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Why Wao’s Pulitzer Matters
By Carolina González
New America Media Commentary
Apr 09, 2008
NEW YORK – The word “Pulitzer” didn’t get scrawled on
car windshields with soap, the way Sammy Sosa’s mounting home run count
was tallied in the heavily Dominican Washington Heights neighborhood
back in 1998 when he was in a race with Mark McGwire for the baseball
record.
But among my tribe, book-reading brown people, word that
Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz had won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for
fiction spread electronically like a California wildfire on voicemails,
text messages, emails, Facebook status updates.
The influential critics and thousands of U.S. readers who raved about
Diaz’s winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, may have
celebrated that a talented American writer with a boldly challenging
narrative received a justly deserved prize. We were celebrating the fact
that we felt that, for once, the winner was one of our own.
Diaz is not the first writer of color to win the award. N. Scott Momaday,
of the Kiowa tribe, was the first non-white to receive the Pulitzer for
fiction in 1969. And Cuban-American Oscar Hijuelos was the first Latino,
in 1990 for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. But Diaz is clearly the
first tiguere to take the hallowed prize.
In Dominican slang, a tiguere is a cat from the streets, a homeboy who
makes the most out of the situation at hand and is a master at
improvisation. Diaz is that. Under the guise of a streetwise tale about
a lovelorn “ghetto-nerd” and a cheating would-be hoodlum, he does
nothing less than place us at the center of history.
Which “us” do I mean? I mean us the brown, us the immigrants, us who
work without respite or benefits, us the young, uncertain whether our
futures hold promise or violence, us the smart ones who try to hide it
lest we compromise our street cred, us who have come a long way and keep
trying to forget the pain that brought us here, us who all too often
feel powerless, silent, unseen.
Don’t be distracted by the numerous f-bombs Diaz tends to drop in
readings, interviews and casual conversation. He just as easily drops
dense footnotes tying the wealth of this nation to the suffering of
millions of people in forgotten places like the smallish island of
Hispaniola.
At a reading in the Instituto Cervantes in midtown Manhattan shortly
after the release of Oscar Wao, I heard him talk about the mantle in the
office of the president of Cornell University, where he attended
graduate school. The mantle was made of Dominican mahogany brought over
when the United States was negotiating to annex the island, a deal
supported by Frederick Douglass, but which was eventually defeated
because the United States refused to take on a territory whose
population it perceived as black. He said that sitting with the college
president before that mantle, as the descendant of those people too
black to be allowed to join this nation, he felt the wheels of history
turn in ways empires cannot control.
That kind of analysis is at the heart of Diaz’s achievement. More than a
validation of the artistic and human worth of brown stories, Wao’s
Pulitzer means that we can step outside of the narrow narrative paths
that have held our stories hostage to cliché and contempt. We can give
ourselves permission to tell complex stories about ourselves,
unapologetic about our cultural touchstones and historical references,
in a language appropriate to our realities.
We can imagine the immigrant experience as interstellar travel between
Sauron’s totalitarian world and the piecemeal hardships of urban New
Jersey. We can imagine that the seeds of empire were sown in a small
island, and that love has power beyond death and forgetting. A new
story, a new language to make a new future.
See another take on Diaz on the Hispanic-American Village blog:
http://hispanicamericanvillage.blogspot.com/
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