At the start of 2010 I interviewed Junot Diaz for an article in Talk Magazine. Dude is eminently quotable and he was so generous with his time — he kept talking until the PA system on the plane he was taking announced that the doors were closing.
You’re reading in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing in March. Why were you interested in coming to China?
Well, my god. I’ve been to Asia about ten or eleven times, but I’ve never made it to China. Just imagine if a such a sizable portion of the planet by anyone’s metric, the role that china plays in our present and our future is substantial and I just have the kind of standard built in curiosity of a life time traveler. I’ve been looking forward to visiting China for probably my entire life. It’s not the only place I’ve wanted to visit but I’m really excited about this.
Expectations?
Well, I mean, you know, you’ve gotta understand my best friend has been working in china for over three years now, lives in one of the big factory cities outside of shanghai, so you know I have some sense of the life, but really as anyone who’s ever traveled knows, whatever your dim imagined view of a nation is always exploded by the reality. Well, strangely enough, he works for canon, he works for the canon corporation and oversees one of the factories, one of their production centers. It’s kinda bananas you know because it’s straight up wild west living – he’s out there in one of those places where everybody lives in a barracks, and he’s in this office block with the other canon folks, and yeah he tells me his big treat every week is to go down to the black market and buy some videos you know.
I just reread the Oscar Wao story that was in the New Yorker in the year 2000. The key words they use to sum it up, I guess in order of importance, are: Dominican Republic; Immigrants; Teen-agers; Adolescence; Fat People; Paterson, New Jersey; Comic Books What do you think of that list? I’m not sure who even searches for “fat people”, but do you think Oscar Wao is what they’re looking for? What keywords would help introduce the novel for people who haven’t read it?
Oh my god, hilarious. These are these kind of bullion key words, these bullion search keywords that always so humourously disfigure a work of art. I would be like New Jersey, I would be like nerds, I would be like families, I would be like dictatorships, I would say love, and then I would say sexual violence, and then throw in the carribearn, and I think you’ll at least have a slightly – I mean that’s a description, as a friend of mine said, that’s a description that you can arrest somebody on.
Does anyone search by ‘fat people’?
I didn’t know that there was a literary category.
Should you specialise in that?
I would probably be wealthy but unfortunately my instincts artistically always lead me to poverty.
Listened to a recording of “How to date a black girl, brown girl, white girl or halfie,” and discussed by Edwige Dandicat who says it has generated some pretty strong reactions from readers. Are you conscious of writing about sex and race being a courageous thing? More so than in other media? Are readers more conservative? When else do you feel like your writing is courageous?
Well, you know, it’s one of those things. Look, I’ll tell you basically what’s going on – you’re trying to enter silences, areas of life that folks don’t feel comfortable or don’t have any interest in talking about and you know you know how these silences work because you’ve participated in them too. And when you push against them you know you’re trying to push against them in a way that’s productive, you’re trying to push against them in way that generates some sort of knowledge, that generates in certain people self recognition and you know this as well as I do, that any time you get too close to a target, whether it’s through nonfiction work or whether it’s through fiction work, people react very strongly. As my mother said, you can always tell that either you told the truth or you said an incredible lie because people get up off their seats. And you know sometimes it hard to known which one you’ve hit, but you’ve gotta at least try, you know. I think people are just more conservative – they imagine themselves more conservative than they really are, which is another way of saying that, a friend of mine pointed out that the same people who have trouble with some of these characters are actually dating some of these characters. In other words it’s so much easier to sort of hide who you really are but when you really see it written out, I think most people don’t connect with that. Or, we all fucking fart you know, we all take shits, but people don’t want to ever talk about it, they don’t want to see it represented. I don’t know how brave it is – but how else do you say anything new without entering into areas that people are not exactly going to enjoy. I know it doesn’t much matter to anyone but among the Dominican community back in santo domingo there’s a lot of people who are heated because they feel that I’m too critical about santo domingo, which is kinda funny because I feel like as a writer if you’re going to be of any use you have to be critical of everything that you belong to or participate in. Again, it’s always easier to be a booster, to be like I love new jersey, I love santo domingo but I think a much more complicated adult relationship involves positive feelings but also critical ones, you know. We’re not politicians, man, we’re not politicians. My friend has made me very aware of how different he has it over there from how he had it in the states. Look man I visited cuba a few times, and cuba is one of those places where it, I mean it shares similar tendencies and I remember someone once said something just so mildly critical of not even the regime, but just mildly critical of something that was happening and within two seconds, man, the guy had just been boxed in by secret police and you know, you realize you’re on another planet.
Many of your characters are people who have migrated from the developing world to the developed world – it’s one of the great American narratives of the last century. I imagine the majority of your audience over here will be people who have moved in the opposite direction – from the developed to the developing world. Is that something you’ve come across before, and how do you see it as different? Follow up: China homogenous – racism towards different provinces, some people are genuinely fearful of black people, they say they look like demons, until they make it into the NBA. Wenzhou entrepreneurs describe themselves as the “jews of the east.”
Yeah, man, I mean come on, expats? Expats are crazy, you know. Every expat community distributes itself or composes itself differently and one year is not the same as the other but I’ve visited Tokyo quite a bit and in Tokyo there’s a pretty extensive expat community and it’s extra, extra nutty. If I had a dime for every negative thing that expats said about their host country I could put warren buffet out of commission. I’ve lived in Santo Domingo, and a lot of the nonsense that was going on in Tokyo, it sounds like the same exact script I hear from first world folks living in santo domingo and talking about santo domingo. Hey man, look privilege is a wonderful thing. I think one of the biggest unspoken areas in folks in the expat community – we say why do they stay – it’s because the privilege is enormous. It’s enormous, man. I think it’s very easy to get addicted to your privilege when you’re abroad. It seems like nothing until you’re torn from it and you get sent back to your community where you’re just nobody, you’re just another person you know? I mean I always feel my privilege so acutely when I travel. Well, I mean it’s pretty extensive, it depends on what sort of community you’re in. I don’t know China at all, but what I see in the Dominican republic, if you are a foreigner from the developed world people treat you differently, they treat you better, in some cases there’s minor discrimination, and sort of messed up stuff that happens but compared to the discrimination that the average poor person from that same country feels, it’s miniscule. In a place like Santo Domingo – and I can’t speak for China – in a place like Santo Domingo there’s also racial privilege. If you’re white in a place like santo domingo you can get into clubs where even the natives can’t get into. And you could’ve been some broke ass kid from new jersey, but in santo domingo because you’re white you know you’re connected in some ways to a community that is considered wealthier and better and you know it continues on. As a friend of mine said in japan, he’s like you know what would ugly white dudes do without Japan. He had me dying, because it’s true, as an expat your dating value goes up if you’re a male, white expat, in ways that could never be that high at home. You trade at a higher rate. And so, again, I don’t want to generalize to everyone, I’m speaking almost entirely about certain areas of the Dominican Republic and Tokyo that I know a little bit but I think that these are the privileges that are clear and have been oft discussed in the literature, you know. You assume, probably unwisely, that the human condition can be generalized. Again, I don’t know. But everywhere I’ve been I’ve not seen an absence of these kinds of preoccupations, whether I’m in japan and the singular obsession with foreigners and with Koreans and with latinos – I think that the manufacture and the preoccupations with others strikes me as a human baseline you know? Now, whether the particular American, and by American I mean new world, whether the American model would be relevant to anyone else as perhaps a role model it’s hard to know. I think that in general the romeo and Juliet paradigm – one group disliking the other group and drawing conclusions based on your membership of that group about your character (your own inclusive group), it just seems like something that never goes away. It’s one of those human chords, those notes that are part of our repertoire.
I wanted to ask you about the Haitian earthquake. In 2008 there was a massive earthquake in Sichuan province, in china. It was a big tragedy – 8.0 on the richter scale, and about 70,000 people died. The government used it as an opportunity for nation building. Quake coverage played constantly on every TV channel for a week. Huge patriotic fundraising efforts by people without a whole bunch of money. President and premiere shaking hands and holding kids in front of film crews. How did the Haitian earthquake play out politically in the Dominican republic? I read that DR hospitals in the west of the country were full of Haitian victims, that the airports were opened to aid coming through the DR to Haiti, but that there were also military posted along the border to stop refugees entering. Haitians are treated very badly in Oscar Wao. NB – After a team from Iceland, the Chinese were one of the first countries to get to Haiti.
I think it surprised a lot of people, how it went down. First of all it’s a catastrophe without analogue, without parallel. It’s basically the level of human suffering from sources who I have there and my friends who are actually in Haiti, who are over there as jourmalists, they are like it’s unimaginable, the new Yorker war correspondent, john lee Anderson, who’s a friend of mine, is over there and you know this guy has seen some shit, yo, john lee Anderson is like things are super fucked up you sort of a get a sense that this guy has things to compare it to, you know? Now, I think that nobody ever expected that a country with so much hostility towards Haiti as the Dominican republic would step up as incredibly as it has. Basically the Dominican republic is on war footing – I mean maybe that’s the wrong word, it’s been almost completely mobilized, I mean for the first few weeks after the catastrophe almost any spare resources that were in the country were aimed at Haiti. Elective surgeries were cancelled, spare generators by the dozens were sent over, mobil operation theatres, troops by the thousands, mobil kitchens, thousands of meals, every Dominican hospital was flooded with refugees and wounded – you’ve never seen anything like it and no one would ever have imagined it. Saanto domingo is not as poor as Haiti but it’s still a deeply impoverished country and for it to give these kinds of resources, to in some ways rush to its neighbour’s aid, again I would have said would be unimaginable in the context of the historical tensions and the historical conflict between the two countries and to be honest as folks on the ground said, the level of suffering and the death that would have occurred had it not been for the early Dominican response I think would have made the situation even much worse than it is if you can imagine that. I think that if the whole global community had mobilized itself in the sort of surprising way that the Dominican republic has done I think we would have seen a completely different Haiti. That’s not to diminish the aid that was presented but I didn’t notice any American hospital being flooded with the Haitian wounded. I certainly didn’t notice the American lifestyle changing one dot. In the Dominican republic the lifestyle has altered and not because there’s any money coming in from Haiti, Haiti was not a trade partner in any way, simply because Haiti was like yo man there but for the grace of god go i. I think it ignited in people a kind of compassion. I mean something, I just gotta tell you man I did not expect. These are two countries that have never been pals, you know. I just think the best way to describe it as that the relationships of any country has to be thought about kind of as a game of poker where some of the cards are facing up and are visible and some of the cards are facing down and only are revealed in situations like this, and I think that the Dominican republic and Haiti on top of having these long term conflicts, on top of having a genocide inflicted on the Haitian nation Dominican community by the Dominican Republic in the 1930s, on top of these like historical enmities and animosity there was also an enormous amount of contact, an enormous amount of solidarity, an enormous amount of mingling that was going on beneath all of these larger political motions. [equivalent of China coming to the aid of Japan]. I think that those were the cards that were hidden all this time. And you know what was interesting, every time that people would tend to characterize Dominican and Haitian relationships along a simplistic access of hostility it wasn’t just me, it was a number of people who would continually say again and again yes, these hostilities are there, I have always been very straight forward about them, and very vocal, but there’s also more to these communities than that, that there is a deep solidarity there, that there is a connection there that I think people don’t speak about. Even though a bunch of us were feeling this and could point to this historically, it wasn’t until the earthquake that I think those cards flipped over and you saw these communities share a totally different relationship than the one that people assumed.
Completely opposite to filling all the same channels with the same content, in your own writing, you build in some distinct changes of voice, different narrators, and even switching to second person. You also break the spell a bit by drawing attention to how middle class oscar’s prostitute girlfriend is – “suburban tropical”. I’ve heard you say It’s not a bad thing to escape the grip of a good story teller. Writing is usually praised for being “persuasive”. Do you think these days, to persuade a reader you need to give them the opportunity to resist? How do you walk that line?
My god, I think you do. I really think you do. Look, I think most of us are in the grip of very powerful narratives, often state or corporate sponsored narratives and we’re not even made aware that we’re in this narrative, you know. Most of us just take it as a commonplace. I think it’s not a bad skill for every person to develop – how ya doing man – sort of a built in critical resistance to these things, man. I think it holds you in good stead; I think it holds you in very good stead.
Use of Spanish and nerdspeak – the idea that quote “Unintelligibility is not a misfire of language” – it’s a real and vital part of it. I think a lot of us here spend a lot of time communicating in ways that’s functional but imperfect and will get that. But do you sometimes feel like there’s a tension between writing for yourself and for readers?
Well, I mean I think that’s the challenge. The challenge is that no book exists in isolation. I don’t write a novel simply because mine is the only novel I’ve ever read. I think there are approaches in writing that mark clearly that you’re not the only voice in this game. That you’re not the only person that’s ever had an opinion about this stuff. If you think about it most writers never mention other books that are not like classics, you know, so that they make it seem like they’re the only present voice in the game. I think that just a small strategy that I can point to most concretely is that if you give your readers options that say there are other people who’ve talked about this topic, maybe you should go check them out and see what you think then it’ll help them to compare and contrast. I come to writing from the perspective of a reader. Reading guides everything that I do as a writer and one of the things that I know about reading is that it is okay as a reader to require the assistance of someone else in your reading. In fact this is the most normal of all processes. Reading requires other people – it has since the beginning. We started to read with people. We learn to read in community with other people and it’s not so much that there’s a split between the solipsism of writing for self and the larger concerns of writing for others it’s more that if you really are a lover of reading and you remember the roots of your reading you know that part of its joy, and part of the practice of reading is that it allows you to connect and it allows you to be in conversation with other people. We’ve forgotten that reading is not meant to be practiced in isolation. Certainly we read alone and by ourselves but books only make sense when in the process of reading we reach out to other people that’s why I don’t mind having sections that people don’t understand, that are nerd stuff or something else, you know, I think it’s okay because I really believe that real readers will enjoy the adventure of finding people who will help them understand the book.
Louis de berniere said there shouldn’t be, unless your interests are bizarre, for instance if you like being shat on your readers might be repulsed. You seem to write about marginal interests (the nerd equivalents of deviant sex) for a wide audience. Does that work because in fact the marginal in your writing isn’t all that marginal, or is watching Blake’s Seven the media equivalent of enjoying being shat on? Have you considered writing something very genre – like futuristic twilight fan fiction?
Oh man, I don’t know how about that, I mean, the poor Blake’s 7 fans would be up in arms. But so would the fans of being shat on, really. When it comes to nerdiness I think it’s – the average person, if you say Blake’s 7 they’d have no idea what that is, on the other hand when you see being shat upon everybody can immediately picture it and get that very visceral reaction. So I just think that the real deal is that you know if you’ve got a main character who likes to be shat on you’d better be the best writer in the world, to make that make sense. Hold on a second the voice upstairs is disrupting. Again my instincts don’t run towards the remunerative, so I’m not writing about werewolves and vampires, but I am writing a kind of an apocalyptic science fiction book called dark America. It’s really bad, I kind of enjoy it.
It is something that you plan to publish?
Oh yeah. I don’t think anybody will plan to read it but I definitely plan to publish it.
Oscar Wao features fukus (curse) and zafas (counterspell). Four days of fireworks have just ended here – much easier to conduct interviews. What is the role of superstition in the first world, and is it best reconciled in fiction?
Superstition: Well look, you gotta remember that I’m from the united states, a deeply, deeply superstitious country. This is no joke in the sense that the majority of people believe in angels, where more people believe in supernatural phenomena than believe in Darwin. For me, living in the Dominican republic – and I know this sounds crazy and it sounds like a put on – literally, living in the Dominican republic was more empirical than living in the united states. On the surface it may not seem so, because the united states is a highly functioning first world economy the paragon of late modern capitalism – but my god anyone who has lived here as long as I have, dude, the level of obfuscatory mythological, magical thinking is just beyond the imagination. And I think that especially in the American example it’s too easy to split the US off from the rest of latin America or even a place like china, you know, I just think that American superstitions are big in ways that are invisible to outsiders. I haven’t really been to new Zealand much, I won’t pretend I have any knowledge of it but new Zealand has a large community, the maori there, and for all the atheism, and maori, not all of them, but the maori have certain beliefs and mythic pathways that I don’t think are necessarily shared by everyone in New Zealand that the new Zealand example is probably a rare one. Folks in general are strangely superstitious and I’m sure in a place like china it must seem so extreme but for someone who’s never been to china or lived there, in a place like the us I have so much problems distinguishing because it just seems like everybody is at the table. When it comes to setting off fireworks to set off the ghosts – it feels like in America everybody is trying to sell you fireworks. What I was sort of trying to pan handedly point out is that often these traditions exist side by side. Like in New Zealand you have this very atheistic, very empirical rational culture existing side by side with other elements. I think that part of what I tried to do in oscar wao by highlighting this jerseyness, this banal prosaic new jerseyness of the present, is that often these things really comfortably sit at the same table and even if they ignore each other they’re there; they’re there with each other.
How important is habit and ritual to the act of writing, and in your case, how important is keeping an impeccably shaved head?
What is happening? Oh my god – our correspondent (?) has been smoking more than me. First of all, I do think that the best work for me happens if I’m working every day. Second of all, I never recovered from being raised by a military father. My old man was like totally a – the best way to describe my father was that he was a fascistic, paramilitary. I guess that the kindest way is to say that he was a fascistic paramilitary lunatic. All the males until we got out of my father’s grasp, all the males had shaved heads, and I think that I never recovered from this. I fight back and forth because as my friend said I’m an Olympic athlete in chilling and then on the other hand I can definitely focus and I can turn on my father’s son in like an instant but I’m at war like most sons we’re at war with our patrimonies, you know.
You took ten years to write Oscar Wao, start to finish. Heard you say that’s because of the distractions of the world, a love of reading over writing, and being a slow writer generally. You talk about five years of failing (same time as de Berniere, who said he wanted a break). How much of the pleasure of writing for you comes from writing and how much comes from having written?
First of all, young man, I would like my year back because it took me eleven years, so I will not be shortchanged. I think to be honest that’s probably the best damned question in all this time that I’ve been interviewed that anyone has ever asked. And I would say that if I could put a number on it it would probably be one third the pleasure is the writing and two thirds the pleasure from having written. When I write on the daily basis I’m just like that sucked. And then at the end of the four hours, I’m like, wow I did it and I’m really happy.
That’s so precise. Are you being facetious?
Not at all, I’m being straight honest. Again at the molar level I’m that way. At the larger level I’m totally fucked up. As soon as I finish something I immediately begin to crank up the pressure on myself and say well what have you done lately, what have you done lately? I mean it doesn’t take a year after me publishing something for me to start calling myself a fraud. And it’s true, I have driven many a girlfriend nuts with how they claim that I don’t know how to enjoy things, especially the success of any of these books.