09 February 2009
An Interview with Junot Díaz
In November 2008 National Public Radio ran a series of interviews with noted immigrant authors to mark the American feast of Thanksgiving, that was started nearly 500 years ago by early first European immigrants to North America. “Morning Edition” host Steve Inskeep interviewed Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Díaz: Look, we talk so much about immigration without talking about it at all. Can you imagine what it would be like if today I just took you, stripped you from your family, your circuits, your language, your culture and dropped your ass off at Kazakhstan with very few people like you and said, ‘hey, not only do you have to make your way through this society but you got to maintain a family?’
Inskeep: Junot Diaz wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." It’s about a kid who is a total outcast, lonely, fat, obsessed with science fiction. That kid is from a family of Dominican immigrants. So is Junot Diaz, who arrived in the United States at age six.
Díaz: I know that being brought to central New Jersey was both this remarkable opportunity – I would not have discovered things about myself that I never would have discovered, I think, had I not been torn away from my moorings. But also it was a real, real, real challenge. Listen, I became a fanatic of the Dominican Republic based on the fact that it was taken away from me. I don’t think I ever would have thought so longingly of Santo Domingo had I stayed there my whole life.
Inskeep: What were your first days in school like?
Díaz: I basically spent my first few months sitting in the classroom, in the back, being ignored by my teachers because there was no one who could speak Spanish. I remember getting into a lot of fights with the kids. Look, is there anyone crueler than children? But at the same time, we were really, really tough kids. And it was me, my older brother, my older sister, my little sister; we were all in it together. We fought our way into a good social niche, but man those first six months were real dicey, I tell you.
Inskeep: Did you show up at school knowing hardly any English?
Díaz: I showed up at school not knowing a word of English and dressed like something out of a wetback comedy. We stood out so much in this community, it was remarkable.
Inskeep: And how would a fight get started? You said there were fights with kids?
Díaz: I mean, how do fights get started? Somebody calls you something that you don’t understand, but it’s clearly negative and everybody laughs and you get scrapping. But look, you don’t want to generalize, because there were also wonderful kids who were very curious about us, who right from the start, would sit with us and would talk with us and would teach us words, and those kids make all the difference. It’s not so black and white.
Inskeep: Because you write about a kid who is so utterly nerdy, I have to ask, if you were nerdy yourself?
Díaz: Yeah, but in the same way any kid who goes to college is nerdy. I can’t imagine that one gets into college by being a thug, you know? What’s interesting in this book is you have degrees of nerds. You have Oscar who is the nerd extreme, you have his sister Lola who is super bookish and super intelligent, you have Junior the narrator who is also very bookish and intelligent but does everything to hide it. And I think in the spectrum I’m somewhere between Junior and Lola, with Oscar being the farthest extreme.
Inskeep: You might be one of those kids who is nerdy but is self aware enough to know that he should separate himself a little bit from the really nerdy kids.
Díaz: You know, I have to tell you, it was the exact opposite. I had a certain cachet of cool by the time the first few years were done, because I had this good-looking family, my siblings were popular. And so I was actually allowed to hang out with the nerdiest of nerdy people and it never splashed back on me. I could walk around my neighborhood with a book or an atlas and nobody would say anything to me.
Inskeep: Did your reading choices say anything about your transition to America?
Díaz: Well, look, that was one of the things that was remarkable. The solitude of being an immigrant, the solitude of having to learn a language and a culture from scrap, the need for some sort of explanation, the need for answers, the need for something that would…in some ways shelter me, led me to books, man…as a kid I was very, very curious, kind of smart, and I was trying to answer the question, first of all, what is the United States and how do I get along in this culture, this strange place, better? And also, who am I and how did I get here? And the way I was doing it was through books, man. I found books. When they showed me the library when I was a kid, a light went off in me, in every cell of my body. Books became the map with which I navigated this new world.
Inskeep: Books about what?
Díaz: Books about everything. There wasn’t a book that I thought a stranger to me. I would look at books that would have oil paintings, Audubon paintings of animals. I would look at books that would be biographies of presidents, I would look at books that would have car engines and mechanical design. I looked everywhere for the answers to those questions.
Inskeep: What’s it mean to be an American?
Díaz : Well, that’s a really good question. I think it means many, many things simultaneously. It’s one of those...it is a question that as individuals and as a country we wrestle with every day. It’s the wresting with that question that defines us; it’s not any of the answers. For me, being an American is in a large part dealing with these multiple Americas. One America which is very xenophobic, which is very close-minded, which is very racist, and an America where simultaneously and in opposition where many things are possible. Where a kid like me can come from a non-bookish culture and miraculously be transformed.
Inskeep: How as a kid did you mesh the side of you which was, as you said, fiercely proud of the Dominican Republic with the kid who was fiercely reading every book he could find about America?
Díaz: Well, you know, what you learn as a kid is that, you learn that [Walt] Whitman concept that you can contain multitudes. One can carry inside of them both the country of their origin and the country that has received them. I mean, the idea that has been popularized that one must choose between your home place and the new place is cruel and absurd. You can be two things simultaneously. If America teaches you anything, is that that is very true.
NPR, Morning Edition. Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be duplicated or disseminated without permission. Because the copyright holder has not granted translation rights, this article appears only in the English language version of eJournal USA.
