To be honest, I had no idea what to expect when I first picked up Junot Díaz’s fictional piece “Monstro.” Only one word comes to mind if I am being asked to describe my reaction to his work of literature. Disturbed. Reading “Monstro” was an extremely unnerving experience. (I mean, truly what can be more disturbing than the image of decaying and deformed bodies simultaneously performing a chorus of chilling screams) At the conclusion of my reading, I wasn’t entirely sure how to feel about the material that I had just encountered. But one thing was for certain, this was a revelatory apocalyptic story.
As mentioned in my previous blog post, Díaz argues in his piece “Apocalypse” that the apocalypse is “a disruptive event that provokes a revelation…it must be revelatory” (Díaz 2) The apocalyptic aspect in “Monstro” is the contagious disease called La Negrura, “The Darkness.” This terrible illness physically decays the body, making it so that all those who have fallen victim to the sickness transform into zombie-like creatures. Díaz describes the disease of La Negrura to have the effect of “a black mold-fungus-blast that came on like a splotch and then gradually started taking you over, tunneling right through you” (Díaz 2). He illustrates how the bodies slowly take the form of coral reefs, “black rotting rugose masses fruiting out of bodies” (Díaz 2) I believe Díaz is revealing through the contagious apocalypse of La Negrura his personal criticism of the inequality between socio-economic class levels, and how this leads to unfair and unjust treatment and exclusion from the circle of human dignity. We see in Junot Díaz’s short story that initially, it was “just poor Haitian types getting fucked up,” their lives were seen as so invaluable and insignificant that no one really cared, “only a couple of underfunded teams stayed on” to fight whatever “The Darkness” was (Díaz 3). For six or seven months the disease only affected the poor Haitians so who fucking cared, right? But once it started effecting those with enough human dignity for people to care about them? Yeah, that’s when people started to give a damn. This exclusion from the circle of human dignity the apocalypse reveals isn’t an isolated case, Díaz sees this as a pattern and it is for this reason he makes socio-economic inequality a central theme in “Monstro.”
1 Comment
Taylor Armstrong
11/20/2017 02:55:33 pm
I think you are spot on with the statements on socio-economic class in “Monstro.” The disease has research funding until it seems like it will only affect Haitians, and then progress takes a nose dive. This can be comoared to the real life situations with Ebola and Zika Virus. One thing that’s importatnt to note is how we are supposed to believe the afflicted react to these truths. We witness their collective behavior with the Silence and the Chorus, and they seem to share a hive mind at certain points. I wonder if La Negrura is Díaz’s way of highlighting collective reactions from marginalized groups. Are the afflicted in a sense saying, “You’ve always thought of us as monsters, here’s what a real monster can do.” It’s great that you touch on these topica and how Díaz presents them to his audiences.
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