Something to Declare, by Julia Alvarez
A Plume Book, 300 pp., $13.95, paperback
ISBN 0-452-28067-2
By Anjela Villarreal Ratliff
In her short introduction, Julia Alvarez states:
…this essay book is dedicated to you, my readers, who have asked me so many good questions and who have to know more than I have told you in my novels and poems.
She does tell us more, so much more…
Something to Declare sent my bilingual brain on an emotional spin amid amazing adventures. Alvarez’ delicious essays become meals set for Hispanic American literary tastebuds and anyone searching for an enriching experience.
One minute the reader nibbles on mangos, pastel de tamarindo, and engrudos (leftovers blended with milk in a mixer for a liquid meal); the next, it’s steak and potatoes; then to sopitas, chile and more mango. I went from tears to laughter as Alvarez took me back and forth, between the Dominican Republic to America. She held me in a cultural time warp as I read essays like, “Family Matters,” “A Genetics of Justice,” “So Much Depends,” and “Doña Aida, With Your Permission.” In her book, we visit the roads of her birth country – the Dominican Republic (in the time of Trujillo’s dictatorship) – and on to New York City, where her family fled – to escape possible persecution as a result of her father’s underground, anti-regime activities – when she was ten. Finally, we venture into states where she lived as an adult writer: Kentucky, Nebraska, and Vermont (where she now resides).
Back when her family, in exile, reestablished roots in New York City, Julia’s parallel self-identity began to evolve: español and English; Dominican Republic and America: two allegiances, much conflict, but a prospective gold mine for the future writer who would continue to simultaneously ride two “horses” bareback — with style, grace, and eventual expertise.
Throughout Something To Declare, we meet Alvarez’ family members and extensive extended family. In “Grandfather’s Blessing,” one can’t help but grow attached to the “gentleman” grandfather, who “…loved to recite bits of poetry…”; or Tía Rosa, in “Of Maids and Other Muses”— who “…studied to be a doctor…” and “…refused to work at catching a husband, … Instead, .. focused on her books and beautiful garden.”
In “So Much Depends,” Alvarez shares – almost in brotherhood – her great admiration for the poet William Carlos Williams, claiming: “As an adolescent immigrant, I, like Williams, wanted to be an American, period. “ This common dilemma of assimilation also visited Williams whose mother was Puerto Rican “with a Paris education”. Alvarez goes on to say that “It was only later that I came to find out that William Carlos Williams was – as would be termed today – ‘a Hispanic American writer’.” In the same essay, one detects some ambivalence in her dual roles as a Latina and an American writer:
… I get nervous when people ask me to define myself as a writer. I hear the cage of a definition close around me with its “Latino subject matter,” “Latino style,” Latino concerns.” …I shy away from simplistic choices… none of us serious writers of Latino origin want to be a flash in the literary pan. …We want our work to become part of the great body of all that has been thought and felt and written by writers of different cultures, languages, experience, classes, races.
Many of her twenty-four essays directly relate to her life as a writer, and as a Hispanic writer in particular. In “Have Typewriter, Will Travel,” she’s painfully honest in her admission:
…I was like other women of my generation: women who had grown up with mothers we could no longer use as models for the lives we were living. And so we stumbled ahead and invented ourselves….And behind the personal struggle of those years lies the lesson of immigration: that success is fickle, that a well-off life can suddenly turn into a life of struggle and uncertainty.
Included in this piece was her internal dilemma regarding advancing her writing degrees and maintaining her teaching profession, versus following her passion as a creative writer: “I…had debated and delayed going for a doctorate because I didn’t really want to be an academic, but a writer. “ Other essays about the writer life include “A Genetics of Justice,” where she comes to terms with having risked family abandonment after writing about semi-autobiographical and painful family experiences. When her mother read In the Time of the Butterflies — the novel Alvarez wrote based on the murder of the Mirabel sisters in the DR by members of the Trujillo regime – Alvarez’ mother sobbingly told her: “You put me back in those days. It was like I was reliving it all. I don’t care what happens to us! I’m so proud of you for writing this book.” In “Chasing the Butterflies,” Alvarez describes the often harsh struggles that went into the writing of that particular novel.
Something to Declare is a must-read for writers and readers of all backgrounds. By the end of this bilingual, bicultural American journey, you will feel that, should you ever have the honor of meeting Julia Alvarez, you would be able to address her as a kindred spirit.
Anjela Villarreal Ratliff
Austin, TX
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