Francisco Goldman:
Bolaño said writers should leap head first into the abyss, but you really can’t do that, you’d never come out alive, and anyway, I didn’t have to leap into it, I was already there. After Aura’s death, I wrote a book that is mostly about her, a very poor substitute for Aura, of course, but something to put back into the abyss so that it won’t only be emptiness.
Junot Díaz:
If I had to parse my first motivations for becoming a writer down to one it would have to be my profound desire to battle that fucked-up erasure (which is really a violence) by singing my community out of that silence (…)
But ultimately I suspect what keeps me on the page, despite all my slowness and all my difficulties, despite the failures and the long doubt, is the same force that returns Yunior to his writing: the profound need to bear witness, to leave a trace, a record, an account of a people that many, including many of the people themselves, didn’t know existed. For a people like mine, children of the abyss, of apocalypses without end — from slavery to dictatorship to immigration — bearing witness is sometimes all we had, like firing a flare up into the dark vault of the universe. Bearing witness in order (to quote you Frank) to put something back into the abyss so that it won’t only be silence and loss. In order to mark that we were here, we lived, we mattered. In order to have a little light by which to see ourselves and others with, a little light to carry us into the future, a little light to call our own.
Fragmento de: Back into the Abyss: Junot Díaz and Francisco Goldman
