Book: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Author: Junot Díaz
Publication Year: 2007
Genre: Fiction
Much as I would like to read half a dozen books for every country in the world, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. Tough decisions have to be made. Yet if you are going to pick one book to represent a country, there can’t be many better choices than The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. It contains multitudes.
Born in the Dominican Republic, but raised in New Jersey (a common formula for success when America has resources and opportunities lacking elsewhere), Diaz finds his counterpart in Yunior, the book’s principal narrator. The story centres around the titular Oscar Wao, brother of Yunior’s off and on again lover, Lola. However, the narrative spirals through time to take in their mother, grandparents and the Dominican Republic in general, especially under the dictator, Trujillo.
Oscar’s real name is Oscar de Leon. An old school science fiction and fantasy nerd, he accepts his moniker after dressing as Dr Who to a party (Wao being a transliteral corruption of Who). Meant as a joke by the other students, Yunior is dismayed to hear Oscar responding to the name.
Wao bears some similarities to Ignatius J Reilly, the main character from John Kennedy Toole’s novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. Both are overweight (Wao less so) and talk in a highly affected manner. Yunior takes Oscar on as a college roommate when no one else will as a favour to Lola. Yet like many books included in this project (see: Vietnam for instance), we know how this story ends in the opening pages, if not from the very title.
Against Oscar’s story is that of Lola, who runs away in her teens to live with her boyfriend. She is captured by her mother and shipped off to the Dominican Republic to be raised by her adopted grandmother, La Inca: Of the mother, Beli, who gets pregnant at 16 to the husband of one of Trujillo’s sisters. She is beaten by their henchmen and left to die in the cane fields. One of her aunt’s servants rescues her and she is forced to leave the country for her safety.
General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo is an indelible stain on the already blood soaked history of the Dominican Republic. He came to power in 1930 and remained ruler until his assassination in 1961. He is known by many as the Hitler of the Caribbean. It’s hyperbole, but he certainly ordered the mass murder of the Haitian population who occupy the western third of the island of Hispaniola. Somewhere in the region of 50,000 people are thought to have died during his reign of terror. Which, for a population less than that of London across both countries in 1960, is not nothing.
According to Díaz’s novel, Trujillo was said to have kept a tank of sharks into which he feed his enemies. A cursory look online revealed no corroborating evidence for this. It’s all a little too James Bond and, given Thunderball came out only 4 years after Trujillo was assassinated, you can’t help but wonder if the relevant scenes in that movie didn’t feed into the myth of the man. Like the idea the Nazis made lampshades out of human skin, despite there being little to no evidence to support this story (many rightly point out what the Nazis did was despicable enough without needing to make shit up – all it does is hand ammunition to Holocaust deniers).
Another part of the myth of Trujillo is that his secret police would scour the country for women and girls to satiate their leader's sexual appetites. This is certainly more believable than a shark tank and central to the downfall of Oscar’s grandfather, Abelard Luis Cabral.
Abelard refuses to bring his eldest daughter to a government function attended by Trujillo and is soon arrested on trumped up charges and tortured. His wife takes her own life shortly after giving birth to Beli and his two eldest daughter later die in suspicious circumstances (one from drowning, the other from a stray bullet). Beli is taken in by relatives who soon sell her into virtual slavery. She in 9 before she is rescued by La Inca, Abelard’s cousin. But not before she has been permanently disfigured by hot oil poured onto her back.
One of the central motifs of the novel is the idea of fukú, the Dominican version of a curse or string of bad luck. Who exactly is supposed to have cursed the Cabral family is never clear, but Lola is the only one who seems to escape its fate. Though she and Yunior split up for good due to his string of infidelities, they later settle into a platonic friendship and Yunior is developing a plan to help Lola’s daughter escape the curse when she is old enough to understand.
For all of his dismissal of Oscar’s interests; for all of his toxic masculinity and casual homophobia in his early life, Yunior is undoubtedly changed by knowing Oscar. He keeps all of his voluminous writing and becomes enough of a nerd himself to become a writer and to pepper the narrative with reference to Marvel, Watchmen, Akira. Dungeons and Dragons and many other franchises besides. All information he no doubt needs to know when his mission begins in earnest.
I said The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao contains multitudes and such it does. Eighty years of Dominican History are distilled down into the tragedy of one family. A country, as we have said before, can never be contained in one data point. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has little to say about the origins of the island of Hispanola: It’s settlement by Columbus as the first Spanish settlement in the western hemisphere. The various wars and revolutions. The disparity in fortunes between the prosperous Dominican Republic to the east of the island and its impoverished neighbour to the west (which is something we will no doubt discuss when covering Haiti). It gives us a literary foothold onto another place on the world map. Which is as much as we can ever demand of such a project. Junot Díaz’s novel ticks all the boxes in this regard.
Like the Pacific Island nations (see: Tonga, Fiji, and Samoa) those islands found in the Caribbean Sea tend to flow into one another in countless different ways. As such. I doubt we have heard the last of the Dominican Republic.
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| Junot Díaz |
