Thursday, October 19, 2017

Introductory Remarks for A Book Reading by Junot Díaz at Dartmouth College, Oct. 2013




These were the remarks I offered upon introducing Junot Díaz, who came to Dartmouth College for a reading of his book This is How You Lose Her.

(The event took place on Friday, October 18, 2013, at 5:00 p.m., Filene Auditorium)


 ¡Good afternoon y Buenas tardes to all! 
¡Bienvenidos! Welcome! 
Thank you for joining us!

My name is Keysi Montás, and I am indeed the Associate Director of Safety & Security here at Dartmouth College…  And yes, this is a book reading by Pulitzer Prize Winner Junot Díaz, but: I am also (to quote a friend form grad school) "an independent scholar," so you are in the right place!

I am thrilled to FINALLY be able to welcome to Dartmouth and to introduce to you Junot Díaz.

Long introductions are a bore, so I aim for a short one! But not as short as the one given for Senator John Spooner of Wisconsin, who also served as adviser to President Roosevelt, by a small town Mayor; for when it came time for it, he said:  “My friends, I have been asked to introduce Senator Spooner who is to make a speech.  Well, I have done so.  And NOW he will do so.”   There is plenty to say about Junot Díaz and his work, which I'll try to contextualize for you; however, I do not want to be a bore, nor as brief as that small town Mayor.

Suffice it to say that he was born in the Dominican Republic and came to the US at age 6, and was raised in New Jersey.  He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her (from which he will read to us today), a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist.  He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award.  A graduate of Rutgers College, he is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I would call Junot Díaz a transterrado, from Transtierro, a term applicable to those who live on that bridge which connects their multiple realities and identities.  Transtierro… Imagine the Atlantic, now the word transatlantic: across the Atlantic, not on one side, nor the other, but in between.  Transtierro is between tierras, lands, countries, it is a condition of today's world, resulting from what humans have done as part of surviving; that is: emigration.

Today there are millions of people, like us, who have left their homeland in search of a better life.  In the particular case of that little island where we both come from, I can name for you a certain Juan Rodríguez, whom in 1613, arrived in a Dutch ship and is now recognized as the first non-Native to settle in Manhattan.  I could name a Jean Baptist Point du Sable, whom is today recognized as Chicago's founder.  I could bring us closer to today's time and place and tell you that in 1912, a young man named Enrique Heráclito Álvarez, a native of Monte Cristi, Dominican Republic, came to our very own Dartmouth College campus to pursue an education.  I have often wondered how Enrique's journey must have been like, a 100 years ago: No airplanes, no Dartmouth Coach, no telephone, no TV, no e-mail, no internet, no Facebook!

Transtierro is a condition of today's world.  It is "modernity and technology" that has made the globe so small, and what allows for the constant connection with what, in other times, was just left behind.  Unlike emigrants of a century ago, nowadays one can remain connected, either by choice or circumstance, and lead a dual or two-dimensional existence as though one had a bifurcated umbilical cord.  It is worth noting that when a person arrives to a new culture & language, many factors play out in the process of acclimation: from their socio-economic class, age and reasons for migrating, to what they end up doing, where they end up living, how far away the homeland is and what connections exist to that homeland.  Regardless, the first years of the immigrant experience in the new language & culture are no walk in the park.  To paraphrase Ariel Dorfman: They will carry the daily necessity of struggling in two languages and surviving in an unknown culture and society "torn between the public dominant language, on the one hand, in which the police interrogate, the school principal complains about a child’s conduct, bank accounts are opened and all too often closed" and "on the other hand the private subjective set of words that keep the new comers in touch with the old homeland and with the persons they once used to be."

        For individuals, like Junot Díaz, the condition of transtierro is shaped not by choice, but by the circumstance of their upbringing which creates the need to live in two dimensions, to pledge loyalty to two cultures and two nations, to use one language to speak to teachers and friends and to create (WRITE), and another to talk to aunts and uncles, making them exist on that bridge, where one aquí es de allá, y allá es de aquí (here one is from there and there one is from here).  Junot Díaz grew up with the English language in his mouth and the home country of his parents in his heart, in his blood, in the color of his skin, in his hair, in his pride and in his subconscious.  And all of that, inevitably, comes out in his literary production.

You will find the wrenching pain of the immigrant experience and the building of that ambivalent duality in Junot's stories such as "Otra vida, otra vez" and "Invierno"; in stories like "Nilda", "Flaca" and "Alma" one can find the struggles of coming of age, trying to fit in, find a self-identity and survive in the face of adversity and poverty.  In "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars " and in "The Cheater's Guide to Love"" we find that journey back "home" [in quotes] where the character brings a critical eye armed with what he knows from the adopted culture, in an attempt to understand who he is in the context of where he is and where he comes from.


Junot's stories could be and are, in essence, the stories of any transterrado, any immigrant from Colombia or from Cambodia. But the reason why Junot Díaz's stories have made it to the forefront of today's literary world is because of how well he tells them and how unique his narrative voice is.  He tells them so well that he got a Pulitzer Prize.  He tells them so well, that the MacArthur Foundation declared him (and Forrest Gump would be jealous) a "God Damn genius!"  But he, himself, will tell you that he is probably no genius, that he is more like Junior, his nerdy main character.

And now: ¡Es para mí un orgullo sumo el poder presentarles a mi co-trasterrado y hermano, Junot Díaz!