Credit Nina Subin/Penguin Group
Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz isn’t just a MacArthur ‘genius grant’ and Pulitzer prize winner, he’s a wickedly smart public thinker who just gets it. From his public commentary about “decolonial love” to his appreciation for women of color writers, especially Black ones, Diaz’s embrace of race conscious feminist thought is refreshing and necessary. Every time the “This Is How You Lose Her” author gets in front of a crowd or interviewer, he offers nuggets of insight that elucidate American racism and give weight to the value women’s lived experiences. Whether he’s using Frantz Fanon to expound upon the brilliance of female writers or explaining how white supremacy functions, his legendary literary skills and bold critiques of race and the patriarchy will make you appreciate his beautiful, beautiful mind.
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“What began to be clear to me as I read these women of color—Leslie Marmon Silko, Sandra Cisneros, Anjana Appachana, and throw in Octavia Butler and the great [Cherríe] Moraga of course—was that what these sisters were doing in their art was powerfully important for the community, for subaltern folks, for women writers of color, for male writers of color, for me. They were heeding [Audre] Lorde’s exhortation by forging the tools that could actually take down master’s house.” – From “The Search for Decolonial Love: An Interview with Junot Díaz,” Boston Review
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“I remember reading these sisters and suddenly realizing…that women-of-color writers were raising questions about the world, about power, about philosophy, about politics, about history, about white supremacy, because of their raced, gendered, sexualized bodies; they were wielding a genius that had been cultivated out of their raced, gendered, sexualized subjectivities. And what they were producing in knowledge was something that the world needed to hear in order to understand itself, that I needed to hear in order to understand myself in the world, and that no one—least of all male writers of color—should be trying to silence.” — From “The Search for Decolonial Love: An Interview with Junot Díaz,” Boston Review
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“Besides the fact that you can outwrite every motherfucker on the planet sentence by sentence, and you’re one of us. Besides that little fact, that little fact that always puts me to bed comfortable. No matter what the hell’s going on in the world, I always lay in bed, and I’m like, ‘The best writer in the world is of African descent. Peace!’ — Junot Diaz on Toni Morrison, during a talk with Toni Morrison at the New York Public Library (Quote via Tumblr)
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“I don’t explain cultural things, with italics or with exclamation or with side bars or asides. I was aggressive about that because I had so many negative models, so many Latinos and black writers who are writing to white audiences, who are not writing to their own people. If you are not writing to your own people, I’m disturbed because of what that says to your relationship to the community you are in one way or another indebted to. You are only there to loot them of ideas, and words, and images so that you can coon them to the dominant group. That disturbs me tremendously.” — Junot Diaz, from “Fiction is the Poor Man’s Cinema: An Interview with Junot Díaz”, Callaloo
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“This is a culture that overemphasizes that sort of heteronormative thing that for women the most important relationship of their lives is going to be the dude that they’re going to fall in love with, as if everybody is straight and that this is the script, and yet, look from my experience as a brother, my sister’s longest, most painful heartbreak was a Sula-like heartbreak, where it was like, the most important relationship of her life was a woman. And yet she never had a space to acknowledge or honor it until after it was all over. And that idea of the controlling male or the controlling paradigm that tends to leave that story out I think is very, very important.” — From a talk with Toni Morrison at the New York Public Library (Quote via Tumblr)
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“White supremacy’s greatest trick is that it has convinced people that it exists always in other people, never in us.” — From “The Search for Decolonial Love: An Interview with Junot Díaz,” Boston Review
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“My point was that in a country that has become so extraordinarily diverse, we still imagine a white writer as the universal writer – and that absurdity is becoming almost unsustainable. I visit high schools all the time. When I look at the kids that are coming up, they look nothing like the writers that we’re all running around calling the voice of this country. Despite what we would like to think, the lag time between what a culture recognizes as its country and what the country is, my brother, is quite extraordinary. Outside of a few strains, I feel like the literary apparatus still thinks of this country very much in the 1950s.” — From “Junot Díaz: ‘Orson Scott Card is a cretinous fool’”, Salon
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