The Wondrous Junot Diaz
By Swati Avasthi, Blog Editor
Junot Diaz’s recent novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has won so many awards that when University of Minnesota’s Professor Evelyn Ch’ien listed them while introducing the author at his reading at the U of M last week, she had to stop and take a breath. After reading from his book, Junot Diaz answered questions from Professor Chi’en and from an audience so large that people were sitting on the floor. The blunt question I wondered, that I always wonder when a writer acquires such deserved approbation, is how did he do it? How did he create a book that is so rich with character and that is so flexible and inventive with language?
During the presentation, he read and spoke slowly, deliberately, as though he wanted the air to transmit the weight and texture of each word. Or perhaps, I was just interpreting his manner of speaking through my lens of nerdy-wordy admiration. But then he spoke about language, talking about how he layered linguistic choices and worked for ten years to acquire the linguistic muscles to incorporate such a variety of languages in his book.
After the presentation, during the book-signing, I asked him if he was working from the unconscious, letting the characters speak through their own voice, or the conscious, deliberately constructing sentences one at a time. He answered that you write every sentence over and over again. So, he told me, language on the page comes from both.
So, how did he do it? While Junot Diaz didn’t give us the key (as if there is one) he did give me a clue. The absorption of language slowly filters to the unconscious. It filters though hard work and time and observation, even for a master, much less the rest of us.
I left with evidence that of the unwritten rule: as a writers, we must always listen, must always hear the millions of languages around me, before we can speak, before we can write.