Tuesday, February 01, 2005
amour robotic
In an old interview, five years after his seminal collection of short fiction Drown was published, Junot Diaz got all deep and said this: "way too often, writers of color are, basically, nothing more than performers of their 'otherness'." Coincidentally, that was my first thought after I read Diaz's book (example: this dude went pop fiction because basically white folk like to read about wacky brown people and their experiences. in English, too!) because his minimalist prose style doesn't always hit me where it hurts so good. But, its more complicated than that--and he certainly has a point about writers of "color". Ishmael Reed has spilled more words on this than putting an Eric B. and Rakim record on repeat for 8,000 years: writing is fighting. But, again, its more complicated than that. Javier Marias put it well: 'literature is the space for complexity'. Textures, symbolism, structural construction--all this is imperative in disrupting the mundane continuity of merely writing about your experience as a a nonwhite person and because you are a nonwhite person writing about your experiences then you expect people to love you. run-on sentences are fun.
I've been thinking heavily about all this as I work on two new stories. One with a strong, independent female character and one with an eccentric latin-american male character that deals with memory, stealing paintings out of art museums, tape recorders and graffiti. I realized, in the end, it doesn't matter.
One just writes.
