For those who have read other stories featuring Yunior and Rafa, "Miss Lora" feels like another kind of bomb exploding. Yunior's relationship with this older woman, amidst a landslide of sadness, does apocalyptic damage. Why does Miss Lora do this to him? Is their secret affair born out of abuse (her abusing him, her having been abused by her history teacher)? Or born of mutual sadness and Yunior's loneliness and confusion after Rafa's death? Or is it born of cultural expectations, explored in Yunior's statement that his father and brothers were both "sucios"? How does this breaking of the adult/child taboo look different to us because of the reversal of genders, with a woman abusing a boy? Does Yunior's searching in the end--his failure to find Miss Lora, the story's end on a photograph of them blinking, smiling--also feel explosive?
What is Diaz up to? How does he do it? Can you write an explosive story?
I just ran across this article Junot Diaz published in the New Yorker this past April: the MFA v. POV. Go read it, and consider your career and education, and how what you read is limited by the people putting it in your path. Incidentally, Helena Maria Viramontes's book Under the Feet of Jesus was given to me in graduate school by my amazing professor Susan Strehle, and it influenced my writing and teaching. I have since met Viramontes on several occasions, and she is one of the loveliest human beings I've ever encountered.
What I love most about Junot Diaz’s work is that it never fails to show you the gritty, dirty side of life. He shows you the kind of thing where someone tells you not to look, but you have to look anyways. You look because you just have to know. And of course once you look, at least the way Diaz writes, you can’t make yourself look away. “Miss Lora” was a whole new kind of explosive for me. All the other Diaz stories I have read were all in first person, but this one was in second. That first line, “Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother, would you have done it?” All this time I have read about Yunior I’ve been able to distance myself from him a bit when Diaz throws him in an awkward position, but in the second person that wasn’t an option. Diaz was forcing me not only to look and keep looking, but he forced me to become Yunior for 13 pages. He didn’t give the reader the option of saying, “Well, I would never have a sexual relationship with an older person.”
ReplyDeleteI think it hints at what Diaz is talking about in the New Yorker article. He’s finding a way, through his writing, to force us into the world of a Dominican teenager who is in an intimate relationship with an older woman. Diaz isn’t letting anyone get away with the “I’m white, so this doesn’t apply to me” excuse. He’s making the reader and Yunior one. I think he does it so the reader doesn’t just look at the story, but stares, gawks at it and wonders what they would do if in the same situation. He makes us feel just as confused about the relationship as Yunior. We start to wonder just as much as he if it’s his brother’s death or his father’s ways that make him keep sneaking out to see her. In the end though, I don’t think that’s what Yunior, or we, are worried about. Instead, we are left wondering with him why he’s still so hung up on this woman.
If he had slept with her because he was a sucio like his father and brother, then why does he act like he cares about whether she’s sleeping with the science teacher or not? Why is he still thinking about her years later? Why does he date all these girls, and start to think Miss Lora ruined him for girls his age? Or why, in the end, is he still looking for her? The questions explode in your mind like a rapid round of fireworks, and then Diaz leaves you with the beautiful image of Yunior looking at a photo of the two of them. The closed eyes and smiles, almost saying that the happiness they brought to each other blinded them from just how powerful their relationship was. It was so much more than casual hooking up. They meant something to each other as can be seen by how he looks for her, and how she shows up to both of his graduations wearing his favorite color. Yet during their relationship they try to convince themselves that it means nothing. It’s genius writing.
This story was by far my favorite of the four we read. It’s the one I still found myself staring back at even after it was over.
If there's one thing that can be said about Junot Diaz, it's that he doesn't pull punches. Nothing in his work is censored and abridged, and he leaves out none of the gritty details. That's what keeps you coming back. There's not a single point in any of the four stories we read where he "fades to black" when something particularly intense is happening, and us having these nasty, often crude details make us feel like we're living the moment just as the characters are. We are the character of Yunior, in "Miss Lora". The "you" gives you no choice but to be pulled in, makes you experience everything that Yunior is, and the outcome is the reader feeling just as confused, frustrated, and wrapped up in Miss Lora as we should be -- as Yunior is.
ReplyDeleteEverything about the story is subtle, while not being subtle at all. We know from the beginning what kind of person we are, and we know where we are in the world. We speak like a Dominican, and we act like a person with those circumstances would. I have no experience with most of the things in the story, including and especially the Spanish, but Diaz gives us no way out. We are treated like we do, plunged into a world that isn't our own. It's us that is being persuaded to stay the night with Miss Lora, and it's us years later, seeing her at our graduation, blaming her for our relationship failures, searching for her and thinking about her. If it's abuse, it doesn't feel like it, because Yunior never sees it that way. We never see it that way. It's only in retrospect that we realize what we've been dipped into, what the relationship truly means, and that's a layered sort of writing that ends up being spectacular. We don't have time to consider the possible abuse in the relationship, not until we are pulled out of the story and given time to consider it. It doesn't matter that we're not Spanish speaking, that we wouldn't have a relationship with an older woman. That's what makes Diaz's work beautiful and what makes it so successful; we see the way the character does, and pulling back, there's a whole other level. That's for the reader, us as individuals, to discover. While we're in the story, though, we are Yunior, and Yunior is us.
Junot Diaz is truly an incredibly personal writer. Even though the other stories I’ve read of his has had Yunior narrating in the first person, you still can’t escape being completely immersed in the character and the situations. Like both Tess and Amanda S. said, the gritty details make you unable to look away. You don’t even want to because you’re too in-the-moment, in the character to just pop out or get distracted. I read these four stories in a slightly out-of-order arrangement: “Miss Lora” first, and then the three in the 3 x 33 anthology. Also, I believe that in Intro to Fiction last year, we read another story of his that had to deal with his brother, Rafa, dying. So while I was exposed to the timeline in a non-chronological way, and while each story is connected, each story was also able to stand alone and give its unique blast of explosiveness. The first in the timeline, “Ysrael,” explored Yunior’s childhood in the Dominican, the effect of seeing this mutilated young boy on such a young spectator. The next, “Fiesta 1980,” was more than just a story about a kid throwing up in his father’s new car. It was about family and his relationship with a harsh, unfathomable father. And “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars” was about love and what he said in the first line, being “basically good.”
ReplyDeleteBut then “Miss Lora” explodes onto the scene, full of sex and desire, loneliness and guilt, confusion, cultural expectations. Being in the second person point of view gives us a whole new level of immersion, makes you feel what Yunior is going through with the death of his brother, but yet Yunior himself is still distinctly characterized. We have an idea—or rather, ideas—of why Yunior is drawn to this older woman. His ambitious girlfriend of the time is one, who is so concerned with getting out of the neighborhood that she won’t take any risk at all of becoming pregnant. I don’t think that Yunior’s and Miss Lora’s affair is something that can be blamed on Miss Lora, saying that she “did this to him.” Yunior allowed it, and there wasn’t an instance, it seemed to me, that Miss Lora was pressuring him into sex or their relationship. If anything, she was very supportive of him, urging him to apply to colleges, trying to get him away from the neighborhood even if that meant losing him. I suppose that with the reversal of genders, it doesn’t look so much like “abuse” to us. We tend to sympathize with both parties more rather than just writing it off as another instance of a teacher abusing his power and privileges on a vulnerable young girl. If anything, their affair is one of loneliness, not abuse, of the desperate need that Junior seems to have for companionship.
But their entire relationship was doomed from the start, and though Yunior knew that, that doesn’t stop the ending, the image of them together blind to the future they were going to face, from being just as explosive. Diaz doesn’t just make Yunior accessible to us through the second person. He also makes the other people in his life appear as they would through Yunior’s eyes. All of the emotions, the thoughts that Yunior has about the people in his life, color our opinions of them as well. As I said before, we’re too immersed in Yunior to be able to step back and condone his actions from (my personal) white, female, 21st century opinions about what is appropriate relations between a boy and an adult woman. And that is what makes this so explosive—it blasts away all of our prejudices and blasts us again with the culture and mindset of this teenage boy.
I don't think I have ever been so assaulted by a piece of writing in my entire life. Everything that came before this piece, despite its grittiness or intenseness was not in second person. When Diaz uses that it brings you another step closer. You are no longer watching from the side lines you are participating in what is going on in the story. Yunior's decision became our decisions and Yunior's experiences became our experiences. We can not longer distance ourselves from him and when he does something taboo we can't judge him the way we want to, because we are him.
ReplyDeleteWhen we experience the world of Yunior, it is such a closeness it becomes hard to say how you yourself, separate from him, would act. In this story you are a young well built Dominican boy that has lost his father, his brother and is becoming distant from his mother. You are alone and even your girlfriend acts at times distant from you. Miss Lora is the only one that listens to you, really listens to you, when you talk about the apocalypse. She is there and she is open. When I step back and I look, I know what is going on is abuse, and that it should not be happening, but when I am Yunior it doesn't seem like that. I don't feel used when I am with her; it's only later when she is gone that I regret it. It's only then that I see it in a different way. I don't think that Yunior did it because he is like his father and brother or that he didn't know what he was doing. It felt like to me it was two people that were alone and wanting someone. Do I think that Miss. Lora made the right decision taking Yunior to her bed? No, but I do see why it happened. I think that the reason it is so easy to make this connection here is because it is in second and all of the stops have been pulled and you are experiencing life with him, whether you like it or not. Writing like this and being so in your face is something that I would like to try. To be so intimate we the reader, To make them look straight at something and see it for all that it is. This is something that Diaz dose extraordinarily well. Making you uncomfortable and intrigued at the same time it something that I would like to steal.
I’m sitting here at my computer wondering if my own inability to consider Miss Lora as a pedophile is a product of the very stereotypes Diaz is speaking against. Am I so inured to the idea of African American men as hypersexed that Yunior’s relationship with this older woman, his high school teacher, hardly stirs me at all? But there is another, more likely reason, which Tess and Jessie articulate beautifully. That is, with Diaz’s use of second-person perspective, we become Yunior, the totality of his experiences, and we cannot see something which he doesn’t. More than anything, Yunior is a product of his emotions and the cultural expectations which follow him to the States. In “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” Yunior rejects the idea that he’s just like all other Dominican men. He tries to be softer, more honest, and more committed than the other men in his life. Yet like his father and brother, Yunior cannot overcome the pressure to fulfil this ideal image of himself. Perhaps he even emulates his brother’s promiscuity in an effort to reestablish a sort of connection, becoming a sucio himself by cheating in his monogamous relationship. When Paloma refuses sex with him in fear of getting pregnant, he jumps at Miss Lora’s comfortable sexuality. Fueled by his loneliness and confusion after Rafa’s death, Yunior seeks compassion and guidance from his older neighbor. With her, he needs no pretenses. In many ways she cares for him, encouraging him (as Courtney mentioned) to apply for colleges, supporting him at his graduation. She even tries to get him to open up about his brother despite Yunior’s unwillingness to cooperate. Yunior uses their sexual bond as an outlet for his despair, introducing new passion, love, jealousy, and guilt.
ReplyDeleteDiaz’s dynamite is his subtly. He doesn’t have to say the emotions the photograph summons at the end—that would be useless exposition when we, the reader as Yunior, understand exactly how he feels. The same goes with his other endings: Rafa and Yunior preparing to run from the bus, Yunior about to vomit in his father’s van, Yunior telling Magda their relationship will work out even when he knows they’re doomed. The power of Diaz is in the reader’s reaction, their own understanding, rather than any true physical action. Ultimately I find this style of writing more effective. Actions you can forget; it’s the feelings that will haunt you.
Even though I’ve read some of Junot Díaz work before, I always find myself unprepared for the world of his stories. As many people have pointed out in these comments, his stories feel very gritty. He doesn’t gloss over any details that may make the reader feel uncomfortable. In fact he wants the reader to feel this initial discomfort. He bombards you with the realities of the world until you become desensitized to them, like his characters. You begin to accept this world that is gritty and raw and so different from what most of us are used to. Díaz can do this even when the story is written in third person, although the use of second person does seem to increase this effect.
ReplyDeleteKeeping in mind how deftly the story acclimates us to its reality, it’s possible to see how Yunior, having lived in this world his entire life, could have inadvertently absorbed some of the characteristics of the men around him, even those characteristics he actively fights against. Although Yunior doesn’t want to be a “sucio,” that is the only example of male behavior that he’s had in his life. All of the men he looked up to acted this way. That being said, his interactions with Miss Lora do not occur because he is a sucio. Perhaps it’s partially this negative influence in his life, but it’s also a product of his sadness and his loneliness. He’s lost his brother, and in some ways he’s lost his mother too. He notices that her behavior is very different now that Rafa is dead. Grieving has distanced mother and son from each other. Rafa’s absence is clearly felt throughout the entirety of the piece. As to whether or not Miss Lora’s actions constitute abuse, Yunior certainly doesn’t seem to think so, and, as we almost become him while reading, in the moment neither do we. It’s after reading and processing the story that doubts start to creep in. Is it abuse? Is there something wrong with me if I can’t seem to fully see it that way? Maybe gender does play a role in skewing my perspective on this matter. If I try to imagine this scenario with the genders switched, alarm bells immediately go off in my head.
The last image in the story, the photograph in which both of them have their eyes closed and smiles on their faces, is exactly the emotional note that needs to end the story. It has a direct, explosive impact, yet it feels completely true in that moment.
I have never read Junot Diaz before. Hell, I've never heard his name until I read it on the syllabus. And so I quickly found myself unprepared for exactly what his story would bring to the table. Yunior is a strange character, but I find him almost magnetic. He seems to look up to his family, showing respect for his mother and love for his brother, but at the same time clearly is aware of many of their flaws. His casual declaration that Rafa is a 'sucio' shows that he has no illusions of what his brother is, yet he still looks up to him. It's fascinating to watch a character that is self-aware enough to see through to the flaws of those around him. Yet he finds himself emulating his brother in a sense. Just reading 'Miss Laura' shows that he has a host of personal issues and I would even say mental problems (that level of paranoia is not normal or healthy in any form) but he still comes across as grounded and even philosophical in his own way.
ReplyDeleteI find his reaction to Miss Laura to be almost a strange tribute to Rafa. He is fully aware that he is changing after his brother's death, but he seems to move more toward emulating his brother as time passes. It makes me wonder if he isn't subconsciously acting like his brother more to feel a connection between them, even after his brother is gone. Miss Laura's own reactions show that she is at least partially aware of how troubled he is and she does seem to honestly care about him. His interactions with Miss Laura are probably his most open with anyone in the story. She shows both the ability to listen and provide understanding to him when he needs it most, when a gap is growing between him and his mother and his 'girlfriend' (and I use the term lightly because there hardly seems to be any actual affection from her, despite Yunior trying to be close to her) is becoming wrapped up in her own life and not supporting him. I would say that they're relationship is born out of a sense of loneliness from both parties and is, despite the context, honestly healthier than most of his other relationships. The raw emotion that is displayed in places makes me wonder how much different his life at the time might have been if he hadn't found a comforting hand.
I’m a fan of Junot Diaz, and I really admire what he has done with Yunior and all the different ways his brother’s death could affect him. Diaz goes from laying it all out for us—“Years later, you would wonder if it weren’t for your brother, would you have done it?” and “You were sixteen years old and you were messed up and alone like a motherfucker” to the complex emotions Yunior feels years later about living “life with a Secret” and feeling scared of his past, disturbed by having been involved with Miss Lora and guilty for having loved it. Along the way Diaz uses some perfect metaphors—“Why is there more blood in the sink?” in reference to the way Yunior would bite his tongue during nightmares of explosions and apocalypses. I thought the ending lines of “Fiesta, 1980” were incredible too—“already knowing what was happening”. Diaz’s Yunior is always overcome by guilt—guilt over cheating, puking, sex, Rafa. But there is another sense of guilt just for being Dominican. In at least two of these stories, Yunior confronts the accusation that he does these guilt-worthy things just because it’s in his DNA. As Alyssa and Megan said, his role models haven’t been great—his father and brother fit the stereotype too well. But we see from the beginning lines how much Yunior wants and has always wanted Rafa’s approval. We sort of see that Yunior is different—he calls himself a worrier, etc—and though he doesn’t want to become a sucio and fall into the Dominican stereotype, he feels a little like the pathetic brother—especially now with everyone touching him and asking if he’s okay. There are so many levels of the imprint of Rafa on Yunior’s life, not just in the many stories collected but in a single story. In some ways going after Miss Lora is like having a piece of Rafa back. Miss Lora is so interwoven with the loss of Rafa. Yunior in the future worries that he is messed up because of her. He searches for her. Yunior thinks he and his brother are the only two guys who would have had sex with her in this situation. Miss Lora makes Yunior talk about Rafa, and in the section that goes into the future we find some lines with double meanings: “It takes a long time to get over it” and “You certainly never talk about it.” I think Diaz has adopted a great way of portraying loss—through a character that turns not to drinking or to mementos to lose himself, but to another complex, flawed human being.
ReplyDeleteWhen I began reading Junot Diaz' work, I began with "Miss Lora" and I'm really glad that I did. From the moment I began the story, I was immediately engrossed in the story, and I think a lot of that is due to the style in which it's written. While the story itself is already extremely emotionally raw and real, the fact that Diaz makes the reader into Yunior makes it that much more devastating to read. I was unable to ignore the feelings, or read it and feel uninvolved. I had to lose my brother, I had to feel the guilt of hurting Paloma, I had to be the "sucio" and deal with the feelings of guilt and self hatred. I feel like that's something really unique that I don't really get from other writers.
ReplyDeleteI also really appreciate, as other people have mentioned, his no-holds-barred style. For Diaz, there's no detail to gross to share. From explicit sexual encounters to Miss Lora's "plastic bag full of worms" body to Ysreal's marred face, we get to see everything he sees, which really adds a lot to his writing. He doesn't try to beautify things that aren't, it's very "it is how it is."
In terms of how I feel about Yunior's relationship with Miss Lora, I'm at best very confused. Part of me feels unused, and as though the feeling was mutual and born out of a desire for somebody to be there and that Miss Lora filled that space, but toward the end, as it is referenced that Yunior feels guilt and hadn't told anybody besides the girl he is with about it out of fear that people will hate him, part of me begins to see it as an adult taking advantage of a minor's in a time of weakness. It's all extremely confusing, but in a way, I think that's what Diaz wanted me to feel.
I do have a few questions regarding Diaz' work. Firstly, is there a reason that the stories are all based around Yunior and Rafa? Does the author have a deep connection to them, such as a similar relationship in his life? Or are they just passages from a larger book/novel? Also, why did he choose to write the other three stories in first person, but this particular one in second?
I decided to read the stories in the anthology first, so Miss Lora ended up being the last Diaz story that I read. I didn’t plan it that way, and I was pleasantly surprised to see Yunior and Rafa appear in more than one story. It brought them to life for me and I think that knowing so much about both characters, and their parents definitely came in handy when it became time for Miss Lora to appear. I’m not going to lie, I spent majority of the story in the back of my mind trying to picture this shapeless, muscular, skinny big eyed woman. Eventually I just gave up and pretended she looked like Stacey Dash. On the other hand, I like the fact that Junot Diaz didn’t make her cover girl perfect. That’s typically what we’d expect in a story of an inappropriate affair right? Guy cheats on his cute girlfriend who won’t put out with a hot older woman who may as well be a porn star. But we’ve all heard that story before. Diaz decides to switch it up. I don’t find myself questioning Yunior’s interest in Miss Lora because from the way Diaz describes her, it makes me want to figure it out too.
ReplyDeleteMaybe my judgment’s clouded because I’m mixed with several minorities, but I feel like it isn’t possible to have the ‘but I’m white mentality’. I think it may seem that way because of the slang and Spanish words but I think if you take that away, it’s pretty easy to find something to relate to. I mean, obviously I’m not a sixteen year old Dominican male who lost his brother and is having an affair with an older woman but I have an older brother that I look up to even though he’s reckless. I have an absent father, and often times my loneliness leads me to make stupid decisions. But those are just the easy comparisons. Diaz gives you such an intimate look inside Yunior’s head that you have to remind yourself that you are not in fact Yunior, or Miss Lora. It’s kind of like when you’re dreaming and a bunch of things happen that would never actually happen to you in real life. But of course you don’t realize that until you wake up. I woke up when I finished each of Diaz’s stories.
While I do agree that Yunior’s affair with an older woman is something a bit out of character, I don’t think that he’s ‘turning into Rafa’ now that he died. Because think back to Ysrael, at the end of the story Yunior threw something at Ysrael and helped Rafa beat him up until they saw his face. I think Yunior always had a bit of Rafa in him, possibly because he loves him, possibly because that’s just how family’s work. I got my anger issues from my brother, along with a bunch of other random quirks that I never realized I got from him. While I think it’s a perfectly sound assumption that Yunior acted the way he did because a part of him wanted to be like Rafa, I think there’s a reason he didn’t have to try so hard to get to that point.
I don’t think Diaz’s stories are explosive because of the shocking language. I think the language is just something that grabs our attention and pulls us in for more. I think what makes Diaz’s stories so explosive is his action reaction. Yea sure his stories are ‘real, raw and gritty’ but that’s not what makes them blow your mind. It’s the fact that he yanks you in and makes you the narrator and really takes things to another level. It’s not explosive because all of this is happening to Yunior, it’s explosive because it’s happening to you. You don’t see Miss Lora as a pedophile because Yunior doesn’t. It’s hard to picture her taking advantage because we’re so wrapped up in Yunior’s life.
I think that this is the most real, true to life story from this class. It's one of those stories that you don't stop reading until the words aren't there anymore. Talk about perspective, the Latin American culture presented in the story is fully engaging, fully alive. From the Spanish to the family dynamics, this creates the persona of the culture and leaves nothing out, and through these characters that honesty is prevalent, by dialogue, language, tone of voice; all of this creates that persona and submerges that culture into the page.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that it is in second person is how it connects this with people, even those unfamiliar with the Latin American culture, and it allows the chance to get to know them better. It engages you, invites to the scene, into their lives. Every little detail adds to the perspective, "And then you are coming back from Chicken Holiday with a four-piece meal, a drumstick in your mouth, and there she is, walking out of Pathmark, wrestling a pair of plastic bags" (63). These are the kinds of details that define these characters, which then define their culture. Just the fact that he goes to a place called Chicken Holiday is very intriguing, and it gives the sense of class that Diaz doesn't hide. It gets specific for that reason.
And the point of view used puts the reader closer to the action, closer to the people even more than first person can, second person is including the reader to feel the effect of every moment in the story, to almost live out the character. "She clasps your shoulders with a nailed grip, and you know that afterwards your back is going to look like it's been whipped" (64), and yes, in that very moment you feel in sync with the character. Because it is personal, it adds to that real factor.
Before this assignment I’d never read or even heard of Junot Diaz before. So reading these stories was a pretty major shock to me, especially the rather graphic descriptions of what was expected of Yunior in terms of relationships (either romantic or not) due to preconceived notions about his race and the examples set by his father and brother. I mean, in “Ysrael” he says that his brother Rafa is regularly having sex even though he is only twelve years old, and in “Miss Lora” Rafa is said to have slept with another man’s wife while still a teenager. In “Fiesta, 1980” an uncle says that even though Yunior is young, “Back in Santo Domingo, he’d be getting laid by now.” Cannonball in a freshwater lake indeed – in my opinion, a lake that just so happens to reside in Maine. Seriously shocking in its cold realism.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me, though, that Yunior desires a change in his life, but is unable to do so due to the cultural expectations that are imposed on him. For example, in “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” he tries his hardest to have a decent romantic relationship with his girlfriend Magda despite the fact that he slips once and cheats on her. But even though we see through the first person narrative that he really does love her and is trying his hardest to make amends, she refuses to let him back in not really because of the cheating, but because he has finally revealed himself as a “typical Dominican man: a sucio, an asshole.” Her friends and family agree as well. He even gets this from his own family in “Miss Lora.” When Yunior trusts a girlfriend with the story of his relationship with Miss Lora, she tells his mother about it. Yunior’s mother is disgusted but not really surprised: “‘He’s just like his father and his brother.’ ‘Dominican men, right, dona?’ ‘These three are worse than the rest.’”
Perhaps that’s why he sleeps with Miss Lorna – it’s considered wrong but not really unexpected in his culture, much like how Miss Lorna slept with her own history teacher. He even muses at the beginning of the story that the relationship might never have happened if it weren’t for his brother’s example.
And so Yunior is trapped in this self-fulfilling prophecy. He is expected to behave a certain way based on his race, and despite his attempts to prove otherwise he can’t help but slip into the role others have set out for him. This feeling of being trapped in an undesired role is especially accentuated – as many others have pointed out – by the use of the second person POV. We cannot escape Yunior’s predicament any more than he can.