Alvarez reflected on how it took him a while to understand the traumas of a dictatorship through his parents.
“They were always so afraid of us talking, and always suspicious, and it helped me understand them and their generation,” he said. “The trauma, even after the death of the dictator, a people is traumatized; the dictator remains in their imagination. So, it helped me to understand them and their generation, which was called “the lost generation” ( the “lost generation”) because so many in that generation lost their lives.”
The documentary ends with his most recent novel, “The Graveyard of Untold Stories,” which Alvarez published this year at the age of 74. The book is about a veteran novelist who creates a graveyard for endless stories and characters.
Alvarez said that after arriving in Queens, he felt like his family “had lost everything.” But despite feeling like an outsider, poetry helped her find a new home.
“I think when I came to English as a 10-year-old, one of the reasons I was drawn to poetry was that it was so rhythmic in cadence and reminded me of Spanish,” he said. “I felt like a way I could speak Spanish in English.”
Alvarez explained that she came from an oral culture in the Dominican Republic.
“I wasn’t really a reader,” he said. “We didn’t really have that many books around, but we had that oral rhythmic culture of recitations and poems and songs.”
“All-American” includes South America
One of the poems that inspired Alvarez once she was in the United States was “I, Too” by the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.
In the poem, Hughes wrote: “Tomorrow, I will be at the table when the company comes. No one will dare to say to me: ‘Eat in the kitchen,’ then.”
Alvarez recalled that reading that verse felt like Hughes was making a promise – she too could one day sit at the table of mainstream America.
This will inspire him later to write “Me too, Sing America“, a reprise of Hughes’s poem, where she defines herself as “truly an American writer”.
“I’m really an American citizen, including all the southern Americas that we sometimes leave out when we say America. So, I think I’m very permeable,” he said, “these skills to really connect over the artificial barriers that people create about us and of them, and the identity that needs to be established, is something you learn to spread when you’re writing.”
And with more than three decades as a published author, Alvarez still uses poetry to boil his writing down to essential truths.
“I start every day of writing by reading poetry, even when I write prose because for me this kind of sets a high bar for what the language can also do,” he said. “In poetry everything that is not essential is stripped away.”
Chronicling a dictatorship, through a female lens
When examining the legacy of Alvarez, the documentary establishes his one of the most significant voices in Latin literature.
“Julia carved a path for young women and their voices to break into the American mainstream,” Cuban-American filmmaker Adriana Bosch said in a phone interview. He produced and directed “Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined.”
Bosch explained that Alvarez’s writing shifted the lens from male-dominated to female-dominated stories.
“She wanted to tell the story of migration from a female point of view. And I think she hit that idea on all cylinders with ‘In the Time of the Butterflies,'” he said.