Junot Díaz, Pulitzer-winning author of 2008’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, always gives a scorching good show, and he did so again during a visit to Stanford earlier this month.
He did it all off the cuff: “Guess what? No fucking lecture,” he announced at the outset.
Díaz has a special license to mention the unmentionable – or what he says is the unmentionable. His sensibility is divided between Dominican Republic, where he was born, and New Jersey, where he was replanted as a child.
Little of the Caribbean side was in evidence in Palo Alto: he wore preppy pullover and white collar, jeans and running shoes – and altogether more slender than he had appeared when I wrote about him in 2008. The spellbinding author spoke about J.K. Rowlings, he spoke about H.P. Lovecraft, and he spoke most of all about J.R.R. Tolkien. (Whether he especially favors writers who use only their initials is not known.)
“I write about race – by extension, I write about white supremacy,” he said, cutting to the chase.
He deplored the “rhetorical legerdemain” of “deforming our silences to fit in with the larger silences of society.” It’s a betrayal, especially, of the people “at the racially sharp end of the stick.”
“Our privileges exacerbate the horrors of others,” he said.
The idea of a post-racial society is a “happy delusion,” he said. “We are as hyper-racial today as we were two hundred years ago.”
He said that describing oneself as beyond race was as delusional as a man saying he isn’t sexist. “These languages do not go away. Heterosexual masculine privilege never goes away.”
How deep is the denial? He recalled observing to a group of male peers that they were all dating white women or women lighter-skinned by themselves. The predictable response: “Oh, but it was love… we just met… it was random.”
No one ‘fessed up: “I date who I date because I was told people who are light-skinned are better.”
“Who wants to embrace that?” he asked. Under such circumstances, “How the fuck do we bear witness to ourselves?”
“The default setting of universality” is white, he said. Though writers of color often resist that categorization, he said he’d never encountered a writer who said, “You know what? I don’t want to be a white writer.”
Díaz, flanked by Packer and Barry (Photo: Toni Gauthier)
People outside that default setting live in a “delusional space” of “specifying without signifying.” He referred to President Obama’s double message: “I’m not that black, but I will code some shit so you know I’m black.”
He, too, was asked to “signify without specifying” – “I ran from that as hard as I could.” He wondered, as a writer, whether it was possible to capture in writing all the layers of denial and truth, avoiding the pitfall that would have been deadly for the writer, one in which “I’m going to blind myself so no one notices I’m not noticing.”
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was his attempt to use “all the nerd stuff” to portray “the hemispheric madness through the Dominican Republic.”
Science fiction and fantasy was an obvious source of inspiration. “Coloniality is the dark subconscious of the speculative genre,” he said.
For example, he commented on the different treatment of the ring in Wagner’s Rheingold and Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring. In Wagner, “the ring just makes stuff go bad for you,” but in Tolkien, “the ring produces slavery” and functions racially, he said. Tolkien was a survivor of World War I, and his Middle Earth is a post-apocalyptic world, said Díaz. The Dark Lord Sauron is “a being that comes from outside Middle Earth,” from a race that dominates Middle Earth.
While the Harry Potter series pits “bad guys versus good guys, my power versus your power,” Tolkien’s p.o.v. offers a different take: “Fighting power with power you lose. Power breeds corruption,” he said. “The more power, the more opposition.” René Girard, of course, would add that you become the thing you oppose – which ought to be a major deterrent, but isn’t.
In the end, said Díaz, “power never destroys power.”
