Junot
Díaz’s stories have appeared numerous times in The New Yorker, as well as in
Story and the Paris Review. He is a recipient of a 1999 Guggenheim fellowship,
and his work has been featured in Best American Short Stories of 1996, and
1999’s Best American Fiction. He is the author of the book Drown, and is a
professor of creative writing at Syracuse University. Mr.
Díaz graciously agreed to speak with Marina Lewis, by telephone, after her
interview with another renowned author evaporated from her tape recorder. Fortunately,
she plugged it in correctly this time. What
are you reading right now? At
this moment I’m reading, basically, what is an act of historical sycophancy.
It’s a book that the president, the old dictator of the Dominican
Republic,Trujillo, had someone write about his regime. It’s the most
astonishing, over the top, adulatory piece of nonsense in the world. Just
propaganda. I
find this kind of genre hilarious. It’s always useful to see what people, given
the chance, will say about themselves. It says so much about who you are, and
how you, in a moment of vanity and self-congratulation and triumph and power,
represent yourself. The silences. All those things make up a person. What
writers have you loved? Who did you love growing up? Who
I loved growing up is not who you might think. Most of us build up our reading.
I’ve always had this sense that reading is this constant piling on of words
upon words upon words, and the initial base upon which all this rests usually
gets crushed under the latest layer—just gets crushed, overridden and pumiced,
and we often forget that the thing which made this amazing structure possible
is often extraordinarily humble, simple, unelaborate, uncut, just the most
basic quarry stone. So as a child, my entire love of reading and of literature
was built on what most people would consider crap. I used to read comic books.
I used to read really kind of nonsense books. The first writer that I
loved—it’s hilarious—as a kid I used to love this insane apocalyptic writer of
children’s stories, this writer named John Christopher. I remember him being a
writer I adored. In some ways he was writing these stories about the
apocalypse, about young adolescent boys always finding themselves in a scenario
where they’re one of the last people on earth, and it was just such an awesome
metaphor for how I felt in those days. I adored crap like that. And then of
course you grow up, and your tastes grow up, and you find yourself in love with
so many different kinds of writers. I remember those first few, it’s like one
of those early relationships, like your first real love, after you’re out of
the stage when you’re an adolescent and you really have adult faculties. My
first real adult love was someone like Sandra Cisneros. I adored her. I adored
her work. I adored what she meant, what she was trying to do, her
experimentalism, her poetry. But I think the most sustained love of mine, the
one that’s carried me through all these years, is my relationship with Toni
Morrison. I’m telling you, I’m one of those people who’s still cracking my head
on many of the ideas Toni Morrison both suggested and elaborated on in her
work. How
did you start as a writer? I
always told stories. I was far more of a storyteller than I was a writer. I
still think I am. In a way, the medium in which I chose to tell my stories was
the medium of least resistance. I think had I been very privileged, and had
access to afford a film background, I could just as easily have gone into that
idiom. The form chose me; it was just the conditions of what I was doing. But I
have to say, the form didn’t just come out of nowhere, it was an extension of
my love for reading. A friend of mine, another writer, told me that the Latin
root for author is augment, and I think that’s basically what it was. I wanted
to augment, to add to, my reading experience. Could
you tell me about your very first published story? It
was a story called “Ysrael” about a kid who gets his face eaten off by a pig.
That would be the plug line. But the real story is about diaspora, about
Dominican families having to live in these worlds where parents are abroad, and
their kids don’t really know them. It’s pretty much a story about families and
brotherhood. It
appears in Drown, but where was it published originally? Story
Magazine Were
you like, so excited? I
was like, you know… People who know me know this: I was extraordinarily
excited, but I’m one of those people who’s a genius at undercutting their own
excitement. I’m like Yeah well, it’s great this got published but what does it
really mean? So in the same way, when Drown was published and received all
sorts of wonderful support from a wide variety of wonderful people, my reaction
was still not celebratory. I still thought, Well, now you have the novel ahead
of you…. Since
you have gotten a tremendous amount of attention for your first story
collection, do you feel a lot of pressure about your novel? I’m
a brutal person. I torture myself. So I think for the first five years I just
pressured myself to the point where there was no joy in writing, and if there’s
no joy in writing you can’t tell stories. It’s funny, because in some ways, if
I had not put so much pressure on myself, I probably would have written two
books already. I’m not saying either of them would have been good, that’s
another thing, but I could definitely have produced two books. When
you’ve got low standards for yourself, or when you’re more generous, depending
on which perspective you take—one more cynical and hard, and the other far more
open minded and kind—when you’re more generous with yourself, you let yourself
do things, make mistakes. I’m awful. I have a tyranny of me. I just don’t allow
myself to make mistakes in ways that probably have held me back. So, yes, I’ve
put a lot of pressure on myself, a lot of bullshit. I kind of shut down a
little bit, but now after five years going on six, the pressure is kind of
gone. I just exhausted myself. It sort of doesn’t matter anymore. That moment
when people were waiting, when there was a sense of held breath, that’s since
dissipated. I feel much better this way. Now I can just do it. In a way I hate
to say this because it sounds so disingenuous, but after this many years you
just don’t give a fuck. It’s like I don’t care. And I’m writing a book that in
its structure reflects the I-don’t-careness. What
do you mean by that? I
think when you’re trying to cultivate or preserve the same audience that had
been giving you all this attention, you write in certain ways. You tend to
extend some of the things you’ve been doing. And I guess one of the great
liberties of these past few years is that I was able to realize that it’s an
impulse to continue writing in ways that get attention for you. It’s natural to
want to extend or preserve the kind of attention you got, which leads to
certain limitations in your artistic production. On the other hand, if you
decide to really challenge this “audience that you’ve built,” or to shatter it,
and try to create a new audience with new kinds of work, that’s really good,
that’s just really interesting. It keeps you fresh. The
impulse for me originally was to re-write Drown in some way. But now that I’ve
had all these years, what I’m trying to do is to remake an entire new audience.
I don’t think I would have tried that without all this time off. What
is your process, and is it the same as it was for Drown? Specifically, some
writers have templates in their heads, whether short story or novel, where they
know the ending, or have an outline, but some work as a process of discovery,
where they don’t know what they’re going to write until they start writing. That’s
me. Nothing takes the joy out for me like planning. And that’s good. I have to
tell you though, one of the things that makes it good is that I have always had
some weird space in my mind where stories take the form of radical geometries
more than they take the form of words and sentences. I know this sounds odd,
but I don’t see my stories on page, I see them as physical structures that seem
to float in my brain. So even if I’m on a journey of discovery with my writing,
the structures begin to unfold lattice-like. It’s hard to describe. I never
realized how odd it was until I spoke to a friend of mine, George Saunders,
about it and he was just looking at me like I was crazy and I realized
hmmm—this is probably why even when I write just slowly, and just exploring it,
I still am able to create some very strange and useful structures. Do
you feel that the structure exists and what you’re doing is uncovering it? No,
I’m not that dumb. There’s an unconscious part of me that creates the
structure. I feel like I have a structural engine that runs in my mind on some
subconscious level. So consciously I’m enjoying myself, and just having fun,
and not paying any attention to structure, but there’s a part of me that really
determines the grammar, but does so without fanfare and without consultation. I
just feel like I’m scribbling and going wild, but when I finish it I realize
later that there’s this amazing structure in place. You know, amazing for me,
whatever that means. What’s
your revision process? I know you’ve said you work very slowly. Are you slow
sentence by sentence, or do you just revise so much it makes for slow going? Both.
I’m sentence by sentence slow. And you would think that I would create more
elaborate sentences. For all my plod, I still produce rather workmanlike, short
sentences. So in some ways it’s rather sad, but yep, it’s both. It’s easy to
talk about this shit because people will tell you nonsense, but I think the
slowness of my production speaks for itself. I work extremely slowly, and I
will re-write a story fifty times. Do
you find yourself cutting a lot, or just really changing? I
find myself doing everything Other
than Sandra Cisneros, what short story writers do you like, or feel you can
learn from? The
ever mighty, but very little known, Edward P. Jones. He wrote Lost in the City,
and you can’t mess with that, at all. Denis Johnson, of course. He had a huge
impact on people coming up, when I was beginning to study writing at MFA.
Jesus’ Son had just come out and made this tremendous impact on people. Really,
there’s just a ton of people. Michael Martone is just ridiculous. His love of
his home state, Indiana, really mirrored my love for New Jersey. He just showed
me radical forms with which to handle it. You
are admired in the same way. A lot of young writers love Drown, and this is
reflected stylistically, for example, in their use of the first person, no
quotation marks. How did you develop that style? That
comes from others, other people do it. I think the structural stuff, like the
no quotation marks, is just metonymic for something else. It’s always great
when students see something you’re doing that they like and they take it and
who cares, right? I mean that’s wonderful. But I think that hides what really
interests me in dialogue. My characters say a lot less than most people
remember them saying. I don’t write dialogue really well. What I write really
well is silence, the things that the characters don’t say, the gaps between
people’s sentences, the ellipses between what we feel, what we see, and what we
recognize. I think that’s where it all comes in. And of course I am someone who
works in two languages. It’s not having quotes, not having italics, not having
any of these things that separate the spoken word from thought-word, from
narrative-word. For me, its also how I think about memory, how I think about
language…A certain branch of democracy which for me is more…Again not to be too
self involved and too self-serving, but I think that these little “showy”
things are linked to much deeper narrative storytelling questions in my work.
It’s not just Ah this motherfucker doesn’t use quotes, but the way that memory
works in my stories has everything to do with why there could easily be
confusion between the spoken word and the imagined word. In
the story “Aguantando,” you describe the United States as “something folks
planned on.” What have you observed about people’s sense of living for their
futures in another nation? I
have a sense of the Dominican…it’s not much of a theory, more a collection of
words, a dot dot dash code that I use to, in another way, decipher a larger
code, which is the Dominican experience, the Dominican diasporic experience,
and the American experience, all hooked together. I always lived in a situation
of simultaneity. It’s like a science fiction book where an alien or creature or
an artifact exists on two worlds, or on two different planes at one time.
They’re not fixed in one place. They phase in and out. That’s why I always felt
that while most people live in memory, which is the ability of memory for you
to limn a memory with another memory, that you’re able to remember something
simultaneously—you’re able to remember something and remember something else at
exactly the same time, exactly the same moment. In memory you’re allowed to collapse.
Something they say you can’t do in quantum physics. Living in a place like
Dominican Republic, we didn’t need to do that as memory, we were doing that as
we lived. Two worlds were existing at exactly the same time. In a way, your
imagination was bifurcated. So you couldn’t help but live in the Dominican
Republic but also in the United States. You couldn’t help but live in the
present and in the past the way most people live, but also in a future. You
have to have an amazing imagination to be an immigrant. You’ve
often likened your work to science fiction. Could you say more about that? What’s
ironic is that no one internalizes social norms in society as do minorities in
that society. So in other words, whatever criteria there is for literature, nobody
follows that more to the letter, I think, than people who are literary
minorities. There’s this kind of colonial baggage, as Homi Bhabha always
reflects, that idea that the Indian becomes more English than the Englishman. I
think it, in some ways, has limited our usage of narrative that would be
revelatory, or transformative in our artistic production. Again, I don’t want
to say that everyone has been limited in this way, but I think it’s true in
general. So that if you’re a person writing about a Dominican diasporic
experience, to hew too closely to canonical ideal of what literature is would
limit you. The conventions of what is canonically known as literature can’t
hope to encompass these radical experiences that you undergo when living in a
diaspora like the Dominican one. And sometimes the only way to describe these
lived moments—the surreality and ir-reality of some of the things that people
like myself have experienced—is through lenses like science fiction. The joke
is you’re Dominican living in the Dominican Republic in 1974, and you get
transported to the U.S. from the campo, where you started out living in an open
air house with no electricity, with no bathroom, living in a world that’s
extremely closed and sealed in some ways, with no access to education, and
almost a sense of living outside of time, though of course you never will live
outside of time. It’s the sense you then get, when you’re transported to a
place like central New Jersey. I think the narrative that would logically be
most useful would be not only space travel—traveling between two planets—but
time travel. Jumping between two entire existences, two entire temporal
moments, is what it feels like. These conventions you find in science fiction
are awesome in trying to discuss some of the tensions and weirdness of being a
person of color, being a third world person traveling between the third world
and the first world. And even the terms “first world” and “third world” already
intimate science fictive travel between planets. So I’m like, why not? Those
resonances are right there. It’s like having this huge, wonderful, gorgeous,
rich, ripe, delicious mango hanging over your desk. But because you’ve been
trained that mangoes are not the kind of food that one eats at a desk, you just
willfully ignore them. How could you ignore such wonderful interconnections?
And that’s why I find science fiction important and useful. Mario
Vargas Llosa recently said, when discussing his run for the Peruvian
presidency, “I’m a writer, and I write about politics because I think this is
part of the writer’s obligation to participate in civic life.” What’s your
reaction to that? Well
goddamn, we need Mario Vargas Llosa to say that? The writer already
participates in civic life. I think what he points out, and why I think it’s a
really useful point, is that many writers participate in civic life in a very
particular, conservative way. And whether Vargas Llosa is himself a political
conservative, I think his approach, that statement, shows a certain amount of progressiveness.
Look, locking yourself up in a room and focusing on yourself is a very
particular and conservative way of dealing with civic life. But you’re
definitely dealing with civic life. Your non-participation is participation. So
it goes without saying. But I think what he’s trying to say is that writers
should have a less conservative approach, and perhaps explore. It seems that as
writers in general we haven’t explored that fully, and again I say “we,”
because in Latin America, or Latin America as I understand it, there are
writers who have. Just think of someone like Martí. That was an experiment in
how much a writer could participate in civic life. In the U.S. it’s far more
discouraged. Writers are supposed to be hermetic. But
it’s always the third world people. They’re the innovators. They’re the people
who really just create other exemplars, other lines of being that don’t
describe some of the Western bullshit. Somebody like Arundhati Roy is really
showing this, in such a public way. She’s really being such a model for young
writers as to how one can approach writing and civic life. I don’t think we
have enough of that, someone who’s deeply committed as a writer to a community,
deeply committed to certain kinds of activism. I don’t find that common among
my writer peers. In fact, because community work is so important to me, I find
myself almost utterly alienated from other writers. Because that is such a
central part of who I am. For most other writers that’s not a real concern. Few
are the writers I can share both my art and my community work with. At
the Chicago Humanities Festival you talked about the privileging of certain
types of language. Could you say more about that? I
think Chicago is an extremely conservative city. Terribly segregated. When
people of color don’t control public space the way that they do in New York.
White people in New York City feel contested, and they don’t feel contested in
Chicago. That creates an amazing amount of conservatism. And you could see it
in the way that the question and answer session came out. There was so much
discomfort among the white audience, with being so openly contested. You should
have been sitting by me when I was doing the book signing, people came up and
railed—all these white men just railed, trying to pick a fight. It was
hilarious. We
all know that there are language forms that are considered impolite and out of
order, no matter what truths these languages might be carrying. If you talk
with a harsh, urbanized accent and you use too many profanities, that will
often get you barred from many arenas, no matter what you’re trying to say. On
the other hand, polite, formal language is allowed almost anywhere even when
all it is communicating is hatred and violence. Power always privileges its own
discourse while marginalizing those who would challenge it or that are the
victims of its power. Just watch what’s happening in Palestine. I find the
language of Israel, for example, the language of an occupying army that
practices collective retaliation, that drops bombs on villagers because someone
utterly unconnected to them kills an Israeli soldier, this language is
considered (by many in the world community) as rational and civilized, yet the
language of a Palestinian revolutionary, fighting to end the occupation, with
whatever limited means he or she has at their disposal, is considered the
language of savagery and of barbarism and of terrorism. It would seem to me
that the Israelis deploy their language privilege to cloak the reality of what
they’re doing and distort what the Palestinian struggle for liberation is all
about. You
had mentioned language as it is typically presented, for example, in The New
Yorker. You see your presentation and usage is more value free, perhaps? I
think I make the values explicit. There’s nothing like making values explicit
to have people questioning their system of values. Think about it. Nobody will
admit that they have certain hierarchies of beauty locked in their head. But
nothing shames or provokes people more than making those hidden values
explicit. They can’t stand it when you take their hidden structures and lay
them out in front of them. People just recoil. They like to think that it’s
just organic, that there’s no ulterior motive, but in fact there’s deep ulterior
motive and if you lay them out people go wild. I enjoy that stuff. Because I
write so much about family and about love, it’s not like I’m intentionally
provocative. At all. I’m rather conservative in most ways. Yes.
In Drown, though you deal with the subjects of sex and drugs, you are
remarkably elliptical in your presentation. You avoid the type of stunning
detail you use to such good effect when describing, for example, the boy whose
face was eaten off by a pig. If
you’ve done drugs, and you’ve fucked, what more do you need? What am I
describing and for whose benefit? Who’s benefiting from anthropology? I figure
that my audience knows what the fuck I’m talking about. And if other people
want their voyeuristic thrills, they need to go elsewhere. Plenty of writers of
color will give you that voyeuristic thrill. I just don’t want to participate
in those patterns. Way too often writers of color are, basically, nothing more
than performers of their “otherness.” I’m trying to figure out ways to disrupt
that. There’s
been a lot of discussion of the autobiographical elements of your work, which
is actually not interesting to me, I
agree. But
what is interesting is how your writing impacts your relationships with family
and friends. Do they ever look at you as a vulture, feeding off their
experiences? My
friends know better. Look, I find other writers to be vultures. Of course not
all. There are plenty of writers, like Edwidge Danticat, where you never get
that sense. But do you know how many writers I’ll be speaking to, and they’ll
be like oh that’s such a good sentence—I’m gonna use that in my story? And I
just look at them and say Look, the reason you’ll never produce work which will
be useful in a better future than this one, is because your relationship is to
people as product. I just don’t have that kind of capitalist relationship with
people. People’s experiences, my own experiences…I don’t see them as natural
resources to plunder. My close friends and family know that I have considered
this stuff deeply. They see the way I am. They don’t feel I ever copy any of
their experiences because I bring so much imagination to the stuff. My friends
never hear themselves in my stories. There’s
such a huge trend, that artists are free to take anything they want, anywhere.
And that’s great. Ninety-five percent of artists support that kind of stuff, or
a lot of people do. And I think it’s funny how in some ways this sounds exactly
how free market capitalists talk. These are the people who have various kinds of
theories and approaches to human being-ness, who have ravaged and dehumanized
and animalized what we call the third world. So this is me being especially
cruel and especially critical. But why in the world would I work toward
duplicating that thought pattern in relationship to my work? I don’t know if
that makes any sense. So even though, in certain ways, we always take from
those around us, I actively think about that relationship. Part of it is
because my mother raised me really well. People have a right to their own
stuff. That’s just it. And other people will contest, and roll their eyes. And
you know what? I think they should know, or should at least accept, that they
would find great, wonderful company in the boards of all these transnational
corporations. They would find so many like-minded souls. And I prefer not to be
seated at the same table as criminals. It’s
fun to blow things out of proportion to make a point. What
do you do at Syracuse and how do you like it? I
teach writing in the MFA program, and I really like my undergraduates. It’s
sort of weird. I think that the kind of reception I got with Drown obscures the
fact that, at least I think, I’m trying to do very radical work. A lot of
students in writing at the graduate school are drawn to me because of the fame,
but they misunderstand. Because they’re so blinded by Oh, he’s in The New
Yorker, he’s got this he’s got that, they don’t look closely at what the work
is really trying to say. In some ways it’s a great experience. I love to teach.
But I also sometimes think that my relationship to my graduate students is more
determined by what little fame I have rather than by my work. And that can be
demoralizing. I find so few students are interested in pursuing radical ways of
creating narratives that don’t seem at all radical but are really subversive. I
find most people just want to get in The New Yorker. It’s
such a great experience at the undergraduate level because those kids just want
to learn. At the graduate level the rewards are far less. I often find myself
being asked just to be a midwife for other people’s dreams of fame. It’s
actually more complicated. This is me at my most ungenerous. And I adore my
undergraduates. |