Old Reviews: 
Act of liberation or trap
Diaz’s stories and their characters cannot be fully appreciated without understanding the place called Dominican Republic
By Moazzam Sheikh

The talented Junot Diaz’s third book can both be read as a novel or a collection of short stories or a sort of a novel in stories. With the publication of      ‘This Is How You Lose Her’,  it is clear that Diaz has developed his signature idiom and language register. This can both be an act of liberation (in the post-colonial sense, at least) and a trap.

The prose keeps the reader in its spell. In the hands of the writer, language itself becomes a subject matter that glues all nine stories together. What else provides the book its cohesiveness is that pretty much all the characters are of Dominican Republic heritage making out a future as immigrants. Some are victims but some are survivors of the proverbial American Dream.

Seen from a feminist lens, the book posits a thesis that men are bigger victims whereas most women are real survivors because the two-fold patriarchal system that oppresses them cannot finish them off. Most men introduced in the various stories disintegrate, both literally and figuratively.

In his classic work     The ‘Ethnic Myth: Race’, Ethnicity, and Class in America,  Stephen Steinberg debunked the view that it is the immigrant’s cultural values and ethnic traits that determine his/her economic destiny. Instead, the sociologist has tried to prove that locality, class conflict, selective migration, and other historical and economic factors played more dominant roles in her success. In short, there is no such thing as a Model Minority. Instead, it is the mode of entry.

It is for this reason I stress that Diaz’s stories and their characters cannot be fully appreciated without understanding the place called Dominican Republic.

Is it a prosperous country? Is it a poor nation? Is it an independent entity? A place traumatised by persistent colonialism? Is it a banana republic? What is its relationship to the US? A cursory glance would reveal American rule and regular intervention, including the toppling of the democratically-elected president Leonel Fernández. The two biggest sources of income, it seems, are a large Dominican diaspora that sends money and its service industry, and its top-notch golf courses that attract tourists all year round. These golf courses are situated in off-limit areas where the natives cannot go. The very first story in the collection touches on this theme.

Colonialism damages, among other things, the conquered man’s sense of virility; complicating further the idea of male proprietorship. The author himself may not have helped in this case. He went along with the prevalent assumption that the gullible readership prefers to read the lines which sparkle with male promiscuity and sexual and sexist language as the Dominican male’s uncontrollable urge to be consistently unfaithful in marital and romantic relationship instead of reading between the lines.

The book’s protagonist, Yunior, laments the fact that, like most Dominican men, his father and brother were both unfaithful and addicted to sex. Yunior confesses his sadness at the fact that the sex addict gene did not skip him, and his girlfriend, whom he loved dearly, breaks up with him after finding through his emails that he had cheated on her with 50 other women. The figure 50 is not a careless throw of a number. It stands for the 50 states of America, even if Diaz numbers it subconsciously. The idea at play here is that the seduction of the fifty has caused Yunior to lose his one true love — the life in Dominican Republic.

What the author is trying to tell the reader is that it was inevitable. For the humiliation and self-devaluation that Dominican men go through when they arrive in the US results in tremendous pain. That mixed with a feeling of devalued sense of malehood, the easiest recourse is to seek out a drug that numbs the pain. This drug comes in the form of addiction to sexual conquest that temporarily boosts the male ego.

The living conditions in the US for men of a certain class, that Yunior’s father and brother belong to, are harsh as is evident in story after story. Yunior’s father’s disappearance and brother’s succumbing to cancer is metaphorical in a sense. The real cancer in the American society is racism. This comes out in full force in the final chapter. Our protagonist by this time is living in Boston, a city famous for higher learning, and despite all odds has managed to land a job as a professor. This is no mean achievement. But pay attention to the following lines:

“Almost on cue a lot of racist shit starts happening. Maybe        it was always there, maybe you’ve become more sensitive after all your time in NYC. White people pull up at traffic and scream at you with a hideous rage, like you nearly ran over their mothers. It’s f***ing scary. Before you can figure out what the f*** is going on they flip you the bird and peel out. It happens again and again. Security follows you in stores and every time you step on Harvard property you’re asked for ID. Three times, drunk white dudes try to pick fights with you in different parts of the city… You take it all very personally. I hope someone drops a f***ing   bomb  on this city, you rant. This is why no people of color want to live here. Why all my black and Latino students leave as soon as they can…”

The paragraph above does not only remind us about what happened to Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard in 2009, it is too prophetic. Though by the middle of the last story Yunior has completely fallen apart, he ends the novel on hope.

Part of the reason why I chose to review this remarkable piece of fiction was that the aspect of connecting the sexual with the political was completely missing from other reviews I read — that the book was not about a critique of some genetic disorder in Dominican men when it comes to sexual behaviour.

Rather the book is political. It is a critique of colonialism and foreign intervention that harm indigenous balance of relationship. If it conquers your motherland and demolishes the citizens’ sense of self-respect, it is only natural to further disrespect the female sex as it was already the weaker of the two in terms of political and economic status quo.

The other reason in reviewing the book was to bring attention to the dearth of this kind of political fiction — exploring the “sexual is political” paradigm — written by people of Pakistani origin, be it in English or Urdu. In my limited experience, I have witnessed more frankness and risk in Punjabi fiction than in Urdu or English. What Junot Diaz does so brilliantly in this book is that he announces a break with the middle class sensibility; not only in terms of the subject matter but in terms of language itself.

While Yunior’s character may be an subconscious homage to Holden Caulfield (protagonist of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’), his language is a homage to America’s modern urban reality.

Moazzam Sheikh’s collection of stories ‘Cafe Le Whore and Other Stories’ is due this year.