By David Edward Clark
Photo by David Roswell.
The author of Drown, a collection of short stories, and The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, a novel and winner of the Pulitzer prize, read selections from both of his books. Though the readings were entertaining, they served merely as a precursor for the extraordinary question and answer session that followed.
Junot started off the night telling Finney that he’d read something from his first book, though “When you only have two books, it’s saying shit like ‘I’ll read something from my first book,’ that sounds so ridiculous.”
The story is titled “Boyfriend,” the inspiration of which Junot attributed to his neighbors. “Anyone who’s ever lived near really kinda weird neighbors–neighbors are a source of wonderful short stories,” said Junot. This particular story came from living in a Brooklyn tenement, where, “Literally, if someone opened a beer, I could hear my neighbor.”
Junot read his first selection slower and deeper than his speaking voice. “I,” he started, in his modified tone, “should’ve been careful with,” and he paused, “the weed.” “Boyfriend” is about a sleepwalking stoner who hears every word of his neighbors’ dramatic relationship. “Boyfriend was trying to snake girlfriend, saying he needed space, and she was like, ‘Motherfucker, I will give you all the space you need.’”
His second reading was from a section of Oscar Wao called “Wildwood.”
Photo by David Roswell.
Though the audience enjoyed hearing Junot read, the most inspiring part of the night came afterwards. The Q+A session was so enrapturing that nearly all of Finney stayed until Junot fielded every question.
A student asked Junot about his typical label of a “Latino” writer, and whether or not white writers will ever be labeled the same way. “It’s not so much that one is identified with a large racial or ethnic category,” said Junot, “but that people seem to draw conclusions based on it.” He hopes that in the future these preconceptions will not exist. Until then, “The question I always get asked is, ‘How has your background affected your writing?’ and I’m like, ‘Shit, you should ask the white kids that.’ Because, you know, white privilege certainly helps you in publishing. So I’m always like, ‘I’m the wrong motherfucker to ask.’”
Junot shocked the crowd when a student asked what aspect of the human experience he likes writing about most. For Junot, the act isn’t pleasurable. “If I could give my gift back I would, in a second,” he said. “Who the fuck would want to spend their life seeing things that people would rather not see and trying to communicate truths that people would rather not hear?”
Junot continued, “I’m very interested in the ways that we rebuild ourselves after tremendous trauma. That happens to be what I’m drawn to that sometimes I wish I weren’t. It would be so much easier if I weren’t interested in how children rebuild themselves after rape, and yet it’s something that I’m interested in…it doesn’t make for a fun living.”
Another student asked, “Is the self something you meet once or is it something you keep meeting?”
Junot replied, “So much of the world is unknowable, so much of other people is unknowable, and you have at your disposal a very complicated fascinating self. It might not be a bad idea to be curious about it, but maintaining that curiosity requires an enormous amount of energy. Most people give it up.” According to Junot though, “When you stop being curious about yourself it’s some ways the death of the human.”
To meet oneself, “I would argue in simplistic terms that it’s almost impossible to not meet yourself if you live a life where art plays a central role.” Junot’s advice? “If you’re not doing something remotely artistic once a week, there a problem. I mean, I would argue that there’s a fucking problem.”
A student who read and enjoyed Oscar Wao but didn’t understand any of the Spanish asked, “What would you say to critics who would argue that this [the Spanish] makes the work less accessible?”
Junot started bluntly. “I write fiction. Is there anything less accessible to the public?” After hushing the laughter, “No, I mean it. I write literary fiction about Dominicans who live in New Jersey. Could we narrow shit anymore?” He continued, “The point of art is that you’re supposed to wrestle with it. Entertainment is accessible, that’s the nature of entertainment…that’s not the nature of art. And guys, you can find thousands of book where you won’t ever encounter a foreign word. Knock yourselves the fuck out.”
Junot concluded, “What I’m being asked to do is what arts education teaches is impossible. I’m being asked to make art easier, and that’s impossible. That can’t happen.”
The night’s best answer came from the question, “Why read literature?”
“From my perspective, literature is like all art,” said Junot. “Which is to say that literature asks of us to remember the complexity of what it means to be human. Literature, like all art, shatters all the myths we have about ourselves and about the world. Most myths, of course, are incredibly dangerous…it would be almost impossible for us to murder people, go to war, think it’s OK for people to not have health care, vote for lunatics, hate entire groups of people–it wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for our ability to digest myth and to believe in simplification and in simplicities.”
Photo by David Roswell.
“Art is the exact opposite,” said Junot. “Every time you come up with a myth that allows you to shortcut and allows you to hate people, art presses in the opposite direction. Art reminds us viscerally and with enormous tenderness that we are flawed and that we are fatal, that we are cruel, that we are cowardly and through all of that, that we are quite capable and worthy of love. It’s when you read a book, when you’re moved by a sculpture, when a play seizes hold of your heart, when a song enters your nervous system and you are moved powerfully–it’s at that moment that you are transported out of your world of myths and simplifications…and for that moment, while the art has you, you become your best self. You become the human who can understand that you are flawed, that you make mistakes, that you are vulnerable, that you are not powerful…and yet, that that’s okay, and that there’s a real beauty in that. For one, two, three or four seconds, you become the human that you always should be.”
At the end of his answer, the crowd erupted into applause.
Junot shared much of himself throughout the night. He touched the audiences’ hearts and minds in ways that few speakers ever do. Though none stood for his entrance, none could sit for Junot’s exit.
