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Junot Diaz has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. (See previous post, Otakuness.) Here’s an excerpt from his Newsweek interview with Jesse Ellison.

“I think that the reason I don’t mind being labeled (as a “Dominican/Latino writer”) or labeling myself is because I think the entire universe can be found in the Dominican experience. I don’t see the Dominican Republic as a limitation. People seem to think that coming from a tiny island with this really bizarre history in the Dominican Republic is somehow limiting. But in my mind, I think that the same way a small, cold, gray, drizzly island nation in the North Atlantic could imagine itself the center of the universe, I see no difference why a Dominican who comes from this tiny little place and time can’t also imagine himself the center of the universe. . .

“All of us, to misquote Whitman, we all contain multitudes. I think more specifically, we all contain universes. It doesn’t matter who you are. You could be some guy who writes code in Mumbai for a major corporation or you could be a truck driver in Cincinnati. But in the end, none of that means that the whole universe isn’t contained inside you.

“But more specifically, the Caribbean generally and the island of Hispaniola specifically is the linchpin, the pivot point where the old world swung into the new world. If you want the transformation point, if you want the ground zero where the Old World died and the New World began, it’s there. I mean, nothing is more quintessentially American—in the entire span of that description—than the Caribbean and more specifically the Dominican Republic. If you want to be incredibly grandiose, the entire world, we’re all the children of what happened in the Caribbean, whether we know it or not. I mean, the extermination of indigenous people, the conquest of the New World, slavery and in some ways the rise of this form of capitalism that we all live under. I mean really the modern world was given rise by what began in the Caribbean.”

Note: The concept is almost. . .Pinoy.