I mention this book to G. yesterday, I wrote a research/essay about it back in 05' so I found it. And here it is.
Junot Diaz, writer born in the Dominican Republic and then immigrated with his family to the United States. Diaz is not just a writer but also a literature teacher first in Syracuse University and currently in MIT. His career started with the publication of “Ysrael” one of the story that compose his book “Drown”, book which made him famous as a new writer he as well “has been hyped as the next young gun of American fiction.” (Spillman) “Drown” is mainly 10 stories about Diaz life, from being a fatherless child in the Dominican Republic to being part of an immigrant family struggling in the look for a better life. The book goes thru topics as; relationships, sex, identity and drugs. The stories which various are related by theme, biographical order and characters are mainly focused in life as an immigrant, the before and after it, his sorrows, his family, his love life and him going thru life unnoted. Diaz shows the issues in a completely factual manner, and in order to do this he uses an uncomplicated language although he uses Spanish words that are impossible to convert from one language to another and also chooses words with much freedom since he does not mind using profanity. Diaz uses real life experiences of the day by day living which makes the book so attention-grabbing and encourages the reader to keep reading until the end of it, which happened not just to me “Once you pick up 'Drown', you won't be able to surface back to your world until you've had the pleasure of reaching the bottom of Diaz's every short story.” (Sidhu) Diaz also uses images with characters and uses the languages to prove the lack of respect for the system from the characters themselves.
The first story in the book is titled “Ysrael” and is the one that introduces us to Yunior our main character and narrator throughout the whole book, character who carry the weight of the Dominican society in its shoulders, a fatherless child with little hope on his future or almost none at all, weight which is represented by his brother, Rafa, also his companion. We can notice how Rafa roughly treats his young brother because of all Yunior’s complaints “…he had about five hundred routines he liked to lay on me. Most of them had to do with my complexion, my hair, the size of my lips. It’s the Haitian, he’d say to his buddies. Hey señor Haitian, Mami found you in the border and only took you in because she felt sorry for you.” (Diaz 5) said Yunior referring to his brother, line as well that relate much to me being also a Dominican that had an older brother which did mostly the same to me, with things just like those. In “Ysrael” Yunior and Rafa set themselves in an adventure to hound Ysrael, a kid that had his face eaten by a pig when he was a child and then covered his deformity behind a mask when he grew up, more than a person Ysrael was a tool used by the author, an image, that represents the life of Yunior and Rafa in the Dominican Republic, with his grotesquely disfigured face Ysrael gives you an idea about the forlorn life of the two brothers in the Dominican Republic. You can tell the relation between the characters because of the fact that both of their parents were living in the United States and by coincidence in the same state, New York.
The keywords that I can recognize from the first story are mainly; Fatherless childhood and ignorance, keywords which symbolize the life of Yunior while he was living at Dominican Republic, and he hated. Lines like “Our father only sent us letters and an occasional shirt or pair of jeans at Christmas” (Diaz 16) were the ones that represented the creation of a fissure in the relation of Yunior with his father.
In “Fiesta, 1980” Diaz set us with the same characters but already moved in to the USA and also we have the first appearance of Ramón, Yunior’s dad or Papi, in the book after just mentioning him in “Ysrael.” From this story we get to know more about the family and the actual relationship of Yunior with his dad. We also get to know much about the Dominican society, because he clearly states the Dominican machismo in Ramón and as well the infidelity that Ramón has going on with the “Puerto Rican woman”. The machismo we can tell from Yunior statements “I didn’t dare glance at him. Papi was old-fashioned; he expected your undivided attention when you were getting your ass whupped. You couldn’t look him in the eye either—that wasn’t allowed. Better to stare at his belly button, which was perfectly round and immaculate. Papi pulled me to my feet by my ear.” (Diaz 26) And we also get to know Yunior’s mother or Mami, which was pretty quiet and also Yunior’s protector because when Ramón was beating him up she said “Ya, Ramón, ya. It’s not his fault” (Diaz 26). Diaz many times used malice, lack of concern and toughness in male characters just like William R. Alford stated in his commentary towards “Drown”;
“Upon reading the repeated references to cruelty and indifference by the male characters [and the corresponding meekness of the females] in Drown, a series of related questions arose: Was Diaz consciously providing stereotypical male figures for dramatic effect or was he betraying his own hostility toward men in general [and fathers in particular]? Did Diaz have an agenda in consistently portraying men in this way?” (Alford)
The fatherless childhood of Yunior affected him a lot because his father left to the United States and he never got an explanation why his dad left to the United States and he always felt that he was waiting on the accomplishment of a dream but while he was waiting onto that dream to come true he was “Aguantando” word which stands for sustaining and is one of the story of the book. He was sustaining for his father absence and for the fact that he was waiting for his dad to come back and take them, himself and his family, to the United States. Yunior most of the time daydreamed about his dad going back to the Dominican Republic, and he also, in his dream, was expecting his dad to be a well dressed and wealthy gentleman we can tell because of his statements in the lines “A man with swinging hands and eyes like mine. He’d have gold on his fingers, cologne on his neck, a silk shirt, good leather shoes” (Diaz 87).
In “Aguantando” we can tell that conditions of the family in the Dominican Republic were terrible. In view of the fact that the only one monetarily sustaining the family was the mother and she couldn’t do much they were poor. In fact Yunior tells throughout the whole story how poor they were “We didn’t eat rocks but we didn’t eat meat or beans either. Almost everything on our plates was boiled: boiled yuca, boiled platano, may with a piece of cheese or a shred of bacalao.” (Diaz 70) ever since the Dominican Republic is one of the main producers of yucca and banana [plátano] worldwide is really inexpensive to get it from the flee market but is very unsafe as well because none of this products are industrially processed or hygienic when they come from flee markets. The consequence of that was the “annual case of worms” (Diaz 71).
Diaz throughout some of the stories in his book uses first-person narrator and in some of them this narrator is observing, studying and commenting others we may see that in “No Face, “Aurora” and “Boyfriend”. In “Boyfriend” the narrator is just simply eavesdropping on a couple that live in the floor below him; he does not know the names of the couple so he refers to them as “boyfriend” and “girlfriend”. Diaz uses this story to establish one of his main themes throughout the book which is how Yunior saw men treating women as an object and just like his brother, Rafa, did in “Ysrael” telling him everything about women and how to use them, also when his dad cheated on her mom furthermore when “boyfriend” mistreated “girlfriend”. Throughout “Boyfriend” Diaz explain how the girl let “boyfriend” manipulates her, and this showed the weakness of the female gender. “He just needed space to cheat space to cheat. Fine, he said, but every time he went for the door she got to crying and would be like, Why are you doing this?” (Diaz 111)
“No Face” the book’s penultimate story is apparently a continuation of “Ysrael” although no name is given is simply sure is the same character but this time this character has many interpretations since his a flight of the imagination, a superhero with a mask which “has his power of INVISIBILITY and no one can touch him” (Diaz 155). The character is a representation of how people are obligated to put themselves out of sight from society when they do not act in accordance with the society expectations. “No Face” himself wants to escape from Dominican Republic therefore his looking forward to go “up north” (Diaz 157) referring to the United States.
In conclusion the book is mainly about how immigrants see themselves “Drown” in to the image of the American dream or illusion and what they go thru before deciding between Mami or Papi which are images that represent which culture to stand for, the American culture [Papi] or your own culture [Mami] what we can also name as identity. This is what I read between lines because it’s what most affected me of the book, since I moved to the United States not so long ago and I’m going thru the same identity issue. We can also outline that this book is clearly autobiographical but also fictional. In an interview Diaz responded the question “Your collection of short stories, basically it is deeply autobiographical and fictional at the same time?” saying “…for me it was important to excavate my life because I spent like all these years in school in the states where thye didn’t value my experiences at all… not valued in the material, not valued in what was being represented in the literature so I went after that I went after those experiences in my whole life, but what ends up happening that the demands of a good story, what they end up doing is they modify things, change things, shape things, play certain things up, play certain things down, so by the time you’re done, the shit is unrecognizable. You know what I’m saying – I feel the basic element is there but many of the details have changed you know.” Diaz clearly states that his life became fiction while he was writing the book and editing it.
Bibliographic References:
Alford, William. "Junot Diaz's Drown -- Sex, Race and Power." UTOPIA UNMASKED. 10 Feb. 2005 .
Diaz, Junot. Drown. Canada: Riverhead, 1996.
Diaz, Junot. Personal interview. 1 Apr 2002.
Sidhu, Rupneet. Drown - Junot Diaz. 02 Feb. 2005 .
Spillman, Robert. 05 Sept 1996. 02 Feb 2005 .
