Comments on: Junot Diaz Doesn’t Like Me, Part Two

By: Rami

Rami — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 11:40:17 +0000

(My apologies for the lengthy posts. Enjoyed reading your blog.)

By: Rami

Rami — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 11:39:21 +0000

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.

By: Rami

Rami — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 10:39:22 +0000

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.

By: Zach

Zach — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 06:15:23 +0000

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.

By: Phil

Phil — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 23:05:41 +0000

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

By: frank

frank — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 03:22:55 +0000

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.

By: Phil

Phil — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 03:05:48 +0000

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?