When I first read Junot Díaz, I wondered what his literature about Dominican diasporic subjects in New Jersey had that was so appealing for someone who grew up in a Southern Cone dictatorship—like myself. His stories, interwoven with humor, anger, and tenderness, portray characters that are not only aesthetically honest but also historically recognizable, at least from my experience as part of a generation that is still trying to overcome the legacies of violence locally engendered by counterinsurgency policies framed within the Cold War. I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) when I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, and, of course, the Trans-American confluences posed by José David Saldívar’s criticism provided me with clues to understand my affinity with Diaz’s characters. Interestingly, while Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Colonialities, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (2012) studies a wide range of radical literatures and cultures of the Americas in order to search for nodes of decolonial proximity among their aesthetics, Junot Díaz: On the Half-Life of Love (2022) seems to delineate a different path.Footnote 1 By focusing on the personal and academic itineraries of a single writer, Saldívar seeks to expose the far-reaching decolonial roots and ramifications of each one of his works. And I believe he proves that the roots and ramifications of Junot Díaz’s literature can be found all over the darker sides of the geographies of the Western Hemisphere, as well as in the modern stories of its inhabitants. By means of some rhizomatic connections—or by “a set of reciprocating colonial complicities” originated in the coloniality of power and the Black Atlantic some five centuries ago—the countless unwritten sagas of people forced into exile to flee from dictatorial violence or neoliberal exclusion in the past decades have a lot in common with Yúnior’s, Virta’s, Óscar’s, or Belicia’s personal struggles.Footnote 2 This is not surprising because, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot lucidly remarks, inhabiting the peripheral regions of modernity somehow makes us all modern, “contradictorily modern, otherwise modern—yet undoubtedly modern”.Footnote 3 I would like to comment on some of the colonial complicities put forward by Junot Díaz’s narratives that link what I would like to describe—after the Spanish translation of Black Skin, White Masks’ fifth chapter, that is, “La experiencia vivida del negro” (my emphasis)—as the “lived-experiences” of those whose lives and bodies, in the present or in the past, in the Americas or elsewhere, have felt the suffocating weight of living in the darker sides of modernity.
I The half-life of the coloniality of power in Junot Díaz’s fiction
After weeks of the father’s prohibition to leave the apartment in London Terrace, supposedly due to the extreme cold and their inexperience in the new neighborhood, one day Yúnior and Rafa, noticing their depressed Mami used to go out for a walk once they were in bed, decided to follow her. “She’s at it again,” says Yúnior. They joined her at the edge of the parking lot, walked straight, and then the three of them “looked out over the landfill.” Yúnior shares: “Rubbish fires burned all over it like sores and the dump trucks and bulldozers slept quietly and reverently at its base. It smelled like something the river had tossed out from its floor, something moist and heaving”.Footnote 4 After waiting for five years to join Rafael in the United States, Virta realized that he continued to be an absent figure and that she would probably “have to spend the rest of her natural life snowbound with her children”.Footnote 5 Considering her way of dealing with depression, we might ask why Virta chooses to grieve over Rafael’s infidelity while contemplating a monstrous landfill, whose eerie view and toxic emanations injured her and her sons’ senses and bodies. By leaving the apartment and consenting to her children to do so, Virta breaks the patriarchal law and begins to mourn for her failed relationship. What I would like to explore about this closing image of the short story “Invierno” is the “colonial complicities” among Virta’s heartbreak, Rafael’s machismo, and the poisonous urban neighborhood—the peripheries of New Jersey—where they, as poor immigrants, are confined to live. In other words, although the main drive of Díaz’s characters is their search for love, at points they seem to epiphanically connect their personal failures with a broader curse related to the legacies of the coloniality of power. As Saldívar says, “Díaz suggests that love is itself not only a specific kind of relationship between human subjects and objects of desire but also a means of decolonial knowledge production” (xvii). This may imply that while succeeding in love is a way to defeat coloniality, love failure leads the characters to put their individual tragedies in the context of a major (intergenerational and historical) colonial doom. Of course, it is Yúnior’s intelligent storytelling that interlaces these complicities. As a rhapsode who recounts and interprets all of the characters’ lives, he compellingly frames their stories within backgrounds linked to national, hemispheric, and global catastrophes—perhaps ultimately insinuating them as the Almirante’s fault. Is this something Virta reflects on when staring at the landfill during that particularly snowy, freezing, and toxic winter—their first winter in the United States?
In the short story “Aguantando,” from Drown, when Virta was still living in the Dominican Republic, working hard to make ends meet while waiting for Rafael to take them to the United States with him—as he had deceitfully announced in his letters_, Yúnior initiates his narration about Virta’s early heartbreaks, referring to the scars on her body. Unsurprisingly, these are traces of the Cold War: her inescapable personal marks of the US invasion of the Dominican Republic. Yúnior tells us: “She was a tiny woman and in the water closet she looked even smaller, her skin dark and her hair surprisingly straight and across her stomach and back the scars from the rocket attack she’d survived in 1965. None of the scars showed when she wore clothes, though if you embraced her you’d feel them hard under your wrist, against the soft part of your palm”.Footnote 6 The invasion of the island is also a turning point for Yúnior that tell us that his early memories about his father are reduced to an old photograph: “When I thought of Papi I thought of one shot specifically. Taken days before the U.S. invasion: 1965. […] You know the sort of photograph I’m talking about. Scalloped edges, mostly brown in color”.Footnote 7 Even when his Abuelo recalls the good old days, the invasion signals the end of a time “when a man could still make a living from his finca, when the United States wasn’t something folks planned on”.Footnote 8 As for Virta’s main scars in this short story, the love scars caused by Rafael, Yúnior recalls her going out for walks—“Mami spent a lot of time out of the house, at work or down by the Malecón, where she could watch the waves shred themselves against the rocks, where men offered cigarettes that she smoked quietly”—Footnote 9 until the day he just found his Abuelo: “She’s gone, he said. So cry all you want, malcriado”.Footnote 10 Via his brother’s recollection, Yúnior recounts the first time Virta made arrangements for Rafael’s comeback, two years after he had left: “She prepared a party, even lined up to have a goat there for the slaughtering. She bought me and Rafa new clothes, and when he didn’t show, she sent everybody home, sold the goat back to its owner, and then almost lost her mind”.Footnote 11
In Drown and in This Is How You Loose Her, Yúnior tells us Virta’s early heartbreak stories to understand the colonial complicities between his mother’s radioactive love relationship with an uncondemned “cheater!”,Footnote 12 and his own love failures as—ditto—a cheater. This explains, perhaps, why in “Fiesta, 1980,” when they have finally migrated to the United States, and Yúnior endures a difficult relationship with his “Father the Torturer,” he underlines a brief moment of love connection between his parents. This occurred when they were driving home after a family reunion: “In the darkness, I saw that Papi had a hand on Mami’s knee and that the two of them were quiet and still. […] I couldn’t see either of their faces, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not imagine their expressions”.Footnote 13 This effort of little Yúnior, the same older Yúnior makes when trying to remember that unusual exchange, reveals the importance that this ephemeral spark of affection has for him as an adult. The effort to see his parents’ faces back in time allegorizes Yúnior’s own search for something that is still invisible and unknown for him, that is, what Díaz, Moya, and Saldívar call decolonial love. This makes me infer that not only the half-life of love is forever in the literary world created by Junot Díaz, but also the half-live of the coloniality of power, for his characters locate their unattainable search for love within the long history of struggles in the Americas in order to defeat the legacies of colonial and capitalistic, racist, and gender oppressions. Is it love, one of the ways in which the radioactive life of the many expressions of the coloniality of power can be reduced, at least in half? But what if, as Saldívar suggests, “love is [inextricably] unreliable under systems of the coloniality of power and gender?”.Footnote 14
II Raging against the coloniality of power, race, and gender
To elaborate on the previous question, one can return to the extensive genealogy of aesthetics that has contested the legacies of modernity and coloniality in the Americas. It is not surprising that Aníbal Quijano coined the term “coloniality of power,” inspired, originally, by the pervasive expressions of inequality imposed during the colonial period in his country, Peru. His criticism emerges, in fact, from a radical Indianist tradition that includes, among others, Clorinda Matto de Turner and Manuel González Prada at the end of the nineteenth century, and José Carlos Mariátegui and José Sabogal in the early twentieth century.Footnote 15 In literature, it was perhaps the novelist José María Arguedas who better expressed the personal and collective conflicts related to what Quijano later described as “coloniality.” What I find interesting in terms of the “colonial complicities” between the literatures of both Arguedas and Díaz is their attention to the difficulties of growing up under systems of coloniality of power, race, and gender. Arguedas’s novel Deep Rivers (1958) portrays a young man’s constant rage against all of the institutions colluded under the hacendado’ law—including his hegemonic masculinity—as well as his efforts toward what we now call decolonization. Footnote 16 In Cusco, after observing the behaviors of the humiliated pongo Indian, the defiant mestizo, and the all-mighty señor, his uncle, the fourteen-year-old narrator Ernesto unsurprisingly concludes: “Nowhere else must human beings suffer so much as here” (Arguedas 20). There is a harsh fragment in the essay “Our Indians” (1904), in which González Prada says: “every Indian woman, single or married, can serve as a target for the brutal desires of the master. Abduction, rape, and sexual abuse mean nothing to a man who assumes that Indian women are meant to be taken by force. In spite of everything, the Indian never addresses the master without kneeling and kissing his hand”.Footnote 17 So let us now rephrase Saldívar’s question: Is it love “unreliable under systems of coloniality of power[, race] and gender?” What strategies do the people whose lives and bodies have been damaged by forms of political, economic, racial, and/or gender oppression create to reverse the biopolitics of the darker Americas?
We can tell by the experience of Argueda’s Ernesto and Díaz’s Yúnior that they both wrestle to unlearn the structural machismo their families and societies have reproduced across genders and generations. But decolonization, even on a personal level, is not a simple process. When revisiting his mother’s love stories as well as his father’s and brother’s love adventures to reflect on his own relationships, Yúnior realizes he comes from a patriarchal lineage of cheaters and machistas. His Abuelo José Edilio, Rafael’s father, was actually a “loudmouthed ball-breaking vagrant who had never married Papi’s mother but nevertheless had given her nine children”.Footnote 18 While in “Aguantando,” Virta almost gets mad because Rafael does not return to the island, in the short story “Negocios” we learn that, during those five years in the United States, he was trying to marry someone else in order to get a green card. After being robbed by an older woman who promised to arrange their papers—as Vargas proves, sucias learn to navigate machismo and racism because “their impermanence allows them to stay ahead, get over, and get by”, and probably because they also consider their male partners as sucios—he finally finds a Dominican-American woman to marry: Nilda.Footnote 19 They have a baby also named Rafael, but the relationship falls apart, and only then Rafael decides to come back for Virta and the boys. He thinks it is time to honor his promise when a friend gets him a job and a free apartment in an unfinished housing complex that rumors said “it had been built on a chemical dump site”.Footnote 20 It was London Terrace. But we know his cheating did not stop when he relocated his family to New Jersey. If these are the stories Yúnior uses to analyze his adult life—about role models that provided him with his first sentimental education—then the question he might be asking himself is how the hell can he step aside from that intergenerational chain of cheaters and machistas? Is coloniality of gender—as María Lugones coined it—another type of unrelenting curse spelled by the Almirante? No wonder, in “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” Yúnior accuses his ancestors and his culture for his failures in love: “You blame your father. You blame your mother. You blame the patriarchy. You blame Santo Domingo”.Footnote 21
Based on Díaz’s remark of how apocalypses can unveil hidden truths or naturalized inequalities, I believe a possible way to answer the previous question is to consider the ultimate, and sometimes ephemeral, wisdom that emerges after personal disasters. One of these powerful disasters is heartbreak and, in Yúnior’s (and Virta’s) case, it is followed by depression: “It feels like you’re being slowly pincered apart, atom by atom […] Like someone flew a plane into your soul. Like someone flew two planes into your soul”.Footnote 22 However painful, personal disasters can reveal unpleasant but illuminating facts: “It kills you to admit it, but it’s true. You are astounded by the depths of your mendacity”.Footnote 23 Another personal disaster that provokes Yúnior’s vulnerability and an alternative type of wisdom is the death of his brother Rafa. (Was his cancer the result of his exposure to the toxic dump at London Terrace? Was it really a medical disaster or a social one?) Years later, when Yúnior encounters Nilda, Rafa’s ex-girlfriend and his own crush for years, they walked through the old neighborhood, and he noticed a different racial demography because the landfill had finally been shut down: “Kicked-up rents and mad South Asian people and whitefolks living in the apartments”.Footnote 24 Then Yúnior suddenly shares: “My heart is beating and I think, we could do anything. We could marry. We could drive off to the West Coast. We could start over. It’s all possible but neither of us speaks for a long time and the moment closes and we’re back in the world we’ve always known”.Footnote 25 What if during that epiphanic instant, Yúnior had decided to step aside from the world he and Nilda had always known? Was that moment an opportunity for them to construct a relationship based on decolonial love?
Perhaps we can infer from the previous approach between José María Arguedas’ and Junot Díaz’s bildung narratives that there are epicenters of coloniality in the Americas where structural inequalities and the suffering of human beings—as Arguedas once articulated—become unbearable. That is, certain chronotopes whose sometimes disruptive historical constellations can reveal how brutally the coloniality of power, race, and gender has penetrated society and expanded over time. In the Americas, these epicenters of coloniality may include sites such as the Peruvian Sierra, where, according to Mariátegui, hacendados behave as feudal lords, and the island of La Española, because it “never freed from the curse of having been the archetypal plantocracy”.Footnote 26 Or, in recent decades, places like dictatorial Chile (Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism lab) and noxious London Terrace. One may consider the narratives that emerged from these epicenters of coloniality—as Sarah Quesada suggests in relation to Díaz’s “Monstro”—as cautionary tales that can help us evaluate the catastrophic impact that the different forms of abusive economic production have historically had in the Americas. But these narratives also suggest, through their characters, alternative strategies to contest the radioactive effects that the coloniality of power, race, and gender has had on our peripherally modern lives and bodies. Following Saldívar, Díaz’s characters experience love “as a historically transformative practice—a practice replete with a Fanonian, dialectical dynamic of reciprocity and liberation”.Footnote 27 As it is not hard to imagine, both Argueda’s and Díaz’s literatures emerge from their own “lived-experiences” as inhabitants of the darker sides of modernity, so unsurprisingly their characters’ personal apocalypses can perhaps unveil paths toward other horizons of decoloniality.
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