Мовні особливості збірки Дж.Діаса “Зануритися"

        

 

 

 

      The short story collection “Drown” consists of 10 chapters:

Chapter One, "Ysrael"

      The stories move generally from a younger male's experiences in Dominica, Dominican Republic, to a maturing young man transplanted to the United States in a rough, poor neighborhood in New Jersey. The stories are colored by the limited view of a child trying to grow up, as well as the limited cultural view of a young person burdened with poverty, an absent father, a preoccupied mother, and the dirt and violence of difficult neighborhoods. Like many kids in such neighborhoods, the young people in these stories act tough and crude, but inwardly suffer from their disrupted families and difficult circumstances.

Chapter Two, "Fiesta 1980"

       When an aunt and uncle move to America, the boys' father, Papi, decides to throw a celebration party. Papi comes home and pushes his way to the bathroom to wash off evidence of his illicit affair with a Puerto Rican woman. Mami looks beautiful to the boys, smelling "like the wind through a tree." Mami has been excited for the party, but as they all wait for Papi to finish his shower, Mami just seems to want it all to be over with. The family waits for Papi to be ready. He is upset because the brother has eaten before leaving for the party, and when that happens, the boy usually becomes carsick and vomits every time. Papi moves toward the boy to strike him, and Rafa looks down on the younger son because he is scared to be hit.

Chapter Three, "Aurora"

       The story, which relies heavily upon sexual references and drug use, opens with the first-person narrator and his friend, Cut, buying a stash of weed, some of which they use as they drive home to sort, weigh, and bag. Cut is eating cookies, but the narrator is waiting for his girlfriend. He notices that the places where she'd scratched him are healing. When she arrives, he notes that she's skinny "like a twelve-year-old" and that she has the shakes, coming down off some drug. They have sex, and she begs him to "go easy," but he's high and hormonal and hurts her, anyway. He feels badly about it the next morning

Chapter Four, "Aguantando"

       "Aguantando" means "holding on," and this story is about how the family tries to hold on, waiting for a father and husband to return. The narrator says he has lived without a father for the first nine years of his life, and most of this story comes from the point of view of a child, not the adolescent in the former stories. The boy only knows his father from faded sepia photos with scalloped edges. They remain dry in a home with a leaky roof, where everything else is wet, only because they are encased in a plastic bag. The father left when the child was four, but since the boy cannot remember the father at all, he feels he grew up without a father.

Chapter Five, "Drown"

         This is the title story of the collection, set in the summertime in New Jersey. Without transition, the family is now located in America. Yunior and a friend, Beto, have gone wild, out of control, in their neighborhood. They "stole, broke windows...pissed on people's steps and then challenged them to come out and stop us." Yunior has another year to graduate from high school but Beto is leaving for college at the end of the summer. He's glad to go, leaving the stinking, dirty neighborhood.

Chapter Six, "Boyfriend"

         This is a very short story about Yunior listening to a woman and her boyfriend in the adjacent apartment. They are both gorgeous and never fight about money, so Yunior thinks they must be models. The boyfriend doesn't live with her and Yunior has seen him coming on to white girls at the bar, so Yunior knows that he's going to be leaving the girlfriend soon. Sometimes the two talk in the bathroom, more often than not, which may seem strange, but it nonetheless makes it easier for Yunior to overhear their conversations. He listens to them shower together, sometimes including sex. Sometimes their arguments are fierce and horrible. There comes a time when the boyfriend never returns and Yunior gets up the courage to ask the girlfriend up for coffee in his apartment. 

Chapter Seven, "Edison, New Jersey"

         In this story, the first person narrator, presumably Yunior, has a job assembling and delivering tables, mostly pool tables and card tables. He works with a partner, Wayne, who is married but still tries to make it with all the ladies. Yunior wonders why the ladies respond to this guy who's big and clunky, but they do. The story is episodic, like many of the stories in the collection. It begins with Wayne and Yunior waiting to enter a home to install a table. Yunior watches a mama duck and three ducklings floating in a ditch.

Chapter Seven, "Edison, New Jersey"

         In this story, the first person narrator, presumably Yunior, has a job assembling and delivering tables, mostly pool tables and card tables. He works with a partner, Wayne, who is married but still tries to make it with all the ladies. Yunior wonders why the ladies respond to this guy who's big and clunky, but they do. The story is episodic, like many of the stories in the collection. It begins with Wayne and Yunior waiting to enter a home to install a table. Yunior watches a mama duck and three ducklings floating in a ditch.

Chapter Eight, "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl or Halfie"

        This story is well beloved by college-aged readers. It is a how-to manual on how to get into the pants of a date. He says to make a move when the family is gone, saying you are sick. Mothers will not believe their sons are sick, but they will finally call them "bad" boys and allow them to stay home.

In reference to an earlier story when the narrator was feeling embarrassed by government cheese, he tells the reader to clear the government cheese out of the fridge. Then hide embarrassing family photos. Hide stinky or embarrassing items under the sink. A whitegirl will be brought by her parents because you live in the projects, which are unsafe.

Chapter Nine, "No Face"

         This story is told from the point of view of Ysrael, who is introduced in the first chapter; Ysrael is the first person narrator in this segment. Ysrael has suffered all his life, ever since a pig came into his cradle and ate off his face when he was a baby. Nobody hides this story from him, so he understands perfectly why he appears so hideous. He must wear a mask every day and be misunderstood and attacked by people in the neighborhood. He counters this by reading about superheroes and imagining himself to be one. He also works out hard every day so he can outrun or outfight attackers.

Chapter Ten, "Negocios"

        Throughout the loosely related stories, Yunior reflects again and again on the recurring pain of his father's abandonment, not only when Papi takes a mistress in Dominica, but also later when he leaves and just disappears to America. This story reveals the truth of what happens to the father. True, Papi is no saint. He is revealed as a bully and an abusive controller in the earlier stories; however, Papi also falls prey to difficult circumstances which prevent him from coming home and taking care of his family when he would really like to. [17].

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 2.LANGUAGE PECULIARITIES OF the SHORT STORY cOLLECTION “DROWN”

2.1. Use of  Spanglish in “Drown”

      The main peculiarity of this short story collection is broad usage of Spanglish. The text of the stories is full of words that are taken from Spanish and used in English, according to the rules of English grammar. The nouns are used with the articles, the verbs are used with particle “to” and so on. Now I’m going to represent short passages of the text and distinguish the units that are peculiar in it:

        We were on our way to the colmado for an errand, a beer for my tio, when Rafa stood still and titled his head, as if listening to a massage I could not hear, something beamed in from afar. We were close to colmado; you could hear the music and the gentle clop of drunken voices. I was that summer, but my brother , and he was the only one who wanted to see Ysrael, who looked out towards Barbacoa and said, We should pay this kid a visit.

      The peculiarity of this passage is the use of spanish word “tio”, which stands for english “uncle”.

        Mami shipped me and Rafa out to the Campo every summer. She worked long hours at the Chocolate factory and  she had no the  time nor energy look after us during  the month school was out. Rafa and I stayed with our Tios, in a small wooden house, just outside Ocoa. rose bushes blazed around the yard like compass points and the mango trees spread out deep blankets of shade where we could rest and play dominos, but the campo was nothing like our barrio in Santa Domingo. In the campo the was nothing to do, no one to see. You didn’t get television or electricity, Rafa, who was older and expected more, woke up every morning, pissy and dissatisfied. He stood on the patio in his shorts and looked out over the mountains at the mists that gathered like water, at the brucal trees that blazed like fires on the mountain. This he said, is shit. 

      In this passage we find such units of Spanish as “Mami” that stands for “mother”, “tios” that means “uncle and aunt”, “barrio” that denotes “neighborhood” .

    Tio Miguel had chores for us (mostly we chopped wood for the smoke house brought water up from the river) but we finished these at easy as we threw off our skirts, the rest of the day punching us in the face. We caught jaivas in the stream and spent ours walking across the valley to see girls that were never there; we set traps for jurones we never caught and never toughened up our roosters with pails of cold water. We worked hard at keeping busy.

         In this passage we find such peculiar units as “jaival” that means “cancer”, and “jurone” which means “basket”.

        I didn’t mind these summers, wouldn’t forget them the way Rafa would. Back home in capital, Rafa had his own friend, a bunch of tiguers who liked to knock down our neighbors and who scrawled chocha and toto on walls and curbs. Back in the Capital he rarely said to me, except, shut up pendejo.

      Unless, of course, he was mad and then he had about five hundred routines he liked to lay on me. Most of them had to do with my complexion, my hair, the size of my lips. It’s the Haitian, he’d say to his buddies. Hey, Senor, Haitian, Mami found you on the border and only took you because she felt sorry for you. 

     The non-English units of this passage are “choca” that means “a kind of a bird”, and “toto” stat stands for “stick”, and “pandeja” that means “silly person”. Also I have to mention that in the first sentence we may notice the peculiarity of Spanish language, that is represented in this sentence. In Spanish pronouns may be omitted, and the verbs can express it by themselves.

     e. x I didn’t mind these summers, wouldn’t forget them the way Rafa would. In this sentence we may see that in the second part of the sentence pronoun “I” is omitted, that is the phenomena of Spanish.

     The summer I was nine, Rafa shot whole afternoon talking about whatever chica he was getting with. Not that the campo girls gave up ass like the girls back in the Capital but kissing them, he told, very much the same. He’d take the campo girls down to the dams to swim and if he was lucky they let him put in their mouths. He’d done La MUDA that way for almost a month before her parents heard about it and barred her from leaving the house forever.

      The peculiarity of this passage is usage of  Spanish word “la chica” that means “a girl”

      If I kept on he’d punch me in the shoulder and walk on until what was left on him was the colour of his shirt filling in the spaces between the leaves. Something inside of me would sag like a sail. I would yell his name and he would harry on, the fern and branches and flower pods trembling in his wake.

       Later, when we were in beds listening to the rats on the zinc roof he might tell me what he had done.  I would hear about tetas and chochas and leche and he’d talk without looking over at me. The was the girl he had gone to see, Half-Haitian, but he ended up with her sister. Another who believed she wouldn’t get pregnant if she drunk Coca-cola afterwards. And one who was pregnant and didn’t give a damn

about anything. His hands were behind his head and his feet were crossed at his ankles. He was handsome and spoke out of the corner of his month. I was too young to understand everything he said, but I listened to him anyway, in case these things might be useful in the future.

       In this passage are a lot of Spanish words, such as “teta” that mean “women’s breast”, “chocha” that means “candies”, and “el leche” that stands for “milk”.

       Ysrael was a different story. Even on this side of Ocoa people had heard of him. how when he was a baby a pig had eaten his face off, skinned it like an orange. He was sometimes to talk about, that set the kids to screaming, worse than el Cuco or la Vieja Caluso.

       I’d seen Ysrael my first time the year before, right after the dams were finished. I was in town, farting around, when a single-prop plane swept in across the sky. A door opened on the fuselage and a man began to kick out tall bundles that exploded into thousands of leaflets as soon as wind got to them. The came down as slow as butterfly blossoms and were posters of wrestlers, not politicians, and that’s when us kids started shouting each other. Usually the planes only covered Ocoa, but if extras had been printed the nearby pueblos would also get leaflets, especially if the match or election was a grande one. The paper would cling to the trees for weeks.

 

        In this passage there are such non-English units as “vieje” that means “traveling”, “pueblo”, that stands for “a city”, and “grande” that is “big”.

       I spotted Ysrael in an alley, stooping over a stank of leaflets that had not come undone from its thin cord.

      He was wearing his mask,

      What are you doing I said? I said.

      What do you think I’m doing? he answered.

He picked up the bundle and va down the alley. Some other chicos saw him and wheeled, howling but, cono, could he run.

   The peculiarity of this passage is use of such units as “va” that is infinitive form of spanish verb “ir” that means “to go”, “chico” means “boy” and “cono” that stands for english “cono”.

         That’s Ysrael! I was told. He’s ugly and he’s got a cousin around here but we don’t like him either. And that face of his would make you sick! I told my heamano later, when I have got home, and he set up in his cama.

      Could you see in your mask?

      Nor really.

     That’s sometimes we got to check out.

      In this passage we have such units as “hermano” that means “brother”, and “cama” that stands for “bed”. All the passages that we have already covered have spanish units, and are constructed according to the logic of spanish grammar.

       He kicked at the mosquito netting and I could hear the mesh tearing just a little. My tio was yukking it up with his buddies in the yard. One of Tio’s roosters had won big the dia before and he was thinking of taking it in the Capital.

     People around here don’t bet worth a damn, he was saying. You average campesino only bets big when he feels lucky and how many of them feel lucky?

You are feeling feliz right now?

You are damn right about that. That’s why I have to find myself some big spenders.

   - I wonder how much of Ysrael’s face is gone, Rafa said.

   - Tenga his eyes.

   - That’s a lot, he assured me. You’d think eyes would be the first thing a pig would go for. Eyes are soft, and salty.

    - How do you know that?

    - I licked one, he said.

    - Maybe his ears. [1, p. 5-20].

        The Spanish units in this text are “el tio” that means “an uncle”, the word “feliz” that means “lucky” and “tenga”, that is the form of spenish verb “tener” that means “to have”.

         In Drown, Junot Diaz uses Spanish words amidst his English to reinforce the differences between American and the Dominican cultures. The author does not visually label Spanish words or provide translations for them. Rather, he forces the reader to recognize Spanish words and decipher the meanings based on their context.                     The use of this technique draws the reader into the world of the narrator; however, as the stories progress, this technique exposes how the cultural divergence between America and the Dominican Republic marginalizes those who do not speak English. Thus Junot Diaz includes the following epigraph, “The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you.” The author implies that cultural difference makes the communication of his stories difficult, and as a result, language threatens their authenticity; however, as the author incorporates Spanish words within his stories, he validates the untranslatable experiences of those who do not speak English. [19]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conclusions

 

After having covered a lot of material we understand that English in its speaking community changes every day. All the time English absorbs new lexical units, there exists a language exchange, especially these changes are noticeable in American English because the USA is a multicultural country.

Thanks to Hispanic culture there appeared a new language phenomenon that’s called Spanglish. Mostly it’s used by people originated from Latin America, Mexico or Cuba. Their language community is approximately 30 million people, that quite a lot. That’s not a secret that all official documents and warnings in the USA are written in both Spanish and English. As it has been written about Afro-American writers, there also appear Hispanic writers that began to write in a mix of English and Spanish or as it called Spanglish.

All these forms of English are non-formal, but we guess that after frequent use in newspapers, books (as we already noticed in collection of short stories “Drown”) these language phenomena can become an official part of English vocabulary or grammar.

The process of this exchange is being deeply learnt by thousands of linguists all over the world. There is a science the aim of which is to learn and investigate these languages; the name of this science is sociolinguistic.

By using the language units of Spanglish instead of some English ones August Junot Diaz wants to make an authentic affect on readers, the author uses slang to transfer them into the atmosphere that is described; it makes the speech more colloquial and comprehensible. As we see, the use of these simplifications fixes the usage of Spanglish and other language phenomena in contemporary literature.

Junot Diaz hails cultural differences as sources of pride rather than as evidence of inferiority. He is well aware that Hispanic people do things differently from the Anglo-Saxon whites and demonstrates in his novel in both subtle and more obvious ways a host of cultural distinctions. Even in the least conspicuous of the daily rituals of Hispanics, Diaz finds their cultural signature: in the way they decorate their houses, in the way they bury their dead, in the way they talk, in the way they worship, and so on. In each work, he constructs a Hispanic world, drawing from as many aspects of the culture as possible: folk customs and beliefs, music, religion, work, language, food, clothing, and so on.

Diaz, through language and symbolism, forces readers into an emotional bond with Yunior while exposing the illusory nature of the American dream. Although intertwined with each story, "Fiesta, 1980" allows for a more concise discussion of Diaz's purpose. Diaz's language, even at first glance, appears very different from conventional authors: Mami's younger sister my tia Yrma-finally made it to the United States that year. She and Tio Miguel got themselves an apartment in the Bronx. He didn't say nothing to nobody.

Two aspects, his Spanish interjections into the text and his tendency to disregard English rules of grammar, surface in the opening of "Fiesta, 1980." Yunior's narratives contain Spanish words an average of about every other sentence. Diaz uses them to keep readers aware of Yunior's culture and homeland, attempting to stop the "stifling" effect America often has on immigrants' cultures. Also, Yunior's rejection of the norms of English writing, evident in the phrases "got themselves" and "nothing to nobody" in the above quote, gives his narratives a certain rebellious quality. Not only does he rebel against America's tendency to smother cultural values but rebelling against American rules in general, even the rules of grammar.

Diaz continues his grammatical attack on the United States' rules with his lack of quotation marks: “Papi pulled me to my feet by my ear.If you throw up-I wont I cried, tears in my eyes Ya, Ramon, ya. It's not his fault, Mami said”

All of the conversations are printed in the manner above, without any quotation marks and are full of Spanish words. [18].

 

 

 

 

 

REFERENCES

1. Díaz J. Drown / Junot Diaz. – New York: Riverhead Books, 1997. – 210 p.

2. Díaz J. Nilda / Junot Diaz // The New Yorker (4 Oct. 1999). – P. 92–97.

3. Dictionary of American slang/ ed. R. L. Chapman with B. A. Kipfer. – 3rd ed. –New York: HarperCollins, 1997. – 617 p.

4. Dillard, J.L. A History of American English / J.L. Dillard. – New York: Longman, 2008. – 310 p.

5. Fickett Joan G. Tense and Aspect in Spanglish / Joan G. Fickett // Journal of English. – 1972. – P. 17–19.

6. Green L. J.  Spanglish in the USA: A Linguistic Introduction / Lisa J. Green, – Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Linguistics, 2002. – 300 p.

7. The Beacon Best of 2001: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures. – New York: Beacon Press, 2001. – 315 p.

8. Naumchuk V. P. Lexical and semantic peculiarities of idioms and American slang in American religious missionary comics / В. П. Наумчук // Англійська мова та література. – 2006. – №9. – C.10–17.