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Junot Díaz
As part of the fifth anniversary of TeatroStageFest and the ninth annual Uptown Arts Stroll, “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Dominican writer Junot Díaz, was adapted and presented by stage actor Elvis Nolasco in a one-man show on June 11.
To mark the occasion and catch up with one of our greatest contemporary authors Debralee Santos of the Manhattan Times exchanged emails with Díaz about the staging of his novel, Trujillo and Anthony Weiner, and, of course, the Dominican superhero.
Debralee Santos: In this new adaptation of OSCAR WAO, Elvis Nolasco performs in a one-man show. You conceived of these characters now being brought to life on stage “por una sola persona” – how does that feel/sound to you, given how deeply you imagined and long you lived with the characters Nolasco now inhabits?Is that just another iteration of the sci-fi nature of the entire “Wao” experience?
Junot Díaz: A book exists only for a reader. Once a book is read it’s your book to do with what you wish. In reading we play all the parts out in our hearts and our head so what Mr. Nolasco is doing feels to me like just an extension of the reading experience. But never in my life did I imagine that someone with so much talent, so much genius, would illuminate my characters so radiantly.
DLS: What does it mean to have OSCAR WAO come uptown, come to El Alto, a space described as “la cuna” [the cradle] of the Dominican experience in the States?
JD: If it wasn't for the Dominican experience which Washington Heights is the heart of, OSCAR WAO would not exist. For me, to have this play in the Heights is everything, the culmination of many of my dreams.
DLS: Much of what you went through coming up in Jersey, including migration, terrible housing, economic hardship, difficulty with the English language, an absent father, plastic covered couches, is all also the norm for another generation of Dominican/Dominican-American adolescents and teenagers in El Alto and the Bronx. You’ve said: “I feel my organic unit is poor immigrant kids who want to do something to make themselves feel valuable.” Thoughts/musings on keeping it together, on feeling valuable, for a new set coming up?
JD: Each life, for all its similarities, is deeply particular. All I know is that there should be Medals of Honor for lives like ours – there should be memorials in Washington, D.C. To grow up poor and immigrant and of color in the U.S. it to have survived one of the most difficult of "normative" experiences. All I can ever say is that – despite how corny this sounds – only by dreaming did a kid like me manage to stay whole long enough to "succeed." If I didn't have my dreams, if they hadn't motivated me, that life in Jersey would have rubbed me out.
DLS: It’s an interesting relationship that blacks/Latinos have with the sci-fi/fantasy/comic book culture. You too revel in the (other) worlds of freaks, mutants and fanboys – can popular culture ever reflect the real? Will there ever be a Dominican X-Man/Woman? What superpower might you endow him/her with?
JD: We kids of color are the original X-Men.
As for a Dominican version she will come and hopefully we will be the ones to write her and not some dude who only knows Dominicans from what he's read online. I hope that her power will be to break Empires in two. That would be nice.
DLS: In OSCAR WAO, Belicia’s life was almost destroyed by the Dominican dictator, whom you describe in the book as “the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated...” Trujillo, you write, is "our Sauron, our Arawan, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator.” We’re marking the 50-year anniversary of Trujillo’s death this year, just a month ago – can you expand on the “Once and Future” bit?
JD: I think that the Trujillato deformed Dominican society in profound invisible ways and we're still dealing with the damage as a culture. If Trujillo were to return right now to DR I suspect, cosmetic changes aside, he would feel quite comfortable with the society, with all the corruption and impunity and anti-Haitianism and absolutism that pervades the country. He would feel quite at home.
DLS: Spanglish is one thing – Dominicanish, as has been coined by “la comadre” Josefina Baez, is another. A few favorite words in that singular idiom that resonate with you?
JD: Mojiganga. Levente. Bultero.
DLS: You’ve written some of the only – and indelible – Latina/Dominican women into print: Belicia, Lola, Aurora, Mami and Tía, Alma. And gotten not a small amount of flack for it on occasion. You have spoken in the past about feeling a responsibility to write of women, given the oversize influence they’ve had on your life. Does it begin ever to feel like a burden?
JD: The Dominican experience cannot be written without its women. Why would it ever be a burden? When all is said and done as a writer humanity is my true subject and who is more human than Dominican women? No one, in my opinion. The day they make it impossible to write about Dominican women will be the day I never write another word.
DLS: Fellow Pulitzer Prize and fiction writer, and voracious reader, Jhumpa Lahiri wrote, “When I became a writer my desk became home; there was no need for another.” Do you share that sentiment? Where is home for you?
JD: To each their own, clearly. I guess I don't understand Lahiri's claim but just on face value that's not the kind of home I would ever choose for myself. A single place where only I have dominion? Sounds kinda scary. Sounds like a tyrant's choice, where nothing we say or do can be contested. I've always preferred to be in dialogue with others, to be in communion with others and yes even in conflict with others. That to me sounds a lot more like home.
Listen: for me there is no home worth residing in that doesn't involve simultaneity. I've always preferred simultaneity – to be both a stranger and to belong; to be an individual and a member of a community, to be from NJ and from Santo Domingo, to be at home at my desk and also at home out in the world.
I was born, like most of us, in the confusion of states and to that confusion I owe my true loyalties.
And anyway individualism by itself, with no claim to a collective, is capitalism's true dream for all of us – a place where we are all supremely vulnerable to its predations and most easily controlled – and that state is something I'd rather resist.
DLS: “Llego el verano a Nueva York”: ice-y or piragua?
JD: YunYun.
DLS: Any Anthony Weiner jokes (good or bad)?
JD: Weiner-gate. There it is. How could you elaborate on that?
After Elvis Nolasco’s performance, during a question and answer period, Díaz had this to say about the experience:
“What is made explicit to me is how little of this [live theater and the arts] is accessible to us. We don’t receive the nourishment that we should. Souls are not nourished by what the f--- you buy or what you wear. This is an enormous gift, and something like this [performance] extends your life, your joy, your soul. This is the society we deserve.”
And what did he say of the new book he’s working on?
“Utterly unreadable.”
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