{"id":6683,"date":"2018-03-28T10:26:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-28T14:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=6683"},"modified":"2018-03-28T10:26:00","modified_gmt":"2018-03-28T14:26:00","slug":"junot-diaz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2018\/03\/28\/junot-diaz\/","title":{"rendered":"Junot Diaz\u2019s \u2018Islandborn\u2019 Is A Kids Book About Immigrants\u2019 Memories Of Home\u2014And What Made Them Leave"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two decades ago, author Junot Diaz was asked by his two goddaughters, Dominican girls living in the Bronx, to write a book about little girls like them.<\/p>\n

\""Islandborn"<\/a>
“Islandborn” authored by Junot Diaz and illustrated by Leo Espinosa.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThe only problem is it took me 20 years to write it. So I am officially the slowest writer. But I also keep my promises,\u201d Diaz said in introducing his new children\u2019s picture book \u201cIslandborn\u201d<\/a> during a talk at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square last Sunday.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2019Islandborn\u2019 is about a small girl named Lola, who, like me, was born someplace else called the Island, who moved up north when she was just 1 and can\u2019t remember anything about the island whatever,\u201d he told the library audience.<\/p>\n

Diaz himself grew up to be a MacArthur “Genius” Grant-winning professor of writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His grownup novel \u201cThe Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao\u201d won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008.<\/p>\n

He was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to the United States with his family as a boy in 1974. They settled in an apartment Parlin, New Jersey, one of the first Dominican families in the area, surrounded by white neighbors who showered them with racist insults.<\/p>\n

\"Junot<\/a>
Junot Diaz speaks at the Boston Public Library, March 25, 2018. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI came to New Jersey and I only spoke Spanish. I found learning English incredibly hard. So hard that for the first two years I didn\u2019t say a word of English,\u201d Diaz told the library audience. \u201cI learned to read English super-fast. \u2026 I used to think I liked to read because nobody could make fun of my accent.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cIslandborn,\u201d Lola\u2019s elementary school teacher asks all the students to draw pictures of \u201cthe country you are originally from.\u201d Lola can\u2019t recall her Island, so she asks neighbors and family members for their memories. They describe an enchanted paradise of bats and dancing, of sunsets along tropical beaches, of dolphins and whales, of coconut drinks and mangos so sweet that they\u2019ll make you cry. But it\u2019s also a place of oppressive heat and hurricanes, and home to a monster\u2014depicted by the book\u2019s illustrator Leo Espinosa as a giant spectral bat that arrives like a hurricane.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole island was terrified and no one could defeat it,\u201d the superintendent of the building where Lola lives reluctantly tells her. \u201cIt was just too strong. For 30 years the Monster did as it pleased. It could destroy an entire town with a single word and make a whole family disappear simply by looking at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Growing up, Diaz found something strange in the way grownups talked about the Dominican Republic. And he reflects this in \u201cIslandborn.\u201d \u201cI knew there was something missing in the story because they would start the story and suddenly they would stop,\u201d he told the library audience. \u201cLater on I found out the secret was this dictator, this monster.\u201d<\/p>\n

\""Islandborn"<\/a>
“Islandborn” authored by Junot Diaz and illustrated by Leo Espinosa.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activism by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Who is the monster, one child asked. \u201cIn my school, there was always a bully. You can have a bully in a school and you can have a bully in an entire island,\u201d Diaz said. \u201cIn a few years, the word dictator will be useful. For now, we\u2019ll say super-bully.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMonsters love fear and they love it when you\u2019re scared. I think this monster came out because people were too scared,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Is the monster like Trump, a child in the audience asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, no. Chaos. Sheer chaos,\u201d Diaz joked\u2014and sidestepped the question. \u201cYoung person, I feel like I\u2019m going to see you at university.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the book, Diaz doesn\u2019t more specifically identify his Monster\u2014but on one page the building superintendent holds a photo of three women and a man under a sign reading Salcedo. It\u2019s a reference to the Mirabal sisters from Salcedo\u2014Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa\u2014who were active in the opposition to Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. They were assassinated in 1960 and became icons of the resistance.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think he’s like most authoritarian, near-totalitarian dictators,\u201d Diaz recently told National Public Radio<\/a> about Trujillo. \u201cThere was no safety for people or families. Today, you could be walking down the street, and somebody who had Trujillo’s ear would want your house, and the next thing you know, you would be out of it. There was constant murder, constant torture. This was also a racial dictatorship, a violently Jim Crow-type dictatorship where people of dark skin, their lives were made much more difficult than the light-skinned people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Diaz told NPR that immigration stories are often framed in terms of people coming to the United States for greater opportunities. \u201cThere’s also the fact a lot of people come because political realities have uprooted them, have driven them from their homes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\""Islandborn"<\/a>
“Islandborn” authored by Junot Diaz and illustrated by Leo Espinosa.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI wrote this book about one island and all islands,\u201d Diaz told the library audience. \u201cI wanted this book to be about the Dominican Republic I could have called it the Dominican Republic. But I wanted it to be about a lot more than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cIslandborn,\u201d people finally band together to successfully overthrow the monster. At the reading, a child asked Diaz how the monster vanished.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you\u2019re young, we call it friendship,\u201d Diaz told the library crowd. \u201cWhen you\u2019re old we call that solidarity. Monsters don\u2019t like friendship. And they certainly don\u2019t like solidarity. This [book] is sort of a how-to guide.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activism by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two decades ago, author Junot Diaz was asked by his two goddaughters, Dominican girls living in the Bronx, to write a book about little girls like them. \u201cThe only problem is it took me 20 years to write it. So I am officially the slowest writer. But I also keep my promises,\u201d Diaz said in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6687,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,107,192],"tags":[211,294,326],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6683"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6683"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6707,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6683\/revisions\/6707"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}