Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the memoir Something to Declare by Julia Alvarez (@1998 by Julia Alvarez) . The narrator of the passage is from the Dominican Republic, an island country in the Caribbean Sea.

Ever since I became a published writer, my family has been trying to figure out where the writing talent came from. The Espaillats have always been poets, one uncle (on the Espaillat side) noted. Another uncle believed that I probably got the writing genes from my father's side of the family.

I can't help thinking that maybe my writing genes, in fact, come directly from my father. When we emigrated to this country and my father had to start over as a doctor, he gave up his other life's ambition of writing books. Instead, he wrote weekly letters to my sisters and me in boarding school in which he detailed the adventures of a young boy, Babinchi, an autobiographical version of himself. At the end of each letter was the little moral we should learn from this recent scrape Babinchi had gotten himself into.

My sisters and I would roll our eyes, but in fact, we cared very much for those letters, "the favorite" bragging that she had gotten the original as opposed to one of three carbon copies. (Papi finally figured out how to sidestep our jealousy by regularly rotating the carbons. ) Obviously, I have gotten a touch of the poet from him.

It's nice to have the family finally arguing over who can lay claim to me. In fact, it's the fulfillment of the childhood desire in the playground to be picked for one of the teams instead of left over to be taken on as a handicap: "Okay, we'll take Alvarez, but we get to have four outs instead of three."

For so many years, I was an embarrassment that my parents had to explain to the rest of the Dominican family. The thing that had gone wrong with my sisters and myself, according to the extended family back home, was that we had settled in the United States of America where people got lost because they didn't have their family around to tell them who they were. Instead, they spent their lives, wandering around, doing crazy things trying "to find themselves."

The family was partly right, of course. My sisters and I entered this country and our teens at the height of the sixties, in the company of friends who were, many of them, dropping out of their families, joining communes, demonstrating against the war, and spending the night in jail. Meanwhile, back home, our female cousins were having their quinceañera (fifteenth birthday) parties in which they waltzed with their papis in sight of all their relatives. By twenty-five, many were leading settled lives with children and households. They knew who they were, Alvarez or Tavares, Bermúdez or Espaillat. But in America, you didn't go by what your family had been in the past, you created yourself anew. This was part of the excitement as well as the confusing challenge of America.

Well, at long last, after almost thirty years of self-creation, I began publishing novels, which were well received. Now my family saw those endless years of struggle in a whole new light. I had shown this poetic talent from the beginning, and they had always known it. I had never let mishaps or misfortunes and unemployment get in my way.

The change in their attitude proves, if nothing else, how even our memories favor the classic Aristotelian structure of narrative—with a beginning, middle, and end. If the ending is "happy," then the events that precede it suddenly light up with meaningful significance.

But where did it come from, this writing talent? It is a family habit, after all, to trace the features of its present members back to the faces of the ancestors. Every time a new grandchild or grand niece arrives, the old tías (aunts) stand around the crib, trying to decide whose nose little Gaby is wearing. Those hands are pure Rochet. The ears are González. As for the dark skin, that comes from the Gómez side.

It gratifies me that whatever talent I do have might have come from somewhere else. For one thing, it clears me of blame for upsetting those same members of my family when they actually sit down and read what I've written. But also it reminds me that I am just one more embodiment of that force for expression and clarity and comprehension which has nothing specifically to do with me, or just with me. As Jean Rhys, another writer with a strong connection to the Caribbean, once said to a young writer wanting some advice, "Feed the sea, feed the sea. The little rivers dry up, but the sea continues. "All that we write and achieve as individuals means finally very little compared to the great body of work—books, music, dance, art, inventions, ideas—that forms the culture and context of our human family.