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Julia Alvarez |
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Raised in a Spanish-speaking household in the Dominican Republic, Julia Alvarez repeatedly failed her English classes at the American school she attended as a young girl which is quite ironic in light of the fact that Alvarez now writes exclusively in English, the language in which she has achieved striking success as both a poet and a novelist. In both her poetry and her fiction, she has drawn heavily on her own experience in pursuing themes of family expectation vs. personal ambition, and the difficulties of living in two cultures and expressing oneself in two languages. Confronted with her success, in 1996 she told an interviewer from Publishers Weekly, "As you talk, I realize I am always that immigrant. This, too, I am experiencing and watching. But I don't put faith in it. In a minute, it can be swept away." Notwithstanding these remarks, it is quite unlikely that Julia Alvarez's contribution to the literature of the United States will be "swept away" in a minute, or at all.
Julia Alvarez, the second of four daughters, was born in New York City on March 27, 1950, but her parents brought her home to their native Dominican Republic when she was less than a month old. Her father, a doctor, was active in the underground movement against the dictator General Rafael Trujillo. Because of these activities, the Alvarez family was forced to flee the Dominican Republic in August 1960, and resettled permanently in New York. At the age of thirteen, Julia Alvarez was sent by her parents to Abbot Academy, a private boarding school for girls. She began writing while still very young; as she told Publishers Weekly, "I came late into the [English] language but I came early into the [writing] profession. In high school, I fell in love with how words can make you feel complete in a way that I hadn't felt complete since leaving the island. Early on, I fell in love with books, which I didn't have at all growing up. In the Dominican Republic, I was a nonreader in what was basically an oral culture and I hated books, school, anything that had to do with work."
Alvarez entered Connecticut College in 1967; while a student there, she won the school's poetry prize. In 1969, she transferred to Middlebury College in Vermont, where she attained a bachelor of arts degree, summa cum laude, in 1971. She earned an M.F.A. (master of fine arts) degree at Syracuse University in 1975, and also attended the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury in 1979-1980. In addition to her writing, she has been professionally involved in education for nearly a quarter of a century. She taught creative writing to schoolchildren in Kentucky, to bilingual students in Delaware, and to senior citizens in North Carolina, from 1975 to 1978. She was an instructor in English at Phillips Andover Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1979 to 1981. She has taught at the University of Vermont, at George Washington University, and at the University of Illinois. Since 1988, she has taught at Middlebury College, her alma mater, where she is Professor of English and Creative Writing. She has won numerous grants and awards, and her work has appeared in several anthologies. On June 3, 1989, she married Bill Eichner, an ophthalmologist.
Alvarez has told of how her first major poetic sequence, the series of loose sonnets entitled "33," was inspired when, going home from a writers' conference, she took stock of her life—no husband (an early marriage had ended in divorce), no children, no secure employment—as her thirty-third birthday approached, and what was originally intended to be a single poem grew finally, in its revised and expanded form, to nearly fifty. This sequence, the centerpiece of Homecoming (1984), Alvarez's first book, moves headlong through a series of trenchant and witty observations on the author's observation of herself, towards its Whitman-inspired conclusion: "Who touches this poem touches a woman." In addition to its beautiful title poem, which opens the volume, Homecoming also contains a sequence of lyrics called "Housekeeping" in which domestic duties are presented not as confining drudgery, but as serious crafts to be properly mastered, crafts which also serve as outlets for self-expression. Alvarez published The Other Side, her second collection of poetry, in 1995. Like its predecessor, it begins with a poem ("Bilingual Sestina") that attempts to come to terms with the parts of the speaker's divided heritage, contains several thematically grouped sections of shorter poems, and proceeds to a long autobiographical sequence that employs some of the formal techniques of traditional verse.
It is for her novels that Alvarez is best known, and especially for the first of these, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991). As its title suggests, the novel concerns the American acculturation of four sisters who flee the Dominican Republic with their parents in 1960. Its chapters are presented in reverse chronology from 1989 to 1956, and the point of view shifts midway through the book from third-person narration to reminiscences, narrated by the sisters themselves, of their pre-American youth. The novel was received with strongly positive reviews and was named one of the "Best Books of 1991" by Library Journal. Alvarez's second novel also used time shifts and multiple narrators to tell a tale of four sisters, but one very different in tone and seriousness: In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) is based on the true story of three sisters--Patricia, Minerva, and Maria Teresa Mirabal—who denounced Trujillo and as a result were murdered by his forces in 1960. The killing of the sisters, known as Las Mariposas (the Butterflies), sparked the insurrection that led to Trujillo's assassination the following year. Alvarez, who had long desired to tell their story, found her approach to the material when she discovered that there was a fourth sister who had survived; her interviews with this sister, Dédé, provided Alvarez with many enriching details of the martyred sisters' personal lives. Like her first, Alvarez's second novel won strong praise from reviewers, and it was an American Library Association Notable Book and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Praise also greeted the publication of !Yo!, Alvarez's third novel in 1997; the title is the Spanish word for "I" and is also the nickname of Yolanda García, the autobiographically-based central character of Alvarez's first novel. Alvarez once again employs multiple viewpoints, but, in a delightful switch from the earlier book, Yo herself does not narrate any of the novel's chapters; instead, the members of her family and other people who are the models for the characters in her published—and well-publicized—fiction express their resentment at their exploitation and the changes that they and the facts of their lives have undergone in their fictional transformation. In addition to its narrative pleasures, !Yo! is an interesting commentary on the relationship between art and the life that it is drawn from, and demonstrates once again that Julia Alvarez is a lively, inventive, and greatly talented writer, one whose future work will be eagerly awaited.
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