[dropcap]I[/dropcap] am one of these unfortunate Calibans who is made up of all these different elements, so it’s hard to distinguish which one predominates because the answer is that none do.” This is Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and, his most recent collection, This Is How You Lose Her. With Díaz’s debut in 1997 his voice burst into our consciousness and exploded. His tragi-comic portrayal of the lives of Dominican immigrants in the barrios of New Jersey all centred around the breathlessly intimate and endearing figure of Yuníor who narrates both short story collections and the novel (Oscar Wao). But how can you fit Díaz into a neat little blurb, for he embodies diversity; he is defined by the very contradictions and disjunctions which make him so difficult to categorize.

Díaz radiates revolution. Even his form is complex and fragmented. His first collection, Drown, traces vignettes of Yuníor’s life, oscillating between childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. His most recent collection, released last September, is the continuation of this work; it is both part two and a completely distinct work in itself. These collections slip out of the definition of short story. They are too novelistic in their themes, in the familiarity the reader forms with Yuníor’s life. Díaz’s books enter an in-between space between the novel and the story: a third form, “a novel in pieces”. While Drown forms a kind of artistic manifesto — focusing predominantly on immigrant experience and issues of hybridity and belonging — Díaz’s novel focuses on history, its telling and how it forms identity. This is How You Lose Her reveals Yuníor, the author-figure, as the collection closes with the beginning of a novel called The Cheater’s Guide to Love, which sounds suspiciously similar to the work it exists within.

This focus on storytelling, on the creation of new histories, the opening up of space for new voices is what Díaz is all about: “I found there to be something very productive about the very narrator-protagonist that I’m working with actually being, himself, a story-maker. And so, therefore, his own process of making stories, his own awareness of the way stories work, would make the reader more aware of the usual subterranean processes of Stories… Yuníor being a storyteller allows me to engage the reader in a sort of high level hide and seek.” Critics have referred to his work so far as a kind of trilogy. Indeed, having read all three books the reader finds themselves uncontrollably within Yuníor’s psyche. We watch him love, cheat, get his haircut; we love his duality, his comedy, his ambiguity and insecurity. “If I was giving advice to a younger author, I’d probably tell them to not pick such a recalcitrant avatar through which to tell their story,” Díaz pondered. “Yuníor is very indirect, he is very reticent about what he has actually suffered. He, in my mind, is the opposite, an exact diametrical pole, of the sort of confessional spirit of the current age.”

It is through Yuníor that Díaz negotiates this tension between belonging and displacement. His work seek to chip away at the erasure American culture performs on its immigrant populations, his focus on history is a way to break open a new space for these stories to emerge. Díaz’s language crashes through binaries. His razor-edge prose mixes poetic, lyrical phrases with irreverent adolescent drawl, punctuated with jolts of Spanish slang and break-neck cultural reference. He roots this unique style in Yuníor’s crackling interiority: “So I was like, OK, let me build a language where this kid, who in some ways is, like, exploding in all different directions, let me build a language so he can find a home for himself.” Many have noted the distinct autobiographical aspects of Díaz’s work but it is in his creation of this new linguistic hybrid where his and Yuníor’s experiences are most tightly bound. “Listen, I don’t exist… if you only know me in English I only exist partially, if you only know me in Spanish I only exist partially… So I think there’s no question that there was a part of me that was fashioning, through my books, a place where I could be simultaneously and finally revealed. It’s really one place I come together, everywhere else I feel like I’m a partial representation.” When I asked whether he came to this voice naturally Díaz responded with a satirical laugh. “Girl, let me tell you something, there were hundreds of earlier iterations that were abandoned. I mean I’ve spent years trying to find the right— what we would call the goldilocks tone. It took a long time, man. He came off too ghetto, he came off too Jersey, he came off too fucking bruto in Spanish, he came off too fucking overbearing. It wasn’t supposed to be a voice to make friends with anybody it was supposed to be a voice that was meant to be human.”

For the moment Díaz is looking forward to a break. With almost sixteen years between his debut and his most recent release, he is almost an anomaly in the current book market. Refusing to churn out a book a year, he makes it no secret that he struggles with his writing. When the subject of his most recent project came up he sighed, “You know what, I’ll be honest with you, this project is going so poorly… I don’t know what the next book will be.” In the New Yorker’s first ever science-fiction edition, Díaz submitted a short story, Monstro, which he tipped to become his next novel.  A self-professed “genre nerd,” the author’s turn to the dystopic represents a fresh take on the tradition apocalyptic tale which centres itself on a brutal viral outbreak in Haiti which turns its victims into violent zombies. This geographical relocation of this familiar plot allows for a more immediate form of social and political commentary, a feature which is omnipresent in Díaz’s writing.

More than anything, he is a social realist. His voice is one which echoes and pops against the psychology of the American Dream, interrogates notions of identity, explores and explodes conventions of masculinity, wades through the thick, undefined texture of love and bounces its language off the reader. During the interview Díaz mentioned that his writing is a kind of writing against silence, “I knew that if I did not bear witness to myself and to my reality I would forever be a member of the disappeared.” Having read Díaz’s prose, it is impossible to imagine his disappearance; his voice shatters something inside you and is forever at the back of your mind.