Conversation with Junot Diaz: (To the Woman in the Mountain Cabin)

Junot, you must be tired of questions by now. Instead of asking you more, I would like to share my responses to your novel and elicit whatever response you might like to make. My comments are grouped under three topics (due no doubt to my Trinitarian perspective):

1. 1. The America(s)

2. 2. Through the Spectacles of Fantasy

3. 3. Bringing it All Back Home

The America(s)

You can tell a lot about a book from its epigraphs, which authors generally choose with great care. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao begins with two. The second is a poem by the West Indian poet and dramatist Derek Walcott:

Christ have mercy on all sleeping things! From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road to when I was a dog on these streets: if loving these islands must be my load, out of corruption my soul takes wings, But they had started to poison my soul with their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl, coolie, nigger, Syrian, and French Creole, so I leave it for them and their carnival— I taking a sea-bath, I gone down the road. I know these islands from Monos to Nassau, a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes that they nickname Shabine, the patois for any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw when these slums of empire was paradise. I’m just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, And either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.

“I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation”—

America is Creole from its birth. And its birthplace was Hispaniola, the cockpit of Castilian settlement, conquest, and exploitation. Taino, Spanish, African haunted from the start by fuku little and large, unleashed by the Europeans carrying enslaved Africans in the fetid holds of their ships. “Its point of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we knew it or not,” Diaz writes. (A judgment that reminds me of Ike McCaslin’s similar take on American beginnings in Faulkner’s mythic Go Down Moses—Europeans had arrived in the new land “from that old world’s corrupt and worthless twilight as though in sailfuls of the old world’s tainted wind which drove the ships.”)

Your book supplies for us, “who missed our mandatory two seconds of Dominican history,” a new perspective upon understanding the history of America from that place of fuku’d origin.

In a course I teach on Religious Encounters in the Colonial Atlantic World, I begin with the priority of the Southern Atlantic in the encounter of various European, African, and Native American peoples whose sustained and usually brutal contact created, through the mediation of the Atlantic Ocean, the Americas. (The “s” made necessary by the U.S. appropriation of the name America.) My students are surprised to learn that the first Africans landed in Hispaniola as early as 1502 and that they outnumbered Europeans 1,000 to 659 by 1514. The first ship of Africans shipped directly to Hispaniola from Africa arrived in 1532 in answer to the pleas of Bartolomeo de Las Casas and others for African slaves to replace the decimated Taino laborers. They are surprised to learn that in absolute numbers more Africans crossed the Atlantic to the Americas than Europeans until the1830swhenEuropean immigration finally forced migration in those fuku-infested ships.

Where you begin determines the story you tell and the perspective from which you envision it. Junot, you change our perspective on the Americas by offering a narrative from a “periphery” which becomes the center. Anyone who reads your book has to think about America differently. What was absent is now present. Not as history lesson, but as the humorous, sad, tragic story of a Dominican family.

Through the Spectacles of Fantasy

The first epigraph of the book is “Of what import are brief, nameless lives . . . to Galactus??” taken from...