Junot Diaz's Drown

The fact that I 

am 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

Gustavo Perez Firmat

Drown, Junot Diaz's collection of short stories published in the 1990s, about a decade before his The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is an interesting early sample of his writing style. Fusing humor, tales of the Dominican homeland and diaspora in the New York/New Jersey area, and introducing Yunior, the narrator in Oscar Wao, Diaz's work reveals a great writer in development. Several of the short stories revolve around Yunior and his family in the campo, in la Capital, and in New Jersey, as well as addressing issues of immigration, race, and assimilation for the Dominican diaspora.

Diaz also introduces No Face, a character who appears twice in Oscar Wao, though only a child in the short stories here who survives verbal and physical harassment from children in the campo. No Face, if I remember correctly, is a villain whose appearance in the novel foreshadows doom for Oscar and his mother, Belicia. The mongoose also appears in one of the short stories here, just as it does when it saves the life of Oscar and his mother, who would have died in the sugar-cane fields without the 'sly mongoose.'

It's also interesting to see how Yunior's youth compares to college-aged Yunior and postcollege Yunior in Oscar Wao. In the novel, Yunior behaves much like his brother Rafa, which is in accordance with typical and expected Dominican male bravado, misogyny, and violent machismo. Yunior clearly picked this up from his brother Rafa and his father, who cheated on his mother with a Puerto Rican woman in Jersey and was not above using violence with his wife and children. The young Yunior was a dark-skinned, innocent child subjected to abuse from his brother, mother, and father, and he internalizes this in the way he interacts with Oscar and his sister, Lola, in Oscar Wao.

One day I shall revisit these short stories and Oscar Wao. Perhaps I'll write some long boring essay that nobody will care to read. Anyway, any fan of Diaz should check out these short stories. One in particular, "How to Date a Browngirl..." is quite hilarious.