 "Photo: Alex Palomino/The Observer")
“As an artist, the one thing you’re not going to get a lot of is approval. Approval is a way to deform your art. Usually approval is more about the other person’s comfort than anything you’ve done,” said author Junot Diaz as he answered a student question about 2007’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” and how it was received in his native country, the Dominican Republic.
Diaz, whose novel won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, spent about an hour and a half on April 15 in the atrium of Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) talking about his novel, childhood and both countries that he belongs to, the United States and the Dominican Republic.
“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” deals a lot with the political and social struggles of the people of the Dominican Republic. A good portion of the book takes place during the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, which lasted from 1930 to 1961. The past dictatorship of the Dominican Republic was one of the topics Diaz spoke very strongly about.
“Part of what makes dictatorships possible is our deep desire for answers out of the confused maelstrom of our experience. We want a world we can explain. I wake up every day and resist the urge to simplify.”
“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is a tragic love story that focuses on the titled character, an overweight and extremely nerdy Dominican teen who badly wants to fall in love. The novel also focuses on the conflict between Oscar’s national heritage of both the Dominican Republic and the U.S. Part of how Diaz addresses this issue is through the novel’s narrative, which smashes together the street talk of Latin American culture and the sci-fi/fantasy references (such as Dr. Who and the Lord of the Rings) of U.S. culture.
“This was a novel that was trying to get at most clearly what it feels like to live in the world, where other cultures are always present, where confusion is the norm, where there’s no such thing as linguistic purity except in our dreams,” said Diaz, a professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in an interview with the Observer before the event.
“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” wasn’t Diaz’s first effort. His previous book, “Drown,” was a collection of short stories released in 1996. The long wait for Diaz’s first novel was due in part to his own slow pace and development as a writer.
“It took me about 7 to 8 years to develop the chops to actually take on the monster I had imagined. Then there were just elements that seemed to be hard to grasp… perhaps my own stubbornness at working smart vs. working hard.”
Working hard is certainly something Diaz knows much about. Diaz was born in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, in 1968. He immigrated along with his mother, grandmother and his four siblings to Parlin, New Jersey, where he was reunited with his father who had moved there years earlier. His family lived in extreme poverty for many years, requiring him to work full time at a steel plant to pay for his college education. While Diaz agrees that his childhood has influenced his writing, it’s hard for him to explain just how much it has had an impact on his work.
“It’s almost impossible for me to know or to understand. Certainly, my
childhood love of language, my childhood love of books, coming from a very large family, growing up inside and around an African American community [created] a real abiding desire for justice. I guess these things all fed into it but there’s so much more
that I can’t account for.”
Due to the fact that both Oscar Wao and Diaz grew up in New Jersey
in a similar cultural environment and that they are both self-described nerds, there has been speculation that Wao is partially based on Diaz himself. When a student asked Diaz if this was true, he denied it but did say there was a more emotional connection.
“The fact that it isn’t autobiographical doesn’t mean it isn’t deeply personal. This is the power of art, to take a complete lie (fiction), and produce inside people a complete relationship to it,” said Diaz. “For people who read it, it produces real emotions, a real relationship. Because these emotions are real, it creates an analogue: it must be true.”
Later on, while talking about the connections between his own life and his book, Diaz said, “Fiction can only handle so much truth, and then people stop believing it.” While much of what Diaz talked about during the event was serious, he did lighten up the room with humor about his adolescence in New Jersey and with his frequently colorful language.
The reaction from both students and faculty members was very positive.
“He spoke really lyrically for being off-the-cuff. I was just inspired by his presence and candid answers about the art of writing,” said Ann Howard, FCLC ’10.
“I was impressed with how conversational, funny and dynamic Junot Diaz was as a speaker. He was very accessible to students. He managed to convey complicated ideas in a funny and relatable way,” said Christina Baker Kline, Writer-in-Residence at FCLC.
After what seemed like no time at all, the discussion was over and Diaz was off to a reading and lecture at Rose Hill. Both events were sponsored by the creative writing program in the department of English and were hosted by Daniel Contreras, assistant professor of English.
While Diaz’s time at FCLC was short, the amount of knowledge he gave to the crowd about his life, his book and his country were ideas that can last a lifetime.
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