The Importance of Language in Drown

           In Junot Diaz’s Drown, the collection of short stories reveals images of the immigrant experience in ten semi-autobiographical stories. Diaz’s status as a bilingual writer living in a country where his native tongue is not the dominant language greatly influences the way he writes in Drown.

In many of the short stories Diaz weaves Spanish words into the English text, which gives the story new depth. For example in “Ysreal” Diaz writes, “The next morning the roosters were screaming. Rafa dumped the ponchera in the weeds and then collected our shoes from the patio, careful not to step on the pile of cacao beans Tia had set out to dry"(Drown 9). The Spanish words blend easily into the English sentence, placing the reader into the mindset of the narrator.

The relationship between the Spanish and English takes on a different context in stories like “Edison, New Jersey” as the narrator is beginning to come of age. Diaz conveys the narrator’s struggle to reconcile his two worlds by emphasizing the differences between American and Dominican culture, especially language. Yunior, a pool table delivery boy, only uses Spanish (his native language) to point out the differences between himself and the American culture he’s immersed in. For example, he describes his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend as “zangano” and “painfully gringo” (Drown 126), demonstrating his feelings of separation from the world around him.

  From a retrospective point of view, the epigraph at the beginning of the book implies that language will play an important role in the work before one even starts to read it. When Diaz chose Gustavo Perez Firmat’s words, "The fact that I/am writing to you/in English/already falsifies what I/wanted to tell you,” he calls into question the ideals of authenticity and belonging and the role that language plays in achieving them. This theme is emphasized even more throughout the book when Diaz chooses not to emphasize Spanish words, which breaks the Standard English language rules. Perhaps Diaz’s chose to ignore these grammatical standards to illustrate the marginalization of non-English speakers in America.