Junot Diaz visited El Museo del Barrio in New York City to discuss his work with audiences. He read excerpts from his short story collection This Is How You Lose Her, focusing on the character Yunior and his views on issues like racism, hyper-masculinity, and relationships. Diaz shared that exploring these complex topics through fiction allows him to have important conversations about societal problems and deficiencies. The event highlighted Diaz's commitment to engaging diverse communities through literature and mentoring emerging writers.

1. THE SUNDAY OBSERVER DECEMBER 8, 2013 PAGE 1www.jamaicaobserver.com
By Lavern McDonald
II
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When Junot Diaz walked onto the stage
of El Teatro at El Museo del Barrio on the
edge of Central Park on the evening of
Friday, September 6, the acclaimed author
was greeted with the warmth reserved for
a favourite relative who had come to spend
the evening with his hermanas and primas
in his tia’s New York City living room. It was
the kind of gathering where, were it not for
the auditorium-style seating, circulating
trays of empanadas, tostones and tres
leches cake would have been in perfect
order. In African diasporic fashion, he did a
hip-hop roll call, recognising all who had
come to spend time with him. Present were
people from all walks of his life and
beyond… from Rutgers, Cornell, Central
Jersey, the Bronx, the Dominican Republic,
and so on. Before his shout-out to “people
of African descent”, he acknowledged that
sometimes in mixed gatherings, this is often
a label that few respond to, attributing this
to the complications of a post-slavery
reality that has many attempting to obscure
this part of their identity. While his verbal
affect was a casualness laced with the
expletives and the Spanglish that is replete
in his novels, Diaz’s commitment to
principle was demonstrated in his pulling his
watch out of his pocket to note his formal
start-time and pledging to give his audience
their temporal money’s worth.
At almost 45, Junot Diaz is a relatively
young writer who is translating the acclaim
around his work into a platform via which
he takes on the debilitating legacies of
modernity. His written word, with its
ricocheting ideas and images, draws the
reader/listener into his world view. Diaz
read three short excerpts from the first
chapter, “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars”
within the collection of linked short stories,
This is How You Lose Her, a 2012 New York
Times Notable Book and a contender for the
2012 Story Prize. He opened with his
protagonist Yunior’s dilemma: “She
considers me a typical Dominican man: a
sucio, an ass****….” reading about the
disintegration of his formerly enchanted
relationship with his steady girlfriend Magda
after she found out about his indiscretion
with a local Jersey girl with big hair, an
incident he had failed to share because
after all, “[a] smelly bone like that [was]
better off buried in the backyard of your
life”. He described the implosion, including
Junot Diaz Brings Yunior – and His
Views on Racism and Hyper-
Masculinity – to New York’s El Barrio
BOOKSHELFBOOKSHELF
>>>CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT
Junot Diaz
Turn to BOOKS on Page 2

2. the severing of the relationship with her
family: “Suddenly her folks want to kill me.
It doesn’t matter that I helped them with
their taxes two years running or that I mow
their lawn. Her father, who used to treat me
like his hijo, calls me an ass**** on the
phone, sounds like he’s strangling himself
with the cord. You no deserve I speak to
you in Spanish, he says.” His attempt at a
permanent rapprochement with Magda, via
a visit to the Dominican Republic, loans us
Yunior’s eyes on the island: “I love Santo
Domingo. I love coming home to the guys in
blazers trying to push little cups of Brugal
into my hands. Love the plane landing,
everybody clapping when the wheels kiss
the runway. Love the fact that I’m the only
nigger on board without a Cuban link or a
flapjack of make-up on my face. Love the
redhead woman on her way to meet the
daughter she hasn’t seen in 11 years. The
gifts she holds on her lap, like the bones of
a saint. M’ija has tetas now, the woman
whispers to her neighbour. Last time I saw
her, she could barely speak in sentences.
Now she’s a woman. Imaginate.”
A man of the people, a man of el campo,
Yunior is forced to accede to Magda’s
wishes and ends up forfeiting the
opportunity for spiritual reconnection with
the people his trips to the Dominican
Republic usually afford him. “I don’t even
want to tell you where we’re at. We’re in
Casa de Campo. The Resort That Shame
Forgot.” Casa de Campo, per Yunior, is one
of the island’s all-inclusives that offer what
is seemingly akin to the 21st-century
plantation experience (meals served by
cheerful women in Aunt Jemima costumes,
beaches full of scary, pale “Eurof**ks” who
look like “budget Foucaults” in the company
of dark-skinned Dominican girls, and
advertises itself in the States as its own
country). Diaz ended the reading by sharing
details about Yunior’s frustrated attempt at
coitus with the wronged Magda, over the
drone of HBO on the hotel television.
Unequivocally an accomplished and
acclaimed writer and public intellectual, Diaz
is committed to engaging with diverse
audiences and to cultivating emerging
voices. He is the author of Drown and The
Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which
won the National Book Critics Circle Award
and the Pulitzer Prize and was named Time’s
#1 Fiction Book of 2007. He is the recipient
of a PEN/Malamud Award and the Dayton
Literary Peace Prize. Diaz is a professor at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is
the fiction editor for Boston Review. He is a
2012 MacArthur Fellow. Diaz also serves on
the board of advisers for Freedom University,
a volunteer organisation in Georgia that
provides post-secondary instruction to
undocumented immigrants. He also mentors
new writers in various avenues, including as
a principal with Vona Voices Writing
Workshops for Writers of Colour @
University of California - Berkeley.
In true democratic fashion, he recognised
audience members from all over the house,
even those in the far-removed balcony and
paid tribute to the hard-working audio-visual
assistants who shuttled cordless
microphones across the space.
Diaz shared that Yunior has presented
him with recurring opportunities to wrestle
with the issues of hyper-masculinity which
defines his lived experience as a Caribbean
man. “As a man, I have been socialised to
not think of women as fully human…
women are always instrumental… for sex,
for kids, for comfort… we only have one
side holding up the discussion” of what it
means to live in a society with these
deficiencies. With his father having
migrated to find work in the United States,
Diaz said he did not meet his father until he
was six years old when he came to the US
Even in the absence of his father, though,
he noted, he was able to learn the script of
hyper-masculinity because the cultural
mythologies, structures and practices of his
family and local community were organised
to facilitate that particular expression of
manhood. He said in order to address the
default in society and in himself, he
regularly vets his work with a small circle of
women of colour. Diaz made the point that
while the character Yunior is often
vociferous in his treatment of public issues,
he is very rarely comfortable with sharing
elements from the private dimensions of his
life, including his personal history of being
sexually molested as a child.
One audience member, one of the few
primos in attendance — “I don’t usually
draw many guys!” Diaz admitted – asked if
the character Yunior was invested in fighting
the race/skin tone fight for people darker
than himself. First chiding great fiction
writers who only wrestle with questions of
race when they write their “race book,” Diaz
said the modern era is defined by the
pathology of racism and writers have a
responsibility to make this a constant in their
work if they are truly authentic. He offered a
few anecdotes to illustrate what he sees as
the reach of white supremacy: taking photos
in Seoul, South Korea in front of a wall of
posters advertising skin bleaches, to being in
a Jamaican corner shop and finding
commercial and home-made skin bleaches,
to visiting his aunt’s salon in Santo Domingo
where skin bleaches were part of the regular
treatment offerings. He called whiteness a
public health catastrophe and said people of
conscience need to work together to create
a space safe for people to exist outside of
the psychic weaponry of racism… a space
where non-white people will be free to
relinquish the self-hate that causes us to
literally burn our skin away with chemicals.
“We need to claim the planet back for
people of all colours,” Diaz demanded.
With the many picayune micro-
aggressions that dehumanise, Diaz said he
tries to find renewal in family, friends, the
community, and art. He surrounds himself
with people who are writing, dancing and
thinking “about us… and these people who
actually like us”. “I encounter art and my
soul gets put back the way it should be…
art reassembles me,” he shared. He said an
easy lift can also come from just parking
oneself at Dyckman Street (in the largely
Dominican-American Inwood, New York City
neighbourhood) for an hour. His audience
knowingly laughed with him. Immediately
following the talk, Diaz signed copies of his
book for attendees, but only after winkingly
warning those of the Instagram generation
who were only there seeking photos with
him that they would have to wait their turn.
La Casa Azul Bookstore and El Museo del
Barrio teamed up to present the literary
evening. Located in the heart of El Barrio, La
Casa Azul Bookstore is the literary centre of
the neighbourhood serving as a community
meeting space. Events at La Casa Azul
Bookstore range from book clubs, author
signings, gallery shows, film screenings,
writers’ conferences, and workshops. El
Museo del Barrio, a fixture in the Latino
community since 1969, specializes in
Latino, Caribbean and Latin American
culture and art. Most recently, El Museo
was a co-presenter, with the Studio
Museum of Harlem and the Queens
Museum of Art, of the multimedia exhibit
“Caribbean: Crossroads of the World.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Junot Diaz is the author
of Drown, The Brief and Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao (which won the National Book
Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize
and was named Time’s #1 Fiction Book of
2007), and most recently, the short-story
collection This Is How You Lose Her.
To read the letter signed by him and
fellow authors Edwidge Danticat, Julia
Alvarez and Mark Kurlansky, recently
published in The New York Times, regarding
the Dominican Republic’s decision to revoke
the citizenship of Dominicans born to
undocumented parents (retroactive to
1929), which would affect an estimated
200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent,
please go to:
www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/opinion/t
wo-versions-of-a-dominican-tale-
html?_r=O
>>>CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT
Junot Diaz Brings Yunior – and His Views on Racism
and Hyper-Masculinity – to New York’s El Barrio
BOOKS from Page 1
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BOOKSHELFBOOKSHELF

3. Archipelago by Monique Roffey.
Simon and Schuster
UK Ltd, 2012. 360
pages.
Reviewed by:
Mary Hanna
AA
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tthhee vvooyyaaggee tthhrroouugghh tthhee
CCaarriibbbbeeaann ooff GGaavviinn
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hhaass ffaalllleenn oonn hhaarrdd ttiimmeess..
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ttoo aa ddeevvaassttaattiinngg fflloooodd
tthhaatt ddeessttrrooyyeedd hhiiss hhoouussee
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ooff hhiiss bbaabbyy ssoonn.. HHiiss wwiiffee
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hhiiss ssiixx--yyeeaarr-- oolldd ddaauugghhtteerr
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aabbooaarrdd hhiiss ssaaiilliinngg bbooaatt,, tthhee
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tthhrroouugghh tthhee CCaarriibbbbeeaann
aarrcchhiippeellaaggoo,, tthhrroouugghh tthhee
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yyoouutthhffuull ddrreeaamm bbyy ssaaiilliinngg ttoo
tthhee GGaallaappaaggooss IIssllaannddss eevveenn
wwhhiillee bbootthh hhee aanndd OOcceeaann aarree
ssuuffffeerriinngg ffrroomm ““ttaabbaannccaa””::
Tabanca. It’s one of his favourite
words, what Trinidadians call heartbreak.
Tabanca fer so, a man or woman will
declare when gripped by this particular
emotion, People laugh or smile at the word
because it rolls so well on the tongue; it
could be the name of a cocktail, or a
flower, something enjoyable, but no,
there’s nothing enjoyable about being in a
state of tabanca, this soft mournful feeling
in his chest. It is killing him, getting the
better of him over so many weeks and
months, wearing him thin. He’s been
dying, slowly, of tabanca – that’s the truth
of it. The sea makes this feeling both
worse and better.
Roffey excels in writing about the sea
and its wildlife, and about sailing. Her
depiction of the child Ocean and her
relationship with her father is loving and
vivid – a pleasure to watch unfold. Roffey is
also magical in her ability to interpret the
love of the humans for their dog. This is a
kind of coming-of-age novel that gives as
brawta a wonderful snapshot of the
contemporary Caribbean, the similarities
and differences of the various islands and
their people. Roffey handles change with
adeptness and a deep understanding of
island ways and the progress of the
grieving process. Gavin and Ocean heal, but
only after suffering even more loss and
learning
some hard lessons about the
ephemerality of life.
Roffey has a wise understanding of the
deeper meanings of Caribbean languages.
Here, she speaks of Papiamento:
And everywhere there is creole language
he’s never heard before, Papiamento, a
callaloo of Portuguese and African and
Dutch. It is impossible to understand,
a language spoken only on these
three islands, a language which could
have expired overnight in modern
times of YouTube and internet-speak
or been killed off by the Dutch.
Instead, it has flourished, for it was
born in self-defence, a self-taught
mix-up thing, just like other nation
languages in the Caribbean. It is
supposed to be difficult for the
white man to understand, who in
turn learnt to speak it in self-
defence.
Gavin has travelled to Aruba,
Bonaire, and Curacao. Ocean has
learnt to snorkel and becomes
less and less febrile, though she
is still subject to tearful fits
triggered by a longing for her
lost brother and her mother
who is sleeping. Gavin, too,
weeps and mourns. The
description of the night of the
flood in Trinidad is hair-raising
and moving. Roffey
understands rain and the
passion of Nature to follow
its own laws. When Gavin
runs away from home and
job, he is doing what is
necessary to heal his family
and recuperate from
tabanca.
Roffey’s assessment of
the damage to sea and
wildlife because of man is keen and
relentless. The tourists feed the fish cheese
and bananas, cut the legs of tortoises, throw
dogs overboard, run over iguanas with
abandon. These passages permeate the text
but do not make it maudlin. Meanwhile,
Gavin is keenly aware of the deep-seated
racism in Caribbean culture and is at pains
to try and educate his daughter otherwise.
He teaches her that all things are related, all
things responsible: “It’s complicated. But
trust me,” he tells Ocean, “we all have
something to do with each other. Seals and
humans have a link. Look at them; can you
see what I mean?” His conversations with
his daughter sparkle with verisimilitude and
conviction. This is one of the best renditions
of adult-child relationships I have ever read,
and indeed I found it so enjoyable that I read
the text twice.
Roffey has previously written The White
Woman on the Green Bicycle, a novel
which was short-listed for the Orange Prize
for Fiction n 2010 and the Encore Award in
2011. I find Archipelago to be a more
profound and wide-reaching text. Roffey
has grown, and her story is a worthy
subject of her great talent. Writing about
the sea takes a special kind of appreciation
of the natural world. Roffey has this
gratitude in abundance. Her love for her
subject is apparent in passages like this
one about its wonders:
He plunges his head under the water too,
unprepared for what he sees and how it
makes him feel, for the sight and the
emotion don’t match. Under the water
there are long violet finger anemone and
wide orange fans of lace and snubby yellow
brains and fields of lush red waving hair and
shoals of yellow and silver striped sergeant
majors. And, right below him, snuggled
together, he spots a crowd of neon fish,
blue tangs, together against the waving red
hair. They are slim oval-shaped fish with
indigo bodies, but their dorsal and tail fins
are iridescent blue.
Ocean becomes entranced by the sea
and its myths. She is inspired by the story
of Ahab and the White Whale, finds much
comfort in it and is filled with hope for the
future when she and her father see a white
whale in the Pacific as they sail on their
way to the Galapagos. This is an optimistic
and uplifting book that is a pleasure to read
on many levels.
Monique Roffey was born in Port of
Spain, Trinidad, and educated in the UK.
She has tutored and taught Creative
Writing at Goldsmiths College. She has also
written the novel Sun Dog and a memoir,
With the Kisses of His Mouth. Archipelago
is her most recent work.
P3December8,2013THESUNDAYOBSERVERwww.jamaicaobserver.comBookends
REVIEWREVIEW
In search of healing
on the high seas
OTHER TITLES BY MONIQUE ROFFEY

4. P4www.jamaicaobserver.comTHESUNDAYOBSERVERDecember8,2013Bookends