Junot Diaz on children’s books, representation and white supremacy
The latest work from novelist Junot Díaz, winner of a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “genius grant” and National Book Critics Circle Award, began with a plea from his goddaughters.
They begged Díaz to create a book that reflected their reality, as “smart, young Dominican girls of African descent living in the Bronx.”
“I always felt like, damn, I really owe these girls something,” said Díaz, a self-admitted slow writer who famously took a decade to complete his dazzling “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” “I told them I would do it.”
And he did. Twenty years later – with “Islandborn,” a 48-page picture book with lush illustrations by Leo Espinosa that marks the first foray into children’s literature for Díaz, who will be in Houston on April 3 for a reading at Christ Church Cathedral, sponsored by the Blue Willow Bookshop.
“They’re like, ‘Yo, it took you long enough’,” Díaz said in a recent phone interview of his goddaughters, who are now in their 20s.
Díaz is part of a wave of well-known adult novelists – such as Edwidge Danticat, Dave Eggers and Jane Smiley – who are trying a hand at writing for a younger audience.
For Díaz, whose “Oscar Wao” was chosen by a group of critics as the best novel of the 21st century to date, the genre required creating “new techniques and tricks because none of the old tricks were going to work.”
As requested, the main character is Lola, a brown-skinned girl who wears her hair in an Afro-puff and comes from a place called the Island. The kind of character Díaz’s goddaughters longed to see but couldn’t find, the kind still all-too-rare in children’s books.
More than just a promise kept, “Islandborn” is also a literary feat.
A children’s book that explores the hidden corners of immigrant life, where sunny memories can mask a dark history. An allegory for both Rafael Trujillo’s brutal 31-year dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and the resurgence of white supremacy in this country. An attempt to pierce through what Díaz calls the “overwhelmingly white” landscape of children’s literature.