Quote Detail

Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in his book:When all of us are communicating and talking when we__e out in the world, we__l be lucky if we can understand 20 percent of what people say to us. A whole range of clues, of words, of languages escape us. I mean we__e not perfect, we__e not gods. But on top of that people mis-speak, sometimes you mis-hear, sometimes you don__ have attention, sometimes people use words you don__ know. Sometimes people use languages you don__ know. On a daily basis, human beings are very comfortable with a large component of communication, which is incomprehensibility, incomprehension. We tend to be comfortable with it. But for an immigrant, it becomes very different. What most of us consider normative comprehension an immigrant fears that they__e not getting it because of their lack of mastery in the language.And what__ a normal component in communication, incomprehension, in some ways for an immigrant becomes a source of deep anxiety because you__e not sure if it__ just incomprehension or your own failures. My sense of writing a book where there is an enormous amount of language that perhaps everyone doesn__ have access to was less to communicate the experience of the immigrant than to communicate the experience that for an immigrant causes much discomfort but that is normative for people. which is that we tend to not understand, not grasp a large part of the language around us. What__ funny is, will Ramona accept incomprehension in our everyday lives and will greet that in a book with enormous fury. In other words what we__e comfortable with out in the outside world, we do not want to encounter in our books.So I__ constantly, people have come to me and asked me_ is this, are you trying to lock out your non-Dominican reader, you know? And I__ like, no? I assume any gaps in a story and words people don__ understand, whether it__ the nerdish stuff, whether it__ the Elvish, whether it__ the character going on about Dungeons and Dragons, whether it__ the Dominican Spanish, whether it__ the sort of high level graduate language, I assume if people don__ get it that this is not an attempt for the writer to be aggressive. This is an attempt for the writer to encourage the reader to build community, to go out and ask somebody else. For me, words that you can__ understand in a book aren__ there to torture or remind people that they don__ know. I always felt they were to remind people that part of the experience of reading has always been collective. You learn to read with someone else. Yeah you may currently practice it in a solitary fashion, but reading is a collective enterprise. And what the unintelligible in a book does is to remind you how our whole, lives we__e always needed someone else to help us with reading.