Dominican American Voices
“Latino Caribbean writers born or raised in the United States are at the vanguard of a literary movement that has opened up a new field in literary history and criticism. The moment, both Hispanic and North American in character, is helping to bring the two cultural groups and their literature together. The body of literature produced gives meaning to postmodern and postcolonial concerns and expresses the aspirations and rejection felt by Puerto Rican Americans, Cuban Americans and Dominican Americans. Writing sometimes in Spanish but mainly in English, they speak to both Latino and all North American readers.”
William Luis, Dance Between Two Cultures
Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He moved to the United States with his parents at age six, settling in New Jersey. His fiction has appeared inStory, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, African Voices, Best American Short Stories(1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), and in Pushcart Prize XXII. He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. The New Yorker magazine placed him on a list of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. He was also featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine to represent a new generation of Latino writers. Diaz is currently a creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Praise for Junot Díaz’s first collection of short stories Drown (1996) which moves between the barrios of the Dominican Republic to the struggling urban communities of New Jersey:
Drown is superb. Junot Díaz is a strong, fresh, authentic talent, and these stories are completely wonderful.
Hanif Kureishi
Junot Díaz is a major new writer. His characters explode off the page into the canon of our literature and our hearts.
Walter Mosley
A writer with ‘the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet’
Newsweek
The following is an extract from “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” published in The New Yorker (December 25, 2000/January 1, 2001) and reprinted here with the kind permission of the author, Junot Díaz
Oscar Meets a Babe
After his initial two weeks on the Island, after the relatives, the parties and the setting up of the household, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up in another country, after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You Do Not Belong, after he'd gone to about ten clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue or bachata had sat and drank his Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own on the Malecón staring at the ocean, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin to get home, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven year olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor café, after an old skeletal woman grabbed both his hand and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, wait until you see the bateys, after the family visited the shack in Baitoa where his moms had been born, after he had taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirl-a-gig that was life in Capital—the guaguas, the cops, the mindboggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Pizza Huts, the tígueres selling newspapers at the intersections, the mindboggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica da Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mindboggling poverty, the snarl of streets and shacks that were the barrios, the masses of niggers he waded through every day, who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the Friday night strolls down the Avenida, the mindboggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth, the signs that banned donkey carts from the same tunnels —after he'd gone to Boca Chica and Villa Mella, after the relatives berated him for having stayed away so long, after he saw again the unforgettable beauty of the Cibao, after he heard the stories about his father and his mother, after he stopped marveling at the amount of political propaganda plastered up on every spare wall, after the touched-in-the-head tío who'd been tortured during Balaguer's reign came over and cried, after he'd caught his first sunburn, after he'd swam in the Caribbean, after tío Rudolfo had gotten him blasted on mamajuana, after tío Rudolfo had gotten the clap from a puta, (Man, his tío cracked, what a pisser! Har-har!), after he'd seen his first Haitians kicked off a guagua because niggers claimed they 'smelled,' after he'd nearly gone nuts over all the bellezas he saw, after he helped his mother install two new air conditioners, after all the gifts they'd brought had been properly distributed, after Lola introduced him to the distant cousin she'd had an affair with as a teenager; (after her rape she'd lived in the DR for almost a year, there were still pictures of her in a private school uniform, a tall muchacha with heartbreak eyes), after he'd brought flowers to his abuela's grave, after he had diarrhea so bad his mouth watered before each detonation, after he'd visited all the rinky-dink museums in the Capital, after he stopped being dismayed that everybody called him gordo, after he'd been overcharged for almost everything he wanted to buy, after Lola flew back to the States, after the terror and joy of his return subsided, after he settled down in abuela's house, the house that Diaspora had built, and resigned himself to a long dull quiet summer, after his fantasy of an Island girlfriend caught a quick dick—Who the fuck had he been kidding? He couldn't dance, he didn't have loot, he didn't dress, he wasn't confident, he wasn't handsome, he wasn't from Europe, he wasn't fucking no Island girls—Oscar fell in love with a semi-retired puta. Her name was Ybon Pimentel. Oscar considered her the start of his real life. (She was the end of it too.)
Vocabulary and some useful references:
| Abuela | grandmother |
| Bachata | Dominican form of music/dance with rural origins. The original term used to name the genre used to be "amargue" (bitterness) due to the prevalence of tales of heartbreak. |
| Batey | a company town consisting of barracks and a few houses for (Haitian) workers in sugar production |
| Balaguer | Joaquín Amparo Balaguer Ricardo (September 1, 1906 – July 14, 2002) was the President of the Dominican Republic from 1960 to 1962, from 1966 to 1978, and again from 1986 to 1996. |
| Belleza | beauty |
| Concho | public taxi |
| Gordo | fat (fatso) |
| Guagua | bus |
| Mamajuana | herb and honey Dominican liqueur reputed to be an aphrodisiac |
| Merengue | lively Dominican dance music |
| Muchacha | girl |
| Presidente | the most popular beer in the Dominican Republic |
| Puta | whore |
| Tígueres | street kids (hoods) |
| Tío | uncle |
| Xica da Silva | 18th century Afro-Brazilian slave who used her sexuality and wits to rise to a position of prominence. Her life story has been the subject of a Brazilian film and telenovela (serial). |