“Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.”
I am no fan of Junot Diaz; I’ve been saying it since my English teacher back in High School would force us all to read him; her very different, accented, troubled, color kids. I’ve always thought that you don't need color to be colored, that its something you carry inside too; the lifestyle, the oppression, the defeat and ingloriousness… Anyways, she made us read Diaz all the time. I guess he bothers me because I understand him probably more than anyone ever could. I understand his slang and jokes, his issues, and lack of sensitivity… I understand it. & I guess I hate reading Diaz because understanding him says a lot about me, too.
Back to this quote, I suppose. Death was always something that I loved to write about. As a writer, it is one of those obscure topics that you never know exactly how to digest or express; but it was always fun to. In the short story, Yunior watched his brother live defeated and inglorious day by day. One could argue that the brother, Rafa, was dying daily. But as a girl who knows this story all too well, the story of the bystander watching, with human incompetency seeping through your pores, I know that it was Yunior and the mother, dying every single day. A wise psychologist once said that it hurts a whole lot more to witness and watch suffering than to experience it yourself.
I agree, Bonaparte. I was really good with history yet I can’t quite put my finger on the contextual pretense through which he says this. All I do know for sure is that I agree. Death is easy. Dying everyday is not. In hopes to sensationalize the phenomenon, I believe we have the ability to die every day, as we do to live. Such as staying in that god awful French class passed the Add/Drop period, or staying in college once you lose the sight of your objective. We die when we lose ourselves in the midst of all this political chaos and we die when we become too comfortable with mediocrity and defeat.
-Vanessa Hernandez
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