Pulitzer Prize Winner Diaz Puts Spotlight on Art

October 26, 2011

"Art is the only {expletive} thing that makes this society worth living in," said author Junot Díaz to an audience of over 150 students, faculty, staff and members of the local community on Tuesday evening.

"This is a society that is encouraging you to do a lot of stupid things," said Díaz, who was at the Martin Institute for the annual Chet Raymo Literary Series Lecture.

Instead of focusing on the pressures of society, Díaz encouraged students to draw their attention to art.

"Art simply asks you, for a moment, to endure contemplating what it means to be human. What it means to be vulnerable. What it means to be fallible. What it means to be perfect. What it means to be contradictive. What it means to not be the one who wins all the time, and, most importantly, what it means to be in contact with other human beings who are equally confused and equally imperfect."

His book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, chronicles the life of Oscar de Leon, an overweight Dominican boy growing up in Paterson, New Jersey who loves science fiction and fantasy novels and dreams of falling in love. It also talks about the curse that has plagued Oscar's family for generations- cancer.

Díaz read a powerful excerpt from the second chapter of the book, in which Oscar's sister Lola, speaking in the second person, tells the story of when she found out her mother had breast cancer.

When asked why he chose to read that selection from his book, Díaz explained the month of October brings him to back to "cancer planet." It was in October 20 years ago that his brother had been diagnosed with cancer.

"If you're a young person and someone in your family gets diagnosed with cancer, that {expletive] separates you from the normal world in ways that are unimaginable.

"As soon as we heard that diagnosis we were transported, my whole family, to a place that looked exactly like the world we lived in, but wasn't the same anymore. It was called cancer planet where no one wants to know about your {expletive} dying brother and siblings, other family members and neighbors pull the {expletive} away and the only people who stick around are the people that you find out have incredible hearts."

Asked about his frequent use of Spanish colloquialisms throughout the book, Díaz said his tactic was simple.

"We forget, just because we practice as individuals, that reading is a collective enterprise and the point of having words that you don't understand is to invite you to reach out to other people the way reading always invites you to ask other people when you encounter something you don't know.

"These days we read, and if we miss something, we think someone is trying to trick us or something is wrong with us but that is not what reading is. Reading is an invitation to make a community. "

Hailed as one of the top 20 writers of the 21st century by The New Yorker Magazine, Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He currently teaches creative writing at MIT.

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