Ground Zero(es) of the New World: Geographies of Violence in Junot Díaz and Edwidge Danticat

Abstract

In early 2008, two writers born on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola—Junot Díaz from the Dominican Republic, and Edwidge Danticat from Haiti—garnered unprecedented plaudits from the anglophone literary establishment in the United States. Díaz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, for his brilliant novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Danticat won the top prize in biography from the National Book Critics Circle for her family memoir Brother, I'm Dying. Reading Díaz and Danticat's prize‐winning books alongside and in conversation with one another, this essay traces how each writer seeks not merely to illuminate their nations' hidden histories of violence, but to base their approach to those histories in a shared Caribbean identity—and in a conception of the Caribbean as the origin‐place for what Díaz famously called the fukú americanus—“the curse or doom of the New World.” In both Díaz and Danticat's work, “Caribbean discourse” serves not merely as a means of limning their own nation's hurts but of understanding the cause and effects of historical traumas in the longue durée of the Americas at large—up to, and including, the epochal attacks of September 11, 2001.