After his reading and talk, Junot Diaz talked with staff writer Claire Greenwood about his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, giving his Spanish-speaking readers a “cultural reflection,” and why we’re all a “a fucking big fuck you to the dominant American narrative.”
Claire Greenwood: Can you tell me about writing your book? Did it develop a lot from the beginning of your idea?
Junot Diaz: Certainly, I mean it began with this idea of telling the story of one family and the difficulty that they faced finding love and it soon expanded… to try to describe the contours of Dominican post-war history from a very narrow point of view. I mean, really the transformation of the book from the beginning to the end was tremendous.
CG: How do you feel about winning the Pulitzer?
JD: Oh, I mean it’s wonderful stuff, but at the same time it’s been a year, I don’t even know, you know… I think the reaction to any large event in your life becomes more apparent the farther away you are from the event. So right now I’m just happy, like “woo woo!” but in three or four years I’ll probably understand what it really signified.
CG: [SPOILER ALERT] In “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” there’s a lot about sex and sexuality, and my take on the ending is that what happens to Oscar is okay because he ends up having sex. Was that your intention?
JD: Oh my God no! I think that’s the problem with reading the book [in a certain way]… the book gives you one tale, one version of the story. Reading is participatory, but this book especially invites you to participate and to organize the story the way that you think most makes sense. Yunior, the narrator, is kind of a fucked up, cruel individual in many ways, no matter how charming and brilliant he is. He ends the novel with that, but do you really want to trust Yunior and what really matters to him is that he gets laid? [A bunch of girls leave the chapel and say goodbye. Diaz yells, Cuidase mucho! He then murmurs, “trouble.”] And so therefore I think there are other endings of the book that a reader who participates in the book, who plays the game of the book can create that are far more meaningful and far more troubling.
CG: Lola, Beli and La Inca are quite different in terms of sexuality, education and tradition. Do you see one as a more positive depiction? Do you object to the question of positive representation?
JD: Well… those are simplistic formulas that have very little to do with how we interact as human beings. I mean, the person that we think is a positive person turns out to be a child molester. The idea is that, when I read literature, what I want to come into contact with is humans who therefore – humans in their struggles, humans in their challenges – who therefore remind me and illuminate my own humanity. And so I don’t think any of these characters are meant to be positive or negative. I think that they’re meant to be fucked up, complicated and human, and also hopefully compelling because of these things.
CG: Who is the man without a face?
JD: It’s up to the reader.
CG: Okay…
JD: Well I mean I’m not just saying that to be coy, I think that there’s a couple of characters, both the mongoose and the man without a face, that depending on how you read them get a very different book. If you want to read them as folkloric, that’s wonderful. If you want to read them as figments of a damaged imagination, because they only appear when people are getting beaten up or crushed or delusional, that’s another way. If you want to read it the way the book argues, with science fiction elements, that’s an entirely different book.
CG: Do you view writing bilingually as empowering for certain readers?
JD: I don’t know, I think that… like I said earlier, the shock of self-recognition for communities that are never given a chance to recognize themselves is a wonderful thing, but I don’t know if I can say much more than that.
CG: I ask because we read your book in class, and I was asking people what questions they wanted to ask you and someone was like, “Does he know that it’s a giant ‘fuck you’ to the U.S dominant narrative?”
JD: Well, sure, I mean yeah. But aren’t we all a fucking big fuck you to the dominant American narrative? I think a Dominican immigrant of African descent with rather critical and progressive standpoints certainly makes that “fuck you” explicit. But almost all of us fall outside of the dominant narrative and many of us, whether we do it actively or passively are attempting to widen that definition so that we can find a place in it.
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