On Becoming a Butterfly

by Julia Alvarez

Convocation speech delivered on September 4, 1997 at Appalachian State University

�����Dr. and Mrs. Borkowski, Faculty and Staff, Silvio Sirias, tireless coordinator of my visit, I feel very honored to be here, especially because of the presence of Ded� Mirabal, the surviving Mirabal sister, and Jacqueline Guzm�n, daughter of Mar�a Teresa one of the murdered Mirabal sisters, both of whom have come all the way from the Dominican Republic to be with us today.

On Becoming A Butterfly

�����Most of what I want to say to you today, I have already said in story form between the covers of my novel, In the Time of the Butterflies. In fact, I'm a little wary of speaking directly of what I've already put in story form. The great mystics, the Sufis, believe that you should teach only by means of a story. If the story is a great story, the student can enter it at any level and draw sustenance and wisdom from it. As the student grows, the story grows with him. But if you tell the student directly some lesson or truth, he will forget it. This is not unlike that wise old saying that you should give a man hook and line and teach him to fish instead of giving him the fish outright.

�����I believe stories have this power--they enter us, they transport us, they change things inside us, so invisibly, so minutely, that sometimes we're not even aware that we come out of a great book as a different person from the person we were when we began reading it.

�����I am assuming that many of you here today have already read In the Time of the Butterflies, and you have already experienced the story intimately and directly. So all I want to do today is remind you of some of the unsaid things you hopefully already picked up in story form from reading the book.

�����This afternoon, I will be speaking at the Open Forum about how I came to write the novel and what that process of discovery was like. That talk, by the way, I've titled "Chasing the Butterflies." You might recall from the novel that the Mirabal Sisters were known in the underground by their code name, las Mariposas, the Butterflies. My talk to you this morning is called "On Becoming a Butterfly," and it is a straight talk on the process of becoming one of the butterflies that you have read about in the book.

�����First, let's define our terms. What do I mean by becoming a butterfly? First, I don't mean any touchy-feely, gushy Hallmark-card, sentimentalized definition of butterfly. I remind you that in Greek mythology, butterflies were symbols for the soul. So the process I am talking about is the process whereby you become a person with a soul. I don't mean anything necessarily Christian or religious by this definition, as this is a process accessible to non-Christians, even to people who would not define themselves as religious. I am talking about the process by which you become a person who is more than a creature, an ethical person, a person of compassion, a humane as well as a human being, a person who is living the larger version of himself with all the doors and windows of the self wide open to the world.

�����This process of becoming a butterfly is, in fact, what getting an education is all about. Why do we read the great stories? Why do we learn the discipline of a science or of an art form? To become that large-hearted, broad-thinking person which is what we mean by an educated person.

�����This is actually a life time process. As Chaucer, one of the first great British poets, exclaimed, the lyf so short, the craft so long to learn. One life is just not long enough for you to grow those wings. But your college education is a good start.

�����So here is the short version of that education. After many more years at it than you, I think I've come up with the three basic rules of becoming a butterfly.

NUMBER ONE: This is the part we always want to forget about. If you want to be a butterfly, you've got to put up with being a caterpillar. A lowly, wormy creature, inching along on the dirt, closed up in some cocoon, not a single promise of wings. In other words, you've got to risk failure and make a lot of mistakes and put in the hard work of learning to fly.

�����Let me give you an example from history and then a personal example. Think of the Butterflies I wrote about, the incredible courage it took for them to found an underground in one of the bloodiest and longest-lasting dictatorships of the 20th century. At a time when no one dared breathe a word against the regime, in a generation and in a culture where women were not encouraged to have public lives, these women risked their lives. Think of the sacrifices they endured, the emprisonment, the torture, the terror of that final ambush. Think of their husbands who had to face the murder of their wives. Think of their sons and daughters, who lost their mothers at a young age. Think of the long years after the dictatorship when it seemed the worm phase would never end: military coups, civil war, disappearances, a marine invasion, pseudo democracy.

�����And year after year, Ded� and others kept heart, they did not forget, they put in the hard work. Finally, just last year, thirty-six years after the death of the Butterflies, the Dominicans went to the polls. They elected a young, forward-looking president, Leonel Fern�ndez, whose family, like my own, had spent many years as exiles in Nueva York. And guess who they elected as vice president: Ded�'s youngest son, Jaime David, who was four years old the day his aunts were killed. And the second in command in the State Department is now Minou, who was also four years old the day her mother, Minerva, was murdered on that lonely country road. The dream of the Butterflies is slowly being realized.

�����More personally, in my own life, I know that a long caterpillar phase is the name of the game if you want to reach that butterfly phase. For me this has meant many years of struggle to become the writer I am today.

�����I grew up in another language, in another world, in the fifties in a dictatorship in a little island in the Caribbean. As a girl, I was not expected to get much of an education at all. My grandmother, who only went up to fourth grade, used to tell the story that she only picked up a book when she heard the teacher�s donkey neighing as it climbed up the mountain to her house. Needless to say, I was not encouraged to be a student or a reader a,nd certainly not a writer of books.

�����We were also growing up in the same dictatorship as the Mirabal sisters. In a school just down the road from where I was going to school, a student wrote an essay in which he praised Trujillo, our dictator, as the father of our country. The teacher commented that certainly Trujillo was one of the fathers of our country, but there were others. The boy, the son of a general, must have gone home and told his father. That night the teacher, his wife, and his two young children disappeared.

�����I grew up being warned that one must never ever tell stories. But life has many turns. In 1960, my father's companions in the underground were arrested. My father was next. We left the country in a hurry on August 6, 1960. I was ten years old. Less than four months later, the Mirabal sisters were murdered. At the time, I didn't know how lucky we had been. All I could see were the losses.

�����Overnight, we had lost everything, our country, our home, our extended family structure, our economic security, our language. We arrived in this country at a time in history that was not very welcoming to people who were different, whose skins were a different color, whose language didn�t sound like English. For the first time in my life I experienced prejudice and playground cruelty, which was no big deal when compared to the devastating cruelty of grown men back where we had come from, but when you're a child, such experiences can be crushing. I struggled with a language and a culture I didn't understand. I was heartbroken and homesick.

�����But sometimes it is these hard caterpillar moments that lead us to our dreams. Because I felt so isolated, I discovered books and the world of the imagination where everybody was welcomed. I became a reader, and soon I began to dream of becoming a writer.

�����But that dream of becoming a writer required hard work. There were a lot of barriers in my way. I might have left a dictatorship, the Dominican Republic of the fifties, but I had entered a United States where the Equal Rights Amendment had not been passed, where the Civil Rights Movement was just getting underway, where multiculturalism and bilingualism were still unheard of.

�����And so the education I received gave me no models, no proof that a woman like me could be an American writer. I read the Canon, the great works of English literature, but there was no voice like my own, no story like my own. I assumed that someone like me couldn't be a writer. In fact, I was told once that it couldn't be done.

�����In college, a famous poet whom I greatly admired announced one day that no poet could write in a language that he hadn't first said "Mama" in. In other words, you couldn't be a poet and an immigrant. My secret fears were confirmed.

�����But the important thing is that I kept writing. I kept sending my work out. I kept working on those darn wings.

�����Finally, in 1991, when I was forty-one years old and had been writing for twenty years, I published my first novel,How the Garc�a Girls Lost Their Accents. The manuscript had already been rejected by several publishers. But then a little publisher down the road from here, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, and a wonderful, skilled editor, Shannon Ravenel, saw potential in my work and gave me a chance. The book has sold over 250,000 copies to date.

�����What did I tell you? Stay with it. Do your caterpillar work.

RULE NUMBER TWO: And this is very important as you are mucking around in the dirt, struggling with jobs, raising families, earning a living. It is easy to forget what it is you are struggling for. So, if you want to be a butterfly, rule number two is: Don't forget where you are going.

�����I still recall a poem written years ago when I was teaching poetry in the schools in Kentucky. A young student, Katie, in 10th grade wrote:

Why is it

I reach for the stars

but I never make it

past the front door?

�����"Katie, girl," I wanted to say," welcome to the human condition." We're all torn between our daily responsibilities, our very real creaturely needs, our limitations, and our far-reaching, star-catching dreams. To give up on that struggle is to become a diminished person, a person without a chance of becoming a butterfly.

�����What I've found helps me remember where I am going is the company of great books.

�����There's an old Yiddish story about a rabbi who walks out in a rich neighborhood and meets a watchman walking up and down. "For whom are you working?" the rabbi asks. The watchman tells him, and then in his turn, he asks the rabbi, "And whom are you working for, rabbi?" The words strike the rabbi like a shaft. "I am not working for anybody just yet," he barely manages to reply. Then he walks up and down beside the man for a long time and finally asks him, "Will you be my servant?" The watchman says, "I should like to, but what would be my duties?"

�����"To remind me," the rabbi says.

�����I think that is really the purpose of all great literature, to remind us.

�����Reading Middlemarch I am reminded to strive like Dorothea for the deepest richest life of the spirit. Reading Song of Solomon. I am reminded that the enslavement of another enslaves me. Reading The Odyssey I am reminded that a man goes through many incarnations in order to arrive where he belongs. Reading Emily Dickinson I am reminded to spread my hands wide and gather paradise. And on and on, great books are my night watchmen.

�����And along with books, my other great helpers have been my teachers. I am talking both about teachers I have had in school, hard-working men and women who will do anything including riding donkeys up a mountain in order to teach me something of value; as well as ordinary people I have met along the way who by their example or by something they say or do, teach me something I really needed to learn in order to keep going. These teachers need not be intellectuals or people with impressive credentials. I remember Spike Lee saying in an interview that one of the great lessons in his life has been that you can learn things from people who are dumber than you. There are all kinds of intelligence, and the one you might need at a certain moment in your life might not be butterfly intelligence, but cocoon intelligence, worm intelligence. Avail yourself of all of your helpers if you want to achieve your dreams.

FINALLY, THE LAST RULE: for becoming a butterfly after you have put in your caterpillar time, after you have found helpers to remind you of your dreams, is -- and this one is my favorite -- Spread your wings.

�����I remember how after several years of collecting information, conducting interviews, traveling back and forth from Vermont to the Dominican Republic, and thinking and musing about the Mirabal sisters, I took a deep breath and decided, "Okay, I'm gonna write this book!" I was terrified. How dare I take on these huge, mythic lives and pretend or presume that I could render them on paper? I had done the caterpillar homework, as I told you, years and years of reading and research. I had found helpers along the way, who reminded me not to let the Mirabal story die. Among them, of course, Ded* Mirabal, whose incredible courage is what has kept the story alive over the years. But now it was time for number three. I had to write the book.

�����I said my prayers. I sharpened all my pencils and rearranged all the books on my desk. And then, I set out. And you know what, this part which seems the dramatic, exciting part where you step into the stretch limo of your talent and ride your way to glory doesn�t happen that way. You write a novel the way you fly, not with majestic soaring strides but wing stroke by wing stroke, word by word. And once you get there, to the top of that mountain or to the end of that novel, what you most remember and what you find yourself talking about years later is the journey there.

�����So don't be fooled by goals. What a goal is really for is to help you structure the journey, but the journey is what is important. The process of growing those wings is what is important. Once you get a first pair, there'll be a second pair to work for, a third. Writers know this. You finish one book, and already you are dreaming of the next one. Again you have to learn a whole new process in order to write a whole new book. Back to the caterpillar phase!

The Lyf so short the craft so long to learn.

�����And the purpose, finally, of this process of achieving your dreams is to pass it on. The function of freedom, Toni Morisson once said, is to free someone else. Certainly the Mirabal sisters knew this. As a writer, this is my credo, to share with you, my readers, all that I have learned on my journey. To tell you the marvelous story.

�����That is my particular talent, the craft of storytelling, but each of you out there has your own talent, and your challenge and one of the purposes of your education is to find out what that is, to cultivate it, to use it, to pass it on. As we learn from the Gnostic Gospels of St. Thomas:

If you bring forth what is inside you what you bring forth will save you.

If you do not bring forth what is inside you what is inside you will destroy you.

�����So, now that you know my three basic rules of becoming butterflies, you can coast through the rest of your college education, right? Wrong. This is just the beginning, as I mentioned before. The journey to become a butterfly is what your life will be about. The journey to this podium to get your B.A. four years from now--the courses you will take, the teachers who will inspire you, the friends who will help you, the enemies who will keep you on your toes, the books that you will read that will keep reminding you--this journey is what you will remember, what will make you the person you are, what will bring forth what is inside you so that you may pass it on to someone else.

�����So work hard and dream big and have fun along the way and don't forget to spread your wings.

�QUE VIVAN TODAS LAS MARIPOSAS!

LONG LIVE ALL THE BUTTERFLIES!

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Copyright � 1997 Appalachian State University Summer Reading Program