Díaz sought to tell story of both joy and trauma
book will be released Tuesday.
“They’re like, ‘Yo, it took you long enough,’ ” Díaz said in a recent phone interview of his goddaughters, who are now in their 20s.
Díaz is part of a wave of well-known adult novelists — such as Edwidge Danticat, Dave Eggers and Jane Smiley — who are trying a hand at writing for a younger audience.
For Díaz, whose “Oscar Wao” was chosen by a group of critics as the best novel of the 21st century to date, the genre required creating “new techniques and tricks because none of the old tricks were going to work.”
As requested, the main character is Lola, a brown-skinned girl who wears her hair in an Afro puff and comes from a place called the Island. The kind of character Díaz’s goddaughters longed to see but couldn’t find, the kind still all-toorare in children’s books.
More than just a promise kept, “Islandborn” is a literary feat.
A children’s book that explores the hidden corners of immigrant life, where sunny memories can mask a dark history. An allegory for both Rafael Trujillo’s brutal 31-year dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and the resurgence of white supremacy in this country. An attempt to pierce through what Díaz calls the “overwhelmingly white” landscape of children’s literature.
“I wanted to write something that speaks to those of us who, even when we were young, knew that our families came from very damaged places, from very damaging histories,” said Díaz, 49, who was born in Santo Domingo and grew up in New Jersey.
He wanted to tell the story of his goddaughters, whose father had to flee the Dominican Republic “because of the postdictator dictatorship.” Of the newcomer students he worked with at Gregorio Luperon High School in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, N.Y. Of his own experience as an immigrant kid. A story that did not flinch from the hard edges of life, as Díaz puts it, a “children’s book which leaves a child feeling joyful and empowered but doesn’t turn away from that trauma.”
It was a daunting task, Díaz concedes, one made even more daunting by the lack of diversity in children’s publishing.
Only 6 percent of the 3,400 new children’s books published in 2016 were by Latino, black and Native American authors, according to Cooperative Children’s Book Center. Of books released over the past 23 years, a mere 11 percent featured multicultural subject matter.
The lack of representation, Díaz said, is nothing short of an act of violence.
“We will one day understand that the bedrock of well-being is to have grown up surrounded by positive images of yourself. Not just surrounded but saturated with them,” he said. “Young people of color are being starved. Their souls are famished because of this violence.”
It is a hunger Díaz knows all too well.
Growing up in the working-class town of Parlin, N.J., he was a voracious reader but never encountered characters like himself in the books he devoured.
“I felt beyond famished,” said Díaz, who immigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was 6. “I felt so wronged — and wrong — because everywhere I looked, I did not see myself.”
Díaz was already in college — newly enrolled at Rutgers University — when he first read a book that spoke to him: Toni Morrison’s “Sula.” It was life-altering.
“I felt like I was existing outside of the habitable zone, and suddenly, this comet — this celestial body — streaked by, and it shifted my orbit,” Díaz said. “I suddenly found myself in a place and with an experience that was generative, that was healing and that gave me back to myself.
Four years after graduating from Rutgers and shortly after earning a master of fine arts degree from Cornell University, the orbit of his life shifted again, with the 1996 publication of his first book, “Drown.” The semiautobiographical shortstory collection centered around the lives of young Dominican men growing up in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic immediately drew critical acclaim. It marked the then-27-year-old Díaz as a rising literary star.
It took 11 years for him to follow up his debut. But when “Oscar Wao” — “a novel about a fat Dominican nerd” — was released, it shattered expectations. The book, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, explores themes of displacement, identity and the experience of the Dominican diaspora with an astonishing verbal dexterity that deftly mixes references to Dominican history, hip-hop, Spanglish and sci-fi and fantasy.
“Oscar Wao reaffirmed the strong connections Latinos maintain with their ancestral homeland’s culture, language and history,” noted critic and author Rigoberto Gonzalez. “It also re-energised these questions: Who is American? What is the American experience?”
In many ways, these are the same themes and questions coursing through “Islandborn.”
The story traces Lola’s efforts to stitch together fragmented memories of a homeland she left as a baby by enlisting the help of her family and neighbors, who paint a portrait of a place with bats as big as blankets, “more music than air,” mangoes so sweet “they make you want to cry” and people who are “like a rainbow — every shade ever made.”
The vibrant descriptions, along with the eyepopping drawings with a retro feel by Espinosa, evoke an idealized vision of the Island. Yet something tugs at Lola. She knows a key part of the history is being left out.
“Even as people are recounting, you can see that no one can keep to the script. Lola is too smart a little girl not to pick up the discordant notes,” said Díaz, a creative-writing professor at MIT. “Our parents will tell us a story, but behind the story we can read another story. And I think that young people become adept at discovering the hidden story.”
In her search, Lola uncovers the trauma at the heart of her origin story: a Monster that terrorized her Island, a hulking batlike creature that “could destroy an entire town with a single word and make a whole family disappear simply by looking at it.”
But she also learns of the heroes who rose up to drive the Monster deep into the ocean and, by unearthing the buried history, helps her family and others who fled north to escape the terror to find healing.
“It takes a lot of people together to bear witness to a calamity like the one that overcame Lola’s island. But it’s not until Lola has taken part in this community-bearing-witness that the grandmother is finally able to herself bear witness,” said Díaz, who lives in Cambridge, Mass. “For me, that was really, really important. That’s what often happens. It’s the child asking questions, the child searching, that enables the older adults to bear witness.”
Like the Island, the Monster — which “did as it pleased” for 30 years — is not named but bears parallels to Trujillo, whose three decades in power were one of the bloodiest eras of LatinAmerican history.
In Díaz’s view, there are parallels as well to what is going on this country. Here, Díaz said, the monster we face is a “resurgent white supremacy.”
“All of us have to fight against this altar of antiimmigrant racism that has become frighteningly normalized,” he said. “All of us have to fight against a politics of impunity, a politics of cruelty that we see being pushed everywhere in the country and beyond.”
In tackling themes of immigration and childhood trauma, Díaz represents an emerging presence in children’s literature. Danticat’s “Mama’s Nightingale” follows a Haitian-American girl whose mother is being held in a federal immigration detention center, while Francesca Sanna’s “The Journey,” which traces the flight of a refugee family, speak to the experiences of children displaced from their homelands.
“These are the voices we wanted to hear but are not always being published,” said Cathryn Mercier, director of the Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at Simmons College, who pointed out that the entry of celebrated adult authors such as Díaz and Danticat gives additional heft to efforts to improve diversity in children’s publishing.
But Díaz, who drew inspiration from Danticat’s “Mama’s Nightingale,” “The Journey” and “a ton” of other children’s books, says the minor gains in diversity are not enough.
“When you are starving, crumbs are good,” he said, “but crumbs are still a crime.” monica.rhor@chron.com