Walking the world
LEAD REVIEW
Diaz avoids all philosophising about identity and instead conveys everything through the grittier material of first-hand experience, finds Anjum Hasan
Diaspora narratives tend to be double mirrors. Thrown into relief against foreign backgrounds, characters become self-aware in new ways — they start watching themselves and we watch them watching themselves. Via writers like Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai, one has come to think of this as a necessary, if sometimes wearying, self-consciousness, but Junot Diaz’s American stories about Dominicans show that it is dispensable. None of his characters ever tries to encapsulate North America or his life in it.
Diaz avoids all philosophising about identity and instead conveys everything through the grittier material of first-hand experience — the experience of people always learning to “walk the world”. When his immigrants miss home they miss it in a hard, straightforward way, without self-pity, and when they go back home, they resent it with a similar directness. “Seeing the country he’d been born in, seeing his people in charge of everything, he was unprepared for it... The poverty — the unwashed children pointing sullenly at his new shoes, the familias slouching in hovels — was familiar and stifling.”
Machismo may have something to do with the ruggedness of Diaz’s style. The protagonists of his stories are men who must not just survive in an adversarial world but negotiate it with skill and flair and style. When the nine-year-old Yunior cries in the collection’s first story, his elder brother spits and tells him — “You have to get tougher... Do you think our papi’s crying? Do you think that’s what he’s been doing the last six years?” On the last page of the last story, their father decides to abandon the new family he has fathered in the United States. “He drank a cup of black café in the kitchen and left it washed and drying in the caddy. I doubt if he was crying or even anxious. He lit a cigarette, tossed the match on the kitchen table and headed out into the angular winds that were blowing long and cold from the south.”
Yunior is the narrator of some of these jaggedly interlinked and overlapping stories. His father — Ramón de las Casas — is seeking his fortunes in the States while the family waits for him in Santo Domingo. Later they come together in an imperfect reunion which flows, over time, towards breakdowns of other kinds. The unnamed, first person protagonist of the other stories could well be Yunior too — a New Jersey child-man searching out love, dealing dope, stealing ‘gear’ from supermarkets, trying to stay in a job, trying to stay out of trouble, watching out for cops. There is no hand-wringing over this edgy and often decrepit existence which is why the rare moments when it is acknowledged for what it is become lyrical: “We’re all under the big street lamps, everyone’s the colour of day-old piss. When I’m fifty this is how I’ll remember my friends: tired and yellow and drunk.”
But machismo doesn’t overshadow heartbreak. In his very use of the English language to describe Spanish emotions and sounds there is obviously a loss, even though Diaz’s English is liberally sprinkled with Spanish words. Yet once again, there is no brooding in these stories over the loss of one language and the struggle with a new one. That delicate task Diaz leaves to an epigraph from Gustavo Pérez Firmat: “The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else.”
