Junot Díazの意外な一面

ネタニヤフの勝利でパレスチナに対して絶望するしかない状況ですが、以下のような本が出版されたようです。Junot Díazはオタク系作家で政治にはコミットしていないと勝手に思っていたので、彼が関わっていたのは意外でし
た。

Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation (2015/04/14) Vijay Prashad 商品詳細を見る

Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation
Edited by Vijay Prashad
Impassioned and intimate writing to Palestinians from celebrated American writers
Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s seven-week bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza in the summer of 2014, resulted in half a million displaced Gazans, tens of thousands of destroyed homes, and more than 2,000 deaths—and, yet, it was only the latest in a long series of assaults endured by Palestinians isolated in Gaza. But, following the conflict, polls revealed a startling fact: for the first time, a majority of Americans under thirty found Israel’s actions unjustified. Jon Stewart aired a blistering attack on Israeli violence, and a video of a UN spokesperson weeping as he was interviewed in Gaza went viral, appearing on Vanity Fair and Buzzfeed, among other sites.

This book traces this swelling American recognition of Palestinian suffering, struggle, and hope, in writing that is personal, lyrical, anguished, and inspiring. Some of the leading writers of our time, such as Junot Díaz and Teju Cole, poets and essayists, novelists and scholars, Palestinian American activists like Huwaida Arraf, Noura Erakat, and Remi Kanazi, give voice to feelings of empathy and solidarity—as well as anger at US support for Israeli policy—in intimate letters, beautiful essays, and furious poems. This is a landmark work of controversial, committed literary writing.

彼のインタビューが出版社のサイトに載っていました。意外にも貧しいニュージャージのコミュニティではアイルランドのIRAや南アフリカのANCとは無縁ではなかったようです。勝手に政治とは無関係と思っていただけでした。。。

Junot Díaz: "I think the occupation of Palestine is fucked up"
By Gayatri Kumar / 14 April 2015

Americans Are So Deranged About Palestine

I grew up in the '80s in Central New Jersey, and every single kind of colonial settler calamity was present in my community. I was friends with an Irish kid, the only white kid in our community, and a hard-core Irish Catholic republican. His family used to pass the hat around in church to raise money for the IRA. My other friend was an Egyptian kid whose family extended into Palestine, and throughout the '80s, while everybody else was watching John Hughes movies, this kid had me on point on Palestine. And then of course this was at the height of the apartheid movement. So all of my African American friends, well, two of them, not all of them, had parents who were part of the leftwing, pro-ANC, anti-apartheid movement. I'm in this poor community and this is all just getting beamed into my head.

（中略）
On the basic, basic level: If you are occupying other people's shit, guess what—you are fucked up. That's that. And that's a tough thing for people to stomach. Because we live in a country that's currently occupying people's fucking land. Perhaps Americans are so deranged about Palestine because Americans are thinking, if we give up here, these fucking Indians are going to want their shit back. Well, maybe they should get their shit back. Since 90 percent of us don't own anything, I don't know how much it would hurt us.

Teju Coleも寄稿しているようなので、とりあえず二人のは先に読んでみます。