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I Mean In The Community That I Grew Up In, You Know, A Very, You Know, Mixed, Almost Entirely African Diaspora Community, One Of The Things That We Were Not Ever Supposed To Say Was How Much Self-hatred And Colorism Determined And Guided What We Would Call Our Desire. In Other Words, What We Would Consider Beautiful.

-Junot Diaz

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I Mean In The

Junot Diaz

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I Mean In The Community That I Grew Up In, You Know, A Very, You Know, Mixed, Almost Entirely African Diaspora Community, One Of The Things That We Were Not Ever Supposed To Say Was How Much Self-hatred And Colorism Determined And Guided What We Would Call Our Desire. In Other Words, What We Would Consider Beautiful.

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People Can Say What They Want, But Historically, Feminism In The Dominican Republic Has Been Extremely Strong. I Guess The Best Way Of Saying It Is That No One Could Have Survived What We Survived - Whether It Was First Extermination And Slavery, Then Abandonment And Erasure, Then The Series Of Gunboat Two-bit Dictatorships, Followed By The Final Apotheosis Of Dictatorships, The Trujillato. You Couldn't Survive It Without The Resistance Of This Kind Of Woman.

I Think Men Spend So Much Time Passing For Being Men.

Love Is The Great Test Of The Human. The Human Is Tested By Our Ability To Withstand Love. Love Is So Difficult, It Is So Challenging, It Demands Of Us That We Wreck It With Ourselves. It Demands Of Us An Honesty That Few Of Us Could Sustain.

For Kind Of Sophisticated Art I'm Interested In, The Larger Structural Rebuke Has To Be So Subtle That It Has To Be Distributed At An Almost Sub-atomic Level. Otherwise, You Fall Into The Kind Of Preachy, Moralistic Fable That I Don't Think Makes For Good Literature.

When I Was Thinking About These Women Characters, No Matter How Bad A Person I Am - A Bad Writer, My Limitations, My Sexism, You Know - The Thought Was, It Would Be Useful As A Writer To Try To Create A Template For All The Male Writers, Especially Dominican Male Writers, Especially Males Of Color, Of How A Writer Can Use Seeing To Create More Nuanced Representations Of Women.

[donald] Trump Is What Happens In America Every Time It Feels Economically And Politically Threatened, And It Encounters The Limitations Of Its Own White Supremacists Practices.

Each Morning, Before Jackie Started Her Studies, She Wrote On A Clean Piece Of Paper: Tarde Venientibus Ossa. To The Latecomers Are Left The Bones.

Travel Light. She Extended Her Arms To Embrace Her House, Maybe The Whole World.

You Try Every Trick In The Book To Keep Her. You Write Her Letters. You Quote Neruda. You Cancel Your Facebook. You Give Her The Passwords To All Your E-mail Accounts. Because You Know In Your Lying Cheater’s Heart That Sometimes A Start Is All We Ever Get.

The World Should Always Be Concerned Whenever A Vast Human Rights Violation Occurs Anywhere On The Planet.

The U.s. That I Had Imagined Was Nowhere Near As Crazy And As Incredibly Damaging And Brutal And Indifferent As The U.s. That We're Currently Living In. I Thought I Was Being Transgressive, Apocalyptic, An Out-there Person. And Then Reality Lapped Me, It Just Lapped Me.

I Have A Very Powerful Sense Of Place, But I Have A Very Powerful Sense Of Being A Migrant, So It's Both. It Seems Like I'm Always Leaving My Home. That's Part Of The Formula. I Love The Dominican Republic. I Go Back All The Time. I Love New Jersey. Go Back All The Time.

The Only Difference Between A Published And Unpublished Writer Is A Tolerance For Imperfection.

My Art Feels Like It's Real Disobedient. I Can Fill Notebooks With Observations And Maybe They Find Their Way Into The Work Unconsciously, Which Is Great. I've Never Been Able To Directly Plug, Like To Take A Little Snip That I've Picked Up On The Street And Transfer It Into A Story. I Don't Know What's Wrong, But It Never Works That Way.

I Act Most Like Myself... When I'm In My Hometown, Santo Domingo. I Try To Get There About Five Times A Year.

I Write Incredibly Slowly. And, On Top Of That, I Spent My Entire Youth And Twenties Working Like A Dog, So One Of The Things That Happened When I Finished Drown Was That I Got Busy Living. I'd Never Travelled, I'd Never Seen Anything. So I Did As Much Travelling As My Job Teaching Would Allow.

I Seem To Enjoy Telling Stories With A Central Absence, With A Lacuna Tunnelled Into Them.

Success, After All, Loves A Witness, But Failure Can't Exist Without One.

The Body Is What Reminds Us On A Daily Basis That We're Human. The Body Defies Us, It Betrays Us, We Have To Struggle With It, You Know. And It Reveals In Curious And In Abiding Ways How We Are Not Perfect.

If We Do Not Begin To Practice The Muscles Of Having A Possessive Investment In Each Other's Oppressions, Then We Are In Some Serious Trouble.

I Write Very, Very Slowly, And For Me, I Have To Summon All Sorts Of Resources To Make One Of These Pieces Work.

For A Long Time, I Let My Mother Say What She Wanted About Me, And What Was Worse, For A Long Time I Believed Her.

This Country Wants To Live In The Illusion That It Is Tolerant But Also Wants To Be Able To Practice Intolerance.

I Prefer The 1950s Where People Were Like, "i'm A White Supremacist, And That's Who I Am." Now People Want To Burn A Cross On Your Lawn And Call Themselves Not Racists.

I'm Having So Much Trouble With Writing. Maybe If I Help Other People, It'll Be Easier For Me.

Tell Her That You Love Her Hair, That You Love Her Skin, Her Lips, Because, In Truth, You Love Them More Than You Love Your Own.

One Of The Many Characteristics Of The New Is That, At First, It's Very Hard To Recognize It For What It Is. We're Lucky If We Recognize Something As Being New When It First Appears. Usually I Think We Don't Have That Privilege. It's Usually After The Fact That We Suddenly Turn Around And Say, 'wow, This Thing Is Amazing.'

Nothing More Exhilarating ... Than Saving Yourself By The Simple Act Of Waking.

The Thing Is - Do We Really Need Another Writer Who Writes A Book Every Eighteen Months, Whether The Quality Is Wonderful Or Not? I Mean, Maybe. But I Can Name Twenty Off The Top Of My Head Who Do It. Maybe What We Need Is A Writer Like Me Who Goes Very Slow, As Well.

This Is What I Know: People's Hopes Go On Forever.

Part Of It Is Eight Years Of A Black President, And White America Still Lost Their [minds] About That. Part Of It Is A Republican Politics Of Vicious, Vicious Partisan [stuff] That Has Completely Poisoned What We Would Call The Political Rhetorical Sphere. All Of These Things Come Together In A Perfect Storm.

...and When He Thought About The Way She Laughed, As Though She Owned The Air Around Her, His Heart Thundered Inside His Chest, A Lonely Rada.

You Said I Could Call You When I Wanted But That You Wouldn’t Call Me. You Have To Decide Where And When, You Said. If You Leave It Up To Me I’ll Want To See You Every Day. At Least You Were Honest, Which Is More Than I Can Say For Me.

On The Outside, Oscar Simply Looked Tired, No Taller, No Fatter, Only The Skin Under His Eyes, Pouched From Years Of Quiet Desperation, Had Changed. Inside, He Was In A World Of Hurt. He Saw Black Flashes Before His Eyes. He Saw Himself Falling Through The Air. He Knew What He Was Turning Into. He Was Turning Into The Worst Kind Of Human On The Planet: An Old Bitter Dork. Saw Himself At The Game Room, Picking Through The Miniatures For The Rest Of His Life. He Didn't Want This Future But He Couldn't See How It Could Be Avoided, Couldn't Figure His Way Out Of It. Fukú.

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