Summary
"Ysrael" is the first story of Junot Díaz's 1996 collection of short fiction, Drown. The story opens with the speaker, Yunior, and his brother, Rafa. They are on their way to the colmado (a local convenience store, canteen, and gathering space). The speaker notices his brother tilt his head and say they should see Ysrael. Yunior reveals that he and his brother are in el campo (the countryside) and that his mother "shipped" them out to live with family every summer. Yunior recounts that his relationship changes with his brother when they are in the campo together. While they are living with their mother en el centro (the city), the brothers have a tense relationship, and Rafa picks on Yunior for his looks. In the campo, however, they "were friends" (5). In the campo, Rafa is more open with Yunior about his sexual relationships with women. When they lay together at night, he tells his brother about the different girls he hooked up with. Yunior listens "in case these things might be useful in the future" (6).
Yunior moves on to think about Ysrael, who also lives in the campo. When Ysrael was a baby, a pig attacked his face, leaving it scarred. He developed myth-like status for the children of the campo, who often tormented him because of his physical deformity. Yunior recounts seeing Ysrael for the first time the previous year, when a plane flew by to disseminate flyers for a wrestling match over their town. In this memory, Ysrael was wearing a mask, which prevented Yunior from seeing his face. When Yunior tells his brother that he has seen Ysrael, Rafa expresses curiosity about Ysrael's face. He decides that he and Yunior should track Ysrael down.
First, Yunior and Rafa go to the colmado with two empty bottles of Coca-Cola, which they exchange for change. Afterwards, they wait for an autobús (a minibus used for public transportation) with a young cobrador (the guy who collects the money from customers in an autobús). On the autobús, Yunior goes to sit in the back while Rafa stays up front with the cobrador. The man sitting next to Yunior begins to talk to him, first about the music on the radio and then about the pastry that Yunior purchased behind Rafa's back at the colmado. The older man begins to touch Yunior inappropriately, and Yunior insults him, though no one else in the autobús notices.
Yunior and Rafa leave the autobús without paying their fare. Rafa argues with the cobrador about it, and then they run away with the cobrador yelling after them. Yunior begins to cry, but he does not tell his brother about the man's inappropriate advances on the autobús. Rafa tells Yunior to stop crying and that he needs to get tougher. He then talks to several people in their path who point them in the direction to find Ysrael. They eventually find him flying a kite in a field. Before the story tells us what happens when Rafa and Yunior find Ysrael, Yunior begins to recount what happened the first time he saw Ysrael. He reveals that he threw a rock at the other boy which hit him in the shoulder blade. He and a group of other boys chased Ysrael down. They nearly caught him, but Ysrael escaped.
Yunior notes how Ysrael is taller than either of the brothers and looks well fed and strong. Rafa catches Ysrael's attention by asking him where he and Yunior can find a colmado so that Yunior can get a drink. Ysrael responds by telling them that there is "a faucet up the road" (15). Yunior describes Ysrael's voice and physical appearance, noting how his face was hidden by a "handsewn" mask from "thin blue cotton" (15). The mask hides much of Ysrael's physical deformity, but Yunior is able to see some scar tissue around Ysrael's left eye and "the saliva that trickled down his neck" (15). Rafa rejects the faucet, saying that he and Yunior are from out of town and drinking the tap water would make them sick. Ysrael then points them down the road in the direction of the colmado. Rafa and Yunior take off down the street, but then they circle back to the field, feigning that they could not find it.
When they return, Ysrael has his kite in his hand, and Yunior notes that it looks well made. Ysrael tells them that his father sent him the kite from New York, and Yunior excitedly tells him that his father lives in New York as well. Rafa asks Ysrael about the mask, feigning ignorance about his physical deformity, and Ysrael tells them that he is sick. He reveals to them that he is looking forward to going to the United States soon where they will perform a reconstructive surgery on his face. Ysrael changes the subject, offering to show the boys where the colmado is. In the colmado, Ysrael stands off to the side and Rafa buys Yunior a coke. Yunior begins a conversation with Ysrael about wrestling, recalling his first encounter with Ysrael, when the other boy was collecting flyers for a wrestling match. Rafa asks Ysrael if he wants to wrestle, and Ysrael turns him down. Yunior notices that Ysrael seems to be smiling beneath his mask as he talks to Rafa and Yunior. While he is in the middle of talking, however, Rafa slams the empty coke bottle down on Ysrael's head, which causes the bottle to explode. Ysrael falls, his body colliding with a fence post on the way down. He lands on his stomach and Rafa kicks him in the side. Rafa and Yunior both push Ysrael onto his back and Rafa takes off Ysrael's mask. The two boys look in disgust and fascination at Ysrael's deformed face.
In the final section of the story, Rafa and Yunior make their way back home. Aboard an autobús, Yunior expresses the hope that the American doctors will cure Ysrael, but Rafa shuts him down. The story ends with the boys running off the autobús without paying their fare.
Analysis
When reading "Ysrael," you probably felt a feeling of extreme discomfort at Rafa and Yunior's cruel treatment of Ysrael. Their cruelty seems especially heinous because they first lull Ysrael into a sense of security by talking about their fathers in the United States and wrestling. In the same moment that Rafa breaks a bottle over Ysrael's head, Yunior realizes through a twitch in the mask that Ysrael is smiling (18). Despite this, Rafa ruthlessly beats up Ysrael and pulls off his face mask without his permission. This novel's sparse language states the events of the encounter between Yunior, Rafa, and Ysrael in matter-of-fact terms, which can help to increase the reader's sense of discomfort as they read the account. Rafa and Yunior express very little empathy for Ysrael except for in the final moments of the story when Yunior expresses hope that Ysrael will be healed. The story, therefore, is marked by an unavoidable viciousness that can be hard to swallow. Despite this, "Ysrael" is considered one of the most important stories from Drown because of the themes that work beneath the surface of the story and invite special attention. The analysis that follows will first examine Ysrael's physical deformity and Yunior and Rafa's fascination in response to it. Then, it will discuss the relationship between Yunior, Rafa, and Ysrael, which sets up the violent act that Yunior and Rafa eventually commit on Ysrael. Following this, we will discuss other instances of violence within this story, including Rafa's treatment of Yunior and the uncomfortable encounter that Yunior has with the older gentleman on the bus. The final three paragraphs of this analysis will show how "Ysrael" deals with the themes of migration, poverty, and race.
Ysrael has a physical deformity which leads to his constant torment at the hands of Ocoa's residents, particularly the packs of young boys who try to hunt him down. As Tobin Siebers notes in "Words Stare Like a Glass Eye: From Literary to Verbal to Disability Studies to Back Again," "Ysrael literally runs through the book, and every time he is caught or almost caught, a high dramatic level is reached because Díaz withholds the image of the face from both characters and readers until key moments." When Rafa and Yunior finally overpower Ysrael at the end of the story, an entire paragraph is devoted to the description of Ysrael's face: "His left ear was a nub and you could see the thick veined snub of his tongue through a hole in his cheek. He had no lips. His head was tipped back and his eyes had gone white and the cords were out on his neck. He'd been an infant when the pig had come into the house. The damage looked old but I still jumped back" (19). Yunior's physical reaction to Ysrael's face probably matched the emotional discomfort that many readers felt when encountering this passage. Part of this reaction might be explained by the fact that Rafa and Yunior's mistreatment of Ysrael is mirrored by the very text itself. As Siebers notes, "the scene, like the institution of the 'freak show,' objectifies human difference for display to satisfy curiosity and entertain. Ysrael is made an object for exhibition: his eyes are cloudy, and he does not return the look of the brothers, allowing them to penetrate him at will with their stares." The result is incredibly emotionally turbulent for both Yunior and Rafa, who, as Siebers suggests, are "simultaneously repulsed and fascinated."
Siebers continues to argue that the way that Rafa and Yunior treat Ysrael solidifies their difference from the other boy rather than Ysrael's appearance within the world of the story: "Rafa penetrates the face with a look but touches it only gingerly, with two fingers, as if he might catch a contagious disease from it. Yunior wants to run away. These reactions, not physical characteristics, transform Ysrael into a freak. His difference from the other boys is confirmed by their morbid fascination with his bodily features. They set out to find someone who is different from them, and they succeed in their mission." As a result, it is "under their gaze" that Ysrael's humanity is stripped from him and he is turned into an object of fascination rather than a living, breathing human. Therefore, we can understand Rafa and Yunior's encounter with Ysrael as a double act of violence: first, they injure him physically, and second, they deny him his humanity as they treat him as if he were merely an object. Díaz counteracts this dehumanization by giving Ysrael his own story, told in his own voice, later in the work with "No Face." For the time being, however, the boys leave Ysrael where he is and move on with their lives. While Yunior is left thinking about Ysrael, it is suggested that Rafa does not give him a second thought and he is able to quickly put the violence of his actions behind him. This violence, in a way, is sanctioned by the entire community in Ocoa, as they all ostracize Ysrael and treat him differently because of the way he looks.
Beyond Ysrael's physical deformity, the story sets up several notable differences between him and the brothers. When they first encounter Ysrael in the field, Ysrael is taller than both of them and looks well fed: "He was about a foot bigger than either of us and looked like he'd been fattened on that supergrain the farmers around Ocoa were giving their stock, a new product which kept my tío up at night, muttering jealously, Proxyl Feed 9, Proxyl Feed 9. Ysrael's sandals were of stiff leather and his clothes were Northamerican" (15). Literary critic Ylce Irizarry understands Ysrael's access to American clothing as a furthering his difference in the eyes of the town: "Ysrael, the mutilated child from Ocoa, is doubly marked. His face is horrifically disfigured; because he is a friendless victim of bullying, his father buys him clothes and toys from New York, marking him as an outsider in his own community." As the story tells us, Rafa and Yunior's father lives and works in New York like Ysrael's. Rather than generate solidarity between Rafa, Yunior, and Ysrael, however, it creates even more distance between them, because their father "only sent [them] letters and an occasional shirt or pair of jeans at Christmas" (16). In other words, while Ysrael enjoys the attention and care of his father, Rafa and Yunior's father is mostly absent from their lives. In Rafa and Yunior's eyes, this fact makes Ysrael even more alien to them, which might have increased the tension that led to Rafa's physical assault of the other boy.
The other notable difference between Ysrael and the boys has to do with belonging in Ocoa and the campo. Rafa introduces himself to Ysrael as an outsider (despite the fact that Yunior has come into contact with Ysrael and conversed with him before). "We're not from around here," Rafa tells Ysrael, "We can't drink the water" (15). In response, Ysrael emphasizes his own belonging within his setting: "I've lived here all my life" (16). Later, when the boys are talking about wrestling, he repeats his belonging: "I'm from around here" (18). What these differences serve to do is draw imaginary lines between the boys, who, on a larger scale, are in fact not very different at all. All three of them are Dominican children who live a significant part of their lives in the campo, with fathers who live in the United States. All three children occupy a kind of "outsider" position within Ocoa: Rafa and Yunior only live there part of the year, and Ysrael is ostracized from his community because of what happened to him. All three children look forward to the day that they will join their fathers in America. Despite this, the differences between them overpower the similarities, and the interaction between them quickly becomes explosive and violent.
Rafa and Yunior's abuse of Ysrael is not the only violence that occurs in the 15-page story. In fact, the story is almost overflowing with violence. This violence even comes from Rafa and Yunior's surroundings themselves, as Yunior describes that when he and Rafa finish their chores, "the rest of the day punch[es] us in the face" (4). On top of that, Rafa constantly picks on his younger brother, often resulting in physical injury for Yunior: "If I was stupid enough to mouth off to him... he pounded the hell out of me and then I would run as far as I could" (5). Notably, the way that Rafa treats Yunior and Yunior's response to that treatment mirrors Ysrael's relationship to the packs of boys who hunt him down in Ocoa—they throw rocks at him, trying to catch him so that they can beat him up, and Ysrael escapes by running as fast as he can. There is, therefore, a parallel between the violence that Yunior experiences at the hands of his brother and the violence that Ysrael faces at the hands of the rest of the world. However, this does not stop Yunior from helping his brother attack Ysrael in the final pages of the story. Later on, Yunior reveals that their tío engages in cock fighting rings and is planning on taking his winning rooster to Santo Domingo (8). Perhaps the most surprising act of violence within the story is the encounter that Yunior has with the older man on the autobús, who touches him inappropriately without his consent. "Let me help. He spit in his fingers and started to rub at the stain but then he was pinching at the tip of my pinga through the fabric of my shorts. He was smiling. I shoved him against his seat. He looked to see if anybody had noticed. You pato, I said. The man kept smiling. You low-down pinga-sucking pato, I said. The man squeezed my bicep, quietly, hard, the way my friends would sneak me in church. I whimpered. You should watch your mouth, he said" (12). This moment in "Ysrael" emphasizes the overarching theme of vulnerable people being abused by those who have more power than them, and it affects Yunior greatly, who cries for a significant amount of time as the brothers make their way to Ocoa. Rafa responds to Yunior's tears with anger and Yunior keeps what happened to him himself. These moments of violence are piled on top of each other to great effect within the text itself. It turns into a cycle: the characters who are affected by this violence, like Yunior, nevertheless enact violence of their own. None of the characters take the time to consider the wrongness of their harmful actions, suggesting an atmosphere of violence that is seemingly accepted as the status quo.
Many readers of "Ysrael" enjoy the opening story of Drown because it offers insight into the rural parts of the Dominican Republic that are often only ever experienced by locals. As Ylce Irizarry describes in "Narratives of Loss: Tracing Migrations," Rafa and Yunior undergo an "internal migration" within the Dominican Republic when they spend their summers with their uncle. As a result, readers gain more understanding of "two arenas of Dominican life: urban poverty and rural poverty." Rafa and Yunior have contrasting reactions to this change in environment. Rafa complains about being in the campo, where "there was nothing to do, no one to see" (4). Rafa complains about the lack of amenities in their tío's house: "You didn't get television or electricity, and Rafa, who was older and expected more, woke up every morning pissy and dissatisfied" (4). Yunior, in contrast, has a more generous reaction to these summers: "I didn't mind these summers, wouldn't forget them the way Rafa would" (5). Ultimately, the difference in the brothers' reactions suggests a more complex reading of the living conditions in the campo instead of one that merely labels them as "bad" or "inferior." The poverty that Rafa and Yunior find in the campo is different from the poverty that they experience in Santo Domingo and it is also different from the poverty that they will encounter once they finally immigrate to the United States. Although all three of these settings are distinct from one another, they are tied together through inadequate access to resources and dissatisfaction from the characters. However, while he is in the campo, which would traditionally be seen as the most impoverished setting of the book, Yunior does not complain about his surroundings and instead takes note of the wealth of natural beauty that surrounds him at all times. "[R]osebushes blazed around the yard like compass points and the mango trees spread out deep blankets of shade where we could rest and play dominos," he describes on page 4. Later in that same paragraph, Yunior takes note of the "mountains," the "mists that gathered like water," and the"brucal trees that blazed like fires on the mountain" (4). Yunior's careful attention to his surroundings reveals his appreciation for his environment, where he enjoys unique and special characteristics in the campo that he would not be able to find anywhere else.
Another theme that Díaz touches on in "Ysrael" is that of race. As Megan Jeanette Myers explores in "'Dos rayanos-americanos' Rewrite Hispaniola: Julia Álvarez and Junot Díaz," "Ysrael" also touches the historical tension between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, which were once united as a single country called Hispaniola. A bit of history is required to understand this analysis: before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in Hispaniola in 1492, it was inhabited by the Native American Tainos. When Columbus arrived, he claimed the island for Spain and incited the mass-scale death of Native peoples through the introduction of foreign European diseases. Santo Domingo, which today is the capital of the Dominican Republic, was the first permanent settlement of the "New World." For centuries, Spain colonized Hispaniola, using it as a stronghold to invade other surrounding islands, including Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. In 1697, Spain signed over the western third of the island (what is today known as Haiti) to France, which split the island into two different colonies: the French-ruled Saint-Dominique in the west and the Spanish-ruled Santo Domingo in the east. In 1796, France took control of the whole island, but Haiti quickly gained independence through the Haitian Revolution by 1804. In 1809, France gave the rest of the land they still controlled (what is today known as the Dominican Republic) back to Spain. In 1821, José Núñez de Cáceres declared independence from Spain, and in 1822, Haiti took control of the rest of the island and ruled for 22 years. Haitian control of Hispaniola ended in 1844, when the residents of the western part of Hispaniola named their territory the República Dominicana ("The Dominican Republic"), and this part of Hispaniola was back under Spanish control. In 1863, the residents of the Dominican Republic fought for independence from Spain in a conflict that was called the Restoration War. By 1865, the Dominican Republic was free from Spain. The United States later occupied the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. After they left, a dictator named Rafael Trujillo took power in 1930 and incited a domestic struggle that led to the deaths of thousands of people, most of them Haitians. He was known as a violent racist who sought to "whiten" the Dominican race, which often led to the massacre of thousands descendants of Africans who had been brought to Hispaniola during the slave trade. Since Trujillo's reign, there have been high tensions between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The Dominican government recently passed a law in 2013 which denied citizenship to the children of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic—a decision which Díaz himself was vocally against. In fact, in 2015 he even lost an award, the Dominican Consul General's Order of Merit, because of his outspoken condemnation of the Dominican Republic's discrimination against Haiti, which the Dominican government ruled as "anti-Dominican."
The cultural division between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is heightened by racial tensions, which tend to classify Haitians as having darker skin than Dominicans. Many residents of the Dominican Republic look down upon Haitians and often are derogatory towards them, resulting in a historical "Anti-Haitianness" across the nation. The reality, however, is often much more complicated and residents of either country cannot be easily separated across racial lines. According to Myers, Díaz pushes back against Dominican culture's insistence on "othering" Haitians in his fiction. She states that in "Ysrael," Díaz "toys with the classification 'Hatian' as a racial marker for both Hatians and Dominicans." To back up her analysis, she notes that Rafa mocks Ysrael because of his physical appearance: "Back in the Capital, he rarely said anything 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 Señor Haitian, Mami found you on the border and only took you in because she felt sorry for you" (5). In this passage, Rafa torments his little brother because of what he deems racialized characteristics, which he attributes as originating in Haiti rather than the Dominican Republic. In this way, he regurgitates a common racist misconception that mixed-race descendants of Africans only come from Haiti. However, as Myers points out, Rafa "does not hesitate to engage in sexual relations with Haitian girls." Yunior reveals this to us when he describes Rafa's encounters with other girls: "Later, while we were in bed listening to the rats on the zinc roof he might tell me what he'd done. I'd hear about tetas and chochas and leche and he'd talk without looking over at me. There was a girl he'd gone to see, a half-Hatian, but he ended up with her sister" (6). In her essay, Myers places great emphasis on these passages, noting how they "prove how close the link is between Dominicans and Haitians." In fact, they demonstrate how the difference between Haitians and Dominicans cannot be determined by race as they "exemplify the continued intermixing of the two sister-nationalities, including in the diaspora."
