Revolutionaries ought to spin the dark girls into beautiful.
—Shreerekha Subramanian.
Abstract
This essay offers an examination of Junot Díaz’s “The Silence”—a nonfiction account of his experience of child sexual abuse and the lingering effects of that trauma—to show how Díaz’s fiction replicates gendered violence even as it claims to write against it. I reveal how his language stages women’s bodies not only as a source of pleasure but as receptacles of pain through which men find their own salvation at a woman’s expense. This essay also highlights the crisis in the Latinx canon that the allegations of sexual misconduct against Díaz revealed and argues that, as the archetype of contemporary Latinx literature, Díaz’s antagonistic position invites us to reconsider how we construct, read, and teach the Latinx canon. His “fall” further reveals the legacies of racial and gendered violence that manifest obsequiously even in “decolonial” literature.
Resumen
Este ensayo ofrece un análisis de “The Silence” de Junot Díaz, un relato factual de su experiencia de abuso sexual infantil y los efectos prolongados de ese trauma, para demostrar como las obras de ficción de Díaz reproducen la violencia de género aun cuando afirman estar en su contra. Sostengo que el lenguaje de Díaz presenta el cuerpo de las mujeres no solo como fuente de placer sino como receptáculo de dolor a través del cual los hombres encuentran su propia salvación a expensas de una mujer. Este ensayo también recalca la crisis del canon latino revelado por las alegaciones de conducta sexual inadecuada en contra de Díaz y argumenta que, como arquetipo de la literatura latina contemporánea, la postura antagonista de Díaz nos invita a reconsiderar cómo construimos, leímos y enseñamos el canon latino. Su “caída” revela además los legados de violencia racial y de género que se manifiestan servilmente incluso en la literatura “decolonial.”
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Notes
Much can and should be said in the whitewashing of Latinx racial, ethnic, and national identity and conflation a tweet like Feal’s signals. Although this is not the focus of this article, I would simply like to gesture to this issue here.
In February 2018 writer Sherman Alexie issued a statement apologizing to the women he “has harmed,” following rumors and allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct. See Neary (2018).
Even Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado Sáez’s important text, The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature, which questions contemporary definitions of the Latinx canon, argues that recent Latinx literature “imagines creative ways to rethink the relationship between a politics of social justice and market popularity” (2007, p. 3). Arguing against the scholarly reception of post-1960s texts as apolitical, Dalleo and Machado present a widely held belief that work by people of color holds progressive politics and projects of social justice at their center.
The investment in writers of color foregrounding politically progressive politics in their work can be seen in Latinx studies generally. For example, even while scholarship is moving away from essentialist notions of identity politics and definitions of latinidad, there is still a strong devotion to literature by Latinx writers (and I would argue by extension an investment in writers of color generally) being politically progressive. See Ralph Rodriguez’s Latinx Literature Unbound (2018).
Yunior de las Casas is the narrator of most of Díaz’s fiction, starting with Drown (1996), and followed by The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and This is How You Lose Her (2012).
This question was raised in a Facebook post that was distributed through various media outlets, including Twitter. See the original post at https://www.facebook.com/lorgia/posts/10155537574447444.
We can see this most clearly in his interview with Paula Moya, “The Search for Decolonial Love,” which first appeared in the Boston Review and was later included in Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination (Torres-Saillant 2016, pp. 391–401). Other interviews and public appearances with the author reassert this as well. See, for example, “Junot Diaz on the Game of Fiction and Intimacy” for the New York Public Library podcast, https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/01/19/podcast-junot-diaz.
There is notable scholarship that addresses the misogyny in Díaz’s work, and are important additions to the conversation, especially because they push against expected readings of Díaz’s fiction. See Ylce Irizarry, “Making It Home: A New Ethics of Immigration in Dominican Literature,” in Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement, edited by Vanessa Pérez Rosario, 89–103 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and “This Is How You Lose It: Navigating Dominicanidad in Junot Díaz’s Drown,” in Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination (Hanna et al. 2017, pp. 147–172); Jason Frydman, “Violence, Masculinity, and Upward Mobility (2009); Ignacio López-Calvo, “A Postmodern Plátano’s Trujillo: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, More Macondo Than Mcondo,” Antípodas (2009): 75–90; Elena Machado Sáez, “Dictating Desire, Dictating Diaspora: Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao as Foundational Romance,” Contemporary Literature 52, no. 3 (2011): 522–555; Trent Masiki, “Ambiguous Seductions: Doppelgängers, Suciogenesis, and the Mask of Tíguerismo in Junot Díaz’s ‘Drown’ and ‘Miss Lora.’” MELUS 43, no. 4 (2018): 194–216.
Outside of the tweets cited at the opening of this article, see Alisa Valdez’s account of her relationship with Díaz at https://oshuncreative.wordpress.com/2018/05/04/i-tried-to-warn-you-about-junot-diaz/; and Monica Byrne’s account at https://twitter.com/monicabyrne13/status/992301359180333056.
A good resource to explore on sexual abuse and abjection in relation to the Blackened body is Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection (2010), in particular chapter 3, “Slavery, Rape, and the Black Male Abject.” Scott’s work participates in a longer tradition of abject and trauma theory, which are useful for thinking of how the racialized body and, in particular for this case, the male subject, experiences and reacts to pain and trauma.
There has been a great deal of scholarship on these concerns in Oscar Wao. See for example, Monica Hanna, “‘Reassembling the Fragments’: Battling Historiographies, Caribbean Discourse, and Nerd Genres in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Callaloo, vol. 32, no. 2 (2010): 498–520.
We also cannot overlook that, in recounting Athena’s story, Díaz is also promoting The Voices of our Nation Workshop, of which he is the co-founder and faculty member.
In fact, the publication of Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination presents this as their primary raison d’être. It is difficult to find scholarship that engages with Díaz’s work as misogynist or a replicating gendered violence. Writing for Avidly, Dixa Ramirez states, “What is appealing in Díaz’s writing, which is possibly connected to his own experiences and behaviors, is that space between his characters’ striving toward absolution and its persistent failure” (see Ramírez 2018). In this way, Ramírez reasserts not only the irresolution at the heart of Díaz’s work, but the seduction consistent failure presents for readers. Ramírez also importantly links the fictional world of Yunior, his narrative violence toward women, and Díaz’s lived experiences as an author.
The audio of this encounter was released via Soundcloud, but I am reluctant to provide a link here for the dubious ethical grounds through which it was distributed. The recording does not demonstrate, in my opinion, a “harrowing” encounter as it has been described, but an author (Díaz) clearly insecure in being pushed to explain his writerly choices.
It is important to note that while constantly describing Belicia’s body in pain—at the hands of the Gangster, the “monsterglove of festering ruination extending from the back of her neck to the base of her spine” (Díaz 2007, p. 247) that is caused by a burn, the beating in the cane field, cancer—Oscar Wao does not inflict this pain on Oscar himself. I would argue that in Díaz’s work, generally, women are always the receptacles of pain who act as tools for Yunior’s and other men’s soul-searching.
See Betty J. Cotter, “Teacher’s Dilemma: Should Author’s Bad Behavior Ban the Book?” The Day, 20 May 2018; Sandra Beasley, “Maybe Abusive Authors Don’t Belong on My Bookshelf. But What About in My Classroom?” Washington Post, 14 May 2018; Lorgia García Peña says also, in “many syllabi Díaz is the representative of Latinx, if not minority literature,” Lorgia García Peña, Facebook, 6 May 2018, https://www.facebook.com/lorgia/posts/10155537574447444.
These two classes were open to the general public of University of Massachusetts Lowell and were attended by professors and staff in the English Department, Women and Gender Studies Program, and the Multicultural Affairs Office, and by students from various courses at the university. I received IRB approval to record the two open classes, to quote from this recording, and to quote from the student work I received in response to this assignment. I would like to thank the Office of Institutional Compliance at University of Massachusetts Lowell who made the application process painless.
Díaz repeats this interpretation in “The Silence,” referencing this same passage in order to speak about his own abuse (2018).
I am “thinking with” feminist thinkers such as Magnet et al. (2014) and hooks here.
One student notably described the link between an author like Díaz and the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh, noting how both men take advantage of oppressive systems: “many of these testimonies talk about him [Díaz] as the representation of Latinx literature. … He’s a gatekeeper, people go to him for connections or advice, and he has taken advantage of being in a position of power.” Importantly, this student addressed the importance of reevaluating not only the authority authors hold, but how their position within our classrooms reproduce misogynistic and corrosive social relations. In this poignant moment, the student invited the class to consider the tendency in the academy to sanitize the discourse surrounding certain writers and historical figures, asking whether it is the “duty” of scholars to illuminate the subjects of their study, stating, “By ignoring the various contexts surrounding an author’s work, we leave out a significant amount of information that could help us better understand an author’s work”.
For example, a student stated, “Hearing about Diaz [sic] and how his words have touched the lives of others, I can not [sic] deny that I am interested in seeing what is so special”.
It is important to note how, in light of the allegations against Díaz, Mary Karr (2018) highlights the tendency of the New Yorker to support their male authors when accused by women of abuse: “Deeply saddened by the allegations against #JunotDiaz & I support every woman brave enough to speak. The violence #DavidFosterWallace inflicted on me as a single mom was ignored by his biographer & @NewYorker as ‘alleged’ despite my having letters in his hand. But DFW was white.” https://twitter.com/marykarrlit/status/992545700004139008.
Although many students in my course were Latinx, few had heard of or read any Latinx author, either in school or on their own (although one student had read Díaz on his own). The same was the case for my white, Asian American, and Black students. After the clases abiertas, many students expressed how the discussion itself had made them curious of Díaz’s fiction and what one termed “the hype around” his work. This is, of course, a paradoxical outcome to my pedagogical exercise, but one that allowed students to not only experience Díaz’s work but put it in conversation with previous and contemporary Latinx writers.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the generous and incisive input of Justin Mann, Ylce Irizarry, and John Ribó, who provided invaluable guidance and support throughout the life cycle of this work. I also want to thank Ricardo Ortíz, Israel Reyes, and Marion Rohrleitner, with whom I participated at the MLA International Symposium; the participants of the 2018 ACLA seminar; and the Colloquium for the Study of Latina, Latino, and Latinx Culture and Theory at CUNY, who provided instrumental feedback in the nascent stages of this project. During the review process, I accrued further debt to many patient readers, especially the anonymous readers of Latino Studies, for their generative criticism, and Lourdes Torres for her careful attention to my work.
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Gil’Adí, M. “I think about you, X—”: Re-Reading Junot Díaz after “The Silence”. Lat Stud 18, 507–530 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00280-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00280-6