Have you ever experienced being an immigrant? Are you, still, an immigrant? At what age did you leave the Country you called home? When did you start speaking that new language on a daily basis? What do you feel when your children answer you in a language that is not yours? Have you ever read novels about people like you, who had to–or wanted to, or both–leave their homelands for life, or for a long period?
This book of the month brings out an author that holds the theme of migration most dear: Junot Diàz. American-Dominican writer and activist, he won a Pulitzer with his very (very!) raw prose and straightforward description of life migrant families in the U.S.A. If you ever wondered what it means to be an immigrant, and you are looking for very, very good prose to tell you about it, Drown is the book for you, and I am sure it won’t be long before you agree with me.
If you have never lived in a country different from your homeland, there are a set of situations, or notions, that you just can’t know. What to do when you are sick, where do you look for a house that suits you and your resources? Opening a bank account, looking for daily basis services, paying taxes, everything basically turns out to be different, cryptic, unknown for you. Plus, some people, more than others, happen to have two or three times more trouble than others in achieving the resolutions of the aforementioned day-to-day task. And that’s when we start talking about race, and the concepts of ‘ alterity’. Let me explain.
Alterity, according to Ludwig:
is most commonly used to refer to a state of difference or otherness between two entities, especially in terms of their beliefs, values, or culture.
For example, The alterity between the two countries was evident in their very different views on immigration policy.
The problem with alterity is, and has been for millennials, that a group of people, a community if you like, labels someone else as ‘other’ than them, that ‘other’ person automatically starts being treated differently, or discriminated against, in other words.
In a white-dominated, patriarchal, western community, alterity factors may include a person being non-white, female, with disabilities, poor, non-heterosexual, or non-binary. If you are a black woman, for example, who lives in a white-dominated society, you are most likely experiencing a double stigmatisation, both for your gender and your race. You are, for the dominating narrative, a double alterity. Junot Diàz dwells a lot on this topic; he writes about dealing with disabilities as a foreigner in the US, and draws the attention to a quite controversial notion: is being a non-white foreigner a sort of disability, in the United States?
Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer, intellectual and activist. When he was six, Díaz immigrated with his family from Santo Domingo to New Jersey. He grew up in strong economic difficulties, but thanks to his first book, the short story collection Drown, his life took a very different turn. He also won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a dramatic novel in which the author deals with his brother’s cancer and the struggles to access the U.S. healthcare system as a latino immigrant.
In fact, Díaz's work points the spotlight mostly on the latino immigrant experience in the U.S. What won Díaz his spot among the sacred monsters of postcolonial literature, is his majestic use of a creolized language: a mix of urban English and insular Spanish slangs. The musicality of his language, together with his decolonial, multicultural perspective of racialised America, give his book a unique aesthetic that speaks a language that doesn’t exist, but everybody understands: truth.
A little digression: ‘decolonial’ is an academic perspective which is trying to get rid of Western culture hegemony of media, and its perceived superiority, trying to offer alternative aesthetics and narratives to those imposed by the white-washed mainstream.
Diaz was a little child who went from the “Global South to the Global North”, and this traumatic experience monopolised his literary production, both in terms of his use of language, his critique of racism, and his depiction of the consequences of contemporary white supremacy. His point of view on society and his imagination are inexorably shaped by his experience of a ‘dual’ reality: the South and the North, the rural and the metropolitan, the hispanophone and the anglophone, the childhood and the adulthood. Díaz is indeed a very political author, but can you avoid that, if you talk about migration?
Drown is an essential text for those who seek good migrant literature. The book is compact, the prose is colloquial but cold at the same time; it shares the author’s disillusionment towards life but dignifies the importance of serenity, in a world that seeks only happiness. The text is composed of ten short stories, most of them tell a slice of life of the protagonist, Yunior, a Dominican boy, teenager, and man, who grows up with a bully brother, a violent, migrant, and unfaithful father, an homosexual best friend, and a poor yet determined mother. Yunior describes himself through the description of the other members of his life, a life of deprivation and violence, but also of love, excitement, and travel.
Díaz’s acclaimed literary work, and his intellectual contribution to the anti-racist discourse, has given Latino fiction unprecedented visibility. By telling the story “just how it is”, by evading –literally– any sugar coating or romanticisation of life in New York for latino migrants, he manages to take us to the perilous paths of all those lives we perceive as “other”, as different from “us”, as different from what it has been told to be standard.
Díaz a perfect example of intersectional critique: a cry against all powers that shaped and dominate the western narrative, telling us straight away what are the everyday damages that poverty, racism and hyper masculinity have had on immigrants, especially in the U.S. What does hyper masculinity have to deal with migrant culture, you ask? That’s a wonderful question, thank you!
It all started when the first Spanish conquistadors landed in the Caribbean, a process historically and rhetorically described as a discovery which basically stood on the idea that white could claim possession over a land, whether inhabited or not, with the excuse of civilisation. Their concept of civilisation was mere enslaving and exploiting for the sake of pecuniary profit. This history of violence through colonialism, translated throughout the centuries in a necessity for the latino man to exasperate its masculinity in order to survive the atrocities of white subjugation, a sort of chain of violence, which turns the subjugated into a violent individual.
Appropriation of resources, control of authority, control of gender, ethnicity and race through classification, and control of subjectivity and knowledge through a white-centred hierarchy generated a sentiment of hatred and a condition of survival for most of the natives of those lands. A condition which, you’ll understand, does not leave much room for personal growth.
However, Diaz is trying to dismantle the logic of coloniality by telling the stories of subjugated characters who have traumatic memories of rape, torture, violence and domination, but whose quest for love eventually becomes the key to individual liberation. He tells stories of people who do not, and don’t want to, give up on themselves to racial violence.
This Dominican writer advocates a more realistic, less celebratory, more diverse cultural representation of the US and has challenged the universalisation and normalisation of whiteness in art: any notion of universal aesthetics, he suggests, is deeply colonial.
This is why it is important to choose non-white narratives, thi is why it is important to read authors who belong to minorities: reality is a spectrum of perspectives, and should not be dictated by just one, pale, and oppressive point of view.
Be cool, read diverse.
