cancelling junot diaz

Like many readers I have been trying to wrap my mind around the recent accusations of misogyny and sexual misconduct surrounding Junot Diaz, in the light of his extraordinarily brave and painful article in the New Yorker about childhood trauma and rape at the age of eight.

I don't know what saddens me more - the stories of his misconduct or the public reaction to it.  When I first read the New Yorker story I was stunned.  Diaz had dismantled his image - removed, in a sense, the very impetus for much of his writing - unmade the persona he had created and revealed deep personal agonies. You couldn't get more vulnerable.  "Not enough pages in the world to describe what it did to me," Diaz wrote. "The whole planet could be my inkstand and it still wouldn’t be enough. That shit cracked the planet of me in half, threw me completely out of orbit, into the lightless regions of space where life is not possible."

Then came allegations of his own misconduct.  When I talked to a few colleagues, I found myself in the minority since only one person agreed with  me that Diaz' New Yorker article, preemptive or not, put his behavior in stark perspective - and that this should be weighed more seriously.  Others were less interested in the complexities of the story.

For them, his article was preemptive, pure and simple.  Publishing now was all about control, and little about anything else. Junot Diaz is now grown up, and heartbreaking thought his childhood trauma must have been, he should know better than to go off on people at conferences and forceably kiss them. He had it coming.

So now he has withdrawn from the Sydney Writers Festival and likely other conferences and festivals will also cancel his appearances going forward.  But as Roxane Gay has suggested "we need a more nuanced conversation than just Junot Diaz is cancelled."

Where there is sexual trauma there are ripples, and these ripples reach into the author's public life.  Junot Diaz has gone off on women in bizarre and disproportionate ways - and he once forceably kissed a graduate student.  I will undoubtedly get flack for saying this.  But my reaction is  - really? Maybe it's generational.  Frankly, most women in my generation have been forceably kissed at some point or other.  Yes, by their professors, too.  Is it unpleasant? Sure.  Repulsive?  Certainly.  But would I equate the trauma I experienced with the rage and pain experienced by an eight year old rape victim, who has nobody to turn to? Not one bit. I wouldn't even call it trauma.  I'd call it one of the many unpleasant things that sometimes happens in life

I should probably mention here that I was raised on Bible stories - and what comes to me when I think about all this, is a story in the book of John about stoning an adulterous woman.  "He who is without sin among you," said Jesus  "let him cast the first stone."   I am so longing for a more complex discussion about misogyny, anger and sexual misconduct - one that will heal wounds rather than pour salt into them. And yes, I would like Junot Diaz to be part of that discussion. I would like to hear more than that he has taken responsibility for his behavior.

Aside from all this, there's the question of our relationship to the work itself.  Diaz' work relies heavily on a persona  - and those of us who have read him will recognize his persona in the reprehensible behavior he's now seen to have exhibited towards women.  His stories in Drown - in This is How You Lose her,  all the objectification of women and his language are cut from the same cloth as Diaz himself.  Those stories were  revered - championed,  and early in his career, when he read in New York from Drown, received with cult like enthusiasm.

Years ago, I went to a reading he gave with Ursula Le Guin.  It was in a church.  Later a friend asked, "do you think there was too much pussy for the church?"  I met Diaz at the reception afterwards and he was very edgy - very on,  and yes, absolutely ready to shock all and sundry in conversation.

But let's remember that the man and his work are two separate things. I know some serious readers who refuse to read V S Naipaul, for instance, because he is such a nasty piece of work as a person. After all, he beat up his lover so badly that she couldn't walk out in public for several days.  But Naipaul is also a Nobel Laureate and his work is extraordinary.  Sometimes I hate his perspective. But I read it not because I think the man is good - but for the work's intelligence and insight, for the way it gives me a way into material I would not find on my own.

 Beethoven had a fiery temper.  Ezra Pound was a Nazi. As was Wagner -  Hitler's favorite composer.  Louis CK is a jerk - but you cannot deny that he's also very funny.  Surely we can separate the work from the people who create it.  Is Oscar Wao less wondrous now that we've discovered that Diaz is an asshole?

Again, I think of Helen Garner's observation, included in my previous post, that our sense of powerlessness, our inability to protect ourselves or our children from the real predators of the world "must get bottled up and then let loose on poor blunderers who get drunk at parties and make clumsy passes."

Diaz is more than a blunderer.  But I categorize a forced kiss - or bad consensual sex as on the same spectrum.  Not nice, mean, demeaning and misogynist.  And yes, certainly entitled. But it belongs in a very different category to the rape which destroyed his innocence when he was a child.

Meanwhile, we have the ugliest, most crass, self serving bully misogynist serving in the highest office in the land. Can it get any worse?  Maybe our sense of powerlessness to oust such a scumbag from center stage causes us to 'cancel' the lesser misogynists among us.

I wish we could do better.