Cursed by the Fukú

Author Junot Diaz draws on his experience as a Dominican-American growing up in New Jersey.

By: Hank Kalet

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JUNOT DIAZ


   Junot Diaz will always consider New Jersey home. The 38-year-old fiction writer and fiction-writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology may split his time between New York City and Boston, but he says he is "home in Jersey every weekend."
   "It’s one of those weird things," he says. "A lot of people who leave New Jersey never come back. But in some ways it was the site of my immigration, a coming of age for me. In many ways, America for me is New Jersey."
   New Jersey and that immigrant experience are important elements of Mr. Diaz’s critically acclaimed 1996 story collection, Drown, and his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which will be issued by Riverhead Books next week. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Best American Short Stories. He will be at Barnes & Noble in the Brunswick Square Mall in East Brunswick Sept. 9 at 2 p.m.
   TIME magazine calls the book "so astoundingly great that in a fall crowded with heavyweights — Richard Russo, Philip Roth — Diaz is a good bet to run away with the field." And Entertainment Weekly says the novel is "a joy to read, and every bit as exhilarating to reread."
   The novel ostensibly is the story of Oscar "Wao" de Leon, a nerdy Dominican kid from Paterson, and his family, which may or may not be dogged by a curse — the fukú — that may or may not have been imposed by longtime Dominican Dictator Rafael Trujillo. It is a book that teems with historical references both real (Trujillo) and imagined (the "histories" of comic books, science fiction and The Lord of the Rings) and is told in a mix of Spanish and English, street lingo and literary styles.
   "Most of us have access to nine or 10 different idioms," he says.
   There are work selves, private selves, the language we use when interacting with friends, family, girlfriends or spouses, he says. There are the languages that come from the television we watch, the books we read, sports and other areas.
   He calls the book "in some ways a love letter to my reading self," it was at least in part an "an attempt to take all my vernaculars and try to make them as equal as possible, to make a sort of — an exuberant equanimity."
   He says that this melting pot approach is "very Caribbean, in a sense."
   "I grew up in a society (in the Dominican Republic) of Native American, African-American and European descent," he says. "I grew up around Lebanese people and Asians and people of all nationalities.
   "There is this concept that multiculturalism starts in the United States," he adds. "But I was always under the sense that the whole was made up of these incredibly diverse parts."
   Mr. Diaz grew up reading science fiction and fantasy novels — Stephen King was one of his favorite writers — but "when I went to college I discovered literature." He went to Rutgers as an undergraduate, then earned a master’s degree at Cornell.
   He says writers like Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston gave him the "necessary literary tools to describe the world from the point of view of a person of color, which is very different from that of someone who is white."
   As a "person of color," he says, "you are aware of the messages a culture gives you.
   "I never met any white kids growing up who thought about race at all," he says. "But I never met a person of color who hadn’t had racism impact on them in very real ways."
   In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Mr. Diaz spends a lot of time exploring the dual nature of the immigrant experience. Oscar is a bookish, overweight nerd who has no luck with women and sits outside his own immigrant culture with its macho stereotype.
   Yunior, the primary narrator, is in many ways Oscar’s opposite, but he ends up playing Boswell to Oscar’s Samuel Johnson, recounting the story of Oscar and the de Leons and the fukú — and helping Mr. Diaz to deconstruct the stereotypes.
   "That’s what I was hoping to do," he says. "What is crazy about poor Oscar is that, in his community, nobody wants him to be Dominican. He doesn’t fit into the comfortable stereotypes. And every group has its comfortable stereotypes."
   Oscar’s plight is not unusual among immigrants, he says. Many create a false choice between their new country and their old country.
   "I actually think a lot of immigrants don’t actually integrate these two halves," he says. "Either they don’t think about the other country or they don’t think about the new country.
   "At every step of my life," he adds, "the integration of the two halves was not encouraged. Either you had people saying, ‘You’re Dominican, don’t forget your roots,’ or the others would say, ‘You’re American.’"
   Neither approach is particularly healthy, he says.
   "It is not so much living in two worlds, but two people living simultaneously in one world," he says. "Even when in Santo Domingo," he says, "The United States was on the horizon. We were always told we were going to the U.S. The U.S. was part of my imaginary landscape.
   "And now that I am here, the part of me that was in Santo Domingo is with me always — it rides shot gun."
Junot Diaz will appear at Barnes & Noble, Brunswick Square Mall, 753 Route 18, Brunswick Square Space 31, East Brunswick, Sept. 9, 2 p.m.; (732) 432-0100.