A Particular Blessing: Storytelling as Healing in the Novels of Julia Alvarez

While Susan Sontag refers in her classic essay, of course, to the experience of pathologically fatal disease,1 her reflection could as easily hold for the experience of mental illness or breakdown, that more inscrutable world of psychological dysfunction that resides as much in the human spirit as it does in the physical body. As Western science reaches for new palliatives for the troubled mind, applying medications, therapies, and analytic treatments to the myriad forms of mental affliction, socioreligious communities in Western and non-Western cultures have looked historically to the spirit world for healing. The Caribbean, with its multicultural matrix of blended religions and beliefs, is a unique site of such mystical curatives. While a thorough description of the richly varied tradition of Caribbean religious rites and healing cures is beyond this essay’s scope,2 tracing the influence of Haitian vodou and its healing practices in the fiction of Dominican American writer Julia Alvarez is useful in elucidating the episodes of mental breakdown and recovery in her novels. Though occasional vodou elements appear without elaboration in the novels, as in the “magic waters” that grace her fictional alter ego’s desk and windowsills, Alvarez makes neither the sacred practices of Afro-Caribbean spirituality, learned from Haitians in her household, nor the symbolic world of her family’s Dominican Catholicism central to her fiction.