Junot Díaz: Just add three more feet

Michael March:  When did you come to America?

Junot Díaz: I came to the United States when I was six years old. In December, so December is always a nostalgic month for me.

MM:  Why nostalgic?

JD:  December brings it all back—the way Septembers remind American kids about school. For me, December brings back my first years as an immigrant.

MM:  What was it like?

JD:  (Whew) Man, we're talking 1974. I was only six. A few months after I arrived, Saigon fell. The country, the United States, was in a deep economic crisis. It was going through another of its long paroxysms of anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner—another of its nativist periods. You know, to immigrate at that time—a young, poor, colored kid, who immigrated to a place in New Jersey that wasn't accustomed to having that many immigrants—was an epic battle. You were young, and so there is no precedent. You don't realize that this is not normal. You think 'oh, that's everyone's life.' Everyone's life is that you battle for every inch of your space—you battle for dignity, you battle to be understood, you battle to be. I just assumed that this was commonplace, but it was certainly a struggle.

MM:  When did you realize that you were old?

JD:  That I was old? As an old man, man. I found out I was old when I was thirty-five. I have godchildren, and there was a moment when I was looking at my goddaughters and I remember it distinctly: I said, 'my time has passed.' This was no longer my youth, this was now their turn. It was kind of a humbling, but also an immense realization.

MM:  No longer on the streets, close to the ground.

JD:  Yeah, you are no longer the market. You don't recognize the music—you don't recognize the actors. You're no longer the main focus of a lot of stuff that you are used to being. Of course, you become another market, right. But at that moment, I just wasn't the same person, not on the street the way I used to be.

MM:  Still in the same fish market?

JD:  Yes, certainly. Certainly.

MM:  How did you find your voice, an identity that spoke?

JD:  Well, you know, Americans are perplexed about identity. The American project is one where even the most highly established, well-placed, well-heeled American struggles with the issue of 'Who the hell am I? Why am I here? Where are we?' Now, of course, there are degrees to this. A brand new immigrant struggles quite differently than some sort of New England blue blood. It's one of the great contradictions of the American project. Displaced people—in what we would call a settler, colonial space and living under capitalism—a rabid, savage capitalism—are forced in some ways to strike out on their own, in some ways to create an individual apotheosis: that I must become someone.

Our sense of history is very thin, very dim and often, because it is so dark, avoided. And as an immigrant kid, I felt like I just joined the race a couple laps behind, but I was in the same damn race. As a young person, what helped me to seek my voice out was the realization that I certainly came to the right place to be in a search of an identity.

MM:  You found literature.

JD:  Look, we live in the societies we live in, with a better sense of these societies than we care to admit. For me, the arts are one of the great gifts that our screwed-up-histories have given us. In the arts I encounter the human. I encounter signs of not only our best selves, but our past selves, our missing selves, the selves that we haven't lived, that we will live. I truly believe that what matters most about our civilization is this damn practice: the arts.

MM:  You could have been a basketball player.

JD:  Oh, yeah. Just add three more feet.

MM:  Why write?

JD: I was a young reader, first and foremost. I was incredibly blessed as a young person to fall in love with reading in a way that has saved my life. It was, and continues to be, the great, abiding passion of my life. I am given extra inches to my soul every time I read a book. It's an extraordinary freedom, an extraordinary grace that I have been given. My writing came out of this love and this enthusiasm. Eventually you love something so much that you want to return the favor, you want to dabble in it. I was so transported by reading that I wanted to create the same opportunities for other people.

MM:  What about the music in your work.

JD:  I grew up in a family, in a community where folks had swag. They had swagger, they had song, they certainly had rhythm. But, you know, American English is notoriously a good dancer. American English has got that walk. I was very much aware that one of the harder-to-grasp characteristics of language is its musicality, its rhythm, which I desperately wanted to 'master'. To get across the lives of the people that I wanted to write about, I needed a rhythm that was both familiar, and in many ways kind of weirdly alienating.

MM:  You're working on a new novel called Dark America.

JD:  It comes from an unique moment in time, which I experienced. I immigrated to the states in the early seventies. I lived in a poor community, which was being flooded by all the returning soldiers from Vietnam. And all the folks who had gone out and lived the sixties now were being, through various vicissitudes, being contracted back into these poor neighborhoods. There were hippies—there were people who had gone abroad—there were people who had tried to live in communes. It was remarkable to live in a transient port community like the one I lived in. My first sense of Americans were all these figures who, in some ways, were refugees from the exploding sixties and the exploding early seventies—and I was really haunted.

In many ways I believed in my encounter with those utopian dreams—some of them were crumbling—some of them had crumbled—some of them were alive—some of them were fiercely alive—that was my sense of what America was. I was meeting people who had been in that moment, which I had no contact with directly. I had always been haunted by that generational moment—by neighbors who had been in Vietnam—by neighbors who had been in the Black Power movement—by folks who had gone into the desert and tried to start this life over.

I was a kid. I didn't know any better. And the stories that I was being told as a kid by these people shaped and, in some ways, affected me profoundly. It is my first sense of America. I only caught a glimpse, and yet I saw part of it. I saw it in people's faces and in their stories. Dark America is a book that, even though it's set in the future, is about what I glimpsed as a child at the end of this period, in all these returning people.

MM:  Only the future exists.

JD:  People's sense of the future has become far darker than it's been in my short forty years in this world.

MM:  Marcus Aurelius wrote, "Abandon your thirst for books or you will die in bitterness."

JD:  Corporations are spending millions of dollars to get you to do everything but read. Reading is a way of taking yourself out of the market. When you read a long novel, you spend a couple weeks with your brain attached to something that is not endorsed by corporations. You're in touch with another person, in touch with a different subjectivity, with another reality. You go off the grid in some ways. Reading also puts you in touch with a different rhythm of life. When you read, you switch back into a rhythm of human life.

My game always has been and continues to be that I just offer up books. If people want them, they want them. I tend to bring the thing-in-question in hand, bring the material in hand, and throw it at them. Most of the time it doesn't stick, but every now and then it does.

New York

December, 2010