Junot Diaz's Drown: Revisiting Those Mean Streets

1 16 Junot Diaz's drown : Revisiting " Those Mean Streets " L izabeth Parav isini-Gebert Junot DIAZ was born in 1968 in a poor section of the city of Santo Dom ingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, and moved to the United States as a child of seven. In th e United Sta tes Dfaz's family m oved to a Latin o neighbo rhood in New Jersey w here he attend ed Kean College in Union befor e transferri n g to Rutgers Univer sity in New Brunswi ck. Ru tgers ' offerings in Latino and African-A merican history and literature opened new possibilities for creativity and political aw areness, and Diaz came "t o see himself- an d assert himself- as a Dominican , an American, and a writer.'" After his graduation from Rutgers, Dfaz enrolled in the graduate w riting pro gram at Corne ll University, from w hich he received a m aster's degree in Fine Arts. In 1996 h e published a collection of shor t stories, drown , w hich has made h im one of th e most promising m emb ers of the younger gene rati on of Latino authors.

2 ANALYSIS OF THEMES AND FORMS Since the publication in 1996 of his first collection of short stor ies, drown , Dominican-born author [unot Diaz has been acclaimed by critics as "one of th e most original, v ibrant and engrossing voices to come along in many years."? Ch osen by Newsweek as one of th ei r "new faces of '96" "A Dese rvin g Dark Horse"-the young writer quickl y became " the most h igh ly trumpeted ta lent of the seas on."? Dfaz' s mem ories of his hom e islan d, of both ur ba n and rural spaces, 165 ~ 164 Literature are faint, "like th e fixed im age of photographs .. [t]her e is a snapshot of his chil dhood house, or a kun g fu movie he once saw dubbed in Sp anish, or a vis it to Haiti,"! bu t t hey rever ber ate in his autobiographical stor ies as sparse but eloquent eleme nts of a landsc ape of mem ory and exp eri ence. Diaz's narr ative space, h owever, is dominated not by nostalgic re cre ations of idealiz ed childhood land sc ap es, b u t by the bleak, barr en, and d ecayed margins of N ew Jersey's inner cities.]

3 Diaz, whom critics have p ra ised for his acute p owers of observation, has a sharp eye for the social and human blight that has resulted from urban neglect . The trajectory of his characters ' lives m irrors Diaz's own observ atio ns and expe riences in this set ting. The N ew Jersey he writes about, as he told one in ter viewer, "is the one he knows : a pla ce of blu e-collar towns of Latin o immigran t s, of tostones (mashed frie d plan tains) and m alls and roads wher e 'beer bottles grow out of the weed s like squashes.' " 5 H is own family was not immune to the d es tructive asp ects of this new enviro n men t- his father, somew hat of a wom an izer, abandoned th e famil y for anoth er wom an when Diaz w as an adolescen t, and his m other, with her insufficient knowle d ge of English, could find only substandar d em ploy ment. Diaz learned ea rly to escap e his unp ro mising circumstance s through.

4 W ritin g. H e began to write in earn est as a high school sop homore when hi s old er brother, Rafael, was d iagn osed with leuk emia and was hosp i talized. Diaz "spe nt his days scribbling long lett ers to Rafa.:" He found anot her aven ue of esc ape thr ough ed ucation by attending Kean College and lat er transferr ing to Rutgers Unive rsity in New Brunswick. After grad uation from Ru tg ers, Diaz enrolled in the graduate writin g program at Cornell University . The mark eting of Diaz's stories reads like a cautionary tale about the commodification of Latino literature, its literary merit notwi thstanding. H e erup ted into the public notice quite dramatically with a blitz of p ub licity following the announcement of h is having rec eived "gobs of m oney" for h is first collection of short stories and a novel he had not yet started. The story of th e feeding frenzy that led to his receiving "six figures" from Riverhead Books has the fascination of th e p roverbial train wreck.

5 If th e tale of his discovery by Rosenth al recalls that of Lana Turner's own d iscovery at Schwab's Drugstore in its seren dipity and improbability, that of the reading at the KGB Bar in the East Village to an au d ience packed with talent scou ts arranged by Rosen th al, and the subsequent summoning of eigh t publishing hou ses to wrestle for the righ ts to publish the book, speak of the fu ry to bring 'se lected Lat ino voices to a market avid for marketable min ority voices. The publication of his short stories in venues as prestigiou s as the New Yorker and the Paris Review soon attracted even m ore notice, placing Diaz in an almost Revisiting " Those Mean Streets " untenable situation of having to meet the highest and m ost overblown exp ectations. His inclus ion in two conse cu tive collections of The Best Ameri can Short Stories ("Ysrael" in 1996 and "Fie st a, 1980" in 1997) atte sts to the profound imp act he has m ade on the American liter ar y scene since the p ub lication of drown .

6 Like Toni Morriso n, w hos e novels ch ro nicle the black American ex perience, focusing on how characters struggle to find themselves and assert their cultural id en tity against an unjust society, Diaz is i n terested in narratin g the great hum an loss of m arginali za tion an d closed options. Unlike Morrison, however, w hose use of fan tas y and highly poetic style lifts her characters tow ard the symbolic and mythic, Diaz is more con cerned w ith depictin g th e petty humi liations an d everyday d eprivations of inner-city life. He is closer in outlook and style to two w rit ers to whom he is frequently compared: Puert o Rican author Piri Thomas and Lan g ston H ugh es, both of w ho m are known for their elo quen t po rtrayal of ghetto you th stru ggling again st the cond itions of life for urban black and Hisp ani c youth. Thomas' Down These Mean Streets (1967) , in particula r, comes to mind when linkin g drown to a liter ary tradition.

7 In many w ays drown is a sort of t h rowback to th e Nuyorican literature of the 1950s and 1960s. Thom as' classic of Latino an guish and desp air wasth e firstina traditionof heart wrenching memoirs depictin g th e destruction of the Puerto Rican soul in th e Am erican ghetto. The text di ssected in hars h detail the d ru g peddling culture, the d eva station cause d by hero in ad di ction, the bru tality of prison life, the loss of the saving power of faith and family , and the constant struggle against the diminishing value of life th at were part of the 1960s as lived by the young Puerto Rican comm u nity of Spanish Harlem. Diaz's drown , though removed in time and space fro m Thomas ' barrio, nonetheless revisits m an y of its themes and motifs, updating for a new aud ien ce, in a trimmed -down, more detac hed style, th e vicissi tudes of young immigrant life in th e inner city.

8 drown chronicles th e h u man cost of an im m igrant people's disp lacem ent in an environment of cultural and racial d iscrimination an d economic exploitation. The trait that separates Diaz' s work fro m this earlier tradition is th e abs ence of a clear political intention, wh ich is most obvi ous in the pas siona te, d enunciatory style of Piri Thoma s' work as comp are d to Diaz's cool, d etached, minimalist prose. If Down These Mean Streets w as a book of searing accu sa tion again st Those forces in American society th at con demned some ethnic minorities to alien ation, discrim ination, and disil lusionmen t, it was also a book that assu med that these conditions could be altere d th rough p olitical action and conscious ness-ra ising. There is no such faith in concerted comm uni ty action in drown ; th ere is, as a m atter of fact, little semblance of a commun ity-in the sense of groups living lives of multileveled communication with each other.

9 Ther e are friends 166 167 Literature and neighbors w ho come across each oth er from time to time in th ese tales, but th ey merge and separate, like th e proverb ia l ships th at pass in th e nigh t, leavin g little in their wake. Jam es Wood s, in his rev iew for the New Republic, accurately poin ts to th e stories "skill fu lly" catchi n g Dfaz's characters "in th eir own glue of confusion, u n able or unwilling to chan ge anythin g."7 drown opens w ith an epi g raph from Cuban writer Gustavo Perez Fir mat-"The fact tha t I am w riting to you in English already falsifies what I wan ted to tell you"-a poignant stateme nt affirming the cen trality of language to a writer's unde rstand in g and articula tion of experience. The ep igrap h, which bemoans Perez Firmat's sense of loss of his "natural" [Spani sh] langu age,annou n cesDiaz'ssubject to be tha tof explainingthat he does n ot "belong to Eng lish though I belong now h ere else.

10 " Its u se in drown sets up a curious paradox for Diaz's work, w h ich d oes n ot d well with particu lar pathos on his variou s im migran t characters' yearn ing for a lost home or lan gu age or on th eir remova l from th eir pl ace of origin. In fact, Spanish has little im p act on the stories in drown ; the texts may be p epp ered with unexp lained and untranslated Span ish w ord s, many of which are misspelled or are used in grammatically incorrect vari a 'tio ns , They ar e not brought into the text to enrich the English lan gu ag e with new exp ressive possibili ties, bu t as a re-creation of t he easy slan g of the minority community abou t whi ch h e writes." This community's alienation and exile come fro m its marginalization fro m mainstre am , mid dle-class Am erican society, from a disempowerment that is endemic to nationa l and im migr an t m ino rities in th e Un ited States, and d oes not necessarily stem from a forced d is connection fro m th e nati ve language and environment.