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
