“I think about you, X—”: Re-Reading Junot Díaz after “The Silence”

Abstract

This essay offers an examination of Junot Diaz’s “The Silence”—a nonfiction account of his experience of child sexual abuse and the lingering effects of that trauma—to show how Diaz’s fiction replicates gendered violence even as it claims to write against it. I reveal how his language stages women’s bodies not only as a source of pleasure but as receptacles of pain through which men find their own salvation at a woman’s expense. This essay also highlights the crisis in the Latinx canon that the allegations of sexual misconduct against Diaz revealed and argues that, as the archetype of contemporary Latinx literature, Diaz’s antagonistic position invites us to reconsider how we construct, read, and teach the Latinx canon. His “fall” further reveals the legacies of racial and gendered violence that manifest obsequiously even in “decolonial” literature.