On a Facebook group called Junot Diaz Appreciation (I'm a fan but taking a break from joining more groups), there's a link to a just-post-Pulitzer interview with el escritor on an Amazon site called Omnivoracious.
One question references my piece "Why Wao's Pulitzer Matters:"
Amazon.com: I read online that "Diaz is not the first Latino to win the prize, but he is certainly the first cat from the streets to do so." How does that make you feel?
Diaz: I didn't have an easy childhood (who ever does?). I grew up super-poor, welfare, section 8 and food stamps all the way, in a community where us boys worried all the time about getting jumped and where mad people got recruited by the military. My mother was raising five kids on an income that didn't break ten grand a couple of years. She cleaned houses for people a lot better off than us and I still have this image of her on her hands and knees cleaning bathrooms. I'm as nerdy as they come, a deep lover of books, but those long hard years marked me as deeply as that river marked Conrad and maybe that's what the writer means when they say that I'm "from the street." If that's what the writer's getting at then I'll take it, I've no interest in erasing my particular version of the "American Experience." But if this is some hollow ghetto glorification... I didn't think I was so cool when I only had three shirts in high school and had to repeat twice a week. I didn't feel too "street" then. I felt like a goddamn loser.
For the record, "cat from the streets" was my rendering of tiguere. So no, no ghetto glorification going on, especially since I think Díaz is often read as ghetto by ig'nant folks when he's speaking multi-culturally and multi-lingually, at registers all over the cultural map.
But the real reason to read the shorty online interview is because it features a preview of the science-fiction vein Díaz is mining for a book currently called Dark America. A short scene atop a transport, where assorted Travelers hang on to the precarious handholds on the roof despite fast speeds and trash bombs from overpasses, is much as one sees in buses all over the world.
Score another one for the coming canon of brown sci-fi, finally seeing us in the future.
[tiger = tiguere image via solarnavigator.net; bus in India pix via Excellence in Mediocrity blog]
That's a good quote to use. What I find peculiar is that often people that didn't grow up in a rough neighborhood think you are "glorifying the ghetto" when you are just telling real stories, as if to be honest about poverty and hardship can only mean you want something for it; pity, empathy, cred, whatever. And these people are also often the ones that can't talk about wealth and privilege honestly either! Que cosas.
Posted by: EL CHAVO! | April 24, 2008 at 10:32 PM
Right on, Chavo. For people who live in Woody Allen or "Friends" land, city brown experience = ghetto. Totalizing, and as if that's the only coin of the realm we can offer. And it metastasizes. Hence, you end up with "Love and Consequences." Why didn't Margaret B. Jones write about her privilege and fascination with gangsta culture honestly? That would have been worth reading.
Posted by: Caro | April 24, 2008 at 11:29 PM