Pulitzer prize-winning author Junot Díaz has laid bare the inspirations behind parts of his celebrated 2008 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in a series of annotations to the text posted on a social media site that lets rap, rock and poetry fans share their passions.
The site, Rapgenius.com, taps into fans' enduring thirst for knowledge about the inspirations of their creative heroes, and enables users to post song lyrics, poems or passages of prose and to "collaboratively annotate" them.
Díaz's prize-winning novel follows the life of Oscar de León, a boy growing up as a Dominican immigrant in New Jersey who is obsessed with science fiction and fantasy novels, and is also falling in love. Diaz took to Rapgenius.com to share the backstory to one of the book's footnotes, which relates to "Outer Azuo", the remote reaches of the Dominican Republic's Azua province, and Oscar's perceptions of it.
Footnote 32 reads: "Outer Azua is one of the poorest areas in the DR [Dominican Republic]; it is a wasteland, our own homegrown sertao, resembled the irradiated terrains from those end-of-the-world scenarios that Oscar loved so much – Outer Azua was the Outlands, the Badlands, the Cursed Earth, the Forbidden Zone, the Great Waste, the Plains of Glass, the Burning Lands, the Doben-al, it was Salusa Secundus, it was Ceti Alpha V, it was Tatooine."
In his annotations Díaz revealed the movies, games, and films from his own childhood in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey that contributed to Oscar's mental image of Outer Azua.
The reference to "the Outlands" was inspired by the landscape from the 1974 science fiction film Zardoz, starring Sean Connery, and the "Badlands" were influenced by Roger Zelazny's science fiction novella Damnation Alley. "The movie adaptation (god-fucking-awful) was on a lot when I was a kid and it had these mutant roaches devouring one brother in an abandoned car and that also gave me nightmares. I really had an overactive imagination when I was a kid," Díaz wrote.
The author references a cornucopia of other science fiction and fantasy, from the Judge Dredd universe to Frank Herbert's Dune, Planet of the Apes and Dungeons and Dragons, and The Wrath of Khan ("still my favourite Star Trek movie of all time …").
Of the reference to Tatooine, Diaz wrote: "Depending on your fanboy orientation either the first or second most famous desert planet in nerdom. Again when I saw those landscapes in Star Wars I felt surge of kinship. Shit, on first viewing I also thought my man's name was Juan Kenobi. But that's what happens when you're an immigrant kid of colour in a culture that erases your community completely. You start inventing filiations."
Díaz's novel, like a number of other influential books of recent times, contains footnotes, and the author also used rapgenius to tell their story: "The first editor I had on this novel wanted me to cut the footnotes. I'm so glad the second editor thought they were as important as I did to the book's point about what narratives we authorise, what narratives we don't. In the end footnotes are not anything you want to fight about with your editor. I've been asked if I got my footnoting from David Foster Wallace – no disrespect to DFW but Jorge Luis Borges and Patrick Chamoiseau and William Vollmann were my inspirations, especially Chamoiseau."
Readers have long been fascinated by what stimulates writers' imaginations. In May, the Guardian reported an auction by Sotheby's of a collection of annotated first editions including JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, among many specially annotated works, which raised a total of £439,200 in aid of the English PEN writers' association.
