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.”
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When I first picked up the book Atomik Aztek by Sesshu Foster, I had no idea what I had gotten myself into. If Sesshu Foster has taught me one thing, it is that I am a spoiled reader. This seems like a weird conclusion to have come to, but it’s true. I have come to the realization that in my studies of literature thus far, I am familiar with the novel as being a western conception. Out of the many books and short stories that I have read, time, in most all of them, takes a linear form. This style of form and content has become the norm for me, and for this reason, the absence of a linear plot and time is confusing and to be honest, unsettling.
From the beginning of the novel, the epigraph actually, Foster offers his readers a warning of what is to come in his book. He warns readers that if they are attempting to find a plot in his novel, they should instead read Huck Finn. He prepares us for the non-traditional reading experience that is his book itself. He closes his epigraph with an excerpt from Charlotte Delbo’s piece Auschwitz and After, “Step out of history/ to enter life.” This is exactly what Foster is asking us to do, to abandoned all of our preconceived western conceptions and ideas of what the novel is and step into the abnormal, to chart the unfamiliar. This is no accident. The narrator states that the Aztex believe in circular concepts of time: Cyklikal konceptions of the universe where reality infinitely kurves back upon itself endlessly so all that has exited does exist and will always exist and so forth into infinity…(Don’t worry if you don’t get it the first time, it all repeats as you shall see. This happened to you already & it will happen to you again in the future.) (Foster 3) Foster demonstrates through his novel that the traditional conception of linear time is an inaccurate representation of reality. Linear time doesn’t imitate the world. It may imitate a western conception of time and reality, but certainly it doesn’t represent the global standard. Foster’s cyclical portray of time shatters the chronology and order that linear time is. And it is for this reason that I was uncomfortable throughout my reading of his text. But, the element of the novel that I was the most uneasy with became the force that drew me closer and closer into the text. Foster, through his shattering of traditional plot and linear time, pushes his readers out of their comfort zones. In doing this, he is able to broaden his readers literature view, providing them with a more accurate representation of reality though his writing. Foster, Sesshu. Atomik Aztex. City Lights Publishers , 2005. For the purposes of this blog post, I will compare Junot Díaz’s piece “Apocalypse” with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” essay in order make the argument that the apocalypse itself is shares similar characteristics with the monster, specifically its ability to unveil a greater truth about society or culture.
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