I listen to WAMC, our local NPR affiliate, on the way to and on the way home from work every day. If I’m not listening to that, I’ve got “Stadium Arcadium” playing in its entirety, again, or I’ve got the six-disc packed with my renewed fascination with the 80s metal that helps me to remember where I was when I was 16: Megadeth, Metallica, Judas Priest, Queensryche…
Anyway, it’s freezing cold in the Berkshires right now, and my wife and I are working just to heat our house, it seems, so every morning I go out and start our cars about fifteen, twenty minutes — an hour — before we have to leave to take our kids to daycare and go to our teaching jobs in the morning. Every frigging morning my wife has some pop music station playing on her radio, and I have to dig through the presets to find NPR for her, because, Jennet, that’s what you should be listening to on the way to work…that, or Motley Crue, or Ratt, or Slaughter, or Night Ranger, or Ozzy when he wasn’t an Osbourne, or…
So last week, on a WAMC program called Vox Pop, there was a feature on blogging, and I learned that I’m probably doing all of this the wrong way. I like writing something that approaches an entire essay, or a feature. Vox Pop says my entries should be short and frequent.
…or Anthrax, Dokken, Whitesnake…
The Junot Diaz appearance was scheduled for a place in the Yale community called La Casa, an organization that supports the Latino population and culture at Yale. Mindy and I text messaged when I got into New Haven, and by the time I was done winding my way through the city streets, I found myself parked right in front of the converted apartment house where Junot would be speaking. I had been racing down Interstate 91 in an attempt to arrive way before the crowds, and I knew it would be a terrible trip through Hartford, because it’s always a terrible trip through Hartford. For all the talk about Connecticut being the bastion of upper middle class American living, Hartford and New Haven are two of the worst cities I’ve ever been to.
The one story I love to tell about New Haven is the time a bunch of us packed into my friend Braulio’s Hyundai and took the ferry from Port Jefferson to Bridgeport, getting sauced on the way, then the short trip to New Haven to see a band called Paw. My friend, Paul, whose father made a point of buying 8, 10, 12 CDs a week, way before Napster, Kazaa, and Limewire, turned us on to Paw, and there was no greater obsession for me, during that six-month span in 1992 or 1993, than Paw. We followed them everywhere, without being overzealous pothead Phish or Grateful Dead fans.
Hey, what does a Deadhead at a Dead concert say after the drugs wear off?
Dude, this music sucks.
Paw didn’t suck. Paw was fantastically awesome and excellent, because their music was moody, like we all were. It was gentle at times, beautiful and melodic, and then it beat the shit out of you. I remember skipping an obviously important class at Stony Brook to drive into Queens to see them at a record store. They were going to do an acoustic set, and I was surrounded by 15 or 20 high school kids waiting for them to stumble out of a touring rig. It was one of those times I looked around and thought…
So anyway, we packed in the Hyundai to go to Toad’s in New Haven to see Paw. We talked Braulio into parking at the first spot he could find, even if it wasn’t a parking space, and he got a hefty ticket afterward. There was an opening band, and the only audience was us. We sat there and listened to them, and at the end of the set, the drummer threw his sticks out to us, the crowd, like six of us. No one went for the sticks and they bounced and rolled all the way to the back of the wall where they remained for as long as we were there. I love telling that story, but I don’t feel like you’re laughing hard enough. It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, and I thought it was so hilarious right away that I think I began reminiscing about the event ten minutes after it happened….aloud. “Guys, remember that fucking drummer, etc. The drumsticks??”
I’m not telling you about the rest of the night: about Keith almost getting us thrown out because he wanted to crowd surf with only ten or eleven people there to lift and push him along; about Tom at Tokyo Spa.
Mindy was up the street at the Salvation Army, because that’s what college kids do, even Yale students. I called her and she walked down to meet me. She’s 18, brilliant, and a college student, but she still looks the same as she did in seventh grade. I mean, seriously, she looks like a lost little girl roaming around the big city. She’s far from lost, though. Last year she won a national philosophy bee, and she was on the front page of the USA Today Life section. She won by answering, extemporaneously, the question “Which is more powerful, fear or hope?”
The inside of this La Casa venue was warm and hospitable, and Mindy and I were basically the first ones there. I scrambled to the front to set my gargantuan backpack down on a chair so I’d have a great seat for the Junot Diaz appearance. They served us food while we waited, and while I was grabbing for another empanada or corn chips, I noticed that everyone who walking through the door was Latino. I am not Latino; I’m white. I started getting a little uncomfortable for no good reason other than I seemed to be the only white person there.
Junot Diaz shows up. He’s a small guy. I mean he’s a short, thin man. I wasn’t disappointed by any stretch, but I guess I misled myself by thinking his big prose and tough stories made him a bigger man than he actually was. I’ve had this problem a couple of times. The other day I saw an ad on television that featured NASCAR driver Jeff Burton. He was standing next to that bunch of guys who are also in that commercial with broadcaster Joe Buck. You know the guys who touch Buck’s throat and ask him to say “swing and a miss” so they can feel what his vocal cords do? Well, even if you don’t know them, they never seemed like unusually tall guys, but Jeff Burton looked to be about 5′1” or 5′2” standing next to them. How can any NASCAR driver be that tiny? I’m 5′9”, or 5′10” in my shoes, so I always wear my shoes, even to bed if I can. I don’t exactly know why I was disappointed with Junot Diaz’ and Jeff Burton’s height, but it’s something I’m willing to keep in reserve when I’ve run out of other psychosis to report on Thursdays, 6PM.
Junot Diaz spoke a lot about the Latino experience, and it seemed as if this was an important appearance for him and the students. It appeared as if Yale were making a concerted effort to reach out to the Latino community and that La Casa existed to make the population feel comfortable about Yale. I wasn’t thinking about any of this, though, while I had my hand up during the question and answer period. I wanted to talk to him about his work and approach it more from a class standpoint. Junot is an Associate Professor of Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT in Cambridge, and I wanted his perspective on being someone who grew up poor, without privilege, and suddenly has found himself in the middle of a privileged academic community. I was interested in knowing his level of discomfort with this, because I feel like that while I’m not Dominican, I always felt a kinship with Diaz and his work because I write about the same kinds of things and felt, still feel, a lot of the same anxiety associate with a man’s place in social and economic circles.
After feeling ignored for a few minutes, he finally called on me. I had interacted with the discussion about ten minutes before when he prompted the audience…oh, the audience was about fifty or so people, packed into a living room sized place, and we were seated on metal folding chairs…”Tell me some stereotypes you’ve heard about writers…”
I had my answer all ready, and I thought it was particularly brilliant because, unbelievably, no one else had even considered asking it. My sterotype was, and I even incorporated myself into it: “If I’m a writer, then I’m involved in the first of three or four marriages right now…”
I thought it was a good sterotype. Writers get divorced all the time. I’m a Catholic writer who is madly in love with his wife, and let’s be serious: I’m really not quite accomplished enough to qualify as a writer who can be a part of the stereotype, so I’m not getting divorced, but still, I thought it was a fair point. Junot Diaz brushed it over like I’d given a wrong answer and he needed to move on before I began to feel stupid. I knew exactly what it was about because I’m a teacher, and I’ve done it myself…
So when I felt like I was being ignored, I reflected on that little episode, and started getting nervous. My discomfort manifested itself into a bumbling three and a half minute explanation of what I was trying to ask him. He felt my struggle and it seemed like he wanted to perpetuate it by repeating that he didn’t understand what I was asking him. It got to the point where I felt so worn out and embarrassed that I resorted to the self-deprecation I often exhibit when I’m feeling out of place. At that precise moment, I felt old and white and like I made a mistake by showing up, probably what a lot of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, etc. feel like regularly. It wasn’t fun.
7 Comments
Did he read from a new, unpublished novel? I once heard him read from a still forthcoming novel about a young Dominican girl, possibly a servant. But I never did hear him read from the sci-fi epic he talked about in interviews, the one with the cyborg Dominican.
Did Junot give any indication as to when his next book will be published?
He read a short excerpt from Drown and focused on the Latino students and their experience at Yale. No questions were asked about the next book, and he gave no clues. Thanks for writing.
Apparently the short story “Oscar Wao” from the New Yorker, a couple of years back, is going to be a chapter of his new book, published later this year. I wasn’t a huge fan of the story, but it will be good to finally see Junot Diaz’s novel.
http://writersatcornell.blogspot.com/2007/02/interview-junot-diaz.html
Hey there,
I was actually looking to see if he has any speaking dates in NY and I found your blog. I think alot of your sentiments stem from your age. I took alot of latino and ethnic lit classes in college and right now I actually live in Harlem. I am white, but I am 23, I grew up in a relatively mixed area and went through college studying class and race and having an open dialogue with people of color and not of color. If you are older and didn’t have these experiences, I can see how you would feel out of place in the situation. I actually met Junot Diaz and talked with him when he lectured at my school and it was mostly latinos in the audience. He called on me when I had a question and we had a good discussion. I mean alot of your meeting him and your feelings may have been circumstantial. Maybe he didn’t see your hand? Maybe he didn’t have time to call on everyone? He is really nice and actually took my teacher and a group of students out to dinner after his reading. He is not prejudiced at all, it is unfortunate you had a bad experience at his reading but it shouldn’t effect your opinion of him or make you feel like you were excluded on the account of you being white.
You know, it’s a fair question, I think. I’m the child of immigrants and grew up “poor, without privilege,” as you put it. Reading Junot Diaz’s work, I often feel discomfitted when I stop to reflect on the author’s current position in the literary and academic world. That his standing has been afforded by representations (for consumption) of poverty and underprivilege causes no end of tension in my reading of Diaz. There’s an aggressive focus on what’s exotic and convoluted about growing up immigrant in Diaz’s work, on what makes immigrants “others.” The problem is that immigrant families are almost always more than the sum of their poverty and bad luck, and that we’re never completely divorced of being American (or of the desire to be American) to some extent. Clearly, Diaz has become very much an American success. Yet he fails to acknowledge the parts of us that tend to hybridize and complicate us, in favor of those that (on the surface, at least) make us colorful and different and consumable as texts. His work tends to want to undo the pains of immigration, even scrambling backwards into history to point out where all the trouble begins. Ironically, he also tends to gloss over the forward-looking drive that fuels immigrant struggle, though his own life clearly illustrates it. This is only one (still impoverished, though improving) commenter’s opinion, of course.
To clairfy, the idea of “hybridity” that I address above refers to the immigrant’s attempts to “become” American by absorbing America. Diaz does acknowledge that we (immigrants) exist as hybrids–linguistic, cultural–but only, it seems to me, as passive hybrids, hybrids by circumstance and not by choice. Few of Diaz’s characters struggle to break free of circumstance the way Lola does, in TBWLOOW. The minute Lola appears, therefore, the book comes alive for me. She’s as close to a true portrait of the hybrid immigrant that I am familiar with as Diaz offers. But even she has to endure being hurled back through space and history, back to DR. The past catches up with her, as it always does in Diaz’s world. Her brother, who also tries to impose the beginnings of some kind of will of his own on the world, is entirely annihilated for it.
In Diaz’s world, people are caught in their circumstances, fallen into their lives as if manipulated by forces with little regard for their wills, the past weighing heavily and working to “drown” them (to pull them under.) To be sure, Diaz is self-consciously explicit about the pull of the past in TBWLOOW. Along the way (in style, in voice, in characterization) the focus is always shifting again onto difference and otherness. Everything is differentiation, pushing the immigrant further and farther from their Americanness. This differentiation tends to truncate and flatten the immigrant, leaves out references to what I call “the forward-looking drive” fueling immigrant struggle, above. The part of the immigrant that wants to be free of the forces, that tries to impose immigrant will and to grab for the American brass ring, gets few nods from Diaz. To fill in the blanks left by that truncated depiction, and to offset the heaviness of the pathos, Diaz throws in plenty of “otherness” and color. What emerges is a fascinating wirhlygig world where characters on their surfaces remind me of people I’ve known, except that something vital has been left out and strings attached to them to make them “perform” for an audience. That Diaz chooses to ignore a substantial part of what I understand as “the immigrant experience”, over and over in his work to this point, poses a growing problem as his success and acclaim as an American writer increase.
(My apologies for the lengthy posts. Enjoyed reading your blog.)
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