(Junot Díiaz) Sponsored by Georgia College & State University / Arts & Letters. Junot Diaz was born in 1968 in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the John Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize; the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. Diaz has been awarded the Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Reader's Digest Award, the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award, the 2003 U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and the Rudge (1948), and Nancy Allen Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Published Date: May 25, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP conference in Washington DC on February 4th, 2011. The recording features Junot Diaz. The views and opinions expressed in the following recording are those of the presenter and in no way reflect the views and opinions of AWP.

Speaker 2:

This is the time when we're all of us together. Most of you are in the middle of your books. A few of you have actually finished the damn things, and you're either full of enormous self-loathing or you're utterly convinced this is the shit. So it's a strange project. The business we're in the business of narrative, this tremendous faith that we have, a faith that I think rarely gets talked about. We spend most of our times in workshops and think we rarely address the tremendous faith it requires for someone to write a piece of art, a book of poetry, a book of essays, a memoir, a book of stories, a novel in a culture such as ours. It's a remarkable, remarkable act of faith. Most of us, of course, write against all odds and with often little hope that there's going to be the sort of reception that your art and your dedication deserves, and yet we push on anyway.

It's the most remarkable thing we do, and this is more than any of the shit we've written, more than who the hell is getting published. And who the hell has an agent. And who the hell is in this program. And who the hell got this fellowship? I think that this is perhaps the most important thing about who we are and what brings us together here is this deep, deep elemental belief in what we do and that thing that we do, the books that we're writing, that they will find a place not only in the culture but in the future.

You, young writers, reach your hand out into the dark with your books because you believe that somewhere there is somebody in the future out there who's going to reach their hand back to you, to your work. And it's really a remarkable thing. It's really the greatest thing I think about what we do. There ain't no fucking loot in it, and unless you're like 1%, there ain't no fucking respect. So the tremendous beauty of this faith is often recompense enough, or I should say probably the only fucking recompense.

So I guess I wanted to also say is are folks from [foreign language 00:03:11] here, fucking love [foreign language 00:03:16]. It's always good to see you guys, man, every year. I wish y'all would've warned me this shit was super, super white. That's actually some shit I will hold against [foreign language 00:03:29] despite loving y'all. Yeah, I had my suspicion. Then I rolled into AWP and I was like, "Fuck Boston White. Y'all motherfuckers AWP White." So we'll improve. Yeah, we will improve. We will do much better with each year, we fucking hope. And for the rest of us in the battle [foreign language 00:04:01], we just keep swinging. And I guess I've wasted enough time. I only have two small pieces to read, so I thought I would talk a lot of shit and then we'll call it a wrap. There's no way that you can read well in a stage like this, so you might as well just [inaudible 00:04:21] it away.

And I guess I always ask this because it's important to me. How many folks are from my beloved home state of New Jersey? New Jersey literature, we pray for you. Yeah, we pray. Okay. How many folks are Latino here? Yeah. My beloved African diaspora, everyone here? They seem a little confused. They're like, oh, oh shit. What might that be? Okay, I'm trying to cover all my identity bases. How about, is there any Dominicans here? You know guys, Jersey just has it all beat. What the fuck happened man, I never expected it.

Speaker 3:

Haiti's here.

Speaker 2:

Say again?

Speaker 3:

Haiti.

Speaker 2:

Oh, of course. How's my neighboring brethren and sister in Haiti? Yes. See, I knew Haiti would rock it.

Speaker 4:

You forgot Italian.

Speaker 2:

They're like "fuck, how did you know I was part Italian?" I'm not. So in fact, I did not forget. But thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And someone shouted out, Vona, where's Vona? Good to see you guys. Fuck, we have to read so much because of you guys.

So two things. One very much undone. This is the stage of a story where you've got the basic nuts and bolts done, but you haven't applied the actual talent to it. Yeah. You all know when you're at that place where you're like, it works, but it ain't fucking cute. It's like this kind of is the literary equivalence of the Snuggy. You'll wear that, but you ain't rolling up to AWP with it. And so here's the Snuggy. Yeah, it's only about five pages and it's a story. It's actually a letter. It's kind of a stupid letter. It doesn't work as a conceit, but it's a letter that my sort of nonstop, constant alter ego, Junior, is writing to his cousin. He has a cousin who tries to get into the country and gets deported three times. So he sort of writes this letter and this is only a fragment of the letter. So we'll see. And again, it ain't great, but you start by making it just work, right? So it's just called Primo and it starts with the second time he tries to get into the country.

Primo, the second time you went at it reluctantly you didn't believe it was going to happen. You didn't have faith, and if you don't have faith, it is never going to happen. Instead of going with the guy, you didn't have faith, and if you don't have faith, it will never work no matter what. Instead of going with the guy we found, you listen to some worthless friend of yours who claimed he knew how to get a visa cheap, a professional one, [foreign language 00:07:55] bueno. And so you made a down payment and you waited for the friend to deliver. Primo, you could wait like nobody's business. You waited and you waited, and finally it came through. But it was a ridiculous thing like I had made it myself with a crayon. So you walked out on that deal, you didn't even try it. Who wanted that humiliation again? And the window closed for a time in your heart as well as in the world, you decided it was a foolish dream, this dream of [foreign language 00:08:32] .

So you bought a used white civic with the rest of the money and you focused on trying to be slick. Slick is a full-time occupation in Santo Domingo. It really is. You flew all over the capital in your civic having a great life and selling to the old school friends here and there. You flew, and you flew, and you flew. You could have had another majete if you'd been more gangster about the dealing, but your are sorry ass actually managed to lose money dealing to the evils, [foreign language 00:09:09]. Seriously primo. How could you lose money to them? How in the world is that even possible?

I wanted to be everyone's friend. I was easy. Those were good times, and you slept half your days away and you knew all the owners at all. The clubs were the only spot of dark, they let in there. And best of all, you were balling girls no one in [foreign language 00:09:40] could ever have imagined touching. Girls with milk, skin and green eyes, girls with hair so straight it could make a black girl ache at a hundred meters.

You got them high, you danced them up, then you took them to the moteles in their own car. These weren't the good girls who would be pussy virgins until they got a ring. No, these were the messed up girls with the divorce fathers and the ex-beauty queen moms who had been raped or be interlocked into their houses for most of their childhood by their general fathers, the messed up girls whose families were Cuban, Italian, Catalan, Lebanese who drank like [foreign language 00:10:21], who had loud hoarse voices, the ones who danced against you like they were in a cabaret, and who you blew up for free. These were the girls who wanted to leave Santo Domingo and you shared that with them, at least, malas or not, they acted the same when you entered the motel like it was their first time. And that gesture at innocence always touching you deeply. Good times all around.

But then some [foreign language 00:10:56] whose girlfriend you had been fucking in the ass did you in. Instead of confronting you, he told the father, a colonel in the policía, about the narco [foreign language 00:11:10] who was fucking his sweet, innocent daughter in the ass. And they grabbed you at a club with two little baggies in your pocket and that was it for the so-called Life. Six weeks they held you. My mother moved back to Santo Domingo to take care of it, to get you out. Prison in the DR of course, beyond terrible. Filth 24/7. You almost went crazy in there. Each time mami visited, you begged her to get you out. You had lice, and rashes, and a sty in your eye the size of a hazelnut. Your second week, three cons threatened to kill you over some stupid slight.

So mommy had to pay for two other convicts to watch over you with knives while you slept and bathed and ate. At night while the lunatics sang old [foreign language 00:12:03] and the guards [foreign language 00:12:05] a screaming man's face on the concrete floor of a cell, you tried to keep it together by thinking of New Jersey, of the Paramus Mall, of the Sherling coats you tried on during your visit, the ones you swore you would buy when you returned. Every time you tried something on, you made me take a picture. And those pictures, the memory of them, were what you focused on. This is how you made it, you told me, how you held it together. The niece in question must have really liked the rabble because she kept after her uncle until finally miraculously the colonel relented and you were free. Mommy brought you home in a taxi. You had hepatitis and a second asshole above your first from a pilonidal cyst that stank worse than 10 assholes combined and whose horrible sinus leaked and leaked and leaked, but you were free. That's it. Thank you.

That one's like a joy. Yeah, I promise. Two or three more rewrites. It'll be okay for real. So there's not really much space or anything for questions at all, but in case anyone actually did have a question and they wanted to scream it out while I prepare for the next reading bit, you can do so.

Speaker 5:

Why do you write?

Speaker 2:

It's a good question. It's a good question. It's one of those things where of course for some people it's a strange thing. Yeah, they've had a myth about why they write. Sometimes the myth changes, sometimes it's fixed. I think the same way we have difficulty approaching art in a sort of complete way. I mean art is in many ways a great mystery. There's no way that you can explicate a novel fully, and there's no way that you can explicate a poem fully. And therefore, often all we have is a cover story for why we pursue art.

We have a really nice cover story. I grew up reading as a kid, I fell in love with these books. I feel like this is important because my community's not represented. I feel like I have to do all these things, but the truth of it is it's no more than a cover story. You have no access to your unconscious motivations that make this incredible labor possible. And so therefore you just come up with some neat little cute tales and we're attracted to them, we're committed to them. We can't help it because we've got not much else. The truth of it is, my cute little tale is I write for all the reasons I stated before, my love reading to death. For me, I would rather read than write any day. I think of my identity as the number one reader and then writer somewhere down at two, three or four because of the enormous silence around the community in which I grew up, both inside the home country and in the diaspora, the sense that there is much work that needs to be done.

The sort of deep belief that I had from my own youthful experience that when I was growing up, there wasn't anything in literature in this area that I loved so much. There was nothing in books that in some ways reflected me back. I couldn't read a poem, I couldn't read a story. I couldn't read a novel. I couldn't read a newspaper where I saw a Dominican kid reflected back in any way. And so I've talked about this before, but you know for a fact that this idea that if you are a child and you grow up in a world without reflections that you know what this means, you know that it's no accident that mythological monsters often have no reflections. Yeah, it's not that monsters don't have reflections, but that if a human being grows up in a world where there are no reflections of them, they grow up to become monsters.

They certainly have that possibility. And I felt that in a childhood where I never saw myself that it was so painful in many ways and it so distorts your sense of yourself that the only thing I really wanted to do was that no matter what the fuck I could get done writing that by the end of my career, I would've left one or two mirrors behind for some young kid out there who was sort of like me, who could look and at least say, I don't see myself anywhere else in this world, but I see myself in this. And it's not a bad thing to leave mirrors. Most of us need more and some of us belong to communities where we're otherwise erased. These are my sort of conscious explanations of why I write. The truth of it is the deep motivations allude me and I've got to leave a space for them. The space for the fact that you don't ever really know why we do this. We have senses of it, but we don't really have access to that part of us. So that's that. Something else really quick.

Speaker 6:

Who are your favorite writers?

Speaker 2:

It's kind of nuts, right? I read enormously. Yeah. I mean motherfuckers read, but I fucking read. So I mean it's like a ton of them here. So you feel like you're blowing them the up. You're like, allow me to blow smoke up people's asses. Yeah. So I think my colleague and dear friend, Edwidge Danticat, one of the greatest living writers. I really think the writer who I've been forever talking about, but folks who've gotten the New Yorker recently, and this is the first time they encountered his power. I think Francisco Goldman is probably one of America's greatest novelists and journalists. Chris Abani, I've got my friend up front who had an enormous impact on my writing, changed the way I viewed it. David Mora, Cristina Garcia. And then of course the giants who you probably have no, you just sort of pick their names praying to God that they had some influence in you. So you're like Patrick Chamoiseau, of course, early Oscar Hijuelos, Pedro Mir, Juan Rulfo.

I mean quoting Juan Rulfo is sort of being, "I hope God had an influence on me", but in the end, the problem with being a reader like most of you are, is usually your favorite writers are on their way. I mean, what makes reading so exciting is that you guys are out there and you're writing shit and you are really excited as a reader that someone's going to come up with some that's going to be great and you can't wait for it. So I have all these people that I love and then, oh, you know the poet Gina Franco? Anybody ever read Gina Franco? Gina Franco is the shit, man. Fucking love Gina Franco and that poet Angela Shaw. You guys know Angela Shaw? Angela, I went to Cornell with Angela and Angela was out writing all of us. Even then I was like this tiny, tiny little white girl and it was like she would write a poem. We were like, fuck. So yeah, she was brilliant. But the list could go on. The list could go on. Michael Martone.

I am so glad, guys. I learned to write about New Jersey because of Michael Martone. I mean, the debt I owe to Michael Martone got to fucking roll like that dude a blunt every day I owe him some and I don't smoke y'all. Okay, so I'll just read something. This is something old, so fuck you. And it's going to just be very short. Yeah, so here you go. I don't know, everything's been in second person lately, so it just seems to have infected me. And then I'll read this and then if you guys have a few more questions, we try to fill it up to at least an hour and then we'll call it a night. Yeah, come on. You guys know the deal. The shorter readings are the better. It's like I'll never forget when I was at Cornell and motherfuckers would be like, I'm going to read seven, no nine chapters from my novel. I'm like, the fuck is wrong with you, man?

And people be saying, fiction writers are fucked up, but I think that that's a badly earned rep. Fiction writers are just as likely as poets to bug the fuck out. I have seen poets be reading 33 poems. So this idea that somehow we're more given to these. Yeah, you know the deal. So it is a short piece called Alma, in second person. It goes like this. You, Junior, have a girlfriend named Alma who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans. Fuck man, fuck. Really? You hear yourself and you're looking, you hear yourself and you're like, this is the real work. And it seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond genes, an ass that could drag the moon out of orbit. An ass she never liked before she met you. Ain't a day that passes that you don't want to press your face against that ass or bite the delicate sliding tendons of her neck.

You love how Alma shivers when you bite her, how she fights you with those arms that are so skinny they belong on an afterschool special. Alma. Alma is amazing gross student, one of those sonic youth comic book reading Alterna [foreign language 00:23:02], without whom you might never have lost your virginity. She grew up in Hoboken, part of the Latino community that got its heart burnt out in the eighties, tenements turning to flame. She spent nearly every one of her teenage days on the lower East Side, thought it would always be home. But then both NYU and Columbia rejected her and she ended up farther from the city than before. Alma is in a painting phase and the people she paints are all the color of mold. Look like they have been dredged up from the bottom of a lake. Her last painting was of you slouching against the front door. Only you are frowning.

I had a lousy third world childhood, and all I got was this attitude visible. Alma, the past couple of weeks. Oh, she did give you one huge forearm though. "I told you", she said, "I would get the muscles in". The past couple of weeks, now that the warm is here, Alma has abandoned the black and started wearing these nothing dresses made out of what looks like tissue paper. Wouldn't take more than a strong wind to undress her. She says she does it for you. And when you see her on the street, flaunting, flaunting, you know what every nigger that walks by is thinking because you are thinking it to. Alma is slender as a reed you are a steroid addicted block. Alma loves driving. You love books. Alma owns a Saturn. You have no points on your license. Alma's nails are too dirty for cooking. You're spaghetti [foreign language 00:24:56] is the best in the land. You are so very different.

She rolls her eyes every time you turn on the news. Says she can't stand politics. She brags to her girls that you are a radical and a real Dominican. Even though on the [foreign language 00:25:17] index you would not even rank. You brag to your boys that she has more albums than any of them do, and that she says terrible white girl things while you fuck. Alma is more adventurous in bed than any girl you've been with on her first date. On your first date, she asked you if you wanted to come on her face or her tits. And maybe during boy training, you did not get one of the memos because you were like, oh, neither. Yeah, it is an opposites attract sort of thing. It is a great sex sort of thing. It is a no thinking sort of thing. It is wonderful, wonderful.

Until one June day Alma discovers that you are also fucking this freshman girl named Lakshmi. She discovers you're fucking Lakshmi because she, Alma, your girlfriend opens your journal and reads. Alma waits for you on the front stoop. And when you pull up in her Saturn and notice your journal in her hand, your heart plunges through you like a fat man through a hangman's trap. You take your time turning off the car. You are overwhelmed by a pelagic sadness, sadness of being caught at the incontrovertible knowledge that Alma will never forgive you. You stared her incredible legs and between them to that even more incredible [foreign language 00:26:49] that you have loved so in constantly these last two years. Only when Alma starts walking over in anger do you finally get out. You dance across the lawn and powered by the last fumes of your outrageous [foreign language 00:27:03] Hey, [foreign language 00:27:06], you say prevaricating to the end.

When Alma starts shrieking you ask her darling, "whatever is the matter?" She calls you a cocksucker, a punk motherfucker, and a fake-ass Dominican. She claims you have a little penis, that you have no penis, and worst of all that you like curry pussy, which really is unfair. You try to explain, since Lakshmi is from Guyana, but Alma is not listening, instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a baby's be-shatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently be-nutted condom. You glance at the offending pages and then you look at her and smile a smile your disassembling face will remember for the rest of your life. "Baby", you say, "baby, this is part of my novel", and this is how you lose her. Thank you.

Very kind. We got to bring it to 40 minutes guys, you have five, six minutes still. Scream something.

Speaker 6:

Jersey, Hudson County, Bergen County. What do you think about Jersey?

Speaker 2:

Well, no, I'm actually very much interested in this. I think my obsession with Jersey has a lot to do with the artist critic, Robert Smithson, his ideas, of course, of elsewheres and somewheres. If you've never read Smithson, you need to go and read Smithson. The monuments of Passaic County is a very important essay, and Smithson has this idea that places like New York, places like LA, places like London, that these are somewheres and that New Jersey is the quintessential classical elsewhere. That somewheres produce, rank, consume, purchase art, but that the greatest art is made in the elsewheres and Jersey's Interesting position is that Jersey is literally abutted against the greatest somewhere on the earth, and yet that proximity doesn't keep it from being the ultimate elsewhere in some ways.

It's really like a fascinating thing. Yeah, the idea of the Jersey exists so that the rest of the United States doesn't have to know what New York thinks about it is really sort of, it's really true. And I guess Jersey also functions as a metaphor for me because what Santo Domingo is to the United States being only 66 miles from the United States. You would never know it. New Jersey is to New York City. I mean, I really did come to the San Domingo of America when we immigrated to New Jersey. It was like, and I just feel it works for me as a productive metaphor for these ideas of elsewhere and these ideas of margins.

One more. We're done.

Speaker 7:

You're kind of an artist with profanity and I was just wondering if you have any lessons for the rest of us on who are interested in that.

Speaker 2:

Well, but I think that this is a question of, I mean, there's a couple of things that have happened. Listen, this is a question. The idea of profanities and the idea of language. This is a question of the constant battle of the culture of respectability. You can't get 10 motherfuckers together with a mic without the culture of respectability snapping over us like the sort of thermal inversion in Mexico City. It's like that strong. And the culture of respectability means that you will behave and act and say stuff that you never behave, act and say that when you are hanging out with your friends.

And the truth of the matter is the culture of respectability is a way to silence all sorts of things. Not only just normal human interactions, the fact that people don't speak like Republican speeches, but also that it introduces an element of silence anyway. Because under the culture of respectability, you're not going to say, well, Dad's out back raping all the slaves. There's no room for all the real stuff that's going on in the universe, in the culture of respectability. Culture of respectability is a wonderful way to obscure the vast violent privilege of people who have it. Now, that doesn't mean that one, of course, shouldn't have a number of masks. We're all adults. We know that you don't sound the same when you're talking to your best friend the way you sound like when you're talking to your boss. Yeah, I always say, my fucking friends sound mad white when they're on the phone with their boss.

And that's a given. We have numbers of faces. I'm here trying to talk to you guys about art. Guys, there's nothing more difficult than this. Trying to communicate the strange thing that brings us all together, but which we all are still wrestling with. Look, it's hard enough to talk about art when you're being sincere and you're coming from at least your heart, you think, or some acre nearby your heart. The difficulties that you will incur when you're trying to talk about art through a mask of respectability, I just think are just not worth the price. I would rather people think that, oh, this dude just curses, it's just performance, it's this, it's that. It's some sort of cool thing, et cetera. I would rather people just dismiss me that way than me run the chance of missing the one connection I could make with somebody about art, simply because I'm speaking in the most, for me, authentic way I can possibly speak when you're in front of 300 people.

And I just think that it's, look guys, this is tough one as it is. All of us wear 30 or 40 masks that we sort of put on and take off, but when it comes to talking about art and dealing with art, it's far better to take them off. For me, the experience of being a grad student in MFA is that it's often so hard to talk and to hear because all the masks that you're wearing of being cool, of wanting to be the future, great writer of trying to get everybody to love you of all that shit just interrupts the ability to truly speak about the shit we want to speak about. And I taught MFAs for a long time. I recently taught a semester and I realized it takes a long time for me to get my students to the point where they're actually fucking talking. Where some of that stuff that we carry, the masks just drop and you begin to hear each other, not just you hear a bunch of muffled stuff. So I think that's it. All right guys, you have been very, very kind. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning into the AWP podcast series. For other podcasts, please tune into our website at www.awpwriter.org.