This was also a racial dictatorship, a violently Jim Crow-type dictatorship where people of dark skin, their lives were made much more difficult than the light-skinned people. There was constant murder, constant torture. Today, you could be walking down the street, and somebody who had Trujillo's ear would want your house, and the next thing you know, you would be out of it. There was no safety for people or families. I think he's like most authoritarian, near-totalitarian dictators. Mir tells Lola of the brave people who fought 'the monster,' referencing Trujillo's dictatorship. Whatever happened to X?' Or 'What is Y about?' She, in her very innocent and curious and energetic way, creates an opportunity for the community to have a reckoning with some of the history which it's attempting to distance or disavow. You know, if you're in a family that has silences, a young person can sort of zero in on them and say, 'Hey. I think what's interesting is that the - often the questions of young people, you know, in some ways, they create an invitation for older people who have spent a lot of time sustaining certain kinds of silences. On how she begins to reconstruct the island And so she and her teacher start devising a way that she be able to find a way to draw a picture by talking to and reaching out to the people around her who do remember.

But Lola, of course, doesn't have any memories. Obi, challenges them to draw a picture of their first home because Lola is in a school called 'the school of faraway places,' and all the children in her school are immigrants. On what inspires Lola to find out more about the Dominican RepublicĪ teacher, you know, Ms.

Islandborn by Junot Díaz