Esta vez Michiko Kakutani reseña el último libro de Edwige Danticat.
Arturo V.
Books of The Times
A Haitian Tragedy: Brothers Yearn in Vain
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: September 4, 2007
When Edwidge Danticat was 2 years old, she recalls in this deeply affecting memoir, her father, Mira, left her and her brother in Haiti to move to New York City. Two years later, when her mother followed him to America, she left Edwidge with 10 new dresses she’d sewn, most of them too big for the little girl and meant to be saved to be worn in the years to come. During the following eight years Edwidge and her brother Bob lived with her father’s brother, Joseph, and his wife, Denise, in their pink house in Bel Air, a Port-au-Prince neighborhood caught in the crossfire between rival political factions and gangs.
Since Joseph and Denise did not have a phone, and access to call centers was too costly, the family stayed in touch by mail. Every other month Edwidge’s father mailed a half-page, three-paragraph letter addressed to her uncle — “the first paragraph offering news of his and my mother’s health, the second detailing how to spend the money they had wired for food, lodging and school expenses for Bob and myself, the third section concluding abruptly after reassuring us that we’d be hearing again from him before long.”
She later learned in a college composition class that her father’s letters had been written in a so-called “diamond sequence, the Aristotelian ‘Poetics’ of correspondence, requiring an opening greeting, a middle detail or request, and a brief farewell at the end.” The letter-writing process had been such an “agonizing chore” for her father, she observes, that this “specific epistolary formula, which he followed unconsciously, had offered him a comforting way of disciplining his emotions.” He later said to his daughter, “What I wanted to tell you and your brother was too big for any piece of paper and a small envelope.”
In “Brother, I’m Dying,” Ms. Danticat brings the lyric language and emotional clarity of her remarkable 2004 novel “The Dew Breaker” to bear on the story of her own family, a story which, like so much of her fiction, embodies the painful legacy of Haiti’s violent history, demonstrating the myriad ways in which the public and the private, the political and the personal, intersect in the lives of that country’s citizens and exiles. Ms. Danticat not only creates an indelible portrait of her two fathers, her dad and her uncle, but in telling their stories, she gives the reader an intimate sense of the personal consequences of the Haitian diaspora: its impact on parents and children, brothers and sisters, those who stay and those who leave to begin a new life abroad. She has written a fierce, haunting book about exile and loss and family love, and how that love can survive distance and separation, loss and abandonment and somehow endure, undented and robust.
Ms. Danticat’s father was a tailor’s apprentice — expected to sew two dozen shirts a day, for which he received about 5 cents a shirt — who eventually went into business for himself. When cheap, used clothes from the United States (called “Kennedys” because they were sent to Haiti during the Kennedy administration) flooded the country in the 1960s, he went to work as a shoe salesman, making less than the equivalent of $20 a month. Fear of being killed by the dreaded Tontons Macoutes (the violent enforcers of François Duvalier’s murderous regime) would eventually lead him to start thinking about leaving Haiti for good. In America he and his wife settled in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and for 20 years he would drive a gypsy cab.
Despite his brother’s entreaties to move, Uncle Joseph clung to his home in Bel Air, determined not to be driven out. After the rise of Duvalier dashed his own political ambitions, he’d become a devout Baptist and decided to build his own church. Nothing could persuade him to abandon his congregation: not a radical laryngectomy (for a cancerous tumor) that left him unable to speak, not his desire to spend more time with brother and family in New York, not the growing violence in the streets outside his church.
Only the burning and looting of his church and death threats from local gangs — who mistakenly believed he had allowed riot police to shoot people from the roof of his building — finally drove Joseph from his home. But while he amazingly managed to smuggle himself out of the neighborhood, where a gang leader vowed to “burn him alive” if he were found, his flight to America would quickly spiral into a nightmare. After making it to Miami and asking for asylum , Ms. Danticat writes, her 81-year-old uncle was put into detention by United States officials. Shortly after arriving at the Krome detention facility, he fell ill and was transported to a hospital. He died a day later.
Meanwhile, in New York, Joseph’s brother, Mira was failing. Suffering from end-stage pulmonary fibrosis, he found it increasingly difficult to drive or walk or speak. Even as his daughter learned that she was pregnant with her first child — a daughter she would name Mira, after him — he struggled to get through each day. He lost more and more weight, and took to wearing a jacket even on the warmest days to hide how thin he’d become.
Though Joseph had never wanted to leave his beloved Haiti, he was buried in a cemetery in Queens, “exiled finally in death,” becoming “part of the soil of a country that had not wanted him.” Not that much later he would be joined by his brother, Mira. Two brothers who made very different choices in their lives — one who wanted to stay in the homeland he loved, the other who wanted to invent a new life for himself in the north — and who ended up, side by side, in a graveyard in one of New York’s outer boroughs.
“I wish I were absolutely certain that my father and uncle are now together in some tranquil and restful place,” Ms. Danticat writes at the end of this moving book, “sharing endless walks and talks beyond what their too few and too short visits allowed. I wish I knew that they were offering enough comfort to one another to allow them both not to remember their distressing, even excruciating, last hours and days. I wish I could fully make sense of the fact that they’re now sharing a grave site and tombstone in Queens, New York, after living apart for more than 30 years.”
viernes, septiembre 14, 2007
martes, septiembre 11, 2007
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao es la primera novela de Junot Díaz, quien entró a la literatura estadounidense con Drown, una brillante colección de cuentos publicada en 1996. Si aquellos cuentos constituían una promesa, Oscar Wao es el cumplimiento de la misma y la comprobación de la madurez narrativa de Díaz.
La narrativa dominicana es una especie de Jano caribeña con la cara insular mirando hacia el pasado para tratar de reconstruir una sociedad a partir de la superación del trauma mientras que la cara extra-insular mira hacia el presente para reescribir la historia a fin de re-formar una idea de nación construida sobre un patrón de violencia, exclusión y racismo. Pero ambas caras tienen en común la mirada sobre la Era de Trujillo y sus devastadoras consecuencias. Si la novelística insular se ha concentrado en episodios específicos de la Era o en relatar su vida cotidiana, la producción literaria de la diáspora ha fijado su mirada en las consecuencias del trujillato para aquellos que están en los márgenes de la sociedad dominicana, principalmente mujeres y gentes de color.
La novela de Junot Díaz es un verdadero tour de force donde se da una reescritura, a partir del humor, la burla y la desacralización, de los principales temas de la historiografía dominicana. Con la “breve y maravillosa” vida de un “ghettonerd” dominicano como tema principal, Díaz aprovecha para ajustar cuentas con los personajes principales del drama histórico de la República Dominicana, he aquí su definición de Balaguer, a quien se nombra como Demon Balaguer, The Election Thief y The Homunculus: “Joaquín Balaguer was a Negrophobe, and apologist of genocide, an election thief, and a killer of people who wrote better than himself, famously ordering the death of journalist Orlando Martínez” (90). Trujillo es denominado a lo largo de la novela “The Failed Cattle Thief” (El Cuatrero Fallido) y su dictadura es descrita como un período oscuro pero sobre todo como una “culocracia” debido al apetito sexual insaciable de Trujillo y su búsqueda de muchachas jóvenes a lo largo del territorio dominicano para satisfacerlo.
Si la reescritura de la historia es uno de los temas principales, el otro gran tema lo es la re-visión de la masculinidad dominicana en su vertiente diaspórica. Oscar, el protagonista, es la antítesis de lo que se propugna como la masculinidad dominicana tanto dentro de cómo fuera de la isla: “Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about—he was no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock. And except for one period early in his life, dude never had much luck with females (how very un-Dominican of him)” (12).
Para los dominicanos los caminos hacia la construcción y afirmación de la masculinidad pasan por la pelota, la bachata y las mujeres. Pero no solo Oscar no es ni bachatero ni pelotero, sino que es un nerd negro, dominicano, con intereses en ciencia ficción y el género fantástico, ésto no sólo lo distancia de los dominicanos sino también de la sociedad estadounidense dentro de la cual está inserto por su experiencia diaspórica: “You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U. S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest” (22).
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao es una novela sumamente ambiciosa y, a pesar de ello, nunca falla en mantener al lector envuelto emocionalmente y lo hace mediante el humor, la sátira y una mirada desapasionada a los rincones oscuros de la dominicanidad. Díaz, a través de su narrador, apela a una mirada que al mismo tiempo está dentro y fuera del discurso y de la tierra dominicanos. Sus personajes viajan no solamente entre Paterson, New Jersey y Santo Domingo, República Dominicana sino también entre el español y el inglés, de una clase social a otra. La novela misma, en su factura, está plagada de intertextos, siendo el principal la producción de ciencia ficción y género fantástico (El Señor de los Anillos de Tolkien, H. G. Wells, Burroughs, C. S. Lewis, los paquitos de Marvel como Los cuatro fantásticos, Los hombres X), también aparecen alusiones a Yeats, Dickens, Proust, Aimé Cesaire y a películas como El Exorcista y The Matrix
Hay muchos otros temas que Díaz toca con sagacidad: el abuso sexual, la violencia de la sociedad dominicanidad y cómo es reproducida a través de las generaciones, la visión de los hijos de los inmigrantes acerca de la isla pero aquí solo he querido tocar algunos que me parecieron importantes para invitar a un acercamiento a The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
La narrativa dominicana es una especie de Jano caribeña con la cara insular mirando hacia el pasado para tratar de reconstruir una sociedad a partir de la superación del trauma mientras que la cara extra-insular mira hacia el presente para reescribir la historia a fin de re-formar una idea de nación construida sobre un patrón de violencia, exclusión y racismo. Pero ambas caras tienen en común la mirada sobre la Era de Trujillo y sus devastadoras consecuencias. Si la novelística insular se ha concentrado en episodios específicos de la Era o en relatar su vida cotidiana, la producción literaria de la diáspora ha fijado su mirada en las consecuencias del trujillato para aquellos que están en los márgenes de la sociedad dominicana, principalmente mujeres y gentes de color.
La novela de Junot Díaz es un verdadero tour de force donde se da una reescritura, a partir del humor, la burla y la desacralización, de los principales temas de la historiografía dominicana. Con la “breve y maravillosa” vida de un “ghettonerd” dominicano como tema principal, Díaz aprovecha para ajustar cuentas con los personajes principales del drama histórico de la República Dominicana, he aquí su definición de Balaguer, a quien se nombra como Demon Balaguer, The Election Thief y The Homunculus: “Joaquín Balaguer was a Negrophobe, and apologist of genocide, an election thief, and a killer of people who wrote better than himself, famously ordering the death of journalist Orlando Martínez” (90). Trujillo es denominado a lo largo de la novela “The Failed Cattle Thief” (El Cuatrero Fallido) y su dictadura es descrita como un período oscuro pero sobre todo como una “culocracia” debido al apetito sexual insaciable de Trujillo y su búsqueda de muchachas jóvenes a lo largo del territorio dominicano para satisfacerlo.
Si la reescritura de la historia es uno de los temas principales, el otro gran tema lo es la re-visión de la masculinidad dominicana en su vertiente diaspórica. Oscar, el protagonista, es la antítesis de lo que se propugna como la masculinidad dominicana tanto dentro de cómo fuera de la isla: “Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about—he was no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock. And except for one period early in his life, dude never had much luck with females (how very un-Dominican of him)” (12).
Para los dominicanos los caminos hacia la construcción y afirmación de la masculinidad pasan por la pelota, la bachata y las mujeres. Pero no solo Oscar no es ni bachatero ni pelotero, sino que es un nerd negro, dominicano, con intereses en ciencia ficción y el género fantástico, ésto no sólo lo distancia de los dominicanos sino también de la sociedad estadounidense dentro de la cual está inserto por su experiencia diaspórica: “You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U. S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest” (22).
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao es una novela sumamente ambiciosa y, a pesar de ello, nunca falla en mantener al lector envuelto emocionalmente y lo hace mediante el humor, la sátira y una mirada desapasionada a los rincones oscuros de la dominicanidad. Díaz, a través de su narrador, apela a una mirada que al mismo tiempo está dentro y fuera del discurso y de la tierra dominicanos. Sus personajes viajan no solamente entre Paterson, New Jersey y Santo Domingo, República Dominicana sino también entre el español y el inglés, de una clase social a otra. La novela misma, en su factura, está plagada de intertextos, siendo el principal la producción de ciencia ficción y género fantástico (El Señor de los Anillos de Tolkien, H. G. Wells, Burroughs, C. S. Lewis, los paquitos de Marvel como Los cuatro fantásticos, Los hombres X), también aparecen alusiones a Yeats, Dickens, Proust, Aimé Cesaire y a películas como El Exorcista y The Matrix
Hay muchos otros temas que Díaz toca con sagacidad: el abuso sexual, la violencia de la sociedad dominicanidad y cómo es reproducida a través de las generaciones, la visión de los hijos de los inmigrantes acerca de la isla pero aquí solo he querido tocar algunos que me parecieron importantes para invitar a un acercamiento a The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
lunes, septiembre 03, 2007
Kakutani Does Wao
Terminé la novela de Junot Díaz, tengo muchas cosas que decir, pero todavía tengo que organizar las notas y las ideas, mientras tanto leánse la reseña de Kakutani (que es durísima y generalmente odia a todo el mundo). Solo les puedo decir que valió la pena esperar diez años por esta novela.
A Dominican Comedy: Travails of an Outcast
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: September 4, 2007
Junot Díaz’s “Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets “Star Trek” meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West. It is funny, street-smart and keenly observed, and it unfolds from a comic portrait of a second-generation Dominican geek into a harrowing meditation on public and private history and the burdens of familial history. An extraordinarily vibrant book that’s fueled by adrenaline-powered prose, it’s confidently steered through several decades of history by a madcap, magpie voice that’s equally at home talking about Tolkien and Trujillo, anime movies and ancient Dominican curses, sexual shenanigans at Rutgers University and secret police raids in Santo Domingo.
Mr. Díaz, the author of a critically acclaimed collection of short stories published in 1996 (“Drown”), writes in a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale: lots of flash words and razzle-dazzle talk, lots of body language on the sentences, lots of David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides. And he conjures with seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, the ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams; and America (a k a New Jersey), the land of freedom and hope and not-so-shiny possibilities that they’ve fled to as part of the great Dominican diaspora.
Oscar, Mr. Díaz’s homely homeboy hero, is “not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about — he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy” with a million hot girls on the line. No, Oscar is a fat, self-loathing dweeb and aspiring science fiction writer, who dreams of becoming “the Dominican Tolkien.” He’s one of those kids who tremble with fear during gym class and use “a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like indefatigable and ubiquitous” when talking to kids who could barely finish high school. He moons after girls who won’t give him the time of day and enters and leaves college a sad virgin. He wears “his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber”; he “couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.”
Two of this novel’s narrators, Oscar’s beautiful sister, Lola — a “Banshees-loving punk chick,” who becomes “one of those tough Jersey dominicanas” who order men about like houseboys — and Yunior, Oscar’s college roommate and Lola’s onetime boyfriend, do their best to try to get him to shape up. They exhort him to eat less and exercise more, to leave his dorm room and venture out into the world.
Oscar makes a halfhearted effort and then tells Yunior to leave him alone. He goes back to his writing, his day-dreams, his suicidal thoughts. Yunior (who seems very much like the Yunior who appeared in some of Mr. Díaz’s short stories) begins to think that Oscar may be living under a family curse, “a high-level fukú” not unlike the curse on the House of Atreus, which has doomed him, like his mother, to lasting unhappiness in love.
In due course we also hear the story of Oscar and Lola’s mother, Beli, a tough, tough-talking woman whose hard-nosed street cred is rooted in a childhood of almost unimaginable pain and loss: her wealthy father, tortured and incarcerated by the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s thugs; her mother, run over by a truck after her husband’s imprisonment; her two sisters, dead in freak, suspicious accidents.
The orphaned Beli herself was abused and beaten before being rescued by her father’s kindly cousin, and as a teenager she has a disastrous affair with a charismatic and dangerous man known as the Gangster — one of Trujillo’s men, who happens to be married to Trujillo’s sister. That affair culminates in a savage beating in the cane fields, a beating that nearly ends Beli’s life and that will propel her toward a new life in exile in the United States.
Mr. Díaz writes about the Trujillo era of the Dominican Republic with the same authority he writes about contemporary New Jersey, the slangy, kinetic energy of his prose proving to be a remarkably effective tool for capturing the absurdities of the human condition, be they the true horrors of living in a dictatorship that can erase a person or a family on a whim, or the self-indulgent difficulties of being a college student coping with issues of weight and self-esteem.
Here is Mr. Díaz writing about Trujillo: “Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor; not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world, isolate it behind the Plátano Curtain, he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers, mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about ‘the great honeymoon’ he’d had the night before. His Eye was everywhere; he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyones who lived in the States.”
It is Mr. Díaz’s achievement in this galvanic novel that he’s fashioned both a big picture window that opens out on the sorrows of Dominican history, and a small, intimate window that reveals one family’s life and loves. In doing so, he’s written a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive and irresistible new voices.
A Dominican Comedy: Travails of an Outcast
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: September 4, 2007
Junot Díaz’s “Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets “Star Trek” meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West. It is funny, street-smart and keenly observed, and it unfolds from a comic portrait of a second-generation Dominican geek into a harrowing meditation on public and private history and the burdens of familial history. An extraordinarily vibrant book that’s fueled by adrenaline-powered prose, it’s confidently steered through several decades of history by a madcap, magpie voice that’s equally at home talking about Tolkien and Trujillo, anime movies and ancient Dominican curses, sexual shenanigans at Rutgers University and secret police raids in Santo Domingo.
Mr. Díaz, the author of a critically acclaimed collection of short stories published in 1996 (“Drown”), writes in a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale: lots of flash words and razzle-dazzle talk, lots of body language on the sentences, lots of David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides. And he conjures with seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, the ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams; and America (a k a New Jersey), the land of freedom and hope and not-so-shiny possibilities that they’ve fled to as part of the great Dominican diaspora.
Oscar, Mr. Díaz’s homely homeboy hero, is “not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about — he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy” with a million hot girls on the line. No, Oscar is a fat, self-loathing dweeb and aspiring science fiction writer, who dreams of becoming “the Dominican Tolkien.” He’s one of those kids who tremble with fear during gym class and use “a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like indefatigable and ubiquitous” when talking to kids who could barely finish high school. He moons after girls who won’t give him the time of day and enters and leaves college a sad virgin. He wears “his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber”; he “couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.”
Two of this novel’s narrators, Oscar’s beautiful sister, Lola — a “Banshees-loving punk chick,” who becomes “one of those tough Jersey dominicanas” who order men about like houseboys — and Yunior, Oscar’s college roommate and Lola’s onetime boyfriend, do their best to try to get him to shape up. They exhort him to eat less and exercise more, to leave his dorm room and venture out into the world.
Oscar makes a halfhearted effort and then tells Yunior to leave him alone. He goes back to his writing, his day-dreams, his suicidal thoughts. Yunior (who seems very much like the Yunior who appeared in some of Mr. Díaz’s short stories) begins to think that Oscar may be living under a family curse, “a high-level fukú” not unlike the curse on the House of Atreus, which has doomed him, like his mother, to lasting unhappiness in love.
In due course we also hear the story of Oscar and Lola’s mother, Beli, a tough, tough-talking woman whose hard-nosed street cred is rooted in a childhood of almost unimaginable pain and loss: her wealthy father, tortured and incarcerated by the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s thugs; her mother, run over by a truck after her husband’s imprisonment; her two sisters, dead in freak, suspicious accidents.
The orphaned Beli herself was abused and beaten before being rescued by her father’s kindly cousin, and as a teenager she has a disastrous affair with a charismatic and dangerous man known as the Gangster — one of Trujillo’s men, who happens to be married to Trujillo’s sister. That affair culminates in a savage beating in the cane fields, a beating that nearly ends Beli’s life and that will propel her toward a new life in exile in the United States.
Mr. Díaz writes about the Trujillo era of the Dominican Republic with the same authority he writes about contemporary New Jersey, the slangy, kinetic energy of his prose proving to be a remarkably effective tool for capturing the absurdities of the human condition, be they the true horrors of living in a dictatorship that can erase a person or a family on a whim, or the self-indulgent difficulties of being a college student coping with issues of weight and self-esteem.
Here is Mr. Díaz writing about Trujillo: “Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor; not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world, isolate it behind the Plátano Curtain, he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers, mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about ‘the great honeymoon’ he’d had the night before. His Eye was everywhere; he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyones who lived in the States.”
It is Mr. Díaz’s achievement in this galvanic novel that he’s fashioned both a big picture window that opens out on the sorrows of Dominican history, and a small, intimate window that reveals one family’s life and loves. In doing so, he’s written a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive and irresistible new voices.
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