Thank you - so beautiful. I struggle everyday with writing - when I write and mostly when I don't. It has never been easy. But I long for it - like an old lover that suddenly leaves you without warning. I am sad when I don't write, but sometimes sad when I do. It is never enough. I am not a natural; I am a foreigner to writing. Everyday I try to find my way, navigating unknow terrains - tripping and falling. Occasionally I walk and sometimes even skip, forgetting where I am.
This line really hit me: “I now understand that sometimes we have talents in precisely the areas that are most challenging to us.” I really believe that to be true. Junot, do you think your writing is is better because you struggle with the solitude? Does that angst ever inform a character, for instance?
Intercision. It was a slow cut in my life. My family migrated from Bosnia to Sweden during the Jugoslavian civil war in the 90s, but there was a before and after. In Bosnia we there's not really a red line between family and friends of family. Everyone in your life was family and there were usually plenty. I lived my kid years with my parents, and grandparents, and their friends, and our neighbours, and our neighbours neighbour. Because the family is so big it takes a while to learn the concept at all.
When the war started, the intercision began, but took several years. First we were uprooted, then we lived with our family in the country. Then again the uprooting began, and we lived above a brothel with our family in Belgrade. My early life was on an escape route, and little did I know we'd end up in Växjö in Sweden. Reflecting upon my life, it feels like part of it was living on a train, that night was as long as my teens, and on a boat, in the company of friendly and scared strangers. I neither knew they were strangers nor scared. The life in Växjö was another kind of family, we slept together on the floor in big empty rooms with several other families. Then another intercision happened and we got our own miniscule room, but I have almost no memories of that room except the timbre of it; I was constantly outside, in the company of other lost children. We didn't even know we were lost.
Then another intercision happened, we got our own apartment, shared with another family, in a little foresty village in Småland, the Texas of Sweden. Finally we got our own apartment. The highest goal in Swedish life, it turns out, was to fully demarcate your kin from strangers by seperation and controlled isolation.
Intercision didn't happen overnight, but it felt like it. For years I made my own Bosnian life in my imagination, inventing a world full of life in the solitude of our roomsize warddrobe, among the second hand clothes in splendid, unswedish colours. I also turned to reading. While I didn't write anything during those years, I realize now that what I did was "penless writing without a penpoised pause".
Hello Boki, I just joined Junot Díaz’s substack and randomly read some posts. The beauty of your contribution stopped me in my tracks. “Intercision didn't happen overnight, but it felt like it. For years I made my own Bosnian life in my imagination, inventing a world full of life in the solitude of our roomsize warddrobe, among the second hand clothes in splendid, unswedish colours. I also turned to reading. While I didn't write anything during those years, I realize now that what I did was "penless writing without a penpoised pause".
I very much hope you are still writing/working on something.
Once again I feel seen. Summers with my family in Puerto Rico verses a life of assimilation in Tennessee where no one had even heard of Puerto Rico much less met a Puerto Rican felt like a severing of the self. I felt that but of course you worded it more poignantly. Thank you.
“With writing, even more. When I write, there often comes a moment when all the pieces of me, even those that I thought lost forever, reassemble themselves, and the me that was and that me that is inhabit one another, radiantly.”
This really hit home. Reading for me has always been a lovely escape. Writing has always been more like putting all the elements of my self together again, some sort of literary Humpty-Dumpty. When I write I transcend the everyday ordinariness of life--which I struggle with--and I shift a deeper internal world.
The loneliness of writing is something so many of us (writers) feel. But it's a paradox; the writing allows us to connect with so many others and find the essence of the human experience and particular experiences (like your case, the immigrant one and much more). I do think writing is our Pharmakon. It is as painful as it is comforting. Thanks for this beautiful reflection. I'm really enjoying the start to your newsletter here.
"I might have read alone but in the chorus of characters and voices that I encountered in books, I regained something of the community that I lost when I immigrated."
This hit home, although I wasn't an avid reader as a young child. I preferred listening to stories from my parents. Their stories reflected the Flemish, Spanish, and English voices in my head, whereas the books I read didn't. If The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao was already published or I was precocious enough to read Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, maybe I would have gotten into reading literature sooner.
Still, I had voices. As "the Belgian kid" raised in a town where bible thumpers think they'll drink a cold Bud with white Jesus on the day they die, I didn't have many friends. My voices accompanied me everywhere I went, often daring me to do things or creating scenarios I'd test out. Writing kept me from testing too many out in real life, and as you put it, "When I write, there often comes a moment when all the pieces of me, even those that I thought lost forever, reassemble themselves."
Of course, we're all discovering new pieces of ourselves as we learn and grow. "Imagine the shock then when we dropped into that Silence that was America. Into the sealed bathyspheric seclusion of our new apartment. Into the Loneliness of our new gringo lives." My parents had spent the past fifteen years living in Costa Rica, Argentina, and Chile, so this Loneliness was also their experience when they moved to Canada. I was four when they decided to stay in Canada, so the silence and loneliness didn't hit me the same way. However, now that I live in Spain, I'm experiencing the gregariousness of hispanohablantes, but as a guiri.
When I write about my experiences, it feels natural to code-switch with enough context so the non-complacent monolingual reader can understand. Still, I'm unsure what to do when I want to write dialogue from conversations solely in Spanish. Should I encourage the reader to look up the translations themselves or include annotations with information about words that don't translate directly?
I wrote about it and would love your thoughts on the article (especially since you inspired a large chunk of it).
“With writing, even more. When I write, there often comes a moment when all the pieces of me, even those that I thought lost forever, reassemble themselves, and the me that was and that me that inhabit one another, radiantly.” Why I write. Thank you for putting it into words.
Thank you - so beautiful. I struggle everyday with writing - when I write and mostly when I don't. It has never been easy. But I long for it - like an old lover that suddenly leaves you without warning. I am sad when I don't write, but sometimes sad when I do. It is never enough. I am not a natural; I am a foreigner to writing. Everyday I try to find my way, navigating unknow terrains - tripping and falling. Occasionally I walk and sometimes even skip, forgetting where I am.
This line really hit me: “I now understand that sometimes we have talents in precisely the areas that are most challenging to us.” I really believe that to be true. Junot, do you think your writing is is better because you struggle with the solitude? Does that angst ever inform a character, for instance?
Intercision. It was a slow cut in my life. My family migrated from Bosnia to Sweden during the Jugoslavian civil war in the 90s, but there was a before and after. In Bosnia we there's not really a red line between family and friends of family. Everyone in your life was family and there were usually plenty. I lived my kid years with my parents, and grandparents, and their friends, and our neighbours, and our neighbours neighbour. Because the family is so big it takes a while to learn the concept at all.
When the war started, the intercision began, but took several years. First we were uprooted, then we lived with our family in the country. Then again the uprooting began, and we lived above a brothel with our family in Belgrade. My early life was on an escape route, and little did I know we'd end up in Växjö in Sweden. Reflecting upon my life, it feels like part of it was living on a train, that night was as long as my teens, and on a boat, in the company of friendly and scared strangers. I neither knew they were strangers nor scared. The life in Växjö was another kind of family, we slept together on the floor in big empty rooms with several other families. Then another intercision happened and we got our own miniscule room, but I have almost no memories of that room except the timbre of it; I was constantly outside, in the company of other lost children. We didn't even know we were lost.
Then another intercision happened, we got our own apartment, shared with another family, in a little foresty village in Småland, the Texas of Sweden. Finally we got our own apartment. The highest goal in Swedish life, it turns out, was to fully demarcate your kin from strangers by seperation and controlled isolation.
Intercision didn't happen overnight, but it felt like it. For years I made my own Bosnian life in my imagination, inventing a world full of life in the solitude of our roomsize warddrobe, among the second hand clothes in splendid, unswedish colours. I also turned to reading. While I didn't write anything during those years, I realize now that what I did was "penless writing without a penpoised pause".
Hello Boki, I just joined Junot Díaz’s substack and randomly read some posts. The beauty of your contribution stopped me in my tracks. “Intercision didn't happen overnight, but it felt like it. For years I made my own Bosnian life in my imagination, inventing a world full of life in the solitude of our roomsize warddrobe, among the second hand clothes in splendid, unswedish colours. I also turned to reading. While I didn't write anything during those years, I realize now that what I did was "penless writing without a penpoised pause".
I very much hope you are still writing/working on something.
Once again I feel seen. Summers with my family in Puerto Rico verses a life of assimilation in Tennessee where no one had even heard of Puerto Rico much less met a Puerto Rican felt like a severing of the self. I felt that but of course you worded it more poignantly. Thank you.
“With writing, even more. When I write, there often comes a moment when all the pieces of me, even those that I thought lost forever, reassemble themselves, and the me that was and that me that is inhabit one another, radiantly.”
This really hit home. Reading for me has always been a lovely escape. Writing has always been more like putting all the elements of my self together again, some sort of literary Humpty-Dumpty. When I write I transcend the everyday ordinariness of life--which I struggle with--and I shift a deeper internal world.
Michael Mohr
Sincere American Writing
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
The loneliness of writing is something so many of us (writers) feel. But it's a paradox; the writing allows us to connect with so many others and find the essence of the human experience and particular experiences (like your case, the immigrant one and much more). I do think writing is our Pharmakon. It is as painful as it is comforting. Thanks for this beautiful reflection. I'm really enjoying the start to your newsletter here.
"I might have read alone but in the chorus of characters and voices that I encountered in books, I regained something of the community that I lost when I immigrated."
This hit home, although I wasn't an avid reader as a young child. I preferred listening to stories from my parents. Their stories reflected the Flemish, Spanish, and English voices in my head, whereas the books I read didn't. If The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao was already published or I was precocious enough to read Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, maybe I would have gotten into reading literature sooner.
Still, I had voices. As "the Belgian kid" raised in a town where bible thumpers think they'll drink a cold Bud with white Jesus on the day they die, I didn't have many friends. My voices accompanied me everywhere I went, often daring me to do things or creating scenarios I'd test out. Writing kept me from testing too many out in real life, and as you put it, "When I write, there often comes a moment when all the pieces of me, even those that I thought lost forever, reassemble themselves."
Of course, we're all discovering new pieces of ourselves as we learn and grow. "Imagine the shock then when we dropped into that Silence that was America. Into the sealed bathyspheric seclusion of our new apartment. Into the Loneliness of our new gringo lives." My parents had spent the past fifteen years living in Costa Rica, Argentina, and Chile, so this Loneliness was also their experience when they moved to Canada. I was four when they decided to stay in Canada, so the silence and loneliness didn't hit me the same way. However, now that I live in Spain, I'm experiencing the gregariousness of hispanohablantes, but as a guiri.
When I write about my experiences, it feels natural to code-switch with enough context so the non-complacent monolingual reader can understand. Still, I'm unsure what to do when I want to write dialogue from conversations solely in Spanish. Should I encourage the reader to look up the translations themselves or include annotations with information about words that don't translate directly?
I wrote about it and would love your thoughts on the article (especially since you inspired a large chunk of it).
https://open.substack.com/pub/bornwithoutborders/p/crush-the-english-hegemony-with-a?r=1qf7m9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
“With writing, even more. When I write, there often comes a moment when all the pieces of me, even those that I thought lost forever, reassemble themselves, and the me that was and that me that inhabit one another, radiantly.” Why I write. Thank you for putting it into words.