, a foreign model against
which to be reflected and legitimised, and the displaced voices of its national and
transnational diasporic subjects.
Eleven years after his first acclaimed collection of short-stories Drown in 1996, Junot Diaz,
also a Dominican-born writer, published his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao, which follows the loves and losses of a Dominican-American family – and though
them of the Dominican ‘nation’, on the island and in New Jersey. What ‘her own’ Mirabals
are to Alvarez – her way to negotiate with the diasporic Dominican nation - the fukú is to
Diaz. He defines fukú as a kind of ancestral curse that pervaded the entire Caribbean from
the time of its ‘discovery’ by the Europeans, and was rekindled with extreme violence by
Trujillo. Through the razor sharp, caustic language that characterises his fiction, Diaz
places Trujillo’s power beyond verisimilitude, beyond imagining, beyond even the sci-fi
genre that constitutes the privileged narrative of the Trujillato in the novel: ‘He was our
Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so
outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass
up’. (2) Yet, the powers that Diaz attributes to Trujillo lose their omnipotence when they
are played against the counter-narrative that is made explicit by the narrator –Yunior – in
the preface to the novel. This preface offers a broader palimpsest made of the effects of
fukú – Yunior blames fukú for the role that USA has played in the Dominican history and
indeed in the history of the whole Caribbean region. Fukú traverses the different colonial
and neo-colonial practices that have characterised the Americas – from the assassination
of JF Kennedy, the war in Vietnam to the US invasion of the DR, which led first to the
omnipotence of Trujillo and consequently to the Dominican migration, much of it
precisely towards the USA: ‘My paternal abuelo believes that diaspora was Trujillo’s
payback to the pueblo that betrayed him. Fuku’ (5).
These events seemingly have at their epicentre the terrain of the Dominican Republic, the
‘ground zero of the New World’. While Diaz maps a legacy of violence, however, the way
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he presents it – through the narrator’s irreverent tone, interrupted by frequent footnotes
– plays with the readers’ intelligibility of such a history, and tests their (in)ability to draw
links between these events and their consequences. Fukú might cause some raising of
eyebrows in those readers not familiar with what could be seen as unabashed Caribbean
superstition. However, what fukú exposes as real and consequential are the geo-economic
and historical links between several events across places that would not necessarily be
associated with each other. This charting of a critical pan-American cartography leads to
my reading of the novel through the category of ‘scaling’ that is conventionally used in
geography: fukú ‘scales’ from the global and the national back down to the local and the
individual, in a move that makes explicit the ways in which places, with their imaginaries
and identities, impact on each other beyond national borders.
Diaz’s narrator blames all human disasters through this unlikely fukú, thus seemingly
supporting the existence of an authoritative narrative out there that explains how things
are, including how Dominicanness ‘functions.’ As Silvio Torres-Saillant argues, ‘la
dominicanidad es una mera profesión’ (Dominicanness is a mere profession), in its
construction oh a homogenous nation. However, Diaz’s use of fukú is not so much an
ominous colonial narrative that simplifies the complexity of history, nor the proof of
Dominican fatalistic attitude towards this history. Fukú matters to the story precisely
because within its all-encompassing power it confronts us with the disavowed reality of
complex pan-American relations. Fukú is a curse whose power operates beyond the
borders of personal belief, history and nation-state, thus providing its ‘victim’ with –
ironically – the diasporic perspective that is able to discern the local consequences of
global events, and the transnational reach of national imaginaries.
It is because Fukú reveals connections that are not easily perceived as ‘real’ that it
represents a valid counterpoint that uses the spectacular ‘unreality’ of the dictator against
itself. This is once again confirmed by the preface of the novel, where the narrator Yunior
calls the book ‘my very own counterspell’. (p.7) The pan-American cartography mapped by
the ‘fuku’ is the ‘other’ narrative that supplements the narrative of Oscar’s brief and
wondrous life. It engages with the erasures of ‘History’, by giving credit and voice to a
narrative that would and could not make it in that official History. As Diaz says in a recent
interview: ‘If you're going to write an American story, which I've always felt this book was,
an American story is about trying to figure out a way to communicate story and
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simultaneously communicate the enormous absence in which that story in some ways
drifts’. (Diaz, 27 May 2008)
Diaz and Alvarez, caught within the desire for both counter-narratives to that of Trujillo’s
Dominican nation, and the need to explore the ‘haunting’ of ambivalence, marginality and
‘unintelligibility’ within the authorial voice, navigate the space of the nation through their
use of textuality. Attention to the textual aspect of these two novels, makes sense of the
ways their imagining of the Caribbean national space moves across the time-space
paradigm of colonial/postcolonial/neo-colonial. They also engage with the interstices
between the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’ Caribbean, through narratives that test
interdisciplinary borders – literature/geography /history - and that reflect on the various
‘values’ of literature – as testimony, propaganda, cultural product and token of the exotic
Caribbean. Through the dialogue between text and paratext, Diaz and Alvarez draw a
complex and un-finished map of the contemporary Caribbean postcolonial.
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
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