Alvarez reflected on how it took her a while to understand the traumas of a dictatorship through her parents.
“They were always so afraid of us speaking up, and always suspicious, and it helped me to understand them and their generation,” she said. “The trauma, even after the dictator dies, a people is traumatized; the dictator stays in their imagination. So, it helped me to understand them and their generation, which has been called ‘la generación perdida’ (the ‘lost generation’) because so many in that generation lost their lives.”
The documentary ends with her most recent novel, “The Cemetery of Untold Stories,” which Alvarez published this year at age 74. The book is about a veteran novelist who creates a graveyard for unfinished stories and characters.
Alvarez said that after arriving in Queens, she felt that her family “had lost everything.” But in spite of feeling like an outsider, poetry helped her find a new home.
“I think when I came into English as a 10-year-old, one of the reasons that I was attracted to poetry was that it was so rhythmic in cadence and it reminded me of Spanish,” she said. “It felt like a way that 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,” she said. “We didn’t really have that many books around, but we had that oral rhythmic culture of recitations, and little poems and ditties.”
‘All-American’ includes southern Americas
One of the poems that inspired Alvarez once she was in the U.S. was “I, Too” from the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.
In the poem, Hughes wrote: “Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table when company comes. Nobody’ll dare say to me, ‘Eat in the kitchen,’ then.”
Alvarez recalled how reading that verse felt like Hughes was making a promise — she too could someday sit at the table of mainstream America.
This would later inspire her to write “I, Too, Sing América,” a take on Hughes’ poem, where she defines herself as “truly an all-American writer.”
