Speaking of Junot Díaz, here’s another interview this time with Nicholas Wrote in The Guardian:
He says his remarkable use of language – his Spanglish is just one example of worlds colliding – was part of an attempt to unite the various parts of himself. “I was from a very strict and conformist family, so it wasn’t even permissible to cohere between home and the streets. Then came college and so on. In artistic terms it took a lot longer to work out than it should have. There are protocols in writing that are used to simplify things. It takes a while for an artist to work out that they can be broken. One of the contradictions of America’s insane capitalism is that you will meet people like me who have lived in three or four worlds. Maybe it’s to do with the fact that I’m straight and male, but I never saw any value in sealing off my background. I was critical, but I never felt one of the options was to entirely reject it. But it did take a long time for me to talk to my friends at home about the kind of books I read and the kind of politics I was interested in at college. It also took a long time for me to take my home into this larger and more intellectual world.”
Dude just rocks so much. Read his books — there are only two and they are both amazing.