Words on a Page: An Interview with Junot Diaz  His two principal
linguistic registers (“this kind of crazy Caribbean language and
music” and “this sort of African-American-infused American
vernacular”) grind against each other along with the many other
voices he ventriloquizes in his writing. Much has been made of
his ability to stretch languages and idioms by putting them
together, an ability that Díaz says is, at its root, the product
of a certain shamelessness. “Shame more than anything interrupts
your ability to learn. If you feel shame when people mock you or
look crazy at you’re less likely to practice it. One of the
things that’s helped me is that I have a particular amount of
shamelessness around these different idioms that I love. I’ve
grown up with hip hop my whole life but I’ve never felt any
shame of misusing the language that I grew up with. I feel no
shame using this discourse which is basically my English jammed
against things that would be anathema in the larger hip hop
culture, you know, mash