Yunior’s idea of Dominican Masculinity

In Junot Diaz’s Drown, multiple short stories depict the lives and habits of various Dominicans related to Yunior. The central idea of Dominican masculinity is not only present in Drown, but in two other books narrated by Yunior as well: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This is How You Lose Her.

In Drown, Diaz begins to develop a depiction of Dominican masculinity through the actions of Yunior’s father. Whenever Yunior rides in his father’s Volkswagen van, he is prone to throwing up. When the family attends a party together, Yunior’s father tells him: “ ‘If you eat anything, I’m going to beat you...and if your brother gives you any food, I’ll beat him too. Right here in front of everybody’” (Diaz 37). From the beginning of Yunior’s childhood, his father is characterized by his frequent use of violence on not only Yunior, but also his entire family. Due to his father’s violent behavior, Yunior grows up with the social norm that men must be tough and forceful as a means of getting what they want. Any signs of weakness or immaturity are consistently repressed.

Throughout The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Diaz gives readers a contrasting depiction of what is not considered Dominican masculinity through the life of Yunior’s friend Oscar. Aside from during his childhood, Oscar is unable to have serious relationships with women because of his physical appearance and interests in sci-fi genres. Because he lacks a father figure for most of his life, Oscar continues to withdraw from conventional activities that Yunior tries to involve him in, like “the gym,” “novias (girlfriends),” and “slutties” (Diaz 172). Because Oscar is an un-athletic virgin that fails to fit in with Yunior and his friends, his Dominican ethnicity is sarcastically questioned at times. Thus, his personality and physical characteristics are examples of what is not considered to be masculine by Dominicans.

This Is How You Lose Her further depicts Dominican Masculinity through Yunior’s continual unfaithfulness to his girlfriends. Even though he is satisfied with his girlfriend Alma, he still cheats on her and writes about it in his journal. She ends up reading it one day and immediately dumping him. (Diaz 50). Yunior is even aware of his disloyal behavior. He states his ex Magda “considers [him] a typical Dominican man: a sucio, an asshole” (Diaz 3). As Yunior recalls all his different relationships throughout the novel, it is clear that his ideas on what is normal Dominican male behavior are a product of his role models as a child: his father and brother.

As Yunior develops throughout all three novels, it is clear that much of why he does what he does is a result of his being raised with his brother and father. The way they treat women and Yunior himself shapes his idea of what is normal male behavior.

Blog Post 5 - The Women around Yunior and their Independence

Over the course of the three books, a certain theme is established that is true for almost all of the women involved: from Mami to La Inca and Beli, even to Yunior's exes in This is How You Lose Her, independence and power are more prevalent as time goes on.  Shown in "Aguantando" and "Invierno" is a picture of Mami as changing fundamentally with and without her husband.  Yunior describes the one photograph he sees of her before marriage as being completely different than her image afterwards; the change is more pronounced when one sees her faithfulness and devotion by "barr[ing] the door with her arm while she said good-bye, just to show them that nobody was getting in" (Drown 73).  Despite Papi's affairs, for which he regularly takes Yunior and Rafa along, Mami never wavers.  Regardless of the fact that the boys are smacked around regularly, her children bind her to Papi.

However, both elements must be present for a woman to be so dependent on a man, as shown by La Inca and Beli.  In La Inca's case, after the death of her husband, she mourned for the rest of her life and never loved a man again.  It was through this process that La Inca acquired independence: she found a man, she lost the man, and was free by virtue of never loving again.  While she did end up taking Beli in as a daughter, the fact remains that her independence was not hampered; after all, she owned a chain of very successful bakeries.  La Inca followed suit in a similar manner, only she actually had children before the tragedy struck.  She was bound, for a time, first to the Gangster and then to her husband upon coming to America, but once he left and she vowed never to love, just like La Inca had, she was strong, independent, and able to take care of herself just fine.

Lastly, most of Yunior's exes are relevant to the newly-found power and independence by way of sexual freedom, but a particularly striking example is that of the "young morena from the Harvard Law School," who ends up having a child but the father is uncertain (This Is How You Lose Her 193).  Upon getting pregnant, the woman leaves her current boyfriend so that Yunior can take care of her, using his time, money, and space for the sake of a child he assumes will be his.  However, as soon as she goes into labor, Yunior gets kicked out of her life in favor for the Kenyan, showing how she manipulated Yunior into doing things through her independence and sexual freedom.  These actions indicate a trend of increased power, typically through sex, from women in Yunior's life as time goes on.

Theme Framing in the Epigraphs

In the novels Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Díaz follows the character Yunior in his struggles to reconcile his upbringing and concern for his reputation with his relationships with women and his awareness of morality.  Drown follows Yunior and his family through the lens of a struggling family unit and their hope to leave the Dominican Republic.  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao characterizes Yunior as one who observes a family's seemingly cursed lifestyle and tries to alleviate some of the grief it brings them, while struggling with the asceticism that necessitates.  In This Is How You Lose Her, Yunior wins and loses the trust of numerous women through his apparent self-awareness regarding stereotypical Dominican relationships and helplessness in resisting those stereotypes.  The epigraphs frame the themes in all three novels.

In Drown, the epigraph from Gustavo Pérez Firmat says:

"The fact that I

am writing to you

in English

already falsifies what I

wanted to tell you.

My subject:

how to explain to you that I

don't belong to English

though I belong nowhere else " (epigraph, Drown).

An epigraph should resonate with the characters in a novel; Yunior's subject should be similar to Firmat's--belonging nowhere.  Yunior seems to feel as though he belongs in between English and Spanish, as demonstrated by his switching back and forth fluidly between the two.  "I played Andrés Jiménez for her--you know, Yo quiero que mi Borinquén sea libre y soberana--and then we drank a pot of café" (115-116, Drown).  His mixed language also serves to make a reader without a background in both feel somewhat isolated; I do not "know" what he says "you know," and it makes me feel as though perhaps I "don't belong," as he and Firmat say that they do not.

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz begins with two epigraphs, one of which comes from Fantastic Four, and the other of which ends:

"I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation" (epigraph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao).

Since Yunior devotes himself in the novel to exploring the life of Oscar Wao, née de León, one might read those epigraphs as applying to him.  His love of science fiction rendered Yunior conscious of his own affinity for it and self-conscious about how that interest might make him look to anyone else.  Furthermore, the notion of Oscar as "wondrous" comes with a degree of irony; he "...is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love" (back cover).  This disastrousness calls his wondrousness into question; ergo, "...either [he's] nobody, or [he's] a nation" (epigraph).

This Is How You Lose Her opens with a heart-cleaving epigraph by Sandra Cisneros:

"Okay, we didn't work, and all

memories to tell you the truth aren't good.

But sometimes there were good times.

Love was good.  I loved your crooked sleep

beside me and never dreamed afraid.

There should be stars for great wars

like ours" (epigraph, This Is How You Lose Her). 

The admission that not all memories are good implies that the speaker--with whom Yunior is naturally aligned in the epigraph--has experienced hardships in the recently-ended relationship.  Yunior fails to respect the women he seems to suspect he loves, but he never quite resolves to change until the end of the novel: "When you finish the Book a second time you say the truth: You did the right thing, negra.  You did the right thing" (212, This Is How You Lose Her).  The bad memories characteristic of his almost-love stemmed from an idea that he could cheat on women as long as they never caught him, and this idea permeated his love life until he abandoned it.  Consequently, his relationships failed slowly, painfully, and repeatedly until the struggle could be likened to a war.

In all three novels, Yunior worked to resolve the issues presented by the epigraphs, and by the end of This Is How You Lose Her, he keeps a prestigious job in America, makes friends with people like Elvis who do not judge him based on the kinds of books he reads, and learns to accept his failure to respect the women in his life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Role of Women in Diaz's Work

Junot Diaz portrays the stereotypical Dominican role of women throughout his three novels, Drown, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and This Is How You Lose Her. Although the female characters in each of these novels are different, they share many of the same hardships frustrations and play fairly similar roles in the lives of the male characters. Throughout his writing, Diaz’s apparent goal, among other things, is to portray the glass ceiling Dominican women are forced to break through if they desire to lead independent lives free of cheating, abusive men.

In Drown, a female character that really stood out was Aurora. At a young age, Aurora had already been involved in numerous abusive relationships with men much older than her, experienced drug addictions, and been to a juvenile detention center. It doesn’t appear that Aurora has any opportunity to improve her situation, yet the reader sees Aurora dreaming of a better life for herself and Yunior (even though Yunior physically and emotionally abuses her). It becomes apparent though, at the end of her chapter, that this life is completely unrealistic for Aurora, an unattainable dream. The story of Aurora is meant to show the reader the way women are treated in Dominican society and the idea that a better life is all but unrealistic.

Diaz portrays the suppressed role of Dominican women in his second novel,Oscar Wao. Beli, Oscar’s mother, experiences the misfortune rooted in her incredibly desirable looks, a blessing and a curse for many women in Diaz’s writing. Beli is the object of desire for many older men, one of which impregnates her and then, upon his wife’s discovery of his affair, abandons her. After being brutally beaten and losing her child, Beli is stricken with more bad luck. She has two children upon moving to America with a man who eventually leaves her, and her daughter grows up to be rebellious and disrespectful of her mother. But Beli does very little to change her situation, and the reader is meant to believe that there is, in fact, nothing she can do.

In This Is How You Lose Her, Yasmin represents another Dominican woman stricken with the trials and tribulations of her culture. As an immigrant, Yasmin is alone in the US. She falls in love with a man, who also happens to have a wife back in the DR. Although Yasmin wants to believe Ramon no longer loves his wife, she continues to send him letters, suggesting that Ramon is writing her back. Although Yasmin possesses much more independence than most of Diaz’s female characters, she is still entirely dependent on Ramon for “happiness” and allows him to get away with whatever he wants.

Diaz’s use of great misfortune in the lives of his female characters represents the subservient and complacent role women play in Dominican culture. Only through abandoning their culture and accepting the backlash that comes with it are Dominican women able to lead independent lives free of both physical and emotional abuse.

Yunature vs. Domincanurture

Over the course of the three books, the audience is able to get a pretty good feel for who Yunior is as a person.  This is interesting because it presents the concept of Yunior’s instinct vs. how he was raised as a Dominican.  This mainly has to do with his treatment of women throughout the three books.  Yunior’s instinct is to treat women more like people and be respectful and a gentleman to them, but for a Dominican man to do this deviates from the norm that Yunior was raised in which is why he often struggles with this complicated difference.  In Drown, Rafa and Yunior’s father make it clear that Yunior is not the most masculine Dominican child. An example of this is when Yunior cries after he and Rafa get kicked off the bus.  However as Yunior grows up, he is influenced by the typical male Dominican culture which means objectifying women, and being more masculine.  Yunior keeps his emasculate side hidden as he grows up and instead becomes more of a typical Dominican male.  In the Brief Life of Oscar Wao, Yunior’s Dominican male nature is present as he coaches Oscar on how to get with girls.  However, you can tell he hides his emasculate side when it comes to certain things like Sci-Fi and fantasy which aren’t “cool” or “masculine”.  This battle between Yunior being who he is and who he was raised to be is seen in How You Lose Her when he repeatedly has a girlfriend that he “loves”, yet he always cheats on them with another girl.  When Yunior is talking about the struggle it has been trying to reconcile with Magda after he was caught cheating, two typical Dominican men tell him “find another girl” and that “jealousy is the best way to start a relationship” which is advice to getting action from girls, not building a good relationship with them (Diaz 18).  Yunior eventually loses Magda and is hurt by this loss which is why he cries when he is lowered into the cave by the Vice-President and his bodyguard.  Because Yunior is hurt by this experience, you would expect him to learn from it, but instead he goes and does almost the same thing with Alma. The difference is in how Yunior goes about after being caught.  With Magda, Yunior owns up to cheating, but with Alma, he tries to make an excuse and weasel out of the situation.  This is no doubt how a Dominican man would handle the situation, and the way Yunior was raised as a child leads him to do this.  However, as he does this Yunior knows it is wrong which is why he smiles “a smile your dissembling face remember until the day you die” (48).  Yunior feels guilty for acting in such a negative way, yet he does it anyway, thus demonstrating that he struggles with doing what he knows is right and what he knows his culture thinks is right.  

What's up with Yunior? Blog Post 5

All three of Diaz's book centralize around Yunior's life. He is the character that the readers get the most background on and get the most insight to his thoughts and feelings. The readers get the opportunity to see Yunior grow up as a young Dominican boy brought later to the United States. Diaz does a very good job at presenting this idea of a standard Dominican man; someone who is strong, gets lots of women, and doesn't show much emotion. Throughout the books, Yunior himself displays many of these traits at some point or another, but he also seems to have some differences from this stereotype. Is Yunior just another Dominican man or is there something more to him?

Drown gives readers a glimpse of Yunior's childhood. From the first couple of stories it is clear that Yunior is different from his brother and father. Rafa is very impulsive and enjoys getting in trouble and sleeping with as many girls as he can get, much like his father. However, Yunior is much more emotional. He cries when Rafa and him have strayed too far on their journey and seems to really care for his mother. Yunior's sensitivity is one of the reasons him and Rafa "fought so much" that their "neighbors took to smashing broomsticks over [them] to break it up" (Drown 5). He
 is also often further ridiculed by Rafa and beat by his father. As a child, Yunior seems to lack the qualities of the "macho" men that every male seems to strive for in these books. At first it seems hopeful that Yunior will be the one to break this mold, but it seems the pressure from his family and society get to him as he ages through the other books.

As a teenager, Yunior emerges as a sex crazed adolescence that can't seem to stay out of trouble. On the outside, it seems that his family and society has transformed him into the Dominican stereotype. Yunior can not remain faithful in a relationship and even cheats on his would be fiancé with over 50 other women knowing full well that the one thing "she swore she would never forgive, was cheating" (Lose Her 175). He gets involved with drugs and outwardly seems to objectify women. By all outward appearances there doesn't seem to be anything special about Yunior and he is just a typical Dominican man.

However, as much as Yunior tries to be masculine, he still has some differences that set him apart. First, Yunior is nerdy and this may be part of the reason Yunior's sexual experiences begin much later than his older brothers. He states that it without the other nerdy girls, he "might never have lost [his] virginity"(45). He is clearly intelligent, writes often, and knows random nerdy facts like how to read Elvish. Yunior's hidden interests allow him to interact well with Oscar in college, but unlike Oscar, Yunior hides from others these interests and at times seems ashamed of it. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, readers can start to pull back Yunior's mask at catch a glimpse at the real boy inside. While Yunior messes around with many women, the quirkiness Yunior displays when alone with Oscar shows that there might be more to him than his facade of masculinity.

Yunior also stands apart from other Dominican men with his treatment of women. Yunior does sleep with and cheat on many women, but unlike his father and brother, some of his relationships seem to be looking for something deeper than sex. This is How You Lose Her presents two very similar stories about Yunior. In the first and last story of the book, Yunior is in a relationship, revealed to have been unfaithful, and the two different girlfriends in the stories stay with him for a short time. It is the things he does after he has been caught cheating that set him apart from the other men in the story. Yunior tries his hardest to make it work. He claims to be "a sex addict and starts attending meetings","gives her the passwords to all [his] e-mail accounts", and composes a mass e-mail disowning all [his] sucias" (176). It seems to be very clear to Yunior that he screwed up and he works his butt off trying to win his women back. Many of the other men in the books, likely would not have done the things Yunior did. They likely would have accepting being caught and move on to the next women in line. While he still is controlled by a lot of the physical aspects of relationships, Yunior actually seems to put some emotional investments into some of his relationships. He real intention does seem to find love, but sex keeps getting in his way. Unlike Rafa, Yunior sometimes really struggles after a break-up which is especially seen in the last story of This is How You Lose Her. Yunior's heartbreaks shows that he actually formed strong bonds with some of these women and probably loved a couple of them. Even with Flaca, Yunior is in a relationship that is not meant to be serious and is mainly about sex. While this would be many mens' dreams in this book, Yunior is not satisfied, and after Flaca leaves, he wishes there had been more to their relationship. Unlike most of the men, Yunior seems to be looking for a deeper emotional connection with many of these women and regrets hurting them.

While Yunior puts on this mask of being a stereotypical Dominican man, Diaz shows the readers that there is more to him than just that. Even in childhood, Yunior is shown to be more sensitive than other boys and to have different interests. However, as he gets older, he soon conforms to the society he is raised in and follows the example of his brother and father. Diaz tries to show through that Yunior has different ideals than the men in his family and perhaps if he had been raised in a different kind of environment, he might have grown up to be much more like Oscar.

Progression of Yunior and Why

            Throughout This Is How You Lose Her, the reader sees Yunior—the narrator and main character for most of the novel—describe the essential “cheater’s guide to love” (Diaz 212).  Much of the novel is spent taking the reader through Yunior’s past relationships along with giving a few segments on the relationships held by his older brother, Rafa.  By comparing the Yunior that prevails in the chapters focusing on Rafa with the later version of the narrator after the death of brother, a contrasting relationship develops due to the significant character shift seen throughout the novel.  Though the Yunior we see in the beginning of the novel differs from most other Dominican men in his treatment/attitude of women, we see a shift from this behavior to the stereotypical hyper-masculine traits of his Dominican forefathers later in his story.  However, this shift did not simply happen at one specific point in time.  As the story begins describing Yunior’s life growing up, we see that he never really developed a strong relationship with his father and was in constant disagreement with his older brother over even the smallest of matters.  Thus, it seemed a bit foreshadowing, especially knowing a bit about Yunior’s past and future life from the other novels that we have read, that he would turn out much different than his brother and father. 

            In the discussion of Diaz’s other novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Yunior had turned out to become notorious for developing relations with multiple different women in his college years.  This version of Yunior, our narrator, differed greatly from the young narrator present in Drown, who seemed to have much more respect for women in his early years and was truly “weak, full of mistakes, but basically good” (Diaz 3). Therefore, it seems to be a mystery as to why the reader suddenly sees a Yunior who cheats on his wife, the love of his life.  However, as known previously through the other novels by Diaz, Yunior never developed a strong relationship with his father that was essentially never around in his early years.  Along with this, his older brother rarely looked out for him, often watching passively as his father would hit him, and even disregarding him toward the end of his life when he develops cancer, as seen when Yunior states, “I tried to talk to him, but he never said nothing back” (Diaz 118).  As a result, it seemed that Yunior never obtained any sort of male role model to really teach him how to ‘be a man’.  He had seen his brother bring multiple girls home, all of which had never amounted to a long-term relationship.  However, his mother had always protected Rafa (seemingly much more than Yunior) even through his worst instances since, “He had us all, the way only a pretty nigger can” (Diaz 31).  Rafa was the oldest son, and on top of this was extremely handsome, which were essentially the two main reasons that Yunior’s mother protected him so fiercely.  Yunior lacked everything that his brother seemed to have, and thus it was obvious that he was definitely not the ‘favorite’ child. However, this neglecting from his mother, father, and brother all seemed to have a negative effect on Yunior in his later years dealing with women.  Through learning from the actions of his father and brother by simple observation, Yunior developed his partial lack of respect for women. Yet, he still differed from other Dominican men in that he actually felt remorse for his cheating.

            Through observing the behavior of his brother and father (the constant rotation of different women to sleep with) and the effects that this lifestyle had on each of their respective outcomes, Yunior eventually developed an ability to pick up women.  However, he had never developed the ability of his father and brother to disregard feelings that he had for these women and therefore ends up being hurt by most of the women of his life.