Junot Díaz: Hunt the Light Knight

Watch video of Junot Díaz reading at the 21. Prague Writers' Festival here.

Much in the news in those days, Jesus de Galindez was a Basque supernerd and a Columbia University grad student who had written a rather unsettling doctoral dissertation. The topic? Lamentably, unfortunately, sadly: the era of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. Galindez, a loyalist in the Spanish Civil War, had firsthand knowl­edge of the regime; he had taken refuge in Santo Domingo in 1939, occupied high positions therein, and by his departure in 1946 had developed a lethal allergy to the Failed Cattle Thief, could conceive for himself no higher duty than to expose the blight that was his regime. Crassweller describes Galindez as "a bookish man, a type frequendy found among political activists in Latin America . . . the winner of a prize in poetry", what we in the Higher Planes call a Nerd Class 2. But dude was a ferocious leftist, despite the dangers, gallantly toiling on his Trujillo dissertation.

What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway? Since before the infamous Caesar-Ovid war they've had beef. Like the Fantastic Four and Galactus, like the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, like the Teen Titans and Death-stroke, Foreman and Ali, Morrison and Crouch, Sammy and Sergio, they seemed destined to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle. Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that's too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like.

Long story short: upon learning of the dissertation, El Jefe first tried to buy the thing and when that failed he dispatched his chief Nazgul (the sepulchral Felix Bernardino) to NYC and within days Galindez got gagged, bagged, and dragged to La Capital, and legend has it when he came out of his chloroform nap he found himself naked, dangling from his feet over a cauldron of boiling oil, El Jefe stand­ing nearby with a copy of the offending dissertation in hand. (And you thought your committee was rough). Who in his right mind could ever have imagined any­thing so fucking ghastly? I guess El Jefe wanted to host a little tertulia with that poor doomed nerd. And what a tertulia it was, Dios mio! Anyway Galindez's disappearance caused an uproar in the States, with all fingers pointing to Trujillo, but of course he swore his innocence, and that was what Mauricio was referring to. But take heart: For every phalanx of nerds who die there are always a few who succeed. Not long after that horrific murder, a whole pack of revolutionary nerds ran aground on a sandbar on the southeast coast of Cuba. Yes, it was Fidel and Revolutionary Crew, back for a rematch against Batista. Of the eighty-two revolutionaries who splashed ashore, only twenty-two survived to celebrate the New Year, including one book-loving argentine. A bloodbath, with Batista's forces executing even those who surrendered. But these twenty-two, it would prove, were enough.

Reminds me of the sad case of Rafael Yepez: Yepez was a man who in the thir­ties ran a small prep school in the capital, not far from where I grew up, that catered to the Trujillato's lower-level ladroncitos. One ill-starred day Yepez asked his students to write an essay on the topic of their choice-a broad-minded Betances sort of man was this Yepez-and unsurprisingly, one boy chose to compose a praise song to Trujillo and his wife, Dofia Maria. Yepez made the mistake of suggesting in class that other Dominican women deserved as much praise as Dofia Maria and that in the future, young men like his students would also become great leaders like Trujillo. I think Yepez confused the Santo Domingo he was living in with another Santo Domingo. That night the poor schoolteacher, along with his wife, his daughter, and the entire student body were rousted from their beds by military police, brought in closed trucks to the Fortress Ozama, and interrogated. The pupils were eventually released, but no one ever heard of poor Yepez or his wife or his daughter again.

from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

photo: Petr Machan