“This is how it all starts: with your mother calling you into the bathroom. You will remember what you were doing at that precise moment for the rest of your life: You were reading Watership Down and the rabbits and their does were making their dash for the boat and you didn’t want to stop reading, the book has to go back to your brother tomorrow, but then she called you again, louder, her I’m-not-f***ing-around voice, and you mumbled irritably, Si, senora. She was standing in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, naked from the waist up, her bra slung about her waist like a torn sail, the scar on her back as vast and inconsolable as a sea. You want to return to your book, to pretend you didn’t hear her, but it is too late. Her eyes meet yours, the same big smoky eyes you will have in the future. Ven aca, she commanded. She is frowning at something on one of her breasts.”
In a quiet Hodson auditorium room, Junot Díaz reads these words aloud from his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. At times, Díaz does not even look at the book in his hands, but as he spins the story, he instead makes eye contact with many of the one hundred or so members of his audience. The captivated audience laughs at the comedy of the speaker’s voice, all the while wincing at the dagger-like second-person interlude, almost physically feeling Díaz’s words —just as one of the characters, Lola, feels her mother’s breast for the cancerous lump she does not want to confirm is really there.
Junot Díaz, a Dominican-American writer and professor at MIT, spoke last Friday evening in an event co-sponsored by Hopkins’ Program in Latin American Studies, the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures and the Department of English. The event is the first in a new series entitled “American Voices,” which seeks to bring “at least one, if not two or three of the top, most important, most vibrant voices in American, in the broadest possible sense, literature” Bill Eddinton, Chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages said in his introduction to the program. The event featured a reading of the second chapter of Díaz’s novel, followed by a question and answer session.
Throughout the program, Díaz spoke on both an intellectual and personal level, occasionally dropping in and out of Spanish, cursing regularly, and asking the students, “How many of you came because your teachers made you?” Following almost every serious moment Díaz would break the tension with some joke or story that kept the audience engaged. In one moment before the reading, Díaz stopped, completely serious, and said, “Oh, can I borrow someone’s book?” He then proceeded to use an audience member’s book for the rest of the reading.
Following Díaz’s reading of the scene in which Oscar’s sister Lola feels her mother’s breasts for the cancerous lump, the author spoke about a wide variety of topics — everything from being born in the poor area of Santo Domingo and the art of cursing to the way in which he refuses to rush his writing. Besides being the author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz is also the author of two short story collections, “Drown” and “This is How You Lose Her”, along with many other short stories published in The New Yorker.
“I really enjoyed Díaz's answers to the audience's questions. They were really genuine, and they gave a lot of insight to his beliefs and personality. It was surprising, how easily he switched from a casual tone to talking about serious issues. It was really fascinating and showed just how intelligent and interesting he really is,” sophomore Andrea Massaro said.
In much the same way that his witty, dynamic manner of dialogue captivated his audience, Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is characterized by a unique blend of references to many different genres, using various forms and styles of writing. This includes allusions to role-playing games, science fiction and fantasy references, comic book analogies, footnotes and perhaps most interesting, a use of what might commonly be referred to as “Spanglish.” Díaz’s novel effectively combines the two cultures he comes from — New Jersey and the Dominican Republic. The novel ultimately depicts a socially maladjusted ghetto nerd, sexually frustrated, in what might only be described as a coming-of-age story.
“His work examines the consequences of a life lived between languages … and through languages irreconcilable distinctions between history and memory, legend and experience, out of which notions of past and present constitute themselves, commune with one another, do battle, and blend into one another like brothers or members of the same family” Marc Caplan, an assistant professor in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture, said in his introduction at the start of the event.
Indeed, Díaz speech was easy and honest, speaking to the way in which oftentimes he felt like a person living between two cultures, not fully fitting into either. Language, such an important aspect in his work, became a barrier. People in Santo Domingo would say to him, “‘You’re not Dominican because your Spanish isn’t f***ing good enough,’” Díaz said. At the same time, however, as he entered college, he felt as if his English was not good enough, as peers would seem to say to him, “‘Oh, you speak with this kind of accent—you’re not f***ing smart’” Díaz said.
“Language is such a weird, shorthand, the way in which people make all sorts of moral, ethical, and characterological claims,” Díaz said.
He observed the way in which cursing plays a role in people’s impression of others, often changing people’s initial impressions of another human being. “But if somebody curses once, and even though they bring truth—you will disqualify them,” Díaz said.
Díaz’s answers presented a fascinating blend of his life as a member of an immigrant family and the way in which that experience shapes his work. In response to questions regarding identity and the national question, Díaz responded by talking about the idea of coloniality, and the way in which people of color face the question of identity being raised again and again, almost defensively. In some sense, it’s almost as if Cuban-ness were a “possession” Díaz said.
“My favorite thing that he talked about was how it can be really hard for realism to capture the experience of ‘coloniality,’ and how science fiction and other ‘fantastic’ genres can actually do a better job,” senior Bonnie Goldberg said.
At one point in the talk, Díaz explained the way in which realism does not even begin to cover or imagine what it means to be a person of color. Drawing a box on the chalkboard behind him, Díaz, moves and draws around it. “How in the world can realism really ever communicate that I look the way I do because I was raped into existence?” Díaz says. Instead, Díaz drew outside of the box, discussing the way in which science fiction became an outlet for him, tapping into fantasy stories are always about race and breeding. These stories are about the people that disappear.
Díaz also spoke about the way in which he takes his time writing, taking five, ten, fifteen years to finish a story. “I find writing impossible,” Díaz said, describing himself as a “tortured” artist type. But at the same time, he also spoke of this lengthy process as a great benefit to his writing career. “I’m somebody who was never in a rush.” Even as his peers were sending hundreds of stories out, Díaz took his time. His patience paid off. The first story he submitted was published and because of that story, he found an agent.
Goldberg appreciated Díaz’s explanation of his writing process. “It was really great how he said that there isn't any rush and the fame hasn't affected his work ethic. It was such a fresh response,” she said.
Díaz urged writers in the audience to avoiding rushing their work “for the applause” calling it “the worst thing you can do to yourself as an artist. The only reason an artists has any worth is because they bring us news of the world that they learned as adults… what I think makes an artist is when they’re a grown a** woman and they go out into the world and encounter the world,” Díaz said.
Massaro believed in Díaz’s point. “I definitely believe that writers should go out and experience the world before writing. I believe the best writing comes from personal experience, and as college students, we still haven't experienced much. How can I say I've lived through something worth a serious story when I'm only 20? When writing, it's fun to imagine what certain situations are like and create a story around them, and brilliant young writers can pull that off, but at least for me, it's difficult because I haven't actually experienced it myself, or experienced the intensity of emotion associated,” she said.
Goldberg also agreed. “I agree with the idea that writers (and everyone, really) need to experience life so that they actually have something to write about! The more things you experience, witness, and feel, the better and more interesting of a writer you'll become,” Goldberg said.
Díaz still continues to work on a new novel, Monstro, delving even greater into the world of science fiction calling it a “crazy, Domincan, end of the world, monster story.” The novel is about “a young woman who tears monsters heads clean off with her hands and knocks planes out of the sky,” Díaz said.
He continues to work at his slow pace, saying, “I’m trying to grow the talent” to finish the project. To Díaz, the writing process is a bizarre growing process, most writers biting off projects, we’re “not equal” to finish right away: “The old saying is really true—you have to become, in the process of the writing, the person you need to be to finish the book. And sometimes it takes a lot more growing than you are ready for.”
Though he has found success, Díaz is still almost disconsolate about his work—maintaining that tortured artist edge. “In the end the book probably won’t survive,” Díaz said of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
However, Díaz’s words still seem to echo around the room, bound to endure. The listener can almost touch them as the character Lola touches them—the powerful impact around the different languages of the world, the meaning of her mother’s words:
“Do you feel that? She asks in her too-familiar raspy voice. At first all you feel is the heat of her and the density of the tissue, like a bread that never stopped rising. She kneads your fingers into her. You’re as close as you’ve ever been and your breathing is what you hear. Don’t you feel that? She turns toward you. Cono, muchacha, stop looking at me and feel.”
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