JUNOT DÍAZ
The Pulitzer Prize winner explores his Dominican Republic origins in every book he’s written.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz, hasn’t forgotten where he came from — every book he’s written explores his origins in some way.
Although his family immigrated to New Jersey when he was 6, his memory of the Dominican Republic is strong. The author of three books for adults, including “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” remembers taking trips from Santo Domingo to his mother’s home in the south, “closer to the primal, historical core of the island,” he says.
“We would be in our family homestead up in the hills above the city and there would be no lights, no anything. I would stand outside my family’s little home and you would feel like you’ve been pressed right up against the face of the world,” recalls Díaz. “Heading out to the country, sitting around carafe lights, listening to my elders talk, the farmers talk about their day and their lives — it did a lot for me and it did a lot to me.”
His new book is his first for children. In “Islandborn,” an Afro Caribbean girl named Lola is asked to draw a picture of her birthplace for a class assignment. Unlike her classmates, Lola left her first country too young to remember it. She goes on an imaginative adventure to collect and record memories from her family and neighbors with pencil and notebook in hand.
His childhood has been a prime topic of discussion during the tour, and like the fictional Lola who creates a book about her past, Díaz published a painfully honest essay in the New Yorker Monday about his sexual abuse and what it means to unpack childhood trauma.
“I’d always assumed that if I ever returned to that place, that island where I’d been shipwrecked, I would never escape; I’d be dragged down and destroyed. And yet, irony of ironies, what awaited me on that island was not my destruction but nearly the opposite: my salvation,” writes Díaz about looking at his past.
The picture book, colorfuland fantastical, isabout looking at a community’s past to find a current sense of place and identity through the disarming sensibility of a child, unafraid to ask questions.
Díaz spoke with The Times by phone, before the publication of his personal essay , about his sources The idea to write a children’s book started when your goddaughters asked you to write a story about kids that looked like them, but that was almost two decades ago. Why write it now?
I kept returning to it. At least once a year I would stick my head into that corner of my brain and I couldn’t come up with anything. It was a testament of my flawed imagination that every idea I had was either so preposterous or derivative that it wasn’t even worth the time to flesh it out. What ends up happening is that you eventually get rid of so many bad ideas that a good one might wander into the space that you’ve carved out. I’m one of those writers who is so slow and bad at what I do that a lot of times my creative ethos seems to be you can’t lose forever. What were your goddaughters’ reactions to reading “Islandborn”?
I do think that their reactions will unfold over a longer period of time. It’s hard to unveil your heart even to someone that you’ve known and cared about for a long time. We are unfortunately in defended times, but they were very happy. They wrote me and spoke to me. They communicated their gratitude. My oldest goddaughter read the book while she was visiting. She read it the first time a few weeks before it was released. She closed the book and cried afterwards. It sort of broke my heart because I love her to death, but it speaks well to perhaps what it meant to her or what’s been missing from so many of our lives. Looking at how Lola and her neighborhood are illustrated brought up memories of wanting to have that representation, wanting to see someone who looked like me and the people around me when I was Lola’s age. I noticed the the characters’ hair and hairstyles right away. matter, but when it comes to Leo Espinoza’s illustrations I can confidently say that they’re absolutely a gift. A gift. A gift. I’m just lucky to have someone like that as my collaborator. He did long labor to bring this world to light. Who were you envisioning when you were writing the book — your goddaughters or maybe yourself ?
One uses oneself as an internal model, as a personal compass but one is also in conversation with people around you. Being an Afro Caribbean, an Afro Dominican, an Afro Latino, I’ve spent my life often in one way or another being sublimated, left out of account or being slotted into the wrong communities — dismissed and blighted and erased. There are a lot of us who have these similar experiences where our complexity, our multiplicity are not welcome. So many of my friends struggled with these questions and difficulties. I was thinking of them, and I was thinking of people in my community who shared similar tribulations. I was also thinking of the children of my friends. Many of them are little Lolas who are growing up in a different place and time with parents creating and nourishing healthier spaces. Lola is not me. Lola is a child from a different generation. Lola is growing up far more loved and better supported than I was. Did you, like Lola, collect memories from others about the Dominican Republic? more pressing. It’s not just the past. It becomes politically, socially and symbolically charged. On the other hand, I had the fortune of actually having experiences and strong memories of the Dominican Republic. I also have siblings who did not have any memories of the Dominican Republic. Between those in the family who had tactile archives in Santo Domingo and those who did not — that is also part of the experience of this book. I always wondered about my little sister who couldn’t remember Santo Domingo at all, what it must mean for her to maintain a strong relationship with the island as opposed to me. Lola’s island seems to be the Dominican Republic, but the island is never named. There is an island monster, never explicitly named as Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship. Why?
I’m not so sure that the island, of which the Dominican Republic takes up one portion, is Lola’s island. Part of what makes the book interesting for me is that it is both the Dominican Republic, both Hispaniola and not Hispaniola. There are plenty of visual clues that this is the Dominican Republic, but there is also plenty of space for someone to read the book and to come to the conclusion that this place doesn’t exist. This is not our world. We are in an adjacent reality, which was really part of the project.
I’ve never had any problems being exquisitely specific in my books. In fact, I’ve believed in the specific door to the universal. This was about the journey that Lola goes on. Lola, in some ways, is encouraged to create a relationship with the place that she has never really known. If I’m asking Lola to engage in such imaginative courage, then I think it would be only logical if the reader had to participate. There is an opportunity, there is an invitation for the reader to mirror Lola’s journey. I thought that was very important. There’s this sense of melancholy and doom in some of the memories that Lola collects. Did you have any second thoughts about incorporating these darker parts into a children’s book?
I don’t believe children are not aware that something is up with the incomplete stories that adults tell. I, as a young person, knew something was amiss in the narrative my family reproduced. I could sense the gaps and the silences strongly. What they were trying to hide from us poured out in the silences anyway because we were not spared anything. We were not spared the anxiety, the loss. We were not spared the agony. We were just denied names and a way to engage it that would be empowering. I think the exact opposite. I think that we do a grave disservice to young people by condescending and hiding from them that which they can already sense. For me, it was more important to give someone like Lola the tools and the community and the guidance with which she can face what was already present in her life. There’s different ways and different strategies, which we render what is traumatic in our histories. It matters quite a lot to me that the strategy for this book would be something that would leave Lola with a sense of her own possibilities, with a sense of her own agency, with a history of her family and community’s heroic resilience. I definitely felt those gaps and silences in my family story. I wish I knew how to dig deeper back then. As a kid, you feel things but you don’t have the words or context to make sense of any of it.
That’s the great trick. Your childhood never stops. The opportunity to dig we will often take up as adults. Therefore, we will do for our childhood selves what we were not able to do and that matters quite a bit. There is no time limit in recovery and recuperation. Did you read children’s books when working on “Islandborn”?
The people that have the biggest impact on me: a book called “The Journey” by Francesca Sanna, Edwidge Danticat’s “Mama’s Nightingale,” which just killed me. It taught me a lot of valuable lessons about how you can tell a story with tough beings in a lovely way. There was of course, anything that Jacqueline Woodson wrote. Jacqueline Woodson is extraordinary. Those are in some ways my compass points. They really showed me the way. Díaz will be at the Festival of Books reading from “Islandborn” at the Reading by 9 children’s stage at 4 p.m. April 21 and in conversation with The Times’ Carolina Miranda at 10:30 a.m. April 22 in Bovard Auditorium.