Follows an excerpt from a conversation between Dominican - American writer Junot Díaz and Paula L.M.Moya:
JD: [Nods quietly] One has to understand that all the comments, all the things that Yunior does in Oscar Wao, move him inexorably away from the thing that he most needs: real intimacy which must have vulnerability, forgiveness, acceptance as its prerequisites. So that even though Yunior is sexist, even though he’s misogynist, even though he’s racist, even though he mischaracterizes Oscar’s life, even though he’s narcissistic—at the end he’s left with no true love, doesn’t find himself, doesn’t find that decolonial love that he needs to be an authentic self. In fact, he ends up—like the work that he assembles and stores in the refrigerator—incomplete.
You know how he assembles this work on Oscar, how he says it needed someone else to complete, a someone he fantasizes as Lola’s daughter, Isis? Isis’s name, of course, is a bit of an inside joke, but an important one. Because, what does Isis do, what is she known for mythologically? In the Egyptian legends I grew up on, Isis assembles her lover/brother Osiris, she assembles the pieces of Osiris that have been chopped up and scattered by Set. That’s one of the great mythical tasks of Isis, except—What does she leave out? In the legends it says that Isis doesn’t find Osiris’s penis, but I like to believe she just leaves it out. Osiris comes back to the world alive but penis-less. Which for some is a horror but for others a marked improvement. In keeping with the Isis metaphor I’ve always thought, the thing with Yunior is that he couldn’t reassemble himself in a way that would leave out the metaphoric penis, that would leave out all his attachments to his masculine patriarchal phallocratic privileges. Which is what he needed to do to finally “get” Lola. In the end, Yunior is left . . . with not much. No Lola, no Isis, no Oscar.
Thinking about Yunior as having been raped made (in my mind at least) his fucked-up utterances in the novel have a different resonance. And while he wasn’t yet ready to bear witness to his own rape, it gave him a certain point of view around sexual violence that I don’t think would have been possible otherwise. It helped me produce a novel with a feminist alignment. A novel whose central question is: is it possible to overcome the horrible legacy of slavery and find decolonial love? Is it possible to love one’s broken-by-the-coloniality-of-power self in another broken-by-the-coloniality-of-power person?
PM: You have a new collection of short stories, This is How You Lose Her, appearing in print very soon. And you are also at work on a new novel, a portion of which you had intended to read from yesterday before you decided instead to give that amazing and insightful lecture. Will you tell me a bit about Monstro?
I have to wrestle with all this weirdness, have to wrestle with the voice, have to wrestle with the characters.
JD: Of course. Monstro is an apocalyptic story. An end of the world story set in the DR of the near future. It’s a zombie story. (On that island, how could it not be?) It’s an alien invasion story. It’s a giant monster story. It’s about the Great Powers (China, the United States) attempting to contain the growing infestation by re-invading the Island for, what, the twelfth time? I always say if people on my island know about anything they know about the end of the world. We are after all the eschaton that divided the Old World from the New. The whole reason I started writing this book is because of this image I have of this fourteen-year-old girl, a poor, black, Dominican girl, half-Haitian—one of the Island’s damnés—saving the world. It’s a book is about this girl’s search for—yes—love in a world that has made it its solemn duty to guarantee that poor raced “conventionally unattractive” girls like her are never loved.
PM: That’s so interesting because just a couple of days ago I went to a talk by the Stanford sociologist Corey Fields; he is doing some pilot studies about the impact of race on black women’s love lives. During his talk, Fields mentioned a book by Averil Clarke called Inequalities of Love. The thing about this book is that it talks about the fact that college-educated black women, in particular, date less, marry less, and have fewer romantic relationships than their college-educated white and Latina counterparts, and than non-college-educated black women. But the important intervention that Clarke makes is that she points out that everyone talks about this fact as a kind of difference. Well, sure it is a difference, but it is not just a difference—it’s an inequality. So she frames the situation in terms of an inequality and describes it as a “romantic deprivation” that black women suffer.
JD: Love this!
PM: And this romantic deprivation has all manner of cascading implications for everything else in their lives.
For the full interview with the writer go hERE
