Me with Junot Diaz sharing a moment while I sneaked in (ups, I wasn’t supposed to) before his speech.
Today I had the most wonderful opportunity of meeting Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. I first heard about Junot Diaz from my dear friend Bruna who is now a senior at MIT. As you know Junot teaches creative writing at MIT and she had many an opportunity of meeting him and speaking to him–she is a huge fan. During my wonderful stay at that amazing and beautiful city of Boston, she and her boyfriend spoke wonders about this writer whom appeared to be truly a sensation among today’s youth. On this particular visit back in March while I was attending the AWP writer’s conference at the Hynes Convention Center, Bruna was hoping to introduce me to him, but due to time constraints and the fact that I had never read one of his books, the opportunity did not come about. But she recommended I should read his literature–because more than anything, he was an inspiration to the young Hispanic community, and she believed it would mark an important step in my career as an aspiring writer, and I must say it truly has, tonight.
Upon many attempts to read Junot Diaz, I must confess I wasn’t in for much luck. I admired his style, but jumping from William Faulkner and Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Bronte to the Dominican vernauclar-ish prose of a young man living in the modern world of globalization and the boom of technology, it was quite a leap of faith. Now, I admire him as a human being and shall not desist from reading his work, for you might agree that before making any abrupt conclusions about the writer, I must first read one of his novels from cover to cover (which I’ve yet to do) and shall be doing so without a doubt from this day forward.
Junot Diaz speaking to the UCF community
Junot Diaz:
- He is the kind of guy that is not afraid to use the word “fuck,” because he is just like that–himself.
- He is the guy that wasn’t afraid to say to one of the members from the audience who was recording him–“turn off that camera, I’m going to read from my novel, you should enjoy this moment and live the present, that is what everyone should always do. Live in the present” [paraphrasing].
- He is the guy who has no doubt about the reasons why he should embrace his culture and hang on to it as tightly, never letting go.
- He is a man that is reactionary and does not use the word Marxist very loosely; particularly when he speaks of the commercialized and sensationalized business that writing has become–in world where he is a fish among a sea of writers who resemble the dogmatic banker Rober Baron type of attitudes present in almost every aspect of today’s America.
- He is the one that encourages confrontation and activism, the one that condemns a vampire system which sucks the life out of young men by enslaving them to student loans and debt, entrusting them with a fake idealism that spending thousands of dollars in a creative writing program is worth a shot because “hey, we all can be writers, and sit on our chairs, and relish on good Fitzgerald wild-life party types as our bank accounts grow by the minute because everyone can be a writer”–but it isn’t like that.
- He is the one that acknowledges a true writer works not for himself, but for society. That deep within the mesh which blinds us from reality, the most important thing anyone can do for themselves is “care.” To sympathize with the world that we live in, and change it.
As you may have now realized, much of what he spoke about this evening resonated deeply with what this blog has always been about since I started it nearly a year and a half ago (I had discontinued writing on this blog as I did not have a clear idea of what I wanted out of it, but started back two weeks ago).
Junot Diaz’s speech tonight is a reaffirmation of Maya Angelou’s quote which I have so religiously quoted on my homepage, and a clear emblem to those who live by the old revolutionary adage of Gandhi which so fervently emotes “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
Tonight, Junot Diaz’s impressive oratorical skills have made me realize, once more, the reason why I want to be a writer. The reason why anyone should be a writer. The reason why many should not be writers. The reason why one must know that the American Dream everyone talks about is but a fantasy embedded in your genes by a society completely engrossed in a highly idealized form of heaven, where money has become their god and fame their daily bread, misleading an entire generation of young students who are living a completely different reality. That is not to say that dreams are not possible and that I should not have a strong belief that there is a key to success as I discussed in my previous post “Finding an internship at a publication,” but one must also be realistic to the woes that we are facing this day in age as a society–and that writers should never ignore such woes, and sing, and sing more, so that everyone can listen, actually listen to the voices of those which have no voice–that is our job as journalists, as poets, as writers and tonight and always I shall hang on to these beliefs.
Thank you Junot Diaz for allowing the reflection. And now I shall dive into “This is How You Lose Her.”
Juan David 