By David Walter, Special Writer
Author Junot Díaz, who on Monday won a Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” came to Princeton University on Wednesday afternoon to discuss his use of high fantasy in illuminating the real struggles of Caribbean-Americans.
”What’s fascinated me was how much of what we don’t want to say or that we don’t like to say … finds itself expressed in the genres,” Mr. Díaz told a capacity audience at the university’s McCormick Hall.
”The human conditions — our preoccupations, our fears, what we’re all about — find themselves impressed in fantasy, horror, science fiction.”
In “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Mr. Díaz presents a multigenerational Caribbean-American saga centered around the book’s college-aged title character, a Tolkein-worshipping Dominican immigrant living in central New Jersey.
In the book, Oscar draws on the fantastic worldviews of his literary idols to make sense of his own improbable journey from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic to Rutgers University. Mr. Díaz said Wednesday that this somewhat improbable narrative device was essential to capturing the truths of the immigrant experience.
”When you’re a Caribbean immigrant of African descent who leaves the Dominican Republic … you confront the limits of realistic narrative in describing your experience,” Mr. Díaz said. “The actual flows of third-world bodies in this kind of weirdly late modern capitalist world, that experience through the eyes of a young person — realism does a poor job of describing that.”
Critics have hailed Oscar Wao as a major literary accomplishment, with special praise reserved for Mr. Díaz’s multilingual prose, a mix of Spanish, street talk, and American Nerd.
”Mr. Díaz writes about the Trujillo era of the Dominican Republic with the same authority he writes about contemporary New Jersey, the slangy, kinetic energy of his prose proving to be a remarkably effective tool for capturing the absurdities of the human condition” Michiko Kakatuni wrote in the New York Times.
Mr. Diaz, who himself left the Dominican Republic for America as a child, said that his frequent use of untranslated Spanish and slang placed the novel more in tune with the rhythms of the real world.
”We’re accustomed to dealing with a world that doesn’t reveal itself, that doesn’t explain itself, that is in some respects untranslatable,” he said, adding that he wanted to, “return an element which the Victorian novel tried to erase — which is unintelligibility.”
Mr. Díaz also said he wanted to leave some aspects of the story deliberately fragmented in order to demand more participation than normal from the reader.
”I was really curious about the idea of a book that isn’t finished until the reader pieces it together,” he said. “The final pages are empty until you order the pieces in the way you want and in the way you (choose to) answer certain questions in the book.”
Mr. Díaz’s writing has also appeared in magazines like the New Yorker and in a 1996 short story collection called “Drown.” Many of these stories also dealt with the Dominican experience in both the Caribbean and America – an experience Mr. Díaz said was essential to understanding the current state of the entire Western hemisphere.
”You can’t begin to understand what this project of the “New World” is without the Caribbean,” he said, noting that Christopher Columbus landed not in the United States, but on the island that later become the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
The role of the Caribbean and its inhabitants in shaping America has too long been ignored, Díaz said.
”In some ways, the Caribbean is the forbidden zone of the New World,” he said. “If you dig around too deeply, what you discover is yourself. You discover more accurate stories about who we are and why we came to be.”
Mr. Díaz then gave examples of how the Caribbean template had shaped American history.
”Slavery — exterminate and breed out all indigenous people? Check. The plantation with the forced racialized breeding for four hundred years? Check,” he said.
It’s a heritage, Mr. Diaz said, that too few wish to acknowledge.
”My mother says that, ‘The American eagle was born out of the Dominican egg.’ But you’ll never be the eagle that will claim the broken, shattered egg as its origins,” he said.
