junot diaz

Podcast • September 26, 2007

At Home and "Global" in the US: Edwidge Danticat

Like her friend from the Dominican east side of Hispaniola Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat is writing "global" literature in our midst, for our mainstream, documenting the "permanent floating" migration games and the fascinating creolization of identities in our time.

Edwidge Danticat — loyal child of Port au Prince and Brooklyn — says in conversation: “I always feel like I bring some of there to here, and some of here to there.”

edwidgeLike her friend from the Dominican east side of Hispaniola Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat is writing “global” literature in our midst, for our mainstream, documenting the “permanent floating” migration games and the fascinating creolization of identities in our time.

The definitions of identity are so fluid. Sometimes people in Haiti will say, “well, you’re Haitian if you live here.” That’s one definition. There’s global youth culture. It would be hard to tell a kid from Johannesburg from a kid from Sao Paulo or Rio or Port au Prince if you put three of them together and they didn’t speak.

There are kids in Port au Prince who don’t even speak English but can recite to you an entire 50 Cent song, who can “do” Kanye West with the same accent and tonality…

If you concentrate on young black men of a certain age in all these places I’ve mentioned in the African diaspora, if you think of them as a particular element of the diaspora, and the disuniting of them throughout time and our history — you know, the slave trade and so forth — then I think these things, whether you like them or not, like hip-hop might be the only common culture there is. If might be the one thing in which all these young men from all these different places can see themselves as one.

All this is part of a cosmopolitan culture, which is usually an urban experience of living in crowded places in a kind of outsider status. These are people who are trying to redefine their outsider status and make something that others find appealing, as they young men and women did in the Bronx with Rap, when that began. You see it in the Paris suburbs — young people who know they’re not part of the main culture: they’re lucky if someone thinks they’re French, or unlucky! They know they have this outsider status. A lot of them, taking their cue from Rap, are trying to create a culture of their own. That interests me a great deal! Young immigrant people who are struggling to become part of a culture, or if that doesn’t happen trying to create a culture of their own that they can belong to and that others end up emulating. That’s their inclusion. That’s where they belong. They create their own belonging.

Edwidge Danticat, in conversation with Chris Lydon, Watson Institute, Brown University, September 18, 2007

Edwidge Danticat has just been through her own “year of magical thinking,” encompassing the deaths of the father and uncle who brought her up, and the birth of her own daughter in Miami, all in the space of a few months. Her new non-fiction book, Brother, I’m Dying is a cool, meticulous chronicle of family history, of sudden shock and turmoil, and of her heart, breaking and surging.

The first part of our conversation tells one of those “refugee stories” that could seem someday to typify this era of mass displacement. Danticat’s 81-year-old uncle Joseph was a Baptist minister in Port au Prince. In the autumn of 2004, in fear for his life in a neighborhood beset by gangs, he fled to Miami, en route to his brother’s place in New York. Though he had visited the States many times and had a current tourist visa, he was detained, then shackled by Homeland Security officers who saw him as “another black man trying to get in.” In his “credible fear” asylum interview, Joseph Dantica vomited violently in an apparent seizure, but humanitarian parole was not to be considered, nor the process interrupted. “I think he’s faking,” said the medic on duty. Then suddenly Joseph failed. “His eyes are open and he’s not unconscious,” the medic commented. “I still think he’s faking, but we’ll take him to the clinic.” Then suddenly, at Jackson Memorial Hospital, Joseph Dantica was dead. When Edwidge saw his body, she was struck by the look of anger on her gentle uncle’s face — a look described in Haitian Creole by a word meaning “you were choked by your own blood.”

Podcast • September 26, 2007

Edwidge Danticat (Part 2)

In the second part of our conversation, Edwidge Danticat takes a "transnational" view of the "cosmic mobility" in a globalizing economy and culture. She says: "Even before people get here, they're working for you, making your baseballs and denims." About Iraq, she says, Haitian memory begins with the US invasion by President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 and the occupation of Haiti until 1934 .

DanticatIn the second part of our conversation, Edwidge Danticat takes a “transnational” view of the “cosmic mobility” in a globalizing economy and culture. She says: “Even before people get here, they’re working for you, making your baseballs and denims.” About Iraq, she says, Haitian memory begins with the US invasion by President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 and the occupation of Haiti until 1934 — “one of the most scarring things that ever happened to us… The Haitian in me sees the circularity in these things… It takes a long time to recover from these interventions and occupations.” I ask her, as I did Junot Diaz, to write us an immigration bill that corresponds with real demography and her own heart’s experience.

 

Podcast • September 14, 2007

At Home in Global America: Junot Diaz, Part I

For people who feed on fiction for tastes of truth in our time, Junot Diaz is a treasure. A double-visioned outsider in two languages, two cultures and two countries, he begins to look like the anointed prince of a generation of young immigrants writing "global" fiction inside the US. Could Juno Diaz be our Joseph Conrad?

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fuku americanus, or more colloquially, fuku — generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and Doom of the New World…

No matter what it’s name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of the Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fuku’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not.

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

For people who feed on fiction for tastes of truth in our time, Junot Diaz is a treasure.

Junot DiazA double-visioned outsider in two languages, two cultures and two countries, he begins to look like the anointed prince of a generation of young immigrants writing “global” fiction inside the US. Could Juno Diaz be our Joseph Conrad?

The roaring liftoff of his first novel,The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao may even be an omen. Are we prepared to hear upstart fictionists tell us, as Junot Diaz does, at the outset: “Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.” Diaz’s young Dominican narrator decries the erasure of public memory: “You didn’t know we were occupied twice in the twentieth century? Don’t worry, when you have kids they won’t know the U.S. occupied Iraq either.”

Underlying what reviewers are calling a comic novel, these are the tough themes: the interplay of political and sexual brutality, the suppression of national and family histories, and an inter-generational repetition compulsion around ancient cruelties that are suffered and re-suffered if not exactly remembered.

Junot Diaz makes you wonder, among other things: where were the eminent post-imperial writers (in the class of Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondatje, Zadie Smith) as the U.S. staggered backward into our own neo-imperial misadventure? Might somebody have warned us?

In the next few weeks, we’re reading and interviewing also Ha Jin, the Chinese exile who has just published his first “American” novel, and the novelist and memoirist Edwidge Danticat, who speaks for Haiti and Brooklyn much as Junot Diaz voices Dominican lives from the New Jersey corridor to Santo Domingo, and often back, and back again.

The premise, of course, is that fiction writers may tell us a lot more than we learned from Congressional struggles with immigration reform about the new diasporas and hybrid identities; what seems a permanent floating migration culture; such things as Junot Diaz calls “a peculiarly Jersey malaise — the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres.”

Michiko Kakutani’s celebration in the New York Times noted the “madcap, magpie voice” of Diaz’s “funny, street-smart” narrator, in the “comic portrait of a second-generation Dominican geek,” the eponymous Oscar Wao. But as she, too, noted, the story and the history behind it are harrowing.

My conversation with Juno Diaz began with the American reader’s shock of non-recognition in his Dominican Republic, Siamese-twinned with Haiti on the eastern portion of Hispaniola, Europe’s original prize sugar colony. We Red Sox and Mets fans know next to nothing of the homeland of Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, and it feels a little scandalous. We call the D. R. the “Republic of Baseball” and know it as Rush Limbaugh’s Viagra-charged Fantasy Island. But the social history and the present poverty? The Hitlerian dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo from 1930 to 1961? The official massacre of many thousands of Haitians in 1937?

Junot Diaz says that the kids wearing MLB caps in Santo Domingo today might have as hard a time profiling Trujillo as I did. “We seem to be built to forget,” Diaz says. We seem to insist on “illusions of purity… coherence… goodness… of the pure present without the shadow of history.” But when we cannot summon our history, neither can we imagine consequences of the present. “This book’s central preoccupation is: consequences.”

Click to listen to Part I of the conversation with Junot Diaz( MB MP3)

Continue the conversation with Junot Diaz in Part II and Part III. Thank you, Junot. We are up for Edwidge Danticat at Brown University next Tuesday. Help me out, Open Sorcerers, with angles and questions, please.

Podcast • September 14, 2007

At Home in Global America: Junot Diaz (Part II)

In our conversation, Junot Diaz speaks of Belicia as a version of his parents' generation -- "our greatest generation [who] suffered so cruelly and created a community for us in America... and founded a dynasty."

junotcropped1The most wondrously imagined characters in Junot Diaz’s new novel are its women: Oscar’s goth, “tougher than adamantine” sister Lola, and their mother Belicia. Mami is a shipwreck of female beauty, cancer-ridden and foul-spirited. But once she was astonishingly attractive and lusty, “allergic to tranquilidad,” and her parents were rich and connected. This, too, is history that Belicia barely grasps, that her children are never told about their dying battle-ax mom who berates them in Perth Amboy, N.J. As a 16 year old in the Dominican Republic, we learn in a long flashback narrative, Belicia followed her girlish heart into love and battle with a goon and gangster who just happened to be married to Trujillo’s sister. The affair ends with a savage beating, one of three horrific canefield assaults in the book. Irreparably damaged, Belicia makes her escape to New York:

She is sixteen and her skin is the darkness before the black, the plum of the day’s last light, her breasts like sunsets trapped beneath her skin, but for all her youth and beauty she has a sour distrusting expression that only dissolves under the weight of intense pleasure. Her dreams are spare, lack the propulsion of a mission, her ambition is without traction. Her fiercest hope? That she will find a man. What she doesn’t yet know: the cold, the backbreaking drudgery of the factorias, the loneliness of Diaspora, that she will never again live in Santo Domingo, her own heart. What else she doesn’t know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together, he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again.

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

In our conversation, Junot Diaz speaks of Belicia as a version of his parents’ generation — “our greatest generation [who] suffered so cruelly and created a community for us in America… and founded a dynasty”:

And continue, please, with Part III.