Junot Díaz

LOURDES TORRES (LT):

As a linguist I am interested in language and I am writing something on Latino writers and their use of Spanish in their work. So you are really unique in that regard, because when you use Spanish in your text− there is never any translation, it’s not italicized, the monolingual reader doesn’t get the chance to understand that a lot of the times even a Spanish speaker who is not of the same dialect who doesn’t speak Dominican Spanish may not understand a reference and you don’t make any bones about that. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your use of Spanish in your writing.

JUNOT DIAZ (JD):

I always, I guess, ever since I was like six or seven, when I came to the United States, for me language has always been not just about communication. It always feels like it has also been about incomprehension, maybe it is that way for everyone, but for me it became very explicit immigrating; how much time I spent not understanding people, and how much time I lived with people who just didn’t understand. That was a part of what language meant to us. And so I guess that to me that was a very visible component of a linguistic process, of linguistic interaction. So I wanted to kind of wrestle with that and to work with it. I was writing for, in a larger context, African diasporic and in the most narrow context, a Dominican diasporic. So I just assume that, you know, there is going to be a lot of things that people are going to understand. I mean, I just assume that this is my audience, if I am writing to them, I didn’t necessarily need to translate things; these are the people that I am writing for, I shouldn’t need to translate. And I also just wanted to figure out a system of how to use Spanish and how to try to get across that kind of violence that English inflicted on my Spanish first, and now; it’s kind of a linguistic violence the way English is taught in the United States, in the way that it is controlled, the way that is propagated. So I was thinking about all of these things and still, it’s not great, I am not the best at it, it was a learning process. I had a few people ahead of me who were doing it and so I used their examples and springboarded.

LT:

Did you get any pressure, editorial pressure to do some kind of translation or glossary or italicize? In the places where you have published, has there ever been a request for you to work that way to make it more accessible?

JD:

Of course, there was a story published in The New Yorker. My first few stories were published in The New Yorker. They refused to let me put Spanish in normal text.

LT:

Italicize it in The New Yorker?

JD:

The New Yorker. Of course when I prepare something it’s in the way I want it. After a certain point, by the third story I realized that, you know what, this was a real serious blow to my artistic project. You know, it’s nice being published in The New Yorker, but I just said, you know what, “If you don’t do it, we are not publishing it.” So they backed down, I was glad I did but, when I first started, it was kind of overwhelming.

LT:

There is this whole question about what Latino writers get taken on by the mainstream. And some people argue that the ones who are accepted are the ones who capitulate to whatever the mainstream Anglo-audience wants to read and how they want to see Latinos represented.

JD:

I would completely agree with that.

LT:

So how do you explain your success in terms of the mainstream because you are very popular in the mainstream igual as with Latino audiences?

JD:

I feel like people don...