On the courage of ordinary women: Las Mariposas

I had never heard of the Mirabal sisters until I recently listened to a podcast about them. I also knew nothing about the twentieth-century history of the Dominican Republic, nor the repressive regime of Rafael Trujillo, who controlled the country 1930-1961. But what a nuisance to him those Mirabal sisters turned out to be. The second part of the podcast was constructed around an interview with Julia Alvarez whose 1994 novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, tells their story and it is one that needs to be heard.

It is no spoiler to say that this story does not end well. Three of the four Mirabal sisters, Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa, along with their driver, were murdered, on Trujillo’s orders, on 25^th November, 1960. A fourth sister, Dedé, who was not involved with the revolutionary 14 June Movement, survived. Her life’s work turned out to be the promotion of the legacy of her sisters. And it was to Dedé that Alvarez went for the primary research for her novel.

The resulting book, which could have been quite sombre given the outcome, turns out to be a celebration of womanhood and sisterhood. Using a range of narrative techniques, Alvarez give each woman a voice, developing four very different characters. In life, Minerva, the third sister, was the acknowledged political leader and activist. As a young woman, compelled to dance with Trujillo at one of his parties, she stood up to him and refused his sexual advances. From that moment onwards she was in his sights, but this did not diminish her resolve. Much later she became the first woman in the Dominican Republic to graduate from Law School, although Trujillo refused her a licence to practice. She and her husband, Manolo, were pioneers of the resistance movement. Minerva was the original Mariposa.

But while Minerva has a first-person voice in the novel, she only gets a quarter of the narrative. This is a story about family. Patria, the oldest and a devout Catholic, tells of her very traditional life, married at sixteen and mother soon after, but drawn inevitably into the fight against injustice after witnessing the violent suppression of a failed liberation invasion. Maria Teresa speaks to us from the pages of a sequence of diaries, much younger, anxious, asthmatic and ultimately resolute. Her prison diary is especially powerful, bringing together all the elements of her character in an unexpected community of disparate women. Dedé speaks to us through the shadowy figure of the author during an interview in 1994 that triggers her own memories of a loving family that cannot be broken.

The novel weaves fact and fiction seamlessly. What Alvarez cannot know, she invents with great plausibility. She gives us an intimate portrait of a family, women who for the most part are not exceptional. Their lives are as ordinary as all our lives. They have the same petty jealousies, they squabble, they argue with their husbands, they deal with unruly children, they love each other despite all of this. Yet at the time of their deaths, they were already clandestine national heroes. Afterwards they achieved a greater status. The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women is observed on the anniversary of their deaths. However, the characters that Alvarez creates are easy to relate to despite their unwanted celebrity. This book is moving, passionate, inspiring and, for me at least, was an education.