So short is always good, yeah?
I was supposed to take some questions,
so I'm going to try to take them from not the first six
rows, which seem to be full of grad school types, yeah?
This is a good exercise, you guys,
because one of my former mentors and beloved mentors
is a writer, Samuel R. Delany.
Does anybody know him?
Yeah, in the back, nobody?
Samuel Delany?
Yeah, greatest writer alive, and he
has this whole thing about asking questions
in class or at events.
He always says, if you don't learn to ask questions
all the time, you're learning how to make
do with what the fuck you got, and that it's easier
to ask me something really dumb than to ask
your boss for a raise.
So he's like, this is good practice for asking for shit,
though you're probably like some of my students.
You don't have any problems asking for anything.
But just in case, we'll put that out there.
So I thought I would take a couple of questions
from the back of any form about anything.
That's a hand all the way in the back.
So I was interested in what your relationship [INAUDIBLE]
Do you mean just--
Your-- I don't know how [INAUDIBLE]
That's a pretty big question.
The question was, what is my relationship with Haiti?
That's like, what's your relationship with the US?
Yeah, no, I mean, it's a useful question,
but it's kind of a tough one to answer.
Do you mean like personally?
Well--
I guess I don't know--
[INAUDIBLE]
Probably a better thing-- can I ask you a question?
And I'll answer.
I promise.
What's your interest in that question specifically?
And then I promise I will answer it.
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE]
Damn, yeah.
OK, I mean, it's kind of a tough question,
and it's an important one.
But it's one of those questions that it's like--
my relationship to Haiti.
It's one of those questions, it's
like it's an open door for like obfuscation and lying, yeah.
Sort of anything I say I don't kind of have to prove.
It's like, my best friends are Haitian, kind of nonsense,
and you probably don't actually know any fucking Haitians,
you know?
So I mean, I would describe it as--
I would describe it as very complicated.
I mean, I would definitely be the Dominican writer
that most of the political figures in the Dominican
Republic wouldn't mind deporting to Haiti,
not because I'm threatening or nothing like that,
but because I seem to think that the Dominican government's
treatment of the Haitian and Haitian Dominicans
is kind of screwed up.
So it's sort of like Turkey and Armenians
where in Turkey, you can't even mention that Turkish people
killed Armenians.
They're just like, never happened.
Santo Domingo's the same thing.
Anybody who even says that there's mistreatment
is sort of persona non grata, but I
would say it's complicated.
I mean, I think for a person to sum up
what their relationship is to an entire collective
is difficult because I've never hung out
with the whole collective.
But I have five or six friends.
But they're a bunch of weed heads,
so it would be hard to be like, they're representative
of the Haitian diaspora.
I mean, I don't know.
They smoke mad herb, yo.
Another question?
[LAUGHTER]
Why or how [INAUDIBLE]?
Why or how-- oh, sure.
No, it's a good question.
Part of it comes--
I come from a family with a lot of cancer, yeah?
And part of it is just that it's, a lot of times,
I think, as a writer, your personality
is sort of not exactly the material that you work on.
And I think I'm pretty much kind of a dumbass, but when I write,
I can push a lot deeper into darker places.
And I think part of it is because I
felt that piece was more representative or emblematic
of the sort of things I think about, and yeah,
so it's just there's been so much cancer in my family.
And I think about how even little kids who don't have
it-- though kids can have it.
That has such a huge impact.
You're just coming of age, and somebody suddenly
acquires something that you don't really understand.
So that's mostly why I read it.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
No.
Specifically, the question was, did it
make it easier or harder?
I hope I'm paraphrasing.
Why did you strategically pick the "you,"
which you say is hard for you to do for that piece?
Actually, it was sort of important for the plot
of the book, but for me, it wasn't any easier in the "you"
because even though it's more distancing
in certain areas, when you're writing it, of course,
all you're thinking about is-- you're like, oh,
my brother had cancer.
You're not really thinking about how the sentences fall in.
But I definitely needed the "you" there, and so no matter
what, whether it was going to come out good or bad,
I had to do it because of the structure.
But those are really good questions.
You're an undergraduate, yeah?
Yeah, yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
I didn't figure.
Thank you, though.
No, I was just saying, it's pretty
smart for an undergraduate.
[INAUDIBLE]
No, I'm raised outside of Perth Amboy.
What part of New Jersey?
[INAUDIBLE]
I know Monmouth County inside it out.
Where?
West Long Branch.
Of course.
I was in West Long Branch a month ago.
Yeah.
Guys, the weird thing about what I
did for a living going to college
is I used to deliver pool tables.
So if there were two rich people in the town,
I was in their house installing a Brunswick gold crown.
So yeah, I know your town.
[INAUDIBLE]
Hey, fuck it.
It's your night, so if you want to ask 12 questions,
run with it.
The amount of money y'all paying for the school, I--
[INAUDIBLE]
OK, other questions?
Here and then there's two that way.
What part of the Dominican Republic are you from?
It's a good question.
What part of Santo Domingo am I from?
No, no, Dominican Republic.
It just in my head translates right to Santo Domingo, yeah?
I'm a weird sort of-- not special, just weird.
I come from the capital, which people know as Santo Domingo,
but I was part of those kids who had a parent abroad.
My father was in the Bronx working,
and so I hadn't met him.
And why I say that's weird it's because that meant since as
soon as I could remember, I was that group
of kids who had been singled out that you were not
long for this country.
I mean, my first memory is being told
that, don't get fucking comfortable.
You ain't sticking around.
And it's a weird thing as a kid because what ends up
happening is that people are always asking me,
oh, this country or that country, which do you prefer?
Which do you feel comfortable?
And I've never known a moment in my life
where Santo Domingo and the United States
weren't simultaneously in my life.
I actually had the same experience [INAUDIBLE]..
What part of Santiago?
[INAUDIBLE]
Uh-huh.
Yeah, my father is from Santiago.
So my island, our island is like the size of our foot,
but there's still regionalism.
My parents, they say they're a mixed marriage because my dad's
from your place.
My mom's from my place, yeah?
My mother [INAUDIBLE].
Well, half of you is picked on because you ain't got a parent,
and the other half of you is kind
of like a little prince in waiting
because you got dollars.
And so your shit is like, doot-doot-doot-doot-doot.
You can't figure it out, and it's much more
common experience for young immigrants
than I think people realize.
Now we had some hands here, sir, glasses, and then right
behind you.
Both the male character from Drown
and the female character from the story you just read
do not have a father present most times [INAUDIBLE],,
yet the male character seems to be very loyal to the mother,
whereas the female character [INAUDIBLE] My question
is, which of those two is closer to your experience?
And then the follow-up to that would
be, how did you draw inspiration from the other?
Well, that's a good question.
The thing is, I come from a big family.
There's five of us, and four of us are a year apart.
So it was like, when we were in high school,
senior to freshmen.
And the thing is that my experience was that, look,
I was your typical guy.
My mom, I was cool with my mom.
I didn't really pay much attention
to her, typical male bullshit where you're so
thinking about other things.
And my poor sisters, sort of to carve out their identity,
they had to, in some ways, fight with my mother in ways
that I never had to fight, because my mother would
say things to me.
And me and my brothers, we could just kind of ignore her.
There was kind of the male privilege of sons in a house
that I think is not general, but it can
be found in certain families.
And so part of what this came from
was my own sister's struggles with my mother,
and my mother was a tremendous personality,
a very powerful woman.
And my sisters were very strong willed, too,
and so they would go at it.
And me and my brothers, we were just
would be eating our dinner as my sisters
and my mother would be like arguing incredible fine
points of logic that would make a Jesuit brain malfunction.
But they were sort of arguing about other shit
that we didn't really understand,
but I found that to be part of my life
because I was living it all the time.
And again, I mean, you can't explain it, I don't think.
Every family's particular, but in my family, my sisters,
to grow up, they first had to defeat my mother.
And they're all very good friends.
I mean, they love each other.
They hang out with each other now,
but adolescence, it was some old Conan shit.
And I wanted to capture that because, as a kid,
I was left outside of it, but I could tell
it affected my sister deeply.
There was a second hand back there, yeah?
[INAUDIBLE] blending a fictional story with a [INAUDIBLE]
all the military commanders from the story [INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
Thank you.
That connects a little bit to the question
that I left unanswered from the young gentleman there,
is about the father, the absence of the father figure.
Part of what interested me about the Americas
is that whether you got a dad or you don't get a dad,
one of the cool things or most excruciatingly horrible things
about the Americas is that there's
an already in-place masculinity for you to jump on.
I mean, what's interesting is that--
I mean, guys, for God's sake, it's
a little weird that the country that
claims to be the most religious country
on the planet in some ways is also the happiest
to go to war, yeah?
I mean, my nephews are in Iraq, and my little brother just
got out of the Marines.
And half the time you hear, the US
is like, we're really about our values,
and we're really about this.
But it's kind of a weird thing that the most Christian country
is in a war every 10 years.
I mean, if you were just a fucking alien,
you would be on some CSI shit.
You'd be like, that's a little weird.
That's like saying you're the most peaceable person,
but every day, you come in covered in blood.
You're like, oh yeah, they jumped me.
[LAUGHTER]
And so I was interested in this.
I came from a military family, and again,
it was like, in my family, my family was like,
we're incredibly disciplined.
We're rational, but any chance there was a war, it'd be like,
let's do it.
So part of it was just my personal interest in the way
that this kind of insane masculinity of the Americas,
whether it's military, whether it's sports,
that if you're a guy, you pick up very quickly.
Whether you decide to reject most of it or not,
you're still kind of a PhD in masculinity
if you grow up in the United States.
You might not be able to practice it,
but boy, do you know it, you know?
And I was interested in that, and I was interested in the way
dictatorships work.
I mean, again, I don't think that the Americans are special,
but I do find that we have an interesting relationship
to powerful males in the Americas
that's probably been dangerous for us in the world.
And I was curious about that.
And so in the book, I had done a lot of research.
I mean, I grew up with a military family,
so you get a lot of exposure to military nonsense.
But I needed to do a lot more.
I feel like you can't make jokes in a language
until you're good at the language, right?
And I needed this to be funny, so I
had to learn a ton of military stuff
before I could actually make any kind of jokes, yeah?
We'll just take a couple more, and then I'll leave you off
with a small reading.
Hand up front.
I hate calling on the faculty.
It's a setup, Jason.
[INAUDIBLE]
How is my writing received in the Dominican Republic?
Well, first of all, people in Santo Domingo
got better things to do with 20 bucks than buy a fucking book,
you know?
I mean, straight off the bat, I think people like me
as a-- they think of me as a positive as an abstract.
They're like, he's a Dominican kid who
likes Dominicans, still hangs out with Dominicans,
comes home twice a year, you know?
And so they're like, that's not bad.
He doesn't want any money, so that's OK.
He's not a politician.
But I mean, am I more popular than a bachatero?
No.
I think it's just, wow, how mildly intriguing,
a non problematic art boy, you know?
So they're cool.
I mean, I think I'm like a seven on positivity,
but I'm not sure.
Honestly, I wouldn't say that the pueblo has read the books.
I mean, there's a lot of young people who have,
but again, a lot of that is just photocopies.
And it's hard to generalize what a collective thinks
about an individual.
I know mad rich Dominicans who can't stand the fact that--
look, guys, if you all know rich people,
you know one thing rich people love is other fucking rich
people, you know?
They might like to fuck some of you poor people,
but they really like themselves some rich people.
And Santa Domingo is no different.
I think a lot of times if the elites have
a comment about my work, it tends
to be couched in the terms of the class.
They're like, well, he comes from a poor neighborhood,
doesn't he?
I don't know what that has to do with the book,
but they'll write a review with that.
But I think it's hard to generalize because there's
an enormous range of response even within the various groups
and the various sectors, but I would
say most people are Junot-positive seven.
They're not as positive on--
air conditioners, more popular, you know?
So I mean, for real, no jokes.
Again, I haven't done anything wrong until the day I
get caught smuggling drugs.
Then they'll be like, oh, he's a gangster.
Now he's the man.
Just a couple more, Jason.
I won't let you since you--
Jason came up with some loot this way, sir.
Well, I was hoping you'd just repeat something
I heard you saying to PR earlier today
about the genre mixing in your novel
and the political implications of that,
how you had to go outside--
people have to go outside of realism
to address the reality of America.
Damn, Jason.
OK.
I mean, it sounded so good earlier.
I know, so you'll get the budget version, gang.
The faculty get together and have a couple of drinks
and, they're like, yeah.
We're so smart.
We're teaching.
Fuck, man.
So we were talking about this book has a lot of genre stuff
because someone was asking about the history.
There's these footnotes with all this history
about the history of the Americas,
the Dominican Republic, of Haiti, all
sorts of kind of bizarre stuff.
But also, in this book, there's a lot of kind
of the nerd references, everybody whose friend collects
the comic books, or maybe not friend, the person you know
who plays Magic, that card game.
Some people up front hiding their cards, you know?
So there's a lot of nerd references to books,
comic books, games, and stuff.
And we were talking earlier that one of the things
is that, look, we live in such a complicated,
in such a tremendously, bizarrely ungraspable world
right now.
I mean, I'm sure it's always been that way,
but this is the only world I'm familiar with.
So I'm only going to judge the present right now--
that it's such an extraordinarily complex
and really difficult thing to grapple with,
to wrap your minds around.
I mean, I always think about just the standard anyone here
who's ever emigrated from a poor background
and then found themselves the United States.
It's kind of difficult to describe even to yourself what
it means to wake up one day in a house
with no electricity, no running water, no TV,
and go to bed in a house with electricity,
running water, and cable.
How do you describe that?
And one of the things that we were talking about
was that often the world is so hard to put your arms around,
to even get an approach, to even get an approximation of what
we call the real.
There's no way that realistic fiction can do it.
In other words, if you just stick
to the sort of strategies of realistic fiction,
you're going to miss what I would
call 90% of experience, yeah?
Because it's in the genres, in things like science fiction
and things like fantasy and things
like horrors and things like western where
a lot of the preoccupations or a lot of the concerns
or a lot of the realities of a culture which it doesn't know
how to address yet find expression,
which is a long way of saying that if you
read realistic fiction in the United States in English--
let's say you only read realistic fiction--
you would never know that 90% of the planet
lives in a dictatorship situation.
You would think it was an anomaly.
It was an odd thing, because realistic fiction
tends not to be obsessed with how
power works, how individual power works on collectives.
How does one person dominate a society?
This is stuff that realistic fiction tends to shy away from,
and for every hundred books, you might get
one book about a dictatorship.
On the other hand, you don't have
to scratch more than the surface of science fiction and fantasy
to see that the human obsession, that our anxieties
about this situation are writ large in these narratives.
Almost every science fiction novel and every fantasy novel--
almost all of them are obsessed with a dark lord or a Darth
Vader or a dark side, one huge dominating figure who basically
enslaves an entire population.
I mean, if you really want a sense of what
living in this world right now is like
and the only book that survives is
a piece of literary fiction, whoever is left
is going to be in a lot of trouble
because they're going to have no idea what it was really
like to be human, and a lot of what it's like to be human
is only expressed in the genres that we
consider less reputable.
Our worries about our body, our concerns about aging,
our concerns about violence or the abject
find expression in horror.
Our concerns about power, our fears of technology,
not only our fears but our fetishization of technology
find their way through most of the science fiction,
and for God's sake, guys, we all fuck a lot
more than literary fiction says we fuck.
I don't care what anybody says, you know?
And it's like this comic book writer Alan Moore said.
He's like, life is fantasy, science fiction,
a thriller, often or not, a coming of age bildungsroman,
and if we're lucky a bit of porn, yeah?
And I guess part of me just thinks that if you're
going to be a writer and you're going
to try to approach this world that is enormously
complex, if you dismiss genres, if you say,
oh, horror, fantasy, romance, all these things are crap,
you're basically robbing yourself of tools
that you're going to need to describe
a world that otherwise resists any attempt at description.
And that's why I find the genre so useful,
and that's why I put so much genre in this book
among for other reasons, is I felt
like you can't describe what it means
to be a young person in the United States
without thinking in science fiction or fantasy terms.
Anybody who's ever been to a private school
and whoever felt like they had a chance at making it
or anyone who's ever had a feeling that the America gives
you that feeling that you could become yourself,
that you could become a superstar
or a super athlete or super rich, read yourself a Harry
Potter book, and that expresses that belief
and that feeling much more clearly
than any of the books about--
even my beloved Tobias Wolff's narratives about being
in college or being in a private school, you know?
And so I guess that's a long really not elegant answer
to the more elegant question.
So we'll just take one more that isn't this brainy,
and we'll call it, yeah?
This is the easy one because the last question can always
be bad or good.
Can you speak about the Americas and machismo?
The Americas and machismo--
guys, come on, man.
I don't know if I can answer the Americans and machismo.
All I know is this.
Think about it.
The primary institutions that this country was founded on--
this is where you get to roll your eyes back and fall back
to sleep, guys.
As soon as you hear "primary institutions," you're like,
pass out.
But think about it.
I mean, if you think about the Church,
it's a pretty boyariffic institution, you know?
I mean, it's pretty boy heavy, you know?
And it's all about worship a male.
God's pretty much it, you know?
If you think about the Church but then you
think about the other major institution that
for a very long time dominated the social sphere
of the Americas, which was the plantation--
I mean, look at any country.
And whether we like to talk about the fact
that the country was founded in these terms
or the Americans was funded in these terms, it's true.
The plantation had a much longer history in the Americas
than we'd like to give it credit for.
Everyone thinks it was just this kind of weird aberration.
It happened to you people, But almost all
of what we call American identity,
that was the foundry of it, and the plantation
was a deeply masculinist project and enterprise.
And then think about this place.
I mean, the frontier?
You couldn't think more boy shit than the frontier.
I mean, the frontier was basically
land grab plus race war plus race genocide plus boys
shooting each other.
And so I just think that all of these things--
we can't help it.
We think that these histories have nothing to do with us.
There's people who are like, well,
I came from France in 1982.
What the fuck does that have to do with me?
Well, all of these histories, while they may feel local,
had an enormous global impact.
They shaped the dreams of the entire planet.
When people say the Americas is the dream of the world,
they don't just mean that positively.
They mean a lot of the things that happened here,
whether we had any part or none of it, shaped
the grammar of the way that human beings dream
across the planet.
And that might seem like a weird thing to say and unsustainable,
but if we had years, we could argue.
And I probably won't lose.
I might lose, but I probably won't.
And I think that a huge component
of what we call the American project
has a lot to do with a masculinity
that if a person speaks Spanish they call machismo,
but if a person speaks English in the United States
they call patriotism, you know?
It finds a number of iterations, but it's extremely powerful.
And it's a really wonderful way of feeding
our youth into a horrifying machine, you know?
So I think that when I write as a Dominican writer,
mostly what I'm writing about is masculinity
in the Americas, both Santo Domingo and the US.
I guess, guys, I actually thought
it was harder to be a man--
I thought the demands of masculinity
were much more demanding in the US, you know?
It was really inflexible when I immigrated here, you know?
It's like the codes of being a boy.
I don't know if you guys have little brothers, man.
Watch the little brothers.
It's tough being a boy in this country.
I mean, we all know it's harder to be a girl,
but I think there's very little scrutiny of how much boys have
to leave behind to fit themselves
into this nice little neat box we call "the guy," you know?
And I watch my little cousins, and I'm like,
it's almost like they psychically
have to cut their arms and legs off to fit in there.
So with that cheery statement--
[LAUGHTER]