It’s not often that I bring the personal lives of authors into our discussions of their work, but the choice to teach Diaz right now is a fraught one (for me and other colleagues) in light of recent national conversations centered on the toxic culture of masculinity, especially in response to Diaz’ New Yorker piece this year and the allegations that followed. This summer, educators weighed in about whether or not to still teach Diaz (see this and this if interested). MIT was pressured to remove him from their faculty (but did not). His children’s book was pulled from many bookstores. So I wonder: What do we do with the literary figures for whom we feel such admiration when we find out such news? Authors (like their characters) are not flawless, and their fictions do not equal their lives (or vice versa); that does not excuse misogyny or relieve our disappointment. To not teach Diaz would mean to not teach Hemingway or Eliot or Hardy, or any number of canonized authors whose books I’ve carried with me throughout my writing life, whose literature has aesthetic and pedagogical value; brilliant writers who were, also, misogynists of their time. (This also raises the question: who gets canonized?) To not teach Diaz is to pass over one of the most innovative fictional voices of our time. And yet I’ve struggled with this choice. I feel responsible for incorporating even more women into the syllabus (ie. Cisneros). But reading Diaz right now offers an opportunity to critically examine the colonial and contemporary contexts (institutions, social structures, figures) of white supremacy that enable the conditions for the machismo so rampant in Diaz’ stories and in our current political climate; a machismo embodied by characters who are portrayed as perpetrators and victims (just as Diaz himself). And so I hope that reading Diaz is also an opportunity to critically self-reflect on what can be generative about engaging his stories, especially if we are to realize our own complicity in sustaining negative discourses of masculinity, and our capacity to disrupt them.
On Thursday we will inevitably address the art/life blur that Diaz presents, but there is more power in staying inside the stories to see how these characters were ever conceived in the first place, and how — or why — they could possibly feel so real.
Consider, also, this, in which the author asks: “How can [Diaz] write so convincingly from the perspective of a machismo cad and still write a book that is not itself sexist?”
Please read this poem by Alicita Rodriguez, “How to Know You’re a Woman in a Junot Diaz Novel.”
