Junot D?az
Lantigua, Juleyka
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW by Juleyka Lantigua Junot Diaz After catapulting to literary stardom with his brilliant short-story collection, Drown, more than ten years ago, Junot Diaz is back with...
...But it was the thing we weren't saying, that people were afraid to say, like, "Yo, what we do is nerdy by definition...
...I'm having so much trouble with writing, you know...
...that we're currently living in...
...Q: So was Oscar among those who absorbed and processed today's youth culture...
...The act of looking is a very violent act...
...Q: Love is very potent, but love also renders you very weak in this book...
...This was thepariguayo (loser...
...We're not something they can ever understand...
...In the novel, not much has changed about him, except that we now revisit the history that forged him...
...As a Dominican man, you're socialized to be a playboy...
...Later I was in Mexico City for a year living with my friend, the amazing writer Francisco Goldman...
...I had no concept that I was Trujillo's son...
...It was a day-in-day-out fucking massacre...
...I think men spend so much time passing for being men...
...And it was because a lot of women in my life were refusing just to be looked at, to be this passive figure...
...I also spent a lot of time on different campuses, in conversation, helping other writers...
...You couldn't survive it without the resistance of this kind of woman...
...I have no sense of anything beyond this, so that's the hardest thing to wrestle with...
...From the vantage point of your writing desk, what do you see...
...And a lot of it had to do with me suffering from depression like most people do, artists do, not any big deal...
...He thought Trujillo was a great fucking man, and we had in my family—and this is very common in many Third World families— a dictatorship in the house...
...In an immigrant Dominican household led by a belligerent and dictatorial mother and in a New Jersey ghetto populated by every character the diaspora has begotten, Oscar is an artist and dreamer who can scarcely maneuver his way through the social labyrinth called college...
...I always thought that my mom and my sisters, without knowing it, were shackled together by history, by survival, and by this desire to be free of all those things— to be a person, to be an individual...
...And the concept of Oscar, the concept of this poor nerd, the concept of the real version of everything that we're performing against—at least as a Dominican man of color—suddenly came into my mind...
...So we have people who were frontrunners of what we call the contemporary, wired young person...
...And everyone has different dictaduras, but the one that I lived under was a dictadura that would've made Trujillo very, very comfortable, because he helped design it...
...And it's not as if we are ever going to be accepted...
...This book required me to look into an abyss and be joyful, because the fact that I'm looking in it meant something, meant that there is life...
...For us there's this cultural component: You're Dominican only if you do this, this, and that...
...And if you do this and that, you'll be accepted to a certain degree and if you don't, people will scorn you for it...
...And all the immigrants were sitting around going, "Yeah, we knew that...
...You spend a lot of time being taught that women are important, but without the really positive framework of why...
...He was everything all of Diaz's male characters in Drown were not— bookish, grotesquely overweight, and utterly delusional about the mysteries of romantic love...
...You figure out quickly it's because of culo (ass...
...Diaz: He's part of the generation of young people that were sacrificed...
...And the dude just ran and got new clothes, and said, "No, I'm not a monster," and everybody's like, "Yes, you're not a monster...
...La dictadura de la casa...
...Q: Were they just posing as macho...
...When people are always telling you that you have to have a lot of women, women are very important, there's a chance that you might actually begin to observe them on a more fundamental level...
...It's this crazy victory, but it's completely tragic...
...Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them...
...They were all shackled together in ways that I wasn't...
...The '80s was where this was all brought up...
...The novel takes place twenty years after this destruction, with all the stuff that we're dealing with now—a dirty war, the disappeared, the concept of terrorism...
...My religious friends would disagree, but I always feel like this world we live in is so incredibly difficult...
...That's what I do: I teach them writing...
...And then reality lapped me, it just lapped me...
...There's nothing more true in being a child of a diaspora, a child of immigrants...
...Thinking about my mother, who's a very powerful force on me...
...We fundamentally have been a culture that's been put together from the explosions of other cultures...
...To produce that identity among young people required guinea pigs...
...I was very clear growing up the only reason this shit worked—what we called the Dominican diaspora—is because of these crazy women characters, women like my mom, and their collective knowledge of survival...
...I thought I was being trans-gressive, apocalyptic, an out-there person...
...I have heard you say that we're all Trujillo's kids—illegitimately and legitimately—even second-, third-generation Dominicans, and hyphenated Dominicans...
...To be exact, upon them has been unleashed a fuku, the mightiest of all spells that can be cast on the island first rampaged by Columbus...
...Junot Diaz: I've been trying to write...
...Diaz: You're 100 percent right...
...So what happened was: a) one novel died, which I hope to resuscitate, and b) I became a writer who does conferences and panels...
...He was the anti-macho...
...But he still displayed a certain intellectual moroseness when discussing the long-lasting effects of diaspora, the complex relationships among generations of immigrants, and the indelible mark the dictator Rafael Trujillo left on Dominican Republic, a place that both perplexes and beguiles Diaz...
...I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration...
...Capitalism seized it and was like, "This is awesome...
...Diaz: These kids created a matrix to survive...
...But these people were ostracized and loathed, and they're the ones that were the test betas...
...People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong...
...You're saying, I'm gonna map my shit over you—but to see is to actually receive information, to be engaged...
...In '94, I started writing a novel about an enormous terrorist act that destroyed the United States...
...I guess the best way of saying it is that no one could have survived what we survived— whether it was first extermination and slavery, then abandonment and erasure, then the series of gunboat two-bit dictatorships, followed by the final apotheosis of dictatorships, the Trujillato...
...Diaz: Katrina was one of those things that rips the clothes off of the guy who keeps saying he's a saint, and underneath you see that he's a monster...
...Q: How did the idea for the novel evolve...
...Diaz: I was surrounded by a lot of male writers of color who have this incredibly bizarre relationship to masculinity...
...Q: Oscar could be considered a "ghetto nerd...
...It's like we were all mega-nerds but you would never know that if you listened to the way they talk about themselves...
...Diaz: When you're the ones in the life raft and you have four or five women in the life raft who put it together, by the end of it your nerves are blown...
...The consequences of those kinds of patriarchal traumas last to the point where the person no longer has contact with the origins of that evil...
...We could use this to capture young imaginations and entertain them...
...Honestly, connecting once at the deepest level with someone, you know, once you've done that, even if your life goes to hell, man, it was really worth living...
...In a way, he accepts the social ostracizing...
...Yet, despite its mechanical uncaring-ness, it's a gift—we didn't do anything to get this life...
...They were not part of society...
...Q: You had to give up on the novel you initially were working on...
...And it doesn't give a shit...
...Diaz: The evil of the father lasts...
...If you were a nerd computer geek in 1982, the amount of isolation you felt—at least what I experienced, or the kids I knew, the isolation they felt—was almost total...
...Q: Tell me about the women in the book...
...So that was the first part, the identification of a silence...
...Q: What about the actual writing process, because this is long form for you...
...He saw that I was losing my mind, not able to write, lost my one novel, going crazy...
...Diaz: I would not say posing, I would say just passing for...
...But then you're knocking your head against the wall all day long...
...How did you approach writing them...
...One day, we were hanging out and we were having drinks with some idiots...
...no one thought they were cool...
...We're accepted as long as we conform to what we are expected to be, and I'm sure that's not any different for anyone else...
...Love is the only thing—I don't want to say that "makes it bearable"— but I feel like without the possibility of love, this place would just devour us...
...Diaz: This thing almost killed me...
...How was it for you to tackle a novel...
...And I have these two very strong sisters who took up a lot of imaginary space in my life...
...Diaz: That sounds exactly like life...
...But there is a sense that it's not that simple...
...I had no concept until I was reading, got older, went traveling, and I was like, OK, my dad was a total copy of Trujillo...
...Diaz: I was writing a novel about a slightly futuristic American version of what we're living now...
...Diaz: This country has such little sense of itself sometimes, I'm astonished...
...Then you get so much focus that one day you might actually see...
...I want people to read this book and be like "Yo, this shit is terrible but my God, what a fucking smooch, what a kiss...
...Maybe if I help other people, it'll be easier for me...
...The U.S...
...They were ostracized to produce the identity that we see now, an identity where kids are into the Internet, into MySpace, into texting...
...When we sat down for this interview in June, Diaz was upbeat about the impending publication of the novel...
...But the greatest myth of all is what America is...
...When I was thinking about these women characters, no matter how bad a person I am—a bad writer, my limitations, my sexism, you know—the thought was, it would be useful as a writer to try to create a template for all the male writers, especially Dominican male writers, especially males of color, of how a writer can use seeing to create more nuanced representations of women...
...And I think what happened to me was that I was always being taught to look, but one day I started to see...
...We first met Oscar de Leon, Diaz's protagonist, in a 1996 short story in The New Yorker...
...We have blinded ourselves to the reality of what our country is...
...So he came to mind, and the little fucker wouldn't let go...
...There's a sense among many writers of color that the most invisible figure that was sitting between all of us was the nerd...
...Diaz: I was really drawn to thinking about the women in my life...
...America is one of the biggest myth-making countries, whether we're talking about how many books are published, how many movies we make...
...And he— along with his clan—is cursed...
...That taught me that you can't be a human without seeing...
...Q: Let's talk a little bit about immigration...
...But it's hard for us to see...
...I mean he grew up in the military, during the Trujillato...
...Where you been...
...You can be from a crazy, fucked up background, but I like to read at night...
...The people you're going to attack are the people who are helping you, who you are holding it together with...
...Q: It seems like Oscar's family loves him but doesn't accept him and is constantly correcting him and trying to redefine him...
...People just couldn't wait to get back to sleep...
...THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW by Juleyka Lantigua Junot Diaz After catapulting to literary stardom with his brilliant short-story collection, Drown, more than ten years ago, Junot Diaz is back with his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao...
...ed street-slang vernacular, the novel reads like an intimate and animated conversation with a friend...
...We're completely new to our parents...
...Q: It looked to me like the relationships between the women are the hardest ones, the most relentless ones, the most unforgiving ones...
...And the final thing is diaspora: We all got held together...
...Q: What about our monster, Trujillo...
...that I had imagined was nowhere near as crazy and as incredibly damaging and brutal and indifferent as the U.S...
...Written in Diaz's elevatJuleyka Lantigua is a writer and journalist based in New York...
...this was the figure who shadows all of us in our attempts to live out this excessive masculinity...
...Anyway, 9/11 happened some years into the process, and I was like, OK, I don't have a novel...
...Q: It's been eleven years since Drown...
...I wrote at least, no exaggeration, 2,000 pages to get a decent 350 pages...
...Q: After Hurricane Katrina, people were saying, "Wait, parts of the United States are a Third World country...
Vol. 71 • September 2007 • No. 9
