Author delves into immigrant experience

Fiction writer Junot Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, where his family moved when he was 6 years old. His work portrays the Hispanic- and African-American community in which he was raised, a culturally rich, economically disadvantaged world whose inhabitants are painfully aware of being marginalized by mainstream society.

In 1996 he made a splash with “Drown,” a collection of bold, funny, uninhibited short stories recounting the lives, dreams and frustrations of young, urban Dominican immigrants. His “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” about an overweight science-fiction nerd, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. “This Is How You Lose Her” (2015), stories of male braggadocio and ill-fated romance, was a New York Times best-seller.

A graduate of Rutgers College and Cornell University, Diaz, 48, is a professor of writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He spoke with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser by phone from Cambridge, Mass., before coming to Hawaii, where he will be speaking Wednesday and Thursday at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

QUESTION: Where did your family come from in the Dominican Republic?

ANSWER: They came from the capital city of Santo Domingo; those rhythms never left me.

Q: The characters in your fiction are also deeply attached to their rural roots.

A: My father and mother were both from the countryside, where I would visit frequently. My sensibility is from the south: a very arid, tough, poor area called Azua.

Q: Why did your family move to New Jersey?

A: I don’t know. Ask them that question five times you’ll get five answers. My sense was, of course the economy was in full collapse and we had a democratically elected crypto-dictatorship that was launching death squads. That created a kind of climate that led my father to seek his fortune elsewhere.

Q: Where in New Jersey did you grow up?

A: A strange town, or area, outside an industrial city named Perth Amboy. The only way to describe its neighborhood-defining feature was we were the entrance to the largest landfill in the state.

Q: When did you start telling stories, writing fiction?

A: Not till late. I wasn’t one of those born storytellers; I think I was a born reader. You cannot get me away from reading. Writing is my justification to stay with my head in books.

Q: What writers influenced you?

A: As a Caribbean writer of African descent, my most important source of inspiration was the African diaspora: Audre Lorde, Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, Michelle Cliff.

Q: In “Drown,” your first book, you quote from Gustavo Perez Firmat: “I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else.” Do you still feel that way?

A: I don’t know any immigrant who has to learn the language they end up using the most who doesn’t feel some sense of profound alienation from this learned language. I don’t think that has changed at all for me.

Q: What’s your favorite city or cities?

A: My fave is probably New York. Mexico City, I adore to no end. Havana. And then of course my sentimental beloved, the city in which I was born.

Q: Have you been to Hawaii?

A: I have been twice, (most recently) five years ago. My partner’s aunt lived in Hawi; we went and spent a month kicking around the Big Island. As someone who comes from an American-occupied, tourist-ridden colonial island, I thought perhaps that I would learn something and that the exchange would prove fruitful.

Q: Did it?

A: I don’t know yet. I come from an island where none of the regular folks have a lot of power over their own land, and that felt very familiar. I think the historical injustices heaped on Hawaii are numerous and just painful.

(But) it’s not really up to me to talk about these things. I might come from a similar island but these are not direct equivalences. I think a lot of people who don’t live in Hawaii have a lot to say about Hawaii. That’s not my genre.

Q: Yunior, in your short story “The Sun the Moon the Stars,” despises staying in a posh resort. Do you share his view?

A: You can’t live on an island like mine and be slightly politically conscious without developing some kind of hostility toward the tourism industry. But you know, listen, it never boils down to that simple. There are plenty of times when my family, a lot of Dominicans, use resorts on the island. It used to be in the old days it would only be foreigners.

Q: What’s your typical day like?

A: My typical day is pretty easy, usually morning, trying to write and then around three hours at the university, then sundry things: work with community groups, a lot around immigrant rights, a lot around education.

Q: What do you do for fun?

A: Well, boringly enough, I love to read, see films and plays, love to dance. As much time as I can spend on my island I do.

Q: That doesn’t sound boring.

A: But I have friends who can say they go ice climbing or swimming with whales.

Q: You can swim with whales in Hawaii.

A: I think I’m going to leave those poor whales alone.