Hilton Als: Junot and I are physically fucked up. He's standing because he has a terrible back issue, and I've had a shoulder issue, so we are a fine pair tonight, but we are going to make a lot of fun for you. I wanted to say this in front of Juno because it will embarrass him, and thus relax him.
Among the many, many things I wish could do, I wish I could write a story like Junot Diaz, because his stories contain so much you don't where they start and where they begin, like nature, but in the end I don't want to write a Junot Diaz story, because I want Junot to write his own stories. Tales that are so emotionally specific everyone can relate to them, even if they aren't Dominican, or straight, or doing crazy things in love.
I hate hackneyed terms like "universal" but in Junot's case it's true; he's a universal writer, or, more specifically, a universalist. He wants to see people as they are and as they relate to other people, but he's also a poet, who likes to miniature a situation that speaks volumes.
In 1996, Junot published his landmark collection, Drown, and then in 2007 he published his first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. And in 2012 her published This Is How You Lose Her, his second collection of stories. I'm grateful for all these works, and I'm grateful Junot's friendship, and humor and politics and commitment, an acknowledgement that we are all sort [inaudible 00:01:49] off. It's what we do with our difference that matters, and with that Junot has done a great deal.
Ladies and gentlemen, Junot Diaz.
Junot, I thought I'd get to something that I think reviewers who are generally hemmed in by political correctness tend to avoid in your work, and that's the pato. I'm a pato, and I don't feel demeaned. I don't feel demeaned or criticized by this epithet in your work since I come from the same world.
Can you talk to us a bit about the machismo in your culture, and what it may, or may not be an expression of?
Junot Diaz: Yeah. Thank you, Hilton. First, I want to thank The Strand for having us--
Hilton Als: Yes.
Junot Diaz: --and I wanted to thank Hilton from taking time off from an incredibly schedule. Anybody who reads The New Yorker knows this dude does all the work over there, and two-thirds of the brain of the whole fucking operation, so it's wonderful to have him here. Thank you all for coming out on this absolutely miserable evening, for real. I was like, guys. Thanks a lot, honestly.
I met some people coming up ... I'm always so embarrassed when I have to do a public event. I met some people coming up the elevator, and I just want to hide and apologize for dragging them out.
I think the question is a foundational one. Certainly it was important to me. I always thought it was really interesting because part of, I guessed, when I think about the political unconsciousness of masculinity, its queerness.
The first book I ever wrote was kind of a first essay, a first pass at a specific kind of masculinity, and so I thought like, "Ha-ha, I'm going to name the book after the queerest story in the collection," and from everything I've seen, I don't think a single critic ever mentioned it in any popular publications.
Hilton Als: I didn't see it.
Junot Diaz: It was absolutely absent. It was weird, it was just an obvious lacuna, so I think that it's something that I'm deeply interested in. The project continues in Oscar Wao, you don't got to be a scholar to see Oscar is a very queer subject, and I just ... I don't know, I just think it's so important, because it's like I can't imagine masculinity without its tissue that it uses to prevent itself from thinking about its own queerness. I mean, masculinity comes with a beard attached, so that it could pretend what it's doing is really, really straight.
As an artist I really was interested in that and how it plays itself out, especially in the kind of culture that I grew up in. My Dominican culture is no one else's, guys. I grew up in an absolutely tiny, granularly, particular place and time, with a particular set of people. There was no universalizing claim to my Dominicanness, and I hope people get that shit. In the Dominican culture that I came up with, of which there's probably 22 billion of them, yeah. Separate cultures going on simultaneously, this was such a present discussion that it just felt like, as an artist, I'd be like a real fucking lame ass, if I didn't jump into it.
Hilton Als: I remember one of the reasons that the question came up for me, was when we were having Chinese food around Christmas time, and you were showing me pictures of friends you had visited in the DR ... and there was a table of queens.
Junot Diaz: Yeah.
Hilton Als: I said, "Oh those queens look so nice, are they your friends?" You said, "Kind of my only friends down there, because they can do sensitivity and then they can also play into the culture at the same time." It was a great discussion that we were having about ... it was a kind of drag, right?
Junot Diaz: Yeah.
Hilton Als: Masculinity as a kind of drag?
Junot Diaz: No ... without any question. I mean, without any question and I think you take that on and the new book you have coming up, there's aspects of that as well, and the way you raise it too. I think that in this case, especially with life in Santo Domingo, there's this kind of performative, hyper masculine spaces where you can't have an openly gay friend. Yeah. That's the rule. Of course the point is, you're supposed to break all that shit.
Santo Domingo is just one place, like where I grew up in New Jersey, my particular neighborhood in Santo Domingo, if you're ... if people think, "Oh, you're hanging out with somebody who is ... you're hanging out with a queen." They're going to be like, "Oh, you're gay."
Hilton Als: Right.
Junot Diaz: It's a way to patrol this very actively, and the same thing was in New Jersey. It was like this kind of ... the homosocial was okay, as long as we called it straight. Right? It's like it's okay that you can just get naked and wrestle with your boys, but it was actually called a sport, that's all right.
The DR brings it ... For me, my life in Santo Domingo makes it really, really explicit, because I think what you're saying is very true. I feel like there's ... the friends that I have down there, who sort of have borne the full wrath of a culture, for me, tend to be more interested in discussing things in explicit terms. I don't know about any of you guys, if you're an artist the least helpful friends are people who say, "I don't think there's racism." I mean, it's okay that they're fucking family members.
Hilton Als: Right.
Junot Diaz: That sounds like my entire family, they're like, "Racism, I just don't like niggers," you know, that's all right. I mean who ... you can't fucking disown your family in the ways you should be able to.
Hilton Als: Right. Also one of the things, to support what you're saying, and it's I know it's a phrase that often makes me uncomfortable, when I hear it or read it, we've talked about this, but it's indigenous to that culture. I remember my brother is very light-skinned, and my West Indian grandmother would say, "Hilton, get out of the sun, you've had enough." Now this Bajan culture and Dominican culture in terms of the color scale can be deeply wounding if you don't realize. . . It took many years of growing up and thinking that this was some internalized craziness that had happened.
Throughout your books, you're always talking about the color scale, and the fact of the story and [inaudible 00:09:08], blah-blah-blah, I don't know the ... I can't sweat the whole titles.
Junot Diaz: Who cares? We got it.
Hilton Als: I think that one of the things that is so brave you is saying it, and then letting the characters illustrate it.
Junot Diaz: You know, we come from cultures, again, just from ... because I know Hilton, I'm not jumping to conclusions about some abstract culture of Hilton's. I know Hilton's, we come from background where people, in some ways, were echo chambers for a lot of the kind of cultural, racial defaults. People would say wild things explicitly, and I just thought it would be big again, it would be such a lame cop out if my characters weren't half as frank as my uncles. I always say my--
Hilton Als: One of the tias is grabbing one of the character's balls by way of introduction.
Junot Diaz: Yeah, man. I've more emails about that from dudes I know, who are like, "Yow, my aunts grab my balls too." Dude, it takes--"
Hilton Als: It takes a village.
Junot Diaz: It takes five genders. It takes five genders to raise this particularly, malevolent form of masculinity that we tend to produce so, like, efficiently. I just think that, it was just interesting for me, because I had a parent ... Listen, who give a fuck, you could take two people who look identical in skin color, and my mom can distinguish with them at the molecular level. My mom will be like, "That motherfucker is lighter," and I don't give a fuck. With everything that we've lost in America, all the kind of vocabulary we've lost in America, to talk about race, is very omnipresent in the Caribbean.
Hilton Als: Yes.
Junot Diaz: We've lost so much vocabulary to talk about race. We don't even have a conversation about race, and we've lost it. Yet, in the Caribbean, there's at least 12 terms for people ... just that would come up in my mind for people's skin color in the neighborhood I grew up in. I think that this, in some ways is useful because it helps when it comes time to approach questions of privilege. People don't claim amnesia.
Hilton Als: Right.
Junot Diaz: People can think of people like my uncles as super backwards because they didn't go to fucking Ivy League schools, but they don't cop to any of that ridiculous, liberal amnesia, "Oh, it's not race, it's class." I'm like, "Motherfucker you can't class without race, it's called Coloniality," but these people that they call ... that they would just come right off the bat and be like, "Oh, this guy is ignorant," my uncles would never make those claims.
They're like, "Yes. It's about Black people." It's that level of frankness for all we claim about it that we say it's regressive and messed up, I'm sorry, that's a better starting point than the constant elision of the sort of liberal moment we have now.
Hilton Als: Do you think that is why the critical discourse around your work hasn't been as substantial as the work itself?
Junot Diaz: Again it's like, Hilton, it's talking about ... it's always weird, it's talking about--
Hilton Als: Relatives you haven't met yet.
Junot Diaz: It's just weird, it's like when I listen to ... I have these great cousins, and they're like: yo, I should have better-looking chicks that I do. I hear them say this, I'm like "Oh, shit. That's a weird statement to make." It's like, "Oh, I should have better critics than I do." You know, b-- [crosstalk 00:12:59]--
Hilton Als: You can have better girls and better critics.
Junot Diaz: Woof. Yeah, I think for most straight men the problem isn't that we don't have women worth us. The problems is that we have women 10 times worth us, but the thing is, I think the question you're saying is, as far as I think of people o color in this country as artists. I think in general, whenever I read work about people of color as artists, it is so overly simplified. We tend to be reduced to the cultural element, so somebody will trod out a Spanish word to describe our ... I mean, how many reviews are like where a non-Spanish-speaking person, will trod out a Spanish word to attempt to describe what the fuck I do?
It's like watching people who can't dance salsa dance salsa. Or it will be reduced to simplistic visions of, "Oh, these works of art, this artist is talking about this crucial moment. Or taking about the problematic of race," they use these terms that mean nothing, because they want to approach what exactly a person is getting at in their work. The reason they don't want to do this is because a part of the problem is ... again, if White artists were discussed along racial terms as often as people of color, we would be a better country for it.
I never see a White dancer, discussing how their Whiteness impacts their dance. I never see any White artist, the first question out an interviewer's mind, "Have you experienced racism?" But as an artist of color--
Hilton Als: The experienced dancer is--
Junot Diaz: --it's incredible. It's incredible the amount of times these questions get asked. I'm always like, if whenever I get ... a White interlocutor who asked me, "Have you experienced racism?" I'm like, "Have you been racist lately?"
I don't know, there's stuff that's going on, but again, I think that one of the best things about art, as anyone who has ever studied a Victorian text knows, is that all of us, the future comes faster than we imagine, and there is a future coming up of young artists and young critics and young scholars who are thinking in ways that make the current conversations about our scholarship look incredibly just reductive.
Hilton Als: It very interesting that you go to this ideas of coming up in time, because we've had several conversations about time travel, and you were talking about one of the reasons that you liked, or love science fiction by people like Octavia Butler, and Samuel Delany, was because they were talking about time travel that, literally, have gone from a slave culture to talking to hundreds of people at this Strand Bookstore. How does that happen?
That time-travel element of being one or two generations away from the characters in your books who were living below subsistence level, to this, how does that affect you, as Junot?
Junot Diaz: How do you narrativize it? I always think of that question, "How do you narrativize being in squint range of ... I'll sit at my Christmas table, and I'm in squint range of my grandmother, who basically grew up in a Proto Medieval, almost slavery sort of background in the Dominican Republic. Working as a tenant farmer, just as terrifying kind of subsistence, and I'm squinting at her in one eye, and then I'm squinting at my little brother who is U.S.-born, a Marine Combat Veteran, who sounds like someone turned the TV to Fox Channel and broke the dial. I'm thinking, how do we narrativize--
Hilton Als: That was fucking funny, Junot.
Junot Diaz: Oh, yeah. We'll smoke about it later.
Hilton Als: Yes.
Junot Diaz: How do we narrativize it, and what you're asking I think is, "How do you create a self that takes both of those people in--?
Hilton Als: Those who can stand it.
Junot Diaz: Yeah. Takes both of them in--
Hilton Als: Right, how do you stand it? How do you physically and emotionally take it, because you've catapulted yourself through artistry into another realm. This goes back to the time-travel metaphor.
Junot Diaz: I think ... it's really helpful for people to assemble selves not always deploying realism. This is true. Realism cannot account for my little brother and my grandmother, but Octavia Butler science fiction can. Samuel Delany's generic experiments can explain them. I read books of Samuel Delany and that range is present, not only present but the unbearable, what is unbearable about trying to hold the two together in one place. I think that even as person like me, it helps not to have exclusively realism as the only paradigm to understand yourself. You know?
Hilton Als: Right. Do you think that the last story you published in The New Yorker, "Monstro," do you think that that was a moving towards a surrealism that explains things better than you felt you had before?
Junot Diaz: Oh, man, I like ... I wish I had had about four more years on that story. I was on deadline.
Hilton Als: It was amazing.
Junot Diaz: Thank you, but honestly four more years on that would have--
Hilton Als: Can we just support him on Monstro--
Junot Diaz: Just stop. Hold it.
Hilton Als: --if you guys read it. I mean it.
Junot Diaz: You're very kind.
Hilton Als: I mean it.
Junot Diaz: No ... but I think it's better to sit four extra years on any piece, it's better that way. I think there are different approaches, I think that--
Hilton Als: I want you to get paid though.
Junot Diaz: Okay. Hilton keeps it ... Hilton will keep you in insurance you guys, which, considering how most of our artists end is not a bad push. The applause today: toothless with insurance tomorrow.
Hilton Als: Right.
Junot Diaz: No. It's true, we have a wonderful way of doing this, so I just ... I do think it's not ... I wouldn't say in advance, but it was more like trying to see if ... what would it look like if I was more explicit about not using realism. Where, with my novel, Oscar Wao, I sort of obscured how little the genre of realism is deployed in the novel. I sort of hid it. I think someone could read Oscar Wao, and be completely convinced they've read a realistic novel with a couple eruptions of like, "Oh, yeah. These weird moments," but fuck, I don't give a fuck about talking about mongooses, this shit was a novel."
In this case I want to see if it's possible to get similar effects without obscuring the pedigree. I feel like Oscar Wao is like octoroon cousin of yours, who doesn't pass for White, but they don't deny it when people treat them real well. Let's see if I can take that like you say, take the drag off, see what happens.
Hilton Als: I was wondering about that in terms of when you say, pedigree. When you began writing your first fiction, did you know or was it a process of discovery that you were going to focus on your particular world, and I'm wondering why modern writers of color and Philip Roth are particularly drawn to that pedigree? It's a great word.
Junot Diaz: Part of it was, I certainly, I came up as a young activist. First of all, how many Latinos are here?Dominicans?
Male: Over here.
Junot Diaz: All right, [foreign language 00:21:38]. "Oh hi, negra, oh, my, god, I didn't see you there." I don't know how many of you guys were in your college, Latino organizations, if your had LALSA, or if you LUCHA or if you had a SALSA, or if you LAL, or an LAO, whatever the fucking organization ... I was in all those organizations, and I was a young activist, that's basically who I was all through college, that was my identity. It continues to be, many ways, my default identity.
Like when I wake up, you know when you wake up and you don't know what room you are or country you're in. The one thing I always know, I'm like, fight the man. I'm like, "Get 'em." Where it came from, my concepts of what I was going to write about came from being the kind of ... the reason they're trying to shut down all the ethnic studies programs. They're trying to shut down all the ethnic studies programs in this country, because they don't want to produce students like they produce out of ethnic studies programs, who begin by saying, "Yo, it's fucked up, we are not talking about us." I think I'm a product of these programs, and they are the ones who aimed me directly towards writing about this tiny bullshit neighborhood that nobody really knew or thought about when I was growing up. It's an old pattern but one that's super-reliable. You think, we are so erased ... you know this, it's like if you're person of color, if you're a woman, if you're from a poor family, if you're from a rural family. If you're from a family who work like dogs and never got any respect or share the profits, you'll know that 99 percent of your stories ain't been told, in any fucking medium.
Yes, we still have to be taught to look and to tell our stories. For many of us, that's something that we have to stumble our way through. It's despite the utter absence of us, it's still an internal revolution to say, "Wait a minute, we are not only worthy of great art, but the source of great art." For many of us it takes a lot of work to get there.
Hilton Als: Carol Walker told me that it takes many hours when she goes into the studio to claim it, to claim the space, to say that it's okay for her to make art. Just going back to what you were saying, I'd like to, if you can describe the process and the stumbling. Did you feel that fiction would be the genre or were you working in other kinds ... were you writing other kinds of genres?
Junot Diaz: No. No. I always did fiction. I always wanted to write ... I belong to a ... again all of us who've had ... all of us who were aware of their parents' infidelities when you were young, if you're aware of that, you have just ... your cosmology begins with this concept that your parents are real big liars. Like my cosmology begins with this constant deception, and so of course I always wanted to write about deceivers.
Hilton Als: Wow.
Junot Diaz: People who were wearing masks, and fiction felt more useful simply, it was like, "I was that literal as a kid." It was like, "I live fiction, let me write fucking fiction." It started there and it seems it's going to end there. I was always terrible in essay form, whether it's confessional or critical, because in essay form you can't ... the whole thing can't be a lie, right? My idea of an essay would be to write about a book that's never been written. Or to draw a complete, ridiculous conclusion, and when everybody checks the footnotes, the problem with essay not fiction--
Hilton Als: Something Borhesian like that?
Junot Diaz: Yeah. The thing nonfiction is people would just be like, "You're full of it dude. The lie shows really quick. Unless you work for The Times, it's hard to just constantly produce. Well you know what I mean. Once you get under the fence people think, "Oh, well the rubric itself gives you a certain amount of room to lie," but I think in fiction I could lie on multiple levels; which is always what my family felt like, so I felt at home.
Hilton Als: Were there stories that you didn't ... that were just a sort of working out before you got the stories in Drown?
Junot Diaz: Yeah, certainly. I mean I had so many absurd stories in my first ... I had so many absurd stories they still hadn't mapped out what it meant ... For example I ... it seems silly, you guys, I just didn't know to scale living in Central New Jersey; I lived in Central New Jersey, we were the first Dominican families in the area. We grew up around a predominantly African-American community, we had some like poor Whites, and most of them were Irish immigrants, so my concept of Republican was not political party.
When I hear Republican just from my childhood, my first thought is like, "Yeah. Home rule," like real Irish political shit, and I couldn't figure out how to scale that, and how to scale family that existed in this really dense Dominican world at home. Then it was passing for Black out in the rest of the world. I had siblings who were phenotypically Black, they didn't look like me, I wasn't like, Terrorism Act-B, they looked African-American.
I couldn't figure out a way to scale it, and so my first fictions they all sounded like I was living in New York City, which is a very different world, because I was reading so many New York writers describing the Latino experience in New York in a really urban setting, and so it just--
Hilton Als: People like [Inaudible 00:27:46] or--?
Junot Diaz: Yeah--
Hilton Als: --who are you thinking of?
Junot Diaz: People like ... if you know guys know Edward Rivera who wrote Family Installments, probably one of the greatest memoirs is Family Installments. Again, if you want to know how I wrote my first book, you read Family Installments), because I just completely copied that book. Then some of the more classic folks, [Nicholas Mahmoud 00:28:11] who was a very big person, even those that were writing about Patterson, it still had a much more urban edge, and then [Terry Thomas 00:28:19], folks like that.
Those first 30 or 40 pieces were just ... I feel like in my first 30 or 40 pieces of writing a character was always robbing a bodega, like they were so stupid. No, for real. It was like I was an embarrassment to my own self, you know. I started out writing film scripts.
Hilton Als: Mm-hmm? I never knew that.
Junot Diaz: Yeah. Before I said the fiction, but fiction, even I wanted to do film scripts, and my few years I was writing film scripts, and those were even worse than anything that any human being could have imagined, and I gave that up very quickly.
Hilton Als: Where did you find your voice, when you knew that this was ... well, we never know, but when did you that this is good enough for me to send out to be published?
Junot Diaz: I didn't ever feel that, but I remember finding my voice when I remember writing a page that thrown out of Drown, but that in some ways was the guiding spirit of it. It will go back in if I ever write another book, was that my ... You know how everybody now wants to claim urban backgrounds, whether it's the fact, like fashion.
Have you noticed in fashion ... if I show you a bunch of pictures of what women were dressed like in 1992, and I show a bunch of pictures of what women are dressed like now, on every continent, fashion has been completely Latinized. Like all women are dressing like Latinas, for real. Don't make me bring the fucking slide projector out.
Hilton Als: Do you know that great quote of Truman Capote's, and he was being interviewed by Warhol, and Capote says, "I really like Bianca Jagger, and she has South American chic," and Warhol says, "What's that?" Truman says, "It's a Spanish adaptation of Negro culture."
Junot Diaz: Or, how about, "Just a Spanish continuation of Negro culture," because most of the cultures that we are talking about are deeply Africanized." I remember this one page that thrown out which was--
Hilton Als: Keep touching me, I like it.
Junot Diaz: Oh, you know. It's like, I had this one page, where I threw this thing out, which was I ... again, that whole claim, everybody is like, "Oh, I have family in the Bronx." Or, "Oh, my mom graduated from Brooklyn," everybody is now a New Yorker, but I remember every time we would have to visit my family in the Bronx or in East New York, my siblings would beg not to go.
Hilton Als: Right, right.
Junot Diaz: We would be like, "We do not want to fucking go." Like, "Yo, this shit was hell," and I didn't want to go. You couldn't go outside. People would always menace us when we would go to the store, and I remember writing that page up, and realize it was so different from say ... Anybody read that memoir Fresh Off the Boat, the new one Eddie--?
Male: Huang.
Junot Diaz: --Huang's, nobody has read that? That's like such a great ... Did you read it? Did you like it?
Male: I only read the first 20 pages before I gave it to my friend because she wanted it, and--
Junot Diaz: Honest man. All right, we'll use that as analysis. Again, there's been this whole tendency of everybody wants to take on this hip, urban culture, but I remembered as kids we were already part of that hip, urban culture, and then we didn't want to get stuck in the fucking Bronx. We were so honest at 11 and 12, we were like, "I don't want to go there." People beat you up bad, and I suddenly ... as soon as I had that, that scene I knew I had nailed my New Jersey moment, where we were Black and Latino. We had no identity issues about ... that we weren't or were, but we did not fucking want to go East New York, and we were honest. It wasn't now where everybody is like, "Yeah. My apartment, I'm a [inaudible 00:32:30], but you know, [Will Dean 00:32:30]. I love that.
Hilton Als: I didn't want to go there ... I didn't want to go there either and I grew up there.
Junot Diaz: You grew up there, yeah, you know the deal.
Hilton Als: Yeah.
Junot Diaz: I can always tell people who had ... Again, we have a rule about my friends, you could always tell people who didn't have a poor childhood, because they like talking about growing up poor. People with poor childhoods are like styling. They're just like, "I've got nothing to say to anybody."
Hilton Als: One of the things that beats so beautifully in Drown, and in all of your work again, goes back to this idea ... he has to stand now ... goes back to this idea, I think if you're an artist, the hardest thing is to survive the people that you come from. The people that you come from are the stories that you tell, often. Can you tell us a little bit about the family reaction to your first book?
Junot Diaz: Yeah. I think it's a wonderful thing ... not a wonderful, but I think it's really honest question and statement and recognition. Again, I think, depending on your childhood, if you had a childhood like mine, most of my friends had to protect their parents and the rest of us from their ambitions. Part of growing up with a certain background meant that you couldn't openly air your ambitions to people, because it would have been an enormous threat, and the first thing that you knew is that you would like, "I've got to protect my parents from my ambition."
I guess when I think of it I just ... I guess my family situation was always a heartbreaker irregardless of any of the ways my career turned out. I think we were always so ... I think the family dynamic internalized all the kind of craziness of growing up as an immigrant. There's so much ... immigration is so difficult as it is, but probably the worst way to take it on the chin is to turn it against each other.
Hilton Als: That's right.
Junot Diaz: It's weird. My family gets together ... we get together almost never, my immediate family, and when we get together it's always a heartbreaker. Like who is not talking to who. How my two brothers live in California as far away from the rest of the family as possible, they want as little contact with the family. It's all this awful, awful stuff, and I'll be honest, I think my family barely tolerates me, and part of the 'barely tolerates me' is that I should never speak about my art. That's like the price of admissions. If I want to go home and sit through Christmas dinner and not have a kind of just ... just meltdown, I should never, ever talk about it.
I'll lie, I'm a big old coward. I will completely ... I'll not tell the truth, I'm not completely a coward, it's guys, no matter who you are, you could stand up to a whole bunch of different stuff. It's sometimes really hard. I'm still auditioning for my family's love. I still hold out this kind of thing, like they'll be nicer if I play along, and I will lie. I won't lie, there are days I go home to my family, Christmas dinners, and I will pay the price just because I'm hoping that people will be nice.
I'll admit it. Guys, it's tough, man. Most of us, you wrestle with your family your life, and the people who don't, I think that's like the most blessed resource in the world, because the rest of us are still caught in a dynamic which doesn't leave much room for you to be very compassionate to yourself because you're so busy trying to fit into a schemata where everybody has decided, "If I'm shitty to you I'll live better."
Hilton Als: You know what's a profound though, Junot, is while that narrative is going on, and it's deeply painful, you were able to be open enough, and funny enough, and friendly enough, to find someone like me who was not so different, so we could make our own family.
Junot Diaz: Yeah. I think this is--
Hilton Als: That's a declaration of love.
Junot Diaz: That was for the [Turner 00:36:56] photo shoot.
Hilton Als: Yeah.
Junot Diaz: Those of us ... Again, those of us who have near misses of families, I think are like of us who just yearn for families. You see that this thing, this thing can work. Did you grow up in New Jersey? Again, Jersey people, anybody grew up around ...? If you grew up in New Jersey, chances are you grew up around Koreans, yeah? No, for real, I'm sorry, I grew up around Koreans. Why are you laughing?
So, I grew up around Koreans, and let me tell you something, if you guys know anything about that, national history. That is a national history that it's like the Caribbean in a day. It's like swoosh, compressed madness, and you realize, it's like I meet people, when I was growing up, whose families were the only reason they survived five years of starvation.
You get the sense that family can really work, and that family can do things for people that few other things can. Now that's not just fetishize family, because there are other relationships that can do the same thing, but I'm just arguing that when it works it has some strength, and so of course I'm a kid who is always looking for people that I can connect with profoundly. I'm willing to take the risk after you ... You get kicked around enough, two things, you either withdraw totally, or you say well, "I could take another kick." I was like, "I could take another kick."
Hilton Als: Also, at the same time, but this might work.
Junot Diaz: This might work, especially because ... come on you're the fucking man, if you think about ... Yeah, it's true though.
Hilton Als: Can I tell them some jokes we told each other about fathers this Christmas?
Junot Diaz: Oh, shit. I'm ready to hear these.
Hilton Als: My favorite was, Junot said, "Yo, your father was like my father, he would drive by the house in his car, and that was a visit."
Junot Diaz: Yes. That's so true.
Hilton Als: It was really true. Except my father didn't have the car.
Junot Diaz: Yeah. Again, it's a Jersey thing.
Hilton Als: Right.
Junot Diaz: With no train, a motherfucker starts saving for their cars when they're nine.
Hilton Als: Do you think that part of the struggle, all worth it, for Oscar Wao was learning how to become a public figure while you were involved in this private occupation of writing?
Junot Diaz: Oh no. I actually ... it's interesting, the best of it is I ... Again, guys, I wrote my first book, it was I could ... The sales to my first book will still convince any of you not to be a writer, it's also [inaudible 00:39:30]. In fact, my sales of Oscar Wao would convince most of you not to be writers, to be honest. My thing was that I published my first book and it got some notoriety among fiction wonks, those people who were into fiction, public school teachers, for real, and fucking Dominicans and allies. The Puerto Rican community, Cuban community, the Chicano community, that was it.
Really that was it, and so I had this great thing, where I had ... I wrote a book in 1996, and then that was it, I spent the next 11 years having like no career. I remember, it's like I had a six-year period where I didn't publish even a minor essay. It was awesome because I got this little burst of attention and then I proceeded to lose whatever ... when I hear my students talking, my students have all this professional language, they're all ready to be famous. They're like, "Yeah, you lost all your momentum." Okay, that's what we had.
Part of it, no, no, no; part of was ... Part of the experience of Oscar Wao was out-waiting my desire to sound like my student. In other words, I didn't want to hear myself saying, "You've got to publish this fast, you've got momentum. Strike while people know who you are. Hey, this would be a great time. If you wrote a really great novel now, as opposed to any time," and I remember spending at least five years just waiting for that voice to die.
True, I was writing the whole time, but I didn't write anything useful 'til that voice died. That voice no longer had control of the Board, where it was no longer saying, "Do this fast, or do this well." When I finally heard the voice go, "Well, you should just write the fucking bad book that you knew you were gonna write because you suck." I was like, "Go." For real.
Hilton Als: You press play now?
Junot Diaz: It was go, and it's the same thing. It took 16 years, there's repetition it took 16 years for This is How You Lose Her it or get done, and This is How You Lose Her, 16 years, because I had to keep wrestling with that voice. I had to wait for the moment that voice died so that I could write the next chapter. Then it would flare up, and then I wouldn't be able to work on the book again.
Hilton Als: There are other voices that intrude into your life in beautiful ways. We had gone to see The Central Park Five documentary.
Junot Diaz: Yeah.
Hilton Als: We were walking down Sixth Avenue, and all of a sudden I heard three girls screaming. I just thought, "Oh, it's New York and people are crazy," and I kept walking, but Junot heard them say, "Junot." The girl came ... it was like being with the Beatles, it was so exciting.
Junot Diaz: Come on. Come on, man.
Hilton Als: It was beautiful, and she said, "Junot, I've been waiting for so long, and your new book is out and I'm so happy for you."
Junot Diaz: That was that, yes, but that was also Dominican shit. That was like, real ... that was that, yeah. No [crosstalk 00:43:03]--
Hilton Als: Can you take that voice?
Junot Diaz: Nah.
Hilton Als: Okay.
Junot Diaz: Nah, because I don't think some of us guys ... everybody got their engine for why the work, and I think that the engine that propels me is the engine that doesn't want to be anybody's friend, and doesn't want popularity, doesn't want ... honestly, and I'm not joking, it's guys I'm not that bad a writer. I can write a short story collection in under 16 years. Do you know what I mean? It's just not ... you may trust me when I tell you, there's nothing wrong with my craft, it's just that none of those other voices produce the horrifying, deceptive intimacy that I need to tell my stories.
There has to be this voice, there has to be a presence in the book, that wants to tell the truth, because by telling the truth it reduces your faith and like for them, and by extension me. I guess I grew up in a post-dictatorship, dictatorship society, and anyone who has grown up in a post-dictatorship ... dictatorship society knows that the axis of [like 00:44:30] is how dictatorship survive. Becoming popular is part of what dictatorships hijack to keep themselves in power.
For me to write things from the same toxic axis that made the dictatorship that completely disfigured my family and my society, it just wasn't going to happen because my father was a Dominican Military Police Aparachick, he not only was emblematic of that culture, but he almost [psalmatized 00:45:06] it, and I lived in that culture where it was so much better to be liked because your shirt was ironed, and to be liked because you had a good posture, and it was just insane the way a military dictatorship is [like-ready]. You just ... honestly man-
Hilton Als: Something like The Autumn of the Patriarch, is a work of realism?
Junot Diaz: Unfortunately, and I think The Autumn of the Patriarch doesn't begin to get at because it takes the twilight of it--
Hilton Als: Mm-hmm (Affirmative). The quiet?
Junot Diaz: and the thing is, is that my experience of living in a post-dictatorship society is that everybody believes they are going to be the read-it article that gets pushed all the way up. There's this constant ... the like axis is just very, very powerful, and so I just needed to just tilt a different way. I needed to say, "Is it possible to say things, to be involved in a conversation with people where our relationship was determined by things more complicated than whether you like me or not."
Maybe the content of my communication would be in itself worthy of discussion irregardless of how you felt at an emotional level with the person bringing the news. Dictatorships are ... two things get quickly put together. They're like, the news you bring is the moral judgment about you, and this is the way you keep critics silent, because you basically say, "If you criticize the dictatorship, it's not only your thinking, your body is out of order, and this is why we must destroy your body."
Hilton Als: This writing is an act of defiance in the home and in the world?
Junot Diaz: This is the way I understand it, it's like a self-aggrandizing lunacy that helps me understand why I wait so long, and why I hear that voice so clearly. I am so desirous; I myself may be part of, because I was so desirous to want to play along with that with my father. I knew if I ironed my clothes everyday my father would like me really well, but my dad make a mistake and took me to the military prisons in the Dominion Republic that he worked in, and his games with me and my little brother, my big brother, was putting us in the cells and pretending to lock the doors and walk away.
I remember, this is like ... I remember my brother thinking this was the funniest thing, and I just remember looking around at the feces-covered walls and thinking, "We are now in the space of this culture." Even though I didn't have the language for it then, I knew I had ... this was home.
Hilton Als: Mm-hmm?
Junot Diaz: Like my dad was taking me to work, but he was also taking me home. I think that that had a profound ... that created in me a deep, visceral desire to attack a different way, because that's not the home I wanted to end up at. I was trying to figure out how do I ... despite the fact that I probably would have happily set up a torture prison if my dad would have let me. I was just thinking, "How could I ..." even with that impulse, "...how could I have pulled away?" I don't know, it was--
Hilton Als: How did you build your home?
Junot Diaz: I think part of it as you identified was in a family like mine were ... listen, how many ... Again, it's hard to describe my family without seeming completely made up, but in my family, how many fights you won in the leisurely-arranged boxing matches between all the kids in our neighborhood, and how many bullets you nail to the [inner 00:49:09] of the target during our Saturday rifle range outing.
In our family that got you love, and so my escape from that weird regime was trying to read. It was weird, it's like being a nerd was an act of escape in my family, because everything else was like, "Shoot guns and get punched by your neighbors."
Hilton Als: I think that the ... just to, because I know you have to do this other stuff here tonight, but just to say that the reading as an act of aggression and salvation, parents who don't read, who don't have any access to that stuff, often think the child is putting up a wall.
Junot Diaz: Oh, yeah.
Hilton Als: They're not agreeing with them.
Junot Diaz: Yeah. Did you see [inaudible 00:50:03]?
Hilton Als: They can't say it's wrong.
Junot Diaz: They're caught ... they're so caught in the enlightenment bind, where your parents know, especially if they're immigrants, that the only way out of this immigrantness is education, in their minds that's the general trope, but at the same time, I know this probably happened with you, when my family would see me with a book, they would be like, "Abnormal. Go outside and play." Do you know?
Hilton Als: Yes.
Junot Diaz: There was like this back and forth, and I figure as a kid you find spaces where there's at least a back and forth that you can hide between.
Hilton Als: My mother used to take us to the Liberation Bookshop, downtown Brooklyn, and it was a Black-owned shop, and you would get things like Gwendolyn Brooks, and that was the treat at Christmastime. I found a picture of Frederick Douglass that I put on my wall, and she said, "Isn't it ..." I heard her on the phone with one of her friends, and she said, "Oh, isn't wonderful he's so interested in history, he has a picture of Frederick Douglass on the wall," but she had no idea why I had a picture of Frederick Douglass on the wall. Now that I get to look like Frederick Douglass I'm even happier.
Junot Diaz: That's brilliant.
Hilton Als: I love you Junot.
Junot Diaz: Thank you so much.
Hilton Als: Thanks for having us.
Female: [Inaudible 00:51:25].
Hilton Als: Okay. The charming Ms. Strand has asked Junot to take four questions.
Junot Diaz: From the audience.
Hilton Als: From the audience.
Female: Hi. This question has to do with This is How You Lose Her, and one ... the chapters you have in there--?
Junot Diaz: You're Rutgers?
Female: Yeah.
Junot Diaz: Yay! My alma mater, what's up Rutgers? That's my shit.
Female: We are reading ... actually we read your book for one of my classes, but one of the topics of discussion was why you included the chapter with the woman who worked at the laundromat, and how we read that in the context of the book?
Junot Diaz: Wait a minute. Are you doing a paper?
Female: I'm not. I'm not.
Junot Diaz: Okay. Just checking. It's so, damn. Again, because my ... I know this sounds completely ridiculous, but because the persona who writes my books is a writer writing my books. Do you know what I mean? Yunior writes all my books first, and so you have to understand Yunior ... you have to understand the books as being filtered first through this dude, who is like a big liar. Also that loves ... who is way smarter than I am, because you know you can write smarter people than you, that's easy.
You guys know, you just look the shit up, right? Yunior is smarter than me, and one of the things about Yunior is that he loves, he loves to destabilize a reader's sense of who he is and who his family is. He loves breaking up any kind of authoritative narrative about his family or himself, and so that he will actually tell different versions of story, and so you have, in my first book, Drown, you have a version of the story where his father abandons the family, and goes and lives in the United States. The story is called "Negocios."
This is the second iteration of the story told from the point of view of the woman who his father almost leaves the family with, and so he keeps the father's name, but changes everything around, because in this way it's hard to tell which story is true. Yunior is so not about true. Again, this comes to the first ... and it's not just something that's to make up stuff, because in Drown, we see in Drown this is already bolted into the book. In Drown, the first book, you see Yunior describe his brother and his brother's relationship in great detail, and then stop talking about it. Yeah?
Hilton Als: Right.
Junot Diaz: In Yunior there's complete silence about where the brother goes. You get the new book, This is How You Lose Her, and suddenly you realize that the brother has died of cancer, and that the brother had been dead of cancer in the first book, but it had been completely left out of the first book, because I always assumed this book would come, and this book would explain the first book, but it would also destabilize the first book.
That story is Yunior telling his ... what would be called his family's foundational myth again. If I ever write my next book in this series, Yunior will tell that story again, and he kind of doesn't ... I believe that, especially those of us who grew up in immigrant families, the foundational story takes on this luminous glow, it takes on its own authority, except it's completely fictitious, because if you pay attention the story doesn't ever cohere. There's always stuff that doesn't come together, people always switch their narratives. I guess that's ... I know, right? Sorry.
Hilton Als: You just wrote her paper.
Junot Diaz: No. She's not writing a paper. I know, isn't that a terrible answer.
Male: No.
Female: Hi. That's loud ... As an immigrant, I also am trying to write the stories of immigrants, and I wanted to know, as a fiction writer, did you ever worry about, you said the moral that you wrote about was specifically your own. Did you ever worry about misrepresenting the immigrant experience, and--?
Junot Diaz: No.
Female: No?
Junot Diaz: No. But I'm saying, if you're not mimic ... if you're not ... Listen, people want to read stories by quote/unquote "marginal artists" as universal, in the exact wrong way we want them to be read. I wasn't to be read as universal not because this stands in for all Dominicans and therefore this is a great map for any of you who are going to the Dominican Republic. This is not about ... the story is about one tiny dot in that shifting constellation of people and moments and identities that we call the Dominican Diaspora.
I'm not claiming to represent anyone but this tiny group of people. Why do you think I create a character like Oscar who absolutely fits no formula of what is a Dominican? He spends his whole time being like, "No. Really, I'm Dominican," and everybody is like, "No. You're not." In some ways I guess he was in argument for: this is the way our art is. All art at its ... because it scales to the human should immediately, because of that human-level distortion, disqualify itself from becoming a stand-in for a nation or a people or a time.
There's something about the granular complexity about any novel or short story collection, which almost seems to immediately invalidate it as a larger argument about this group or this people. If you understand that complexity, you shouldn't get worried. I think that we only worry about this because we ourselves sometimes, I'm not saying you; we ourselves sometimes want to claim, partially, that we are spokespeople for our nation, but [abajo 00:58:23], in the lower frequencies where we don't like to admit things, we really, truly want to be the writer of our generation, or the writer of our people, of our moment.
I think that that's what leads us all astray. On one hand we don't want to be called out for that, but on the other hand we want all the banners and prizes and privileges that come with that. I think that it's a terrible, terrible two-headed dragon to serve. I think you should just immediately disqualify yourself from being the writer of generation, your nation and people, and write what you need to fucking write, which will be useful to no one, we hope.
The best art seems utterly disposable, and it has its way of reminding us that it's the exact opposite, yeah. I guess I don't worry about that. I always grew up so far away from what was called normal, yeah. It's hilarious, people will be like, "I feel this so strongly, I read in your work ..." People, two people have told me, "Ah, this speaks to me." I'm like, "It barely speaks to me, I'm really happy."
Two more.
Female: I have so many things I want to say, but obviously I can't. First of all, I am a Rutgers College Graduate.
Junot Diaz: Oh, RC.
Female: When Rutgers College was College Avenue, but in any event, I'm wondering, you described this deprivation you grew up with and these, forgive me, crazy role models, which forgive me again for being White, but that is a universal experience in many ways. In any event, how do you explain that you succeeded so beautifully and didn't succumb to all the other things that could have happened to you, and didn't follow all these dysfunctional paths?
Junot Diaz: Who says it hasn't? I just think--
Female: Oh, come on.
Junot Diaz: No, no, but wait a second. No, no, no, but wait a second, I'm not just being tendentious, I just think that this is the mythography of America, that we just love to think of the ... the American mythography is progressive. This idea that everything moves upward, and people are always on this journey to improvement, and how did you make it--
Listen guys, this is very important to understand, is that I don't speak the language of "make it" because you well know that our instance, our moment in late capital, has no problem through its contradictions, occasionally granting someone ridiculous moments of privilege. That's not what matters. In other words, we can elect Obama, but what does that say about the fate of the African-American community?
We have no problem in this country rewarding individuals of color momentarily, as a way never to address structural cannibalistic inequalities that are faced by the communities these people come out of. I'm like--
(Applause)
... and the record ain't done yet. The last time I checked I ... again my ... has anybody tabulated my full account of cruelties towards people? I just mean it like, I don't think we can safely say just because someone has some sort of visible markers of success that in any way they have avoided any of the dysfunctions. That is the kind of Chaucerian, weird, physiognomy as moral status.
I just think that ... in fact, none of us we don't know anything about anybody. Certainly I think that, yes, I have made a certain level of status as an artist and as a writer, but what I'm reminded most acutely is not of my quote/unquote "awesomeness" or some sort of will to power that has led me through the jungle of the maze. What I'm aware of, being here, is that I am representative of a structural exclusion. That room is made for ones, so that room does not have to be made for the manys, and that's what I'm really aware of. Ha-ha.
Hilton Als: Plus [Inaudible 01:03:10] used to say, "We are not crazy."
Junot Diaz: That's what I was trying to say. I know I'm fucking nuts, you know.
Hilton Als: One more?
Junot Diaz: There's so many ... wait a minute, first of all, have we any Dominicans at all? I want to hear from one Dominican before I go out. [Foreign language 01:03:34], okay, I'm sorry I don't mean to be like that, but I feel like I've got Jersey covered. No, for real, if Jersey hadn't been I'd need to hear from Jersey.
Female: How did you know that I was from Jersey and I'm Dominican?
Junot Diaz: Oh, I've got a two for one.
Female: She's an artist too.
Junot Diaz: Oh, shit, and an artist.
Female: I wouldn't admit it though. I guess what I'm wondering is, I'm sure you've felt some sort of displacement within society, and especially your own culture. How did you overcome that? What did you have to [inaudible 01:04:06]--?
Junot Diaz: Again, I don't think these things are ... these are not ... transmits up ... I think we accept too much at face value, these ideologies of transcendence. That one overcomes their ... I guess first ... my first thing was I noticed nobody was at home. This idea that some of us are less at home than others, that's a big fucking laugh. I think some of us have better operational masquerades than others, but last time I noticed, America is epically addicted to cocaine, especially White, upper-class America, because it feels at home, because it feels comfortable in its own fucking skin, because it feels in its place.
I just think that ... it's just that some of our displacements are pathologized in ways that other people's displacements are. We try to explain everything, it's because we are immigrants and that we are of color. That's the way the society explains everything. If I, tomorrow, blow up a building, it would be like, "Ah, fucking, an immigrant." Right, because that's the easy go-to-myth. I just think that for me, that I quickly realized that from everything I saw, that there is no transcending the human experience.
That there is just, you've got to fucking realize that most of us, and I'm just saying this to leave room for some superhumans out there, most of us feel permanently displaced, most of us feel savagely undone. Most of us try everything we can to manage our fears and our insecurities. Most of us are profoundly inhuman to ourselves and other people, and that makes us no more valuable, no more worthy of attention and love.
My thing is, that I didn't transcend all this stuff, I just am like, "You've got to live with them man," and I think that there's nothing like trying to run away from all that stuff, to guarantee their supremacy.
Hilton Als: Right.
Junot Diaz: My idea is to try to change at least the percentage of the vote. These voices are always going to get a vote, but do they always have to have the majority of the vote?
Hilton Als: They don't get to win all the time.
Junot Diaz: Yeah, man. It's just like you try to distribute who you are in different proportions but the transcendence myth, I think will just do you in in the long run.
Hilton Als: Did you ever see that extraordinary moment on Oprah, when Toni Morrison's son had just died, and she said, "I was very..." Oprah says, "I'm very sorry to hear about your son, but now you have closure--"
Junot Diaz: Oh, Oprah!
Hilton Als: --and the camera mistakenly went to Toni's face, and she said, "I don't know what you're talking about, I'll be sad for the rest of my life."
Junot Diaz: Oh, yeah.
Hilton Als: This idea of the arrival myth is what you're speaking of. That once we arrive, but one of the great and amazing things about America and Americans is that they never do.
Junot Diaz: No. Tomorrow, listen guys; my first reading was at Boston attended by one person. Yeah, my best friend, Shuya Ohno; that was my first reading, and that was about my first 20 readings. Today all these fine faces here, and I really appreciate the support for me and Hilton, but tomorrow you're back to one person. America is not like Latin America that tends to be much more committed to its artists. You could be 30 years in the game and not publish one book, and people are still like you matter.
Guys, we are a fickle, fickle nation, and today's arrival is tomorrow's ... see, I told you, what a fraud. Somebody will come along, and that's the reality of it, this is not ... I love you guys and I appreciate you being here, but if this is why you're doing your art, you're in for a lot of pain; a lot of pain. Guys, I see you, I'm trying to be here 100 percent because you've made your night out, like really be present, but at the same time I know that I'm back to reading to my boy Shuya, always in my heart, because that's the place where most of us end up as artists.
You've got to be comfortable there, man. No matter what your fantasies of supremacy in a success are, because tomorrow that's where you'll be at, and it's okay. I forgive you the way I forgive myself for being human and not producing what will keep you famous and rich. It's none of us can equal that, and it's absolutely okay.
The best part about art is that is as long as civilization survive, somebody out there will keep one copy of your text, perhaps; and perhaps that will give comfort, inspiration, and more importantly, a space for an individual to be in touch with their humanity. To be temporarily in touch with their best selves, which is fragile, flawed, weak, scared, and that's all we can ask for in art, and I think that that's what's worth working for, and it's worth preserving, and I think that's the moment why most of us go this very long, shadowed path into producing this art, because we fundamentally believe that what we do is the best of what we call human. The best of us, even at times we don't like to recognize it.
Hilton Als: Here, here. Thank you, Junot.
(Applause)
Male: Thank you.