“Masculinity in the Stories of Junot Diaz”

One of the common threads in Díaz’s first story collection, Drown, is the recurring character and frequent narrator Yunior. In these stories, we see him as a young boy, aged nine and younger, in the Dominican Republic, and as an adolescent in urban New Jersey. Díaz has gone on to employ Yunior as the (partial) narrator of his 2007 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which follows him into his college years at Rutgers, and he reappears as an adult (still going by the juvenile name Yunior) in the 2012 story collection This Is How You Lose Her. Díaz has described his larger writing project as a kind of cumulative biographical novel of Yunior’s life. Yunior’s circumstances closely echo Díaz’s own, yet he insists that his character is not a transparent representation of himself—Yunior is a fictionalized rendition of the author, as Rafa is a “satanic extremity of [Díaz’s] brother.” In the same interview with Richard Wolinsky where he memorably describes Rafa as “satanic,” Díaz says of Yunior, “I had an idea for Yunior at the beginning. My entire project had certain preoccupations. I kept looking for a protagonist that would allow me to address some of these preoccupations. I wanted to talk about gender. I wanted to talk about masculinity. I wanted to talk about race. I needed a character who was fantastically honest, fantastically observant.”

The stories throughout Drown reflect these preoccupations with gender, masculinity, and race, and these preoccupations are focused in this collection on young men in the process of forming their identities. Even the stories that don’t feature Yunior center on young men—pre-teens or early teenagers, sometimes young adults—who occupy Yunior’s north Jersey urban immigrant milieu. We imagine the narrators of “Drown” or “Aurora” or “Edison, New Jersey” as guys Yunior might know, or go to school with, or live down the block from. The collection could be read as a study of coming-of-age as experienced by young Dominican immigrant men to Northamerica, and of course, sexuality and gender identity are a big part of any coming-of-age story. We encounter these characters at a formative stage in their lives, and we see them trying out their nascent masculine identities, figuring out where they fit into the culture. A recurring theme throughout concerns the pressure to be, to act like, a particular type of man: dominant, assertively heterosexual, emotionally detached, sexually virile and promiscuous, and independent of women’s influences. Yunior navigates his coming-of-age with his older brother Rafa and his often absent father as his male role models, and we see him both wanting to be a man and grappling with some serious ambivalence about what it means to be a man in his community. Even in his absence, his father serves an ambivalent role-model function, communicating a picture of “manhood” as independent and not firmly tied to family. It seems that Yunior isn’t sure he wants to be like his father, even as he understands that in many ways his father is typical and representative of what masculinity entails in his world.

We see a similar dynamic between male friends and co-workers throughout these stories, with the narrator/protagonist often as a younger, less experienced male who is “apprenticed” to an older or more experienced man (Lucero and Cut in “Aurora,” the narrator and Beto in “Drown,” the narrator and Wayne in “Edison, New Jersey”). Our protagonists are given subtle and not-so-subtle life lessons in what it means to be a man in this Dominican American community. Another common thread is the relationships between these young men and their mothers. It would sound disparaging to call them “mama’s boys,” but their mothers loom large in their consciousness, and these sometimes emotionally callous young men are remarkably sensitive and empathetic toward their mothers. We see how their views of masculine sexuality are strongly shaped by their lonely, abused, and steadfast mothers—Yunior’s view of his father is largely shaped by his bitterness about his Mami’s suffering and struggle to raise the family in his absence (reflected in “Aguantando”). Yunior’s love and admiration for Mami is unambiguous and evident throughout the book—he portrays her as strong and committed, where his father is shady and unreliable. Did you notice that Díaz dedicates the book to his mother?

Yunior and Rafa share the secret knowledge of their father’s ongoing affair with “the Puerto Rican woman,” and they both decide not to say anything to their mother, in “Fiesta, 1980.” Yunior’s resentment of his father for riding him so relentlessly about his motion sickness is compounded by his resentment of his brazen infidelity and disrespect of his wife. While Rafa seems to be modeling himself as a young Papi-in-training, going off with the girls at the fiesta, Yunior—as the object of his father’s critical scrutiny and negative attention—feels more of an allegiance toward his mother, sitting in the hall and watching her whisper back and forth with her sister. He wants his father to be publicly “exposed” as a cheater, and he even looks forward to it as a justified comeuppance (40), but he hesitates to be the one to do it (in large part because he doesn’t want to hurt his mother, but also because he’s not certain it would improve the situation to tell her). What he’s really learning in this story is that his mother likely knows something about the affair, and that she resents it but is powerless to do anything about it. When his father unabashedly takes him to the other woman’s apartment, Yunior glimpses how unremarkable and commonplace such infidelity is in this community—a “boys will be boys” approach that sends him and Rafa mixed signals. On the one hand, he’s upset at the way it hurts and upsets his mother; on the other hand, he realizes on some level that the sexual double standard will apply to him, too, and that he might even be expected to be a habitual cheater.

There are interesting examples of young men learning these implicit lessons about gender and masculinity throughout these stories, but I’ll just cite one other. The narrator in “Edison, New Jersey” has recently broken up with his girlfriend, and he laments that his mother misses her as much as he does. He has his own ethical limitations—he openly boasts about “stealing” from his boss—but his moral sense is strong when reacting to Wayne’s open boasting about his own marital infidelity. “Twice this year Wayne’s cheated on his wife and I’ve heard it all, the before and after,” he complains. The narrator communicates his disapproval, but that makes Wayne drive all crazy, so he “[tries] to forget that I think his wife is good people and ask[s] him if Charlene’s given him any signals” (124). He’s bothered by Wayne’s reports of pursuing Charlene throughout the story, no doubt chafing after his own recent breakup with “the girlfriend.” When he makes his romantic effort to “save” the Dominican maid by helping her escape from Pruitt, Wayne warns him not to. The only way the narrator can save face is to imply that he is just trying to score with the maid. Wayne asks, “Was it worth it?” and the narrator admits “it wasn’t.” “Did you at least get some?” Wayne asks. “Hell yeah,” the narrator replies. When pressed, he says, “Why would I lie about something like that?” (138). Well, why would he lie? The reader knows that whatever romantic interactions went on in the van on the way to Washington Heights were awkward and halting, endearingly innocent, in contrast to Wayne’s relentless pursuit of women. The narrator does seem to have some vague romantic intentions: he puts his hand in her lap and leaves it there as he drives, hoping she’ll grasp his hand. She doesn’t. “Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work” (137). The narrator is not a predatory alpha-male but a sweet, romantic dude who is quite passive and even childlike in his efforts to seduce the maid. His bid to “save” her is deemed foolish by Wayne, his mentor figure, and the only way he can reclaim his pride is to insist that he “scored” with her. He turns himself into a Wayne—there’s less shame in predatory pursuit of women for sex than this quasi-heroic, even chivalrous attempt to rescue her from a sketchy situation.

We see these young men at decisive stages in their lives, in terms of gender and identity. It makes sense why this macho ideal of masculinity would take hold in a marginalized and exploited immigrant community like this (with roots, of course, in the Dominican culture they’ve moved from—Papi is already cheating before he comes to the US). These men feel marginal, neglected, criminalized, and ostracized from the American Dream and mainstream white American culture. They live among poverty, vice, and often squalor, and the projection of physical strength and independence has a lot to do with pride and a strong assertion of self. Their masculinity is implictly under attack in America, and they have something to prove. Yunior, in Oscar Wao, has gotten deep into weightlifting, and Díaz has described his character’s bodybuilding as a way to give himself a kind of protective layer against his vulnerabilities and insecurities. We can see the men in all these stories as playing out some version of this same dynamic, asserting their dominance over the women in their lives when they are unable to assert it elsewhere.