(Continued from p.1)
| Q: |
A character from Drown narrates your novel. What made you decide to use him as a vehicle for this story? |
| A: |
It actually has everything to do with some of the novel’s central preoccupations, which are masculinity and authority and the desire that people have for authority. I think in some ways Junior is a perfect foil for this, the same way that Oscar is a perfect foil for discussing Dominican international culture. |
| Q: |
In your novel, there is an exploration of identity, of what it means to be Dominican as in: “Harold would say, ‘Tú no eres na dominicano’, but Oscar would insist unhappily, ‘I am Dominican, I am.’” Is it because Oscar is not, perhaps, what people would typically think of when they think of a Dominican? Is playing into stereotypes something you were consciously not doing? |
| A: |
Stereotypes, they’re sensual, cultural weapons. That’s the way that we attack people. At an artistic level, stereotypes are terrible writing.
The thing is, you don’t cure yourself of a culture. You’re in a struggle with whatever rules the culture teaches you, and that’s a struggle that lasts your whole life. We know every culture comes with a prepackaged wall of clichés and stereotypes and shortcuts and specifications. You don’t cure yourself of that. You spend your whole life trying to make sure that you don’t duplicate these in a harmful way. |
| Q: |
In your introduction to Drown, you quote Gustavo Pérez Firmat: “The fact that I’m writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else.” In your own work, you provide an idiosyncratic mix of Spanish and English. What is your relationship to the Spanish language, and how involved are you in the translation of your work? |
| A: |
The translator sends me each chapter. I go over it and make all of the corrections I think are worth it, and then I give it to this one friend of mine. She’s super-Dominican, super-picky, and particular. Between the two of us, we pretty much straighten out anything that needs straightening out. The actual heavy lifting of doing the translation is something someone else does. They can do that so incredibly fast. If I had to translate this book it would take me about two years. |
| Q: |
Have you noticed a difference in how various generations respond to your work? Have your parents and grandparents read your novel? |
| A: |
My parents and grandparents can’t read the darn thing until it’s in Spanish. They’ve got to wait to see what’s up. I’ve been hearing from a lot of teachers who have been teaching this book over the last few months, [and] they keep telling me that what’s fascinating is that it has gotten their kids and parents talking in ways that they normally wouldn’t. The parents are suddenly telling the kids about what it was like to live under Trujillo. I’m hoping that it becomes a two-way conversation because part of what turns a traditional reader off from a book like this is that they’re not accustomed to someone from a younger generation being the narrator of an epic. They don’t want to hear the hip-hop kid; they want somebody with nice, smooth British or Castilian tones. If kids are going to be respectful and listen to the stories of the elders, I think it’s only right that the elders have to be respectful and listen to the stories of youth. |
| Q: |
You were in your twenties when Drown came out and now you’re 39. How has age affected your writing? |
| A: |
What’s interesting about getting older, for me, is that all of the illusions of youth, the illusions of endless and boundless super-humanness are scuttled once you get to 40. You realize that you’re vulnerable, that you’re fallible, and that you’re human. I never realized how human I was until I started approaching 40 and things—aches that normally I could brush off—began to last longer. These aren’t bad things to know because I feel like, in the last few years, I’ve come to value, appreciate, and honor life in ways that I didn’t when I was in my twenties. |
| Q: |
You’re only the second Latino writer in U.S. history to win the Pulitzer for fiction. [The first was Oscar Hijuelos in 1990 for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.] What has that experience meant to you? |
| A: |
That very statement is a criticism toward the entire U.S. literary establishment. It speaks volumes on how certain kinds of writers are just consistently marginalized and undervalued. The other thing is that what success tends to do for any piece of art is to encourage and give permission—in a psychological way—to other artists to do the same and to do more. |
| Q: |
What are you working on now? |
| A: |
I’m working on a novel called Dark America. It’s a science fiction novel. |
| Q: |
Does the Pulitzer affect your thinking about this project? |
| A: |
It has no effect. I work so slowly and so onerously that nothing could get between me and my auto-torture. |
