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The burgeoning and prudent life of Junot Diaz
Celebrated Pulitzer Prize winning author visits UWM
By Danielle Stevens
“I spend 90% of my occupational time with 18-year-olds. When you’re 40, you feel like an alien planet,” Diaz said.
As the key-note speaker for the sixth annual Hispanic Heritage Month, Pulitzer prize winning author Dominican author Junot Diaz made a much anticipated stop in Milwaukee last Monday, giving a short, yet powerful reading from his award winning first novel, “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”
The Roberto Hernandez Center, as well as several other local sponsors had originally booked the eclectic author in the spring before his Pulitzer win, and the general mood was relief.
Before the event even begun, nearly 300 hundred attendees had arrived, and organizers were forced to bring in more chairs to accommodate the growing crowd.
Against a consortium of Latin and American flags, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee English professor Maurice Kilwein Guevara welcomed the casual looking writer, who wore a simple black sweater and black-rimmed glasses. He quietly announced he would spend the majority of his time answering audience questions directly, book-ended by two short readings from his 2008 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award winning first novel.
“Nothing is more humane than a short reading. How many of y’all are students forced to come here by your teacher?” Diaz joked while a handful of people raised their hands. “Aw, shit. Isn’t that fucked up? I know there‘s about a billion other things to do than chillin’ with an artist for an hour,” he said.
Unless of course, that artist is Diaz. Throughout the entire hour, the relatively young, yet immensely celebrated author proved endlessly fascinating, interesting, erudite, witty and hilarious. Nearly every personal musing seemed quotable both for aspiring writers and literature fans alike.
Diaz spent a great deal of time warmly teasing the audience, mixing his enthralling intellect with a comfortingly relatable and informal language. The author spent his early childhood in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, until his family immigrated to Parlin, New Jersey. Diaz claims that he took to over-achieving due to suffering what he considers to a typical immigrant compulsion stemming from family pressure for their children’s prosperity both socially and economically.
Diaz mused that the youth of today, “don’t gotta do jack fucking shit, God bless ’em, I wanna have kids like that.”
A perpetually avid reader, he majored in English at Rutgers University, and then earned his MFA from Cornell. Diaz now teaches creative writing and humanistic studies as an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I spend 90% of my occupational time with 18-year-olds. When you’re 40, you feel like an alien planet,” Diaz said.
Diaz has written numerous critically lauded short stories. However he has been awarded the majority of his awards, fellowships and accolades for “Oscar Wao”, written over the course of some 11 years. He is only the second Latin American writer, after Oscar Hijuelos in 1990, to receive the literary prize since its inception. “Time” magazine called the novel, “astoundingly great”, describing it as, “an immigrant-family saga for people who don’t read immigrant-family sagas.” “The New York Times” was also impressed by its “streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale.”
One topic continually addressed throughout the evening was the underlying sociopolitical themes of the novel. Diaz matter-of-factly elaborated on the novel’s treatment and portrayal of the horrific real-life former Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.
“The history of the new world is not for the faint of heart,” he said. Diaz also took the time to respond to the novel’s use of language. Readily mixing Spanish, English, Dominican and American slang and profanity, with numerous fantasy/sci-fi references, Diaz has been repeatedly by a select few readers online.
“If you tell the truth and you curse too much, nobody believes you,” Diaz said. “But, you can couch a lie in the most official language and nobody questions you.”
During the Q&A, Diaz explained that he grew up with 6 females of “enormous personalities” in the home. He readily admits not being nerdy enough to be the title character Oscar, “People go, A. You’re not smart, B. you’re not fat. What the fuck?”
Diaz claimed that while not being “amazing enough” to be the novel’s narrator, Yunior, literary alter egos are exaggerated forms of ourselves.
Even after actively engaging individual members the audience for over an hour, Diaz also stayed also on hand to sign books and meet the hundreds of attendees one by one. Even after talking to nearly a hundred people, Diaz still appeared extremely friendly.
“What do you do?” he warmly asked.
“I’m a writer. I’ll be writing a piece on your visit.”
“Really? Make sure to quote me!”
“Will do.”
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