I was pleasantly surprised to find Junot Diaz’ name on the roster of presenters, who’ve numbered, over the years, major leaguers like Sonia Sanchez and Derek Wolcott. I’d been clocking his rising star through his edgy, sometimes irritating, but always engaging short stories published in the New Yorker with enough regularity to pay the rent. They referenced dominicanos trying to get it on, get over, get smart and get out. While I wasn’t always captivated by his surrogates’ predicaments—but maybe that was his ploy: to get me to struggle with my sympathies—his characters were always fully-formed and deeply penetrated; the dialog was snap your fingers true and oftentimes hysterical.
I can’t remember what Junot read (nor did I know that he was then, as he would be for 10 long years, in agony over a hiccoughing first novel that needed to expire several times before being birthed). But, I remember he wore a fly Panama hat that made him look, at the same time, muy caribeño and positively Princess Line, and that he made us all crack up.
Back in New York less than a week later, near my home, I spied Diaz on the street, unmistakable this time in his wire frames and face and pate powdered in fuzz.
I approached, uncharacteristically bold, probably in unconscious acceptance of a generally inviting vibe. “Hey, I know you. I saw you read at the Calabash Festival last week.” We talked easily, not so much about our craft as about Jamaica. I was impressed at how, after just that one brief other-focused visit –by then, I’d probably notched in 20—he’d been able to digest and articulate so clearly Jamaica for all its dysfunctionality and misplaced humanity, assimilating what would seem the most inconsequential clues into an unassailable identikat.
I put Junot Diaz into my teeny evening purse of perfect intellectuals—those who use their gut instincts and superior power of observation and poetry to navigate the world and then apply left brain formatting to legitimize their findings in order to communicate and, hopefully, make a defining contribution to society.
When the story of Oscar Wao’s brief encounter with life came out, I rushed to buy the book, but put off reading it. I was afraid I’d be disappointed and, with it, the Junot Diaz bubble would burst.
But the searching interviews of the author, officially conferring his brainiac status, while confirming his earnest humility, moved me to get to it. The undertaking was epic.
Diaz’ apportioned history of the DR is doctoral yet reads like a Classic Comic, his Oscar Wao (from Wilde, you see, but the homies can’t put the ‘l’ and the ‘d’ together) is redemptively not cloyingly pathetic, and the narrator, Yunior, the homie hustler is the perfect foil, and alter ego, to outsized Oscar. In the end, because they both ring so true, I think our professor of English at M.I.T. has crafted the two characters from the dead-set middle that is himself.
And here’s Diaz, with his home-honed humility bigging up the big heads (as they say in Jamaica) at M.I.T. for allowing their brilliance to nurture “Oscar Wao’s” womb.* But, au contraire, Junot. It’s your brain, that perfect ping pong left brain, right brain, 2-stepped merengue that’s feeding them mouthfuls indeed!
* "I'm just so proud and overjoyed and happy to have finished this book at MIT, surrounded by so many brilliant colleagues and students." MIT News (online—9th April, 2008)
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See, too, Carolina Gonzalez on Why Wao's Pulitzer Matters on the HAV home page.
