Is Junot Diaz a sexist writer?

Re-read Homecoming, With Turtle and consider these questions:
Is the narrator a sexist character? If so, cite evidence from the text to support your opinion.
[Post your answer in the comment section by Friday November 13th at 11:59p]

Read this excerpt from an article that was first published in The Atlantic September 11, 2012 issue.

How Junot Diaz Wrote a Sexist Character, but Not a Sexist Book by Joe Fassler

 The Pulitzer Prize-winning author's new collection takes an honest, critical—and sometimes unsettling—look at gender dynamics.

Yunior de Las Casas—narrator of many of the stories in Junot Diaz's new collection, This Is How You Lose Her—is capable of great turns of phrase and stunning social insight. But his understanding of women is—as Diaz told me in an interview by phone—"pretty f---ing limited." Take, for instance, his description of Miss Lora, an aging seductress and high school teacher:

"Miss Lora was too skinny. Had no hips whatsoever. No breasts, either, no ass, even her hair failed to make the grade."

This isn't a description of a person so much as a mental checklist of physical attributes, a man scoping a woman's dimensions the way a butcher might rove his eye over a calf. The book is filled with similar descriptions; Yunior lavishes time on chronicles of body parts and erotic hydraulics. At the same time, he spends little space engaging with the emotional lives of female characters—their motivations, complications, and desires; their reasons for entering and leaving relationships; the psychological effects of his wounding betrayals. It's almost as though Yunior doesn't have the depth to contemplate a female psychology, let alone make one real for a third party. And when he does directly address the reader—like when he tells us Nilda, his brother's girlfriend, has "a chest you wouldn't believe"—he assumes we're high-fiving heterosexual males (just like he is).

This failure of imagination worsens Yunior's mistreatment of his romantic partners, whom he betrays serially and without flinching.

But Yunior's cavalier descriptions of the way he dupes and wounds these women are at odds with the sadness he feels when they find out. Diaz writes that this despair is "pelagic," sea-like in scope, and the feeling only deepens with time. Part of the heartbreak of this book is watching Yunior make the same self-destructive decisions again and again—and still he lacks the insight or vocabulary to understand why he feels so blown away. We feel it in the way he mourns: Yunior loves these women, and he would do anything to keep them if only he knew how.

The book, then, is the story of late-blooming empathy, a long path towards gender enlightenment. We only see Yunior's dawning awareness of his subjectivity on the final pages of the book, in an epic called "The Cheater's Guide to Love"; otherwise, Diaz's commits fully to his chauvinistic method-acting. That's what makes This Is How You Lose Her such a brave and risky book. How can an author write so convincingly from the perspective of a machismo cad and still write a book that is not itself sexist?

Diaz has walked this line before: In Drown, his 1996 debut short-story collection, and in 2007's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He told me that sometimes people—usually women—lambaste him at his readings and public appearances.

"There's plenty of people out there who are like, 'F--- you. You are endorsing this shit. Your portrayal of women is f---ed up,'" he told me. "It happens all the time."

But then, there are women who defend his portrayals as honest, brave, and sufficiently complex. "They'll argue the exact opposite," Diaz said. (It's worth noting that men seldom ask questions about women at all, according to Diaz. "Rarely do I get dudes who want to talk gender," Diaz told me. "That's the strange thing about privilege.")

How can a book's portrayal of women be praised and criticized at the same time? Part of it may stem from Diaz's unflinching authorial vision, which requires giving voice to the silenced victims of history and of our moment. But Oscar Wao's many scenes of brutal violence, including rape, required a strong stomach. As a one-star GoodReads review of the book, written by a woman, explained:

"I recognize the literary abilities of Junot Diaz. The book is well-written; the language hypnotic in fact. This book, for all the things that bothered me, is hard to put down.

So, the one star rating is more of a reaction to the emotional upheaval this book left me with. I just can't get behind a book so completely misogynistic. And I don't know the author's intent, and I'm afraid I don't know nearly enough about Dominican history as I should, but I was just left really quite devastated by it.

Women are objects in this novel. Objects for men to own, to destroy, to collect as many as they can. Almost every female character in the novel is cheated on, raped, attacked, beaten or murdered; sometimes more than once, sometimes all five. And while I understand the violence of the Dominican Republic during the time of Trujillo, I guess what pisses me off is the flippancy with which the narrator talks about it...

I'm not necessarily offended by these things being written about in this way...if there's a point. Perhaps a scathing commentary about the misogyny in Dominican society. But he doesn't get there and I was left with so much anger and confusion." …

Still, there are clues about the author's alignment. In This Is How You Lose Her, Diaz cites the fact that Yunior's behavior results in persistent unhappiness. "All of Yunior's f---ed-up visions of women never get him anything," Diaz told me. "They end up with him more alone, more frustrated, more aware of his dehumanization and farther away from the thing that he deeply longs for—a human connection." The narratives in no way reward Yunior's perspective; in fact, they serve to undermine and subvert it (just not in obvious ways).

Perhaps the author's stance is clearest in "Otravida, Otravez," one of the collection's most affecting and successful stories. The story achieves an abrupt shift in perspective: It's narrated by a Dominican-American woman named Yasmin whose boyfriend's wife stayed behind in Santo Domingo. When Yasmin discovers the wife's pleading letters, she must question her role in a family's dissolution: Please, please, mi querido husband, tell me what it is. How long did it take before your wife stopped mattering?

The language becomes more brooding and gentle in this story. By displaying his stylistic range, Diaz reminds us just how subjective Yunior's brutishness is. Furthermore, Yasmin's portrayal veers drastically from the butt-waist-bust women who populate Yunior's stories. She's sensitive, capable of stunning insight and self-reflection, but she isn't perfect or romanticized. Her crime, betrayal, is Yunior's, and her participation is similarly complex. Ultimately, she is able to do what Yunior can't—achieve empathy for someone else. Another woman leaps from a stack of letters, full-blown, into her mind, and it causes her to change her life. …

[To read the entire article go to http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/09/how-junot-diaz-wrote-a-sexist-character-but-not-a-sexist-book/262169/]

Vocabulary - Find definitions and translations for all of the underlined words found in the excerpt. On paper due in class on Monday November 16, 2015.

Post a Comment - Answer this question: [How can an author write so convincingly from the perspective of a machismo cad and still write a book that is not itself sexist?]
After posting your answer you will also have to respond meaningfully to a classmate's answer. Follow rules of academic discourse.
Due online by Sunday November 15, 2015 at 11:59pm.

Homecoming, with Turtle by Junot Diaz

Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award.  A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen         Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the cofounder of Voices of Our Nation Workshop.

link - http://www.junotdiaz.com/about/

"Homecoming, with Turtle" first appeared in the June 14, 2004 issue of The New Yorker magazine.

Homecoming, With Turtle BY JUNOT DÍAZ

That summer! Eleven years ago, and I still remember every bit of it. Me and the girlfriend had decided to spend our vacation in Santo Domingo, a big milestone for me, one of the biggest, really: my first time “home” in nearly twenty years. (Blame it on certain “irregularities” in paperwork, blame it on my threadbare finances, blame it on me.) The trip was to accomplish many things. It would end my exile—what Salman Rushdie has famously called one’s dreams of glorious return; it would plug me back into that island world, which I’d almost forgotten, closing a circle that had opened with my family’s immigration to New Jersey, when I was six years old; and it would improve my Spanish. As in Tom Waits’s song “Step Right Up,” this trip would be and would fix everything.

Maybe if I hadn’t had such high expectations everything would have turned out better. Who knows? What I can say is that the bad luck started early. Two weeks before the departure date, my novia found out that I’d cheated on her a couple of months earlier. Apparently, my ex-sucia had heard about our planned trip from a mutual friend and decided in a fit of vengeance, jealousy, justice, cruelty, transparency (please pick one) to give us an early bon-voyage gift: an “anonymous” letter to my novia that revealed my infidelities in excruciating detail (where do women get these memories?). I won’t describe the lío me and the novia got into over that letter, or the crusade I had to launch to keep her from dumping me and the trip altogether. In brief, I begged and promised and wheedled, and two weeks later we were touching down on the island of Hispaniola. What do I remember? Holding hands awkwardly while everybody else clapped and the fields outside La Capital burned. How did I feel? All I will say is that if you fused the instant when heartbreak occurs to the instant when one falls in love and shot that concoction straight into your brain stem you might have a sense of what it felt like for me to be back “home.”

As for me and the novia, our first week wasn’t too bad. In one of those weird details that you just couldn’t make up, before leaving the States we had volunteered to spend a week in the Dominican Republic helping a group of American dentists who were on a good-will mission. We would be translating for them and handing them elevators and forceps and generally making ourselves useful. Even with the advantage of hindsight, I can’t figure out why I thought this was a good way to kick off a homecoming, but that’s just how we thought back then. We were young. We had ideals.

Our group of five dentists and five assistants treated roughly fourteen hundred kids from some of the poorest barrios in the city of La Romana (which is, ironically, the sugar capital of the D.R.). We weren’t practicing the kind of dentistry that First Worlders with insurance are accustomed to, either; this was no-joke Third World care. No time or materials for fillings. If a tooth had a cavity, it would be numbed and pulled, and that was that. Nothing else we can do, our chief explained. That week, I learned more about bombed-out sixes, elevators, and cowhorns than a layperson should ever have to know. Of our group, only me and the novia could be said to speak any Spanish. We worked triage, calming the kids, translating for everybody, and still we had it easy, compared with the dentists. These guys were animals; they worked so hard you would have thought they were in a competition, but by the thousandth patient even their hands started to fail. On the last day, our chief, an immensely compassionate Chinese-American with the forearms of a major-league shortstop, was confronted with one extraction he just couldn’t finish. He tried everything to coax that kid’s stubborn molar out of its socket, and finally he had to call over another dentist, and together they pulled out a long bloody scimitar of a six. During the ordeal the twelve-year-old patient never complained. ¿Te duele? we asked every couple of minutes, but he would shake his head fiercely, as though the question annoyed him.

Tu eres fuerte, I said, and that might have been the first sentence I had conjugated correctly all week.

No, he said, shaking his beautiful head, no soy.

Of course, we fought, me and the novia—I mean, the needs of the pueblo aside, I had just been bagged f---ing some other girl—but it was nothing too outrageous. For one thing, we were too busy wrenching teeth. It wasn’t until the mission was over and the dentists had packed their bags and we had headed out into the rest of the island that our real troubles began.

I don’t know what I was thinking. Travelling the Third World is challenging enough as it is, but try it with a girlfriend who is only just realizing how badly she’s been hurt and a boyfriend who is so worried that he no longer “fits in” at “home” that every little incident and interaction is sifted for rejection, for approval—a boyfriend who is so worried about his busted-up Spanish that he f---s up even more than normal. What I wanted more than anything was to be recognized as the long-lost son I was, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not after nearly twenty years. Nobody believed I was Dominican! You? one cabdriver said incredulously, and then turned and laughed. That’s doubtful. Instead of being welcomed with open arms, I was overcharged for everything and called un americano. I put us on all the wrong buses. If there was money to lose, I lost it; if there was a bus to catch, I made us miss it, and through some twist of bad luck all my relatives were in the States for the summer. The one relative we did manage to locate, a great-aunt, had been feuding with my moms since 1951, when Mami had accidentally broken her only vase, and my arrival signalled a new stage in the age-old conflict: each morning, she blithely served me and the novia sandwiches completely covered in fire ants.

Now that we didn’t have the dentists to hold us back, we basically went off the deep end. We fought about everything: where to eat, what town we should visit, how to pronounce certain words in Spanish. We fought our way across the country: from La Capital to San Cristóbal to Santiago to Puerto Plata and back. It was miserable. If one of us wasn’t storming off down the road with a backpack, the other one was trying to hitch a ride to the airport with strangers. Our craziness culminated one night in a hotel in Puerto Plata when the novia woke up and cried out, There’s someone in the room! If you’ve never heard those words being shouted into your dreams, then yours has been a blessed life. I woke in a terrible fright and there he was—the intruder we’d all been waiting for.

It’s at a crossroads like this that you really learn something about yourself. There was someone in the room with us, and I could have done any number of things. I could have frozen, I could have screamed for help, I could have fled, but instead I did what my military father had beaten into us during his weekend toughening-up exercises: no matter what the situation, always attack. So I attacked. I threw myself with a roar at the intruder.

It wasn’t a person, of course. The intruder was a sea-turtle shell that had been cured and waxed and mounted on the wall. For the sake of national honor, I can say that I acquitted myself well in the battle. I smashed my head clean through the shell, struck the concrete wall, and bounced back to the floor. But instead of staying down I went back at him again, and only then did I realize I was punching décor.

That was the end. A couple of days later, we returned home, defeated, she to New Jersey, me to upstate New York. There was no miracle reconciliation. For a couple of lousy months, the relationship dragged on to its inevitable conclusion, like the heat death of a universe, until finally, having had enough of me, she found herself a new man who she claimed spent more money on her than I did. You’re cheap, she asserted, even though I’d used a travel grant and all my savings to pay for our trip. She broke my heart, that girl did, which was a fair trade, considering that I’d broken hers first. But in the end none of it mattered. Even though a dead turtle had kicked my ass, even though my girlfriend had dumped me and a family member had tried to poison me with fire ants, even though I was not granted a glorious return by my homeland, I wasn’t entirely crushed. Turned out I wasn’t all that easy to crumb; before the year was out, I was back in the D.R., trying again. I kept going back, too. I had committed myself to the lucha, much as I had committed myself to that fight with the damned turtle.

These days, I get around Santo Domingo pretty easily (Los Tres Brazos? La Pintura? Katanga? Capotillo? No sweat), and most people will at least concede that I have some Dominican in me. My Spanish has improved to the point where I can hold forth on any subject—animal, vegetable, mineral—with only one major f---up per sentence. I’m sure if you’d shown me that future during those last days of my trip with the novia I would have laughed at you. But even in the midst of the rubble there were signs; even on that last day, at the airport, I was still trying to pick my stupid self off the floor. My head was throbbing from the tortugal beat-down, and my nose felt as if it had only recently been reattached. (When I got home, my roommate blurted out, without so much as a hello, Fool, what the hell happened to you?) I was beat, truly beat, and, just in case I hadn’t got the point, there was nothing cold to drink at the airport. But that didn’t stop me from engaging in the debates that were going on all around me regarding the recent election and Santo Domingo’s eternal President Balaguer—blind, deaf, and dumb but still jodiendo el pueblo. A present that the United States gave our country after its last military occupation, in 1965—God bless them all! Just before our flight was called, I was asked by a group of locals what I thought of Balaguer. I went into fulmination mode, and said he was a murderer, an election thief, an apologist of genocide, and, of course, a U.S. stooge of the Hosni Mubarak variety.

See, the newspaper seller announced triumphantly. Even the gringo knows.

11/2/15 - FIRST POST - Who is the author of Homecoming, with Turtle? What are the 1st four underlined vocabulary words or names inn the story?