By Isaac Hamlet | [email protected]
This past week, Junot Díaz — a Pulitzer-Prize-winning author and activist — visited campus through the auspices of the Magid Center for Undergraduate Writing, with numerous events, including a reading Tuesday and a Q&A Wednesday morning.
Díaz was born in 1968 in the Dominican Republic, grew up in New Jersey, and received an M.F.A. from Cornell.
Since his first short-story collection, Drown, the character of Yunior de Las Casa has been a point of return of him.
“Yunior’s life is deeply fascinating to me,” Díaz said. “His slow development from an entrenched tribune of toxic masculinity into a human being is a central project of mine, one that I believe is best unveiled slowly over a series of books.
“Hegemonic ideologies are not so easily resolved inside anyone — if they were, we wouldn’t all be so imprisoned by them.”
This journey has extended past Drown into his second collection of short stories and his first novel, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in which Yunior appears as narrator.
The novel, which took more than a decade to write, follows Oscar de Leon. As a nerd, Oscar finds himself struggling to interact with women as well as aspiring to be “the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien.”
“Tolkien’s foundational fantasy novels best demonstrates the argument that the novel makes about how the fantastic and the postcolonial are implicated in one another,” Díaz said. “How all the oppressive systems and histories that the New World helped to foist onto the planet became the political unconscious of our genre books. Without the racial system that first took root in the Caribbean, a book like The Lord of the Rings would make no sense.”
Diaz has been an activist on topics of ingrained racism and oppression, delineating issues of racism that come programmed into our cultural consciousness.
“The dream is that we can begin to accept the raped factions of our history,” he said, referring to the aspects of his and America’s heritage that have been obliterated by racial and cultural hegemony.
This underlying idea is reflected in his work. Yunior journies to free himself of toxic masculinity, and Oscar’s family goes from a place of affluence in the Dominican Republic to being another immigrant family in New Jersey.
Even with his consistent inclusion of themes and characters that address social issues, Díaz is less predictable in what he reads.
“When it comes to books, I don’t have seem to have a type. Clearly we all have preferences, but what surprises me looking over the books I’ve read the last few years is how often I go against my ‘preferences.’ ”
In terms of what ideas and emotions he wants people to emerge from his stories with, he doesn’t much mind.
“Ultimately, it’s the readers’ book,” he said. “They may take from it what they will, but I wouldn’t mind if my work left them wanting to read more of anything. Books at their best encourage us to seek other books.”