From Fukú to the Fantastic Four:
Dominican-American Cultural Identity
in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life
of Oscar Wao
Emily Knoppert
Student Number: 3785939
Utrecht University
MA Thesis Literature and Cultural Criticism
June 2015
Supervisor: Dr. Maria Kager
Second Reader: Dr. Reindert Dhondt
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Table of Contents
Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………2
Chapter I: How to Analyze Dominican-American Cultural Identity ………………………….5
Chapter II: What’s in a Name? Negotiating Race in Oscar Wao ……………………………15
Chapter III: Fukú and Dominican Cultural Identity in Oscar Wao ………………………….21
Chapter IV: Dominican-American Cultural Identity in Oscar Wao …………………………30
Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………...40
Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………..43
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Introduction
“What more sci-fi than Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles? But now that I
know how it all turns out, I have to ask, in turn: What more fukú?” (Díaz 6).
“How do people in the Americas who are historically displaced [and] historically have
a very problematic relationship to lands that they’ve either helped colonize, colonized, or
suffered colonization on – how do we make a home?” (Díaz qtd. in Okie). This is one of the
central issues in the bestselling novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. Home in itself is a difficult concept for those who are
part of a diaspora, as the characters in Oscar Wao are. Is home the country of origin, the adopted
nation, or is it possible to feel at home in both? A large part of feeling at home in a nation is
determined by the extent to which an individual can relate to the culture. In Oscar Wao Díaz
shows how his characters negotiate their Dominican and American cultures to find their own
mixed cultural identity, for instance through their use of language and their perception of their
African heritage.
The novel has as its central figure Oscar, an overweight Dominican-American nerd who
lives in New Jersey. More than anything he wants a girlfriend, but the combined factors of his
weight, looks and social awkwardness make it impossible for him to have a romantic
relationship. Oscar finds solace in his love for science fiction, fantasy and comic books and
dreams of becoming the Dominican Tolkien. The novel is filled with references to these genres
thanks to the narrator Yunior, Oscar’s college roommate and on-again, off-again boyfriend of
Oscar’s sister Lola. Yunior takes it upon himself to tell Oscar’s story which he characterizes as
a fukú story: a story of Dominicans haunted by the colonial curse brought into existence by the
first Europeans who came to the island of Hispaniola. Fukú has haunted Oscar’s family ever
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since his grandfather Abelard Cabral defied the Dominican dictator Trujillo. By detailing the
fukú’s path, Yunior tells a multi-generational story that takes place both in the Dominican
Republic and the United States; from Abelard’s fall from grace, to Abelard’s daughter Beli’s
escape to the United States and Oscar’s quest for belonging and love. Yunior’s vibrant writing
style filled with Spanish slang, cursing and pop-cultural references seamlessly tie the separate
narratives together. As members of the Dominican diaspora in New Jersey, Oscar, Yunior and
Lola must decide how they negotiate their Dominican heritage in the United States and what
type of cultural identity is right for them.
Oscar Wao, since its critical accolades, has been the subject of several academic articles.
Much attention has gone to the novel’s narrative style, particularly how Yunior’s narrative can
be understood as an act of resistance against the historiographies written by dictators, but at the
same time Yunior’s narrative displays a form of dictatorship since the writer’s voice is the only
one that is heard.1 Other articles analyze Díaz’s frequent use of intertextuality and mixture of
genres ranging from science fiction to realism and from magical realism to fantasy.2 Academic
studies of both narrative style and intertextuality are useful for better understanding Oscar Wao,
since the complexity that these aspects add to the novel can be missed on a first reading. It is
my opinion, however, that not enough attention has yet been paid to how the characters in the
novel struggle to find a balance between their Dominican and American backgrounds. For
instance, in “Comic Book Realism” Daniel Bautista offers an excellent analysis of the role that
pop culture (most notably comic books, science fiction and fantasy) plays in the lives of Oscar
and Yunior as an expression of their American cultural identity, but he does not pay equal
attention to the role of Dominican cultural traditions and how they relate to contemporary life
in the United States for Díaz’s protagonists.
Monica Hanna, “Reassembling the Fragments,” 2010. Anne Garland Mahler, “The Writer as Superhero,” 2010.
Pamela J. Rader, “Trawling in Silences,” 2012. Ben Railton, “Novelist-Narrators of the American Dream,” 2011.
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Sean P. O’Brien, “Some Assembly Required,” 2012. Daniel Bautista, “Comic Book Realism,” 2010.
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My main question is: How do Díaz’s protagonists confront their Dominican cultural
background – with such complicated elements as fukú, black self-hatred and hyper masculinity
– and place it in the context of their American lives in order to create a Dominican-American
cultural identity that is right for them as individuals? Though the text focuses on a small set of
individual experiences, Oscar Wao depicts issues relating to migration, diaspora and identity
formation in a widely relevant manner. The first chapter will detail how the issues pertaining to
Dominican-American cultural identity in the novel can be analyzed with the help of theoretical
concepts. It is necessary to first look at particular moments in Dominican history to fully
understand the cultural consequences in the Dominican Republic. The second chapter will
analyze the ways in which Beli, Lola and Oscar negotiate their race and what it means to them
to have an African heritage. The final two chapters will discuss Dominican and DominicanAmerican cultural identity as they are portrayed in Oscar Wao through such themes as fukú,
popular culture and the use of language.
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Chapter I: How to Analyze Dominican-American Cultural Identity
“When has this country ever been human, Abelard? You’re the historian. You of all people
should know that” (Díaz 229).
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an intricate mix of genres ranging from
historical fiction to magical realism and from science fiction to fantasy. With such an
amalgamation of genres, the novel calls for a broad approach that can properly make sense of
the frequent references to Dominican history and culture. First, I will provide a historical and
sociological framework for understanding Dominican history and issues that are at the forefront
of contemporary Dominican-American life. In this thesis I will use two main texts as a basis
for analyzing Dominican cultural identity: “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” by Jamaican-born
cultural theorist Stuart Hall, which was first published in 1990, and Kristian van Haesendonck’s
introductory chapter to Caribbeing: Comparing Caribbean Literatures and Cultures published
in 2014. In order to better analyze the novel in the following chapters, I will first introduce
some theoretical concepts in this chapter. Many of these are from the field of sociology rather
than literary theory, since Díaz’s modern commentary on social issues invites the inclusion of
social science disciplines. Sociological research on concepts such as cultural identity and race
help in understanding how these issues play a role in the lives of the characters.
Though Díaz’s novel is a work of fiction, the Cabral-de Léon family in New Jersey
reflects the reality of Dominican-American life in the second half of the twentieth century.
Quantitative research on Dominicans in the United States shows that their presence in the
country has risen rapidly to over a million inhabitants in 2000, making Dominicans the fourthlargest Latino/Hispanic group, after Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans (Hernández and
Rivera-Batiz 2). The average Dominican lives in poverty with an annual per-capita household
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income of $11,065 in 1999, while the poverty threshold at the time was $11,869 (Hernández
and Rivera-Batiz 4). To put this into perspective, the national average income that year was
double that of the Dominican average and Dominicans also did worse than the AfricanAmerican and Latino average, owing to low-paid unskilled jobs providing the main source of
income for Dominicans in the United States. However, U.S.-born Dominicans show
extraordinary dedication to pursuing higher education. In 1980 31.7% of U.S.-born Dominicans
over the age of 25 had received (though not necessarily completed) college education, but this
percentage grew rapidly to 55.1% in 2000 compared to a U.S. average of 51.8% (Hernández
and Rivera-Batiz 54). This data is reflected in the text through Oscar, Lola and Yunior who
grow up in poverty-stricken ghettoes, but go on to attend Rutgers University.
Oscar Wao discusses issues that feature in the lives of Dominican Americans such as
race and the use of Spanish. Before analyzing these themes in the text itself, this chapter will
provide a historical and sociological framework in order to fully appreciate the unique
Dominican dimensions of race and language. Dominican racial categories, for instance, differ
greatly from American views on race. In the United States, white is the point of reference and
any other skin color is designated as colored with a lower social standing, whereas in the
Dominican Republic black is the point of reference and colored refers to varying skin tones on
the ladder towards whiteness which has the highest social standing (Kunsa 218). Dominicans
have no less than 21 words to categorize gradations of skin color, such as mulato (mixed race),
indio (indigenous) and moreno (dark-skinned) (Torres-Saillant 1090). A look at Dominican
history explains the preoccupancy with racial terms.
Large numbers of Africans were brought to the island by Spanish colonizers to work on
plantations from the fifteenth century onward. However, the collapse of the plantation economy
in the seventeenth century due to international competition meant that the white colonizers fell
to the same hierarchical level as their former slaves which led to increased interracial relations
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and the ethnically mixed population of today (Torres-Saillant 1094). On the western side of the
island of Hispaniola, Haiti became the first independent black nation in 1804. After invading
the Dominican side of the island, Haiti came to control the entire island of Hispaniola and
abolished slavery, but the death tolls resulting from the invasion and the complete disturbance
of economic and social life led to hostility from the Dominicans towards the Haitians; a hostility
that would endure for centuries (Kunsa 215). In 1844 white and mixed race elites who had lost
land to the Haitians successfully led a war for an independent Dominican Republic. The
Dominican national ideology was thus built on a foundation of hatred towards the black Haitian
state. Silvio Torres-Saillant, founder of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, explains that
this anti-Haitian sentiment was strengthened by the negrophobic Trujillo regime so as to
validate the massacre of tens of thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic in 1937
(1093). Trujillo had ordered his troops to kill Haitians living on the Dominican side of the
border so that Haiti could make no claim for the borderland and to strengthen his hold over the
borders so that revolutionaries could not leave or enter the Dominican Republic. Torres-Saillant
explains that the regime encouraged the use of the term indio, which refers to the indigenous
Taino Indians who were nearly wiped out by European colonizers, rather than terms like
moreno which had African (and thus Haitian) connotations (1104). Indio became an official
designator for skin color on national identification cards during the Trujillo era and due to the
Taino Indians’ non-white and non-black status, indio could easily refer to a mixed heritage
without making any reference to an African background (Torres-Saillant 1104).
In the United States, Americans may thus consider Afro-Dominican Americans to be
black while they themselves might not want to accept an identification with the black
population. Jose Itzigsohn and Carlos Dore-Cabral conducted a qualitative study in 2000 to
research how Dominican Americans organize their own racial categorization. They found that,
though an identification with the nation of the Dominican Republic remained more important
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to them than racial identification, Dominicans in the United States often categorized themselves
as part of the Hispanic or Latino race in the same way that they would call their race indio in
the Dominican Republic (243). The respondents acknowledged that they were non-white and
thus a racial other in the United States, but they related more to other Hispanic/Latino
populations than to African Americans (Itzigsohn and Dore-Cabral 237).
A large part of that Hispanic/Latino identification lies in the use of Spanish. Almeida
Toribio found that Afro-Dominicans in New York differentiated themselves from African
Americans, who they physically resembled most, by speaking Spanish (6). Some of Toribio’s
respondents even considered it important to ensure that their English, and especially that of
their children, did not resemble African American Vernacular English for fear of negative
reactions (6). However, second-generation Dominican Americans often displayed a different
attitude and were quicker to adopt an array of linguistic influences ranging from Puerto Rican
slang to African-American vernacular. (Itzigsohn and Dore-Cabral 240). This mixed style of
speech is displayed by Oscar Wao’s narrator Yunior who is exposed to both Puerto Rican and
African-American influences in his day to day life in Paterson and at Rutgers: “Paterson had
mad girls, and if that wasn’t guapas enough for you, well, motherfucker, then roll south” (Díaz
26). He writes the way he speaks, showcasing both English-language and Spanish slang.
The historical and sociological framework provided above shows how aspects
pertaining to the Dominican population – whether it be race, language use or national identity
– can carry different weight at different times and places. A sociological concept called
intersectionality relates to the ways in which multiple categories of someone’s identity can
contribute to an experience of social oppression. Baukje Prins explains that intersectionality is
used to expose how existing binaries, such as white vs. black and male vs. female, interact to
heighten the social inequality that minority individuals have to face (279). For instance, a black
female with a low income matches three subordinate poles of such social binaries and thus is
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low on the social hierarchy. Yet some combinations weigh heavier than others in Western
society. For example, a low-income white woman and a low-income black man both display
two subordinate poles, yet the low-income black man faces more social inequality in a country
like the United States. Nira Yuval-Davis explains that an important part of the intersectional
approach is understanding that certain factors are more relevant than others depending on the
circumstances (203). Afro-Dominicans in the United States, as shown by Itzigsohn and DoreCabral’s study, think that their nationality is one of their most important features, but to most
Americans the race of Afro-Dominicans stands out most and they are treated accordingly (243).
Close reading of Oscar Wao in the following chapters will show how the personal
characteristics of the characters, such as race and gender, influence their degree of social
oppression and how they can both help foster a cultural identity or complicate their cultural
identity. For example, Beli’s black skin makes her stand out at school and prevents her from
entering the higher circles of Dominican society and Lola feels constricted by the Dominicanbased gender norms upheld by her mother.
With such a mixed historical and ethnic background, Dominican cultural identity is
difficult to explain and can be experienced differently by individuals. Indeed, as the novel and
Díaz’s own remarks in interviews suggest, Dominican cultural identity can be interpreted in
various ways, especially considering the disparity between Dominicans on the island and those
in the United States. For my analysis of cultural identity in Oscar Wao I will use Stuart Hall’s
essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” and Kristian van Haesendonck’s introduction to
Caribbeing: Comparing Caribbean Literatures and Cultures. Hall’s text is a classic essay on
cultural identity specific to the unique case of the Caribbean which makes it particularly
relevant to understanding the lives of Beli, Lola, Oscar and Yunior with their Caribbean
backgrounds. Caribbeing is one of the most recent texts on Caribbean cultural identity and it
shows how Caribbean Studies has grown into a larger scholarly discipline to which many
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specialists belong and have contributed essays for Caribbeing. The text also shows how the
discipline has progressed and come to further insights since Hall’s canonical text of 1990.
In “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” Hall discusses his understanding of Caribbean
cultural identity as something that cannot be viewed as fixed, but instead changes continuously
by the way people place themselves in the context of the past (Hall 435). This placement of
Caribbean cultural identity relates to three different presences, or existences of cultural
influences: African presence, European presence and American presence (which refers to the
New World rather than just the United States) (Hall 436). The African presence is the most
suppressed and denied, since the Caribbean population, despite the fact that a large number of
people have African heritage, for so long has resisted any pronounced identification with
Africa, as illuminated by the negrophobic Trujillo regime. Only in the later twentieth century
did an awareness and recognition of African cultural heritage come about after news of the civil
rights movement and emphasis on black power in the United States made its way to the
Caribbean. However, Hall argues that this recognition concerns an old understanding of Africa;
the Africa from which the first slaves were brought, and that all Caribbeans must eventually
face their African presence and understand its historically imagined nature to prevent taking on
the Western imperialist view of Africa (437). After all, this imperialist view greatly differs from
Africa as it is today.
The European presence is much more dominantly present in Caribbean cultural identity
than the African presence. Hall argues that the European presence is the presence of power and
domination and that its colonial discourse is embedded in Caribbean cultural identity (437).
This is evident in racial hierarchy with lighter skin maintaining its social superiority. The
American presence, the New World presence, represents the site where the African and
European presences meet (Hall 438). It is a site of displacement; not only for the indigenous
people but also for the slaves taken away from their continent and for the Europeans expanding
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their global presence. What makes the New World unique is that the majority of the presentday inhabitants did not originally belong there, with the exception of the small number of
indigenous inhabitants remaining (Hall 438). The cultural history of the New World is
characterized by constant migration and it has become a core component of Caribbean cultural
identity. According to Hall, Caribbean people are thus at their core a diasporic people with their
migratory past (438). For Hall, the diaspora experience is characterized by diversity, continuing
adaptation and hybridization – the interaction of different cultures to create new traditions and
customs (438). This is the type of diaspora experience represented by The Brief Wondrous Life
of Oscar Wao, particularly by Oscar’s generation. Oscar, Lola and Yunior ultimately learn to
honor their Caribbean heritage by acknowledging fukú and zafa, but find new ways to
understand these phenomena, for example Yunior and Oscar’s placement of fukú within the
framework of science fiction and fantasy.
As the title of Caribbeing, a collection of essays edited by Kristian van Haesendonck
and Theo D’haen, suggests, this work revolves around the question of what it means to be
Caribbean. What are the factors, internal and external, that contribute to the making of a cultural
identity? How do the cultures of the Caribbean nations differ from each other and from the rest
of the world? And is it possible to speak of a collective Caribbean cultural identity? For this
thesis the introductory chapter to Caribbeing, written by Van Haesendonck, is most relevant
since it discusses what constitutes Caribbean cultural identity. Van Haesendonck, like Díaz, is
interested in how homeland politics and culture still play a part in the lives of those who are
part of the Caribbean diaspora (7). He makes special reference to writers like Díaz who live
between two cultural contexts which complicates the concept of home (Van Haesendonck 7).
This question of what and where home is, is a core theme in Oscar Wao, particularly for Oscar
and Yunior.
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Like Stuart Hall, Van Haesendonck sees the Caribbean as a meeting place of Africa,
Europe and America which makes the Caribbean a difficult region to characterize since it does
not match the other parts of the Americas surrounding it (8). Linguistically the Caribbean does
not form a cohesive region and the geography of all the separate islands complicates this further.
Van Haesendonck summarizes the unusual situation of the Caribbean: “Caribbean territories
are viewed as a paradigm of indeterminacy, as either third or first worldish, postcolonial or
colonial” (8). These disparities are visible in Oscar Wao as well with the Dominican elite
belonging to the first world, particularly since Trujillo’s dictatorship was backed by the United
States, while many other parts of the nation are made up of third world slums. Trujillo and his
government lead a life of luxury in Santo Domingo while Beli spends the first years of her life
in the slums of Azua, physically abused and uneducated. One other section from Caribbeing,
besides the introduction, will be used in this thesis, namely the essay by Giulia De Sarlo called
“The Sugar Plantation as a Place of Caribbean Identity: A Literary Focus.” De Sarlo’s research
on Dominican sugar plantations helps to better understand the scenes from Oscar Wao that take
place in cane fields, namely the beatings of Beli and Oscar.
In “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Stuart Hall draws a link between the Caribbean
diaspora experience and Benedict Anderson’s concept of the imagined community. Dominican
Americans, though living in the United States, still feel a strong connection to the Dominican
nation and the national sense of community it exudes. Holding on to the national community
can provide a sense of belonging that Dominicans might not feel in the United States. In
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, first published
in 1983, Anderson calls the national community imagined because no one can realistically know
each individual member of the nation, yet members feel an inherent kinship to all fellow
countrymen (6). Belonging to a nation is also something that sets people apart, since the world
is divided into a vast number of nations with each nation having its own community (Anderson
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7). Anderson explains that a nation is not merely a bureaucratic entity, but that emotional
connotations manifest themselves in the shape of an imagined community:
It [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality
and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep,
horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the
last two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to
die for such limited imaginings (7).
Imagined Communities was written as an analysis of the wars between Vietnam, Cambodia and
China in the second half of the twentieth century since these wars featured opposing nations
rather than opposing ideologies. Anderson’s characterization of nationalism as having the
power to rally an entire population shows how nationalism is akin to religion, especially with
the emphasis on fraternal bonds (Anderson 5). For centuries, religion has had the ideological
strength to unify people around one cause, such as in the case of the Crusades, but the example
of twentieth-century Indochina demonstrates that a common ideology is no longer a requisite
for a large-scale community. In Oscar Wao, religion is not what holds the Dominican diaspora
together; it is rather the national imagined community of the Dominican Republic that extends
beyond its national borders. Particularly Beli and her generation members, such as tío Rudolfo,
hold on to their national cultural identity and the racial and gender norms that belong to it.
Like Benedict Anderson, Salman Rushdie writes on the role of imagination in feeling a
bond to a nation and its inhabitants in his essay “Imaginary Homelands” published in 1991. He
argues that emigrants have visions of their nations in their mind – imaginary homelands – but
that they are subjective and shaped by new experiences (10). As an exiled writer, Rushdie
recognizes his vision of India is fictional, but he argues that by writing from a distance he can
come to new, personal insights (10). Rushdie’s description of the personal nature of the
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imaginary homeland resonates with a remark made by Junot Díaz on writing about the
Dominican Republic:
I’ve been asked to be “representative” for as long as I've been a Dominican. As a person
of color living in the U.S. you're often considered an extension of your group—
individualism is hard to come by. So this is nothing new. But I'm just one person, writing
about one tiny set of (imagined) experiences. Sure, you can use what I write about to
open a discussion about larger issues, about the communities in which my set of
experiences is embedded, but that doesn't make me any expert on anything or the
essence of the Dominican Republic (Díaz qtd. in O’Rourke).
This issue of imagination is thus relevant on the level of the author as well as on the level of
the fictional text. Díaz provides his own version of the Dominican nation and the characters in
the novel have to cope with their experience of nationhood, whether it be a feeling of alliance
with the imagined Dominican national community or an adaption to their new nation.
The concepts discussed above – intersectionality, cultural identity as defined by Hall
and Van Haesendonck, imagined communities, imaginary homelands, as well as the
sociological and historical background of the Dominican Republic – serve as the theoretical
foundation of this thesis. They will return throughout this thesis in order to analyze passages
from the novel and demonstrate how Díaz discusses issues pertaining to race, Dominican
cultural identity and Dominican-American cultural identity.
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Chapter II: What’s in a Name? Negotiating Race in Oscar Wao
“That’s the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child’s black complexion as an ill
omen” (Díaz 248).
In the novel, Beli, Oscar and Lola are forced by those around them – both individuals
and society at large – to decide how they negotiate their African heritage. For a large part this
is represented by the words used to describe their skin color, such as morena (dark-skinned)
and india (refers to the indigenous Tainos). Yunior describes Beli, Lola and Oscar as black
through this colorful characterization: “darker than your darkest grandma” (Díaz 168). Yet Beli
and Lola’s coping mechanisms show a great disparity, since Beli actively denies her blackness
while Lola accepts herself as she is, thus demonstrating different attitudes towards their AfroDominican identity. Their opinions on blackness tie in with their opposing cultural identities,
as this chapter will show.
Junot Díaz himself confirms that he is worried about the phenomenon of black selfhatred and that he brought this theme into Oscar Wao. In an interview conducted by HaitianAmerican author Edwidge Danticat, who is greatly concerned with diasporic identity in her own
fiction, Díaz argues that black denial is widespread among those with African heritage: “I try
to foreground the Dominican example in order to explore how general and pernicious this is
throughout the African Diaspora. […] It’s one of the great silences of our people—no one really
wants to talk about how much a role anti-black self-hatred has in defining what we call ‘our
cultures’” (qtd. in Danticat). Here Díaz points out the inextricable connection between racial
characterization and Dominican cultural identity. Díaz’s statement matches Stuart Hall’s
characterization of the African presence in Caribbean cultural identity as being largely
repressed and denied, since the anti-black attitude demonstrates a resistance to acknowledging
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the African background so many people in the Dominican Republic have (436). However, in
interviews Díaz shows a great willingness to accept and even celebrate his Afro-Dominican
identity. In a live interview with African-American author Toni Morrison he repeatedly praises
her role in creating black literary voices and tells her that he can sleep well knowing that “the
best writer in the world is African” (Morrison). In an interview for Slate.com conducted by
Meghan O’Rourke, Díaz argues, however, that his African heritage should not automatically
place him in a hermetic author category:
I try to battle the forces that seek to "other" people of color and promote white
supremacy. But I also have no interest in being a "writer," either, shorn from all my
connections and communities. I'm a Dominican writer, a writer of African descent, and
whether or not anyone else wants to admit it, I know also that Stephen King and
Jonathan Franzen are white writers. The problem isn't in labeling writers by their color
or their ethnic group; the problem is that one group organizes things so that everyone
else gets these labels but not it. No, not it (qtd. in O’Rourke).
He is thus keenly aware of the privilege held by white authors to write without being viewed as
a representative of their racial group and not being held to the responsibilities and restrictions
that come with that. This demonstrates that the issue of race not only plays a part on the level
of the text, but on the level of reading and writing as well.
Already on the second page of the novel the Dominican attitude towards blackness
during the Trujillo era is introduced when Yunior describes Trujillo as a “mulato who bleached
his skin” (Díaz 2). Owing to Trujillo’s status as dictator, his negrophobic position was the norm
on the island. When Beli is born her skin is “black black – kongoblack, shangoblack, kaliblack,
zapoteblack, rekhablack – and no amount of fancy Dominican racial legerdemain was going to
obscure the fact” (Díaz 248). Throughout her entire life Beli has to struggle with the negative
connotations attached to her skin color. At school it sets her apart from the other students: “She
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never would admit it (even to herself), but she felt utterly exposed at El Redentor, all those pale
eyes gnawing at her duskiness like locusts” (Díaz 83). Not only does her black skin signal a
physical difference from her fellow students, but also a social difference since it makes her
socially inferior to her lighter-skinned classmates; an attitude heavily promoted during the
Trujillo dictatorship. Therefore it comes as no surprise that Beli falls head over heels in love
with Jack Pujols, “the school’s handsomest (read: whitest) boy” (Díaz 89). He is the ultimate
status symbol who could help Beli rise in the social ranks. Yet it is only once her breasts grow
to an extraordinary size that he takes any heed of her. Their meetings are limited to secret sexual
encounters in the school’s broom closet and he shows no evidence of actual affection, as
demonstrated by his disregard for the pain she experiences during sex. When they are
discovered, one of the greatest factors of shame is that “he’d been caught not with one of his
own class (though that might have also been a problem) but with the scholarship girl, una prieta
to boot” (Díaz 100). Her relative poverty is not the only thing that matters in this scandal.
Indeed, her being una prieta (a dark-skinned girl) brings an entirely new level of shame to the
incident. Beli’s affair with Jack Pujols teaches her that her black skin will keep her low in the
social hierarchy. The widespread negrophobia in the Dominican Republic has as effect that she
has no interest in embracing her African heritage.
Instead, Beli chooses to deny her Afro-Dominican identity. When the Gangster, who
would become the second man in Beli’s life, first meets her he calls her morena and she loses
her temper. Beli is “not a morena (even the car dealer knew better, called her india)” (Díaz 115).
This fits in with Silvio Torres-Saillant’s explanation of the use of the descriptor indio during
the Trujillo era as a type of euphemism for Dominicans of African descent (1104). Rather than
accept an identification with Africa, the term indio allows a cultural identification with the
indigenous Taino Indians. Anything to distinguish Afro-Dominicans from the inferior black
Haitians. Even after having lived in the United States for decades, Beli holds on to the
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fundamentally Dominican racial prejudice against Haitians. On a trip to the Dominican
Republic, Oscar sees “clusters of peddlers at every traffic light (so dark, he noticed, and his
mother said, dismissively, Maldito haitianos)” (Díaz 273). This quote shows that Beli still
harbors negative feelings toward the black-skinned Haitians. It prevents her from ever being
proud of or even truly acknowledging her African heritage, since that would create a cultural
link between Haitians and herself.
Oscar in no way has his mother’s aggressive nature to combat the racism directed at
him. Oscar’s situation differs from his mother’s specifically Dominican situation, however, due
to the fact that he lives in the United States. After disappointing teenage years in the ghetto of
Paterson, Oscar hopes to find likeminded people at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New
Jersey. Yet he quickly discovers this was a vain hope: “The white kids looked at his black skin
and his afro and treated him with inhuman cheeriness. The kids of color, upon hearing him
speak and seeing him move his body, shook their heads. You’re not Dominican” (Díaz 49).
Oscar’s skin color automatically draws a barrier between the white kids and himself, as
displayed by their overcompensating behavior after seeing him. They are much more cheerful
than a sincere interest would require because they know their interaction is merely out of
politeness as opposed to an act of friendship. Oscar’s appearance dictates that he should
associate with the other students of color, but his entire personality involving science-fiction
and fantasy and his formal English do not match the expected Dominican identity characterized
by self-assured masculinity and the use of Spanish.
In this instance the difference between the Dominican and American attitude toward
blackness is evident. In the Dominican Republic, Haitians are considered black and Dominicans
have different racial gradations. In the United States Oscar is automatically grouped together
with all the other people that are not white, despite the vastly different cultural identities. Oscar
does not actively deny his African heritage like his mother does, but he does not embrace it
19
either since for him it only functions as another factor that sets him apart from others. Even his
favorite work of literature, The Lord of the Rings, works to make him hate his skin color: “Got
through almost the whole trilogy, but then the line ‘and out of Far Harad black men like halftrolls’ and he had to stop, his head and heart hurting too much” (Díaz 307). For years Oscar
says he is “going to be the Dominican Tolkien” (Díaz 192) but this sentence from Tolkien’s
work makes Oscar feel as if racial hierarchies cannot be escaped even in the realm of fantasy.
Lola demonstrates a much more confident attitude towards her racial appearance than
Oscar, but without her mother’s aggressive arrogance. Yunior describes Lola as physically
similar to Beli: “You were twelve years old and already as tall as she was, a long slender-necked
ibis of a girl. You had her green eyes (clearer, though) and her straight hair which makes you
look more Hindu than Dominican […] You have her complexion too, which means you are
dark” (Díaz 52).3 Lola’s green eyes and long straight hair make her stand out in the
neighborhood and form a source of pride for Beli, who still holds on to her negative opinion of
a distinctly black African look. Beli is not the only one who admires Lola’s straight hair: “the
morenas used to come after me with scissors because of my straight-straight hair” (Díaz 56).
Here Lola uses the same descriptor – morena (dark-skinned girl) – that her mother considered
such a derogatory term when directed at her by the Gangster. The incident with the scissors
shows that the girls want to rid Lola of her beautiful hair, but also that they are envious of this
symbol of a higher social status and wish that they could have it themselves. When Lola herself
chooses to shave her head it is a sign that she cares less about Dominican standards of beauty
and racial status than her mother. It is an act of rebellion against her dominant mother and the
oppressive standards she represents.
3
This quote is from part II of chapter I in which Yunior briefly uses a second-person narrative. Yunior does not
provide an explanation for why he addresses Lola in this section, but it may be to prove his closeness to Lola
through his intimate knowledge of her thoughts.
20
Beli’s attitude towards race reflects the cultural identity of the Dominican Republic
during the Trujillo era while Oscar and Lola show two variations of the Dominican-American
culture. Beli grows up with the Dominican negrophobia of Trujillo and learns to hate the black
Haitians. For this reason she actively denies her own African heritage and refuses to be called
a morena. Instead she uses the term indio, which grants her a connection with the indigenous
Taino Indians rather than black Africans. Throughout the novel she uses haitiano as a
derogatory term. Oscar grows up in the United States and knows about the Dominican racial
hierarchy through his mother and neighbors, but at college he is subjected to the American
racial hierarchy. Due to his skin color, he does not belong amongst the white students, but he
does not fit in with the students of color either due to his un-Dominican behavior. Unlike his
Dominican-American peers, Oscar is unable to display hyper masculinity or speak Spanish in
the same colloquial manner. He displays black self-hate because his black skin is yet another
factor of his person that prevents him from achieving a sense of belonging. Lola shows the least
amount of black self-hate and even shaves her head, thus removing the straight hair that
distinguished her from what her mother dismissively calls morenas. Lola’s interest in the world
around her and her travels to Spain and Japan during her studies match her resistance to
culturally-specific racism. Lola’s character most represents Díaz’s own stance on AfroDominican identity with her unwillingness to deny her African heritage along traditional
Dominican lines. With Lola, Díaz seems to suggest that diasporic Dominican cultural identities
have a chance to move away from the Trujillo negrophobia and acknowledge African heritage.
21
Chapter III: Fukú and Dominican Cultural Identity in Oscar Wao
“Because in those days he was (still) a ‘normal’ Dominican boy raised in a ‘typical’ Dominican
family, his nascent pimp-liness was encouraged by blood and friends alike” (Díaz 11).
Through Yunior’s descriptions of the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo era it
becomes clear that Dominican cultural identity for decades was a clearly nation-focused cultural
identity with very few outside influences coming in. Yunior calls Trujillo’s forced isolation of
the country the Plátano Curtain: “By the middle of T-illo’s second decade in ‘office’ the Plátano
Curtain had been so successful that when the Allies won World War II the majority of the
pueblo didn’t even have the remotest idea that it had happened” (Díaz 225). Yet Oscar Wao
shows how outside forces have shaped Dominican culture for centuries, which can be
understood through Stuart Hall’s characterization of Caribbean cultural identity as composed
of African, European and American presences (Hall 436). This is most evident in one of the
core thematic phenomena of the novel: fukú. This chapter will look at fukú and other more
spiritual and traditional elements of Dominican culture before moving on to contemporary
social issues like hyper masculinity and the use of Spanish. In the novel, the Dominicans in the
United States demonstrate Benedict Anderson’s assertion that due to the strength of the
imagined national community the national cultural identity still holds a firm grip on those who
have left the nation (7). For this reason fukú has the power to follow the Cabral family to the
United States.
The opening passage of Oscar Wao introduces fukú as an integral part of Dominican
cultural identity as characterized in this novel. Since analyzing this passage helps to understand
the meaning and relevance of fukú in the novel, the full text will be quoted here:
22
They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the
death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it
was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in
the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú – generally a curse or a doom
of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the
fukú of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great
European victims; despite “discovering” the New World the Admiral died miserable
and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved
Best (what Oscar, at the end, would call the Ground Zero of the New World), the
Admiral’s very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fukú, little and large;
to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and
yours. No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans
on Hispaniola unleased the fukú on the world, and we’ve been in the shit ever since.
Santo Domingo might be fukú’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us
its children, whether we know it or not (Díaz 1).
It is possible to recognize Stuart Hall’s three presences of Caribbean cultural identity in
Yunior’s description of fukú. The African presence is represented by the African slaves who
were brought to the Caribbean by Europeans. The decimation of the Tainos forms the American
element, since they were the original inhabitants of the New World. Lastly, the European
presence manifests itself through the Europeans who initiated this migratory movement and
annihilation of peoples. Christopher Columbus is the personification of the European presence
and by characterizing him as both the bearer of fukú as well as one of its first victims Oscar
Wao shows how the European colonizing nations have a complicated relationship with the New
World as being both the cause of unrest and ultimately victims of colonial unrest (for instance,
the wars related to decolonization and the migration of people from decolonized nations to the
23
former colonizing nations). Fukú represents colonial oppression and by showing how it endures
today, the novel suggests that colonialism has not been vanquished; it has merely changed in
form. Trujillo with his U.S.-backed dictatorship sustained the colonial hierarchies put into place
by early settlers.
The second part of the passage introduces another main element of Oscar Wao, namely
the acknowledgement of one’s cultural past. Dominicans do not want to say the name
Christopher Columbus out loud for fear of unleashing the fukú, which can be interpreted as a
silencing of the nation’s history and a refusal to address the issues surrounding colonialism and
how it continues to affect contemporary life. However, the final sentence states that: “we are
all of us its [fukú’s] children, whether we know it or not” (Díaz 2), which indicates that the fukú
can be ignored, but not escaped. With this narrative, Yunior confronts the colonial curse. Yunior
sees Oscar’s case as his fukú story; an example of the curse laid on the Cabral-De Léon family
ever since Oscar’s grandfather Abelard resisted the will of Trujillo by refusing to let Trujillo
seduce his beautiful daughter Jacquelyn. As Yunior explains: “No one knows whether Trujillo
was the Curse’s servant or its master, its agent or its principal, but it was clear he and it had an
understanding, that them two was tight” (Díaz 3). Go against Trujillo and your family was sure
to have a fukú hang over them for generations. By exposing the horrors of Trujillo’s regime
and showing how Trujillo relates to the long history of colonial oppression, Yunior confronts
the Dominican cultural past.
One of the most important sites in Dominican history is the sugar plantation and it is no
surprise that Díaz utilizes this location in Oscar Wao in order to connect the modern-day lives
of his characters with the colonial past. It is in the sugar cane fields that both Beli and Oscar
are faced with their fukú. Giulia De Sarlo writes in “The Sugar Plantation as a Place of
Caribbean Identity: A Literary Focus” how sugar plantations form a key part of Dominican
cultural identity, for “it is on the plantation that the Dominican confronts, both now and in the
24
past, the Others which mark his identity: the world of Haiti and the world of the United States”
(172). De Sarlo explains that the Dominican sugar industry only grew to a larger scale after its
independence in 1844 when slavery had already been abolished, so instead many cheap workers
were brought to the plantations from neighboring Haiti and even today an estimated 80% of
sugar plantation laborers are Haitian (172). However these Haitians did not all work for
Dominicans. Investors in the sugar plantations were almost all from the United States, which
meant that the colonial hierarchy with the white man at the top stayed in place (De Sarlo 174).
Dominicans could still differentiate themselves from the lower Haitian workers since they
technically owned the houses and the land on which the sugar canes were grown, but they were
at the mercy of the American investors (De Sarlo 174). This type of hierarchy is evident in the
novel as well. The previous chapter on race already made clear what position the Haitians hold
in Dominican society, but Yunior explains that despite Trujillo’s ubiquitous power in the
Dominican Republic, even he had to answer to a higher power in the form of the United States.
For decades his regime was supported by the United States, until President John F. Kennedy
authorized Trujillo’s assassination by the CIA in 1961 (Díaz 3).
In Oscar Wao, the sugar plantation is likewise a site where the strict social hierarchy of
the Dominican Republic is evident. Beli and Oscar are brought to the sugar cane fields by
Trujillo’s minions and helpers of a police captain respectively with the objective of being beaten
and left for dead. Beli is taken there because of her affair with the Gangster who turns out to be
married to Trujillo’s sister and Oscar is even brought there twice due to his continuing romantic
involvement with Ybón, the girlfriend of a police captain. Oscar’s situation shows that even
after the end of the Trujillo era, the institutions of power retained their capability to injure and
murder without prosecution. Yet an element of magical folklore clings to their horrifically real
beatings in the form of a mongoose with golden eyes and black fur, who appears to both Beli
and Oscar when they are near death. Yunior acknowledges the appearance of the mongoose is
25
fantastical, but he asks the reader to remember that “Dominicans are Caribbean and therefore
have an extraordinary tolerance for extreme phenomena. How else could we have survived what
we have survived?” (Díaz 149). The mongoose’s singing voice is a voice of guidance, leading
Beli out of the cane field and leading Clives to find Oscar in the cane field. In a footnote, Yunior
characterizes the mongoose as “an enemy of kingly chariots, chains, and hierarchies” (Díaz
151). Anne Garland Mahler, in her analysis of Oscar Wao, sees the cane fields as a
representation of the long history of oppression and the mongoose as a symbol of resistance
(128). The mongoose represents resistance against colonial oppression and the fukú brought
upon the Cabral family by Trujillo. It is a beacon of hope that symbolizes the potential to
overcome the colonial hierarchies that have dominated the Dominican Republic for centuries.
The mongoose is a fantastical being who comes to the aid of Beli and Oscar, but La Inca
is their corporeal savior. La Inca, cousin of Abelard and rescuer of Beli from the slums of Azua,
represents a more traditional strain of Dominican culture; her ways date back to the time before
Trujillo came to power. She holds on to the dream of restoring the House of Cabral to its former
glory and Beli is the key to that: “La Inca, with her stiff skirts and imperious airs, had as her
central goal the planting of Belicia in the provincial soil of Baní and in the inescapable fact of
her Family’s Glorious Golden Past. […] Remember, your father was a doctor, a doctor, and
your mother was a nurse, a nurse” (Díaz 81). La Inca demonstrates impervious respectability
in all aspects: in her appearance, in her capacity as a business owner and as a member of the
neighborhood community. She does not exhibit the strong negrophobic tendencies of the
Trujillo era nor does she use slang terms in her speech. When Beli is taken to the cane fields,
La Inca turns to the only hope she has left: prayer. Yunior says of this: “We postmodern plátanos
tend to dismiss the Catholic devotion of our viejas as atavistic, an embarrassing throwback to
the olden days, but it’s exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, when the end
draws near, that prayer has dominion” (Díaz 144). The novel suggests a connection between La
26
Inca’s intense prayer and the appearance of the mongoose that rescues Beli. Both Catholicism
and folklore are older elements in Dominican culture which were not central to Trujillo’s
Dominican Republic, yet the novel demonstrates how they survive and remain culturally
relevant and powerful.
While folkloric Dominican traditions are important in Oscar Wao, the novel also
demonstrates more tangible, every-day elements of Dominican culture. Hyper masculinity
presents itself as a major component of Dominican culture in Oscar Wao. Oscar’s lack of
machismo and sexual conquests contributes to his inability to be seen as Dominican by those
around him: “Anywhere else his triple-zero batting average with the ladies might have passed
without comment, but this is a Dominican kid we’re talking about, in a Dominican family: dude
was supposed to have Atomic Level G” (Díaz 24). His classmates in high school and later
Yunior’s friends in college ridicule Oscar for still being a virgin. Even his own students at the
school where he is a substitute teacher do not take him seriously knowing that he cannot get a
girlfriend. Yunior, however, is the other extreme as he himself so graphically describes: “Me,
who was fucking with not one, not two, but three fine-ass bitches at the same time and that
wasn’t even counting the side-sluts I scooped at the parties and the clubs; me, who had pussy
coming out my ears” (Díaz 185). Yunior fits the stereotype of the Dominican macho, but the
next chapter on Dominican-American cultural identity will show how this attitude is scrutinized
by Oscar Wao to show its damaging effects. What is important to note is that not only
Dominican men hold up hyper masculine standards for each other, but that some Dominican
women expect the same. The first time Oscar cries over the emotional pain a girl has caused
him, his mother reprimands him: “Tú ta llorando por una muchacha? […] Dale un galletazo,
she panted, then see if the little puta respects you” (Díaz 14). Beli tells Oscar to slap this girl so
that she will respect him. Beli thus holds on to the cultural standard of physically dominant
men. As Nira Yuval-Davis’s writing on intersectionality shows, some facets of a person’s
27
identity, like gender or sexuality, weigh heavier in certain situations than others, for instance in
the way that someone can be forbidden by law to marry their homosexual partner, but their
homosexuality does not have any relevance when applying for college (203). Among
Dominicans, Oscar’s sexuality – or more specifically his inability to be a hyper masculine
heterosexual – is at the forefront and contributes greatly to his social oppression.
Another way in which Oscar is excluded from Dominican culture is through his
inadequate command of Spanish. He understands the language, but lacks the fluency to feel
comfortable speaking Spanish with other Dominicans. The novel does not offer an explanation
as to why Oscar’s Spanish is so poor, but the cause may be his lack of interaction with his
Dominican peers. He learns his formal English from reading, but he does not learn Spanish or
slang from those around him since he is not their friend. During his visit to the Dominican
Republic people call him Huáscar, which Oscar failed to remember was his Dominican Spanish
name. His peculiarly formal English forms an even greater barrier between him and his
classmates, since it emphasizes his oddness and inability to relate to their lifestyle. Only
moments before his death, when Oscar has finally come to terms with who he is (which I will
explain in the next chapter) does Oscar speak Spanish properly: “The words coming out like
they belonged to someone else, his Spanish good for once” (Díaz 321). Yet his fluency in
Spanish cannot compensate for the fact that he pursued the police captain’s girlfriend Ybón,
thereby ignoring the social hierarchy in place in the Dominican Republic, and therefore he is
brought once again to the sugar cane fields, but this time he does not return alive.
Not only is the use of Spanish relevant in the plot of Oscar Wao, but also in relation to
the narrative style of the novel. Many words and even full sentences of the text are in
untranslated Spanish. Sean P. O’Brien writes in his article “Some Assembly Required:
Intertextuality, Marginalization, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” that he sees this
as Díaz’s strategy to challenge the dominance of the English language in literature: “Oscar
28
Wao's use of Spanish refashions English-language literature as a heterogeneous textual space
in which languages, like cultures and communities, can interact without necessarily being
assimilated or fused together into a homogenous entity” (80). The reader can either choose to
gloss over the Spanish phrases they do not understand or engage more actively with the text by
looking up the meaning. Junot Díaz has commented on his choice to include untranslated
Spanish in multiple interviews. In a Slate.com interview with Meghan O’Rourke, Díaz gave the
following explanation: “What's language without incomprehension? What's art? And at a
keeping-it-real level: Isn't it about time that folks started getting used to the fact that the United
States comprises large Spanish-speaking segments?” (Díaz qtd. in O’Rourke). On the one hand
the use of untranslated Spanish is thus about confronting the people of the United States with
the fact that Spanish by now is ubiquitous in the country and important to millions, but on the
other hand he assures readers it is all right not to understand everything. In an interview with
Terry Gross on NPR, Díaz expands on this, explaining that he wants readers to know what it
feels like to be an immigrant who does not always understand every word of a language that is
not their native language (Gross). He encourages readers to engage in the language and the
intertextual and pop-cultural allusions through research of their own, but it is natural that they
will not understand everything.
Oscar Wao demonstrates Stuart Hall’s claim that Caribbean (in this case, more
specifically, Dominican) cultural identity is composed of African, European and American
presences. By placing fukú at the center of the narrative, Díaz shows how the different presences
contribute to a complex and mixed cultural heritage. Giulia De Sarlo convincingly argues that
the sugar plantation is a key site in Dominican cultural identity and the novel supports this
statement by having pivotal scenes take place in the Dominican cane fields. The mongoose
offers hope not only to Beli and Oscar, but also offers a symbolic optimism that colonial
hierarchies can be challenged. The mongoose also shows the more traditional and spiritual side
29
of Dominican culture, along with La Inca and her Catholic devotion. For Oscar one of the main
factors barring him from an acknowledged Dominican identity is his inability to display hyper
masculine behavior. Moreover, his flawed Spanish and formal English make him stand out from
other Dominican men. As the novel shows, for decades the Dominican Republic was shut off
from outside cultural influences during the Trujillo dictatorship, but since 1961 more
opportunities for outside influences have been made possible. On a superficial level this is
evident through the introduction of U.S. fast food chains, but a major part of cultural change is
brought by the Dominican diaspora: “Every summer Santo Domingo slaps the Diaspora engine
in reverse, yanks back as many expelled children as it can” (Díaz). These diasporic Dominicans
bring new cultural influences with them on their visits to the Dominican Republic. In Oscar
Wao, Yunior, Oscar and Lola represent the youngest generation of the Dominican diaspora and
the ways in which they combine their American cultural identity with their Dominican
backgrounds is the topic of the next chapter.
30
Chapter IV: Dominican-American Cultural Identity in Oscar Wao
“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color
in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles
growing out of your chest” (Díaz 22).
For Stuart Hall the diaspora experience is characterized by diversity and continuing
adaptation (438). Oscar Wao exemplifies this characterization by showing three DominicanAmerican characters who develop three different understandings of their Dominican-American
cultural identity. When taking Benedict Anderson’s description of the national imagined
community into consideration, it becomes clear how difficult it is to recognize a clear cultural
identity when this identity makes reference to multiple nations. As Anderson explains, a core
component of a national imagined community is its exclusivity, since no nation has as its goal
to include the entire human population (7). However, as history has proven, a great difficulty
lies in having ties to multiple nations, for instance in the case of Japanese Americans during
World War II. Regardless of whether they supported the Japanese in the war or not, Japanese
Americans on the west coast of the United States were indiscriminately sent to internment
camps. This chapter will analyze how the Dominican Americans in Díaz’s text negotiate their
national and cultural affiliations and in which ways. A prominent mode of expression for the
characters is pop culture: punk for Lola and science fiction and fantasy for Oscar, as well as
secretly for Yunior. Language is another tool with which to create an identity, from AfricanAmerican and Spanglish slang to formal English and even Elvish. This chapter will also discuss
the role of hyper masculinity in Dominican-American culture. Lastly, the characters’ attitude
towards more traditional elements of Dominican culture, like fukú, will be analyzed.
31
One of the most obvious ways in which the characters show their Dominican-American
identity is through pop culture, since this is a departure from Dominican folkloric tradition.
Lola, for instance, goes through a punk phase much to her mother’s dismay. However, the most
important example is Oscar’s love for science fiction and fantasy which brings him great
comfort in an otherwise lonely childhood. Oscar “could write in Elvish, could speak Chakobsa,
could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman in acute detail, knew more about
the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a role-playing game fanatic” (Díaz 21). Not only
does this quote show Oscar’s extreme dedication to the Genres – as they are referred to in the
novel – but it also demonstrates Yunior’s fluency in nerd culture and language. He can even
read the sign written in Elvish on Oscar’s door. Yunior hides his love of Genres from his friends
to keep up his macho Dominican image, but Oscar “wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light
saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to” (Díaz 21).
Oscar’s dedication to the Genres is a core component of his identity and the basis of his
ambition. Throughout his teenage and adult life Oscar holds on to his dream of becoming an
acclaimed science fiction and fantasy author. Ben Railton sees this as Oscar’s version of the
American Dream in his article “Novelist-Narrators of the American Dream: The (Meta-)
Realistic Chronicles of Cather, Fitzgerald, Roth, and Díaz” (145). Railton places Oscar Wao in
the long line of American Dream narratives with a modern view on what the American Dream
can be and for whom. Though not all of Oscar’s favorites are American, like his love of
Japanese anime, they do reflect his aspirations in the United States and how he wants to achieve
a better life for himself, namely through becoming a bestselling author.
Yunior manages to hide his knowledge of science fiction, fantasy and comic books from
his friends, but his narrative style is overflowing with references to these genres. He even refers
to himself as the Watcher, after the Fantastic Four series which is also used for one of the
novel’s epigraphs. Yunior’s frequent comparisons between real life and these genres give the
32
impression of an homage to Oscar who would appreciate the parallels, but Daniel Bautista,
author of the essay “Comic Book Realism: Form and Genre in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao,” considers another interpretation. Bautista sees Oscar Wao as a new type
of genre which he refers to as “comic book realism, that irreverently mixes realism and popular
culture in an attempt to capture the bewildering variety of cultural influences that define the
lives of Díaz’s Dominican-American protagonists” (42). This certainly matches Yunior’s own
statements on the issue, such as the connection he draws between life in Paterson for Oscar and
the X-Men in the accompanying quote to this chapter: “You really want to know what being an
X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma
mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest” (Díaz 22). Yunior
and Oscar on the one hand have their Dominican cultural background, but on the other hand
find themselves drawn to American culture and even further influences from Japanese pop
culture and European literature. What this shows is that pop culture is not a strictly American
phenomenon in the lives of Yunior and Oscar and that the mixture of Dominican and American
cultures is not the only hybridization that takes place. For example, Oscar and Yunior’s love of
dystopian fiction, as illustrated by their frequent viewing of the Japanese animated film Akira
about a futuristic dystopian Tokyo, becomes mixed with Yunior’s approach to characterizing
the Trujillo era as a terrifying dystopia. Yunior combines the narrative strengths of American,
European and Asian fiction (in film, literature and comic books) to tell his own story of
Dominican history in Oscar Wao. For Oscar, the Genres both strengthen his alienation from his
peers and offer him solace and a sense of belonging to something bigger and better than his
own life.
Oscar also displays his American identity through his superior command of the English
language which juxtaposes his poor Spanish. However, this proves to be yet another factor that
alienates him from his peers. Oscar uses “a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like indefatigable
33
and ubiquitous” in the ghetto of Paterson (Díaz 22). It is not only his overly formal English that
sets him apart, but also his conversational style drenched in references to nerd culture. When
flirting with a girl on the bus, he says: “If you were in my game I would give you an eighteen
Charisma” (Díaz 174). Yet even Yunior – who has a much better understanding of nerd culture
and a more extensive English vocabulary than he wishes to admit – sometimes has trouble
understanding what Oscar means, as is clear from this exchange:
He slumped. I’m copacetic.
You ain’t pathetic.
I said copacetic. Everybody, he shook his head, misapprehends me (Díaz 189).
By telling Oscar that he is not pathetic, Yunior voices what he expects Oscar to say in his
situation. After all, Oscar is overweight and has never even kissed a girl even though he
desperately wants to. However, “I am copacetic” is simply Oscar’s (quite formal) way of saying
that he is fine. By expressing that he feels misunderstood he is not only referring to language
but also to all his peers who do not understand his good intentions, pure emotions and love of
the Genres.
Whereas Oscar is unable to change his manner of speech, Yunior shows great skill in
adapting his language to each particular setting. He remains fluent in Spanish which means he
can communicate well with Dominicans, he adopts African-American and Spanglish slang
around his friends, and he can throw as many pop cultural references into a conversation as
Oscar. In an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Díaz talks about growing up with several
different vernaculars: formal Dominican Spanish at home, African-American slang outdoors
and colloquial Spanish with friends (Gross). By incorporating this into the novel, particularly
for Yunior, Díaz shows how difficult it is to maintain a self with so many disparate threads.
Dominican Americans have affiliations with multiple communities and use of language is one
tool to distinguish between them.
34
Similarly to how Spanish slang and African-American vernacular is used by Yunior to
keep up a tough façade, hyper masculinity plays a large role in Yunior’s outward display of
Dominican-American identity. Here I would like to argue that by juxtaposing Oscar and Yunior,
Díaz provides a critical commentary of this macho image and shows that it does not have to be
an integral part of Dominican-American culture as well. Though Oscar is by no means a hyper
masculine figure, his devotion to the Dominican heterosexual norm is extreme, as Yunior can
attest: “I thought I was into females, but no one, and I mean no one, was into them the way
Oscar was. To him they were the beginning and end, the Alpha and the Omega, the DC and the
Marvel” (Díaz 173). Oscar does not only feel lust for women; he feels love. Like his mother
Beli, Oscar falls head-over-heels in love with three people during his life: Ana in high school,
Jenni in college and Ybón in the Dominican Republic.4 Oscar’s devotion to the principle of
love is so strong that he refuses time and again to visit a prostitute with his male cousins in the
Dominican Republic, even though his virginity bothers him greatly. Oscar, for most of their
friendship, sees Yunior as a role model, but during one of their last conversations Oscar
confronts Yunior on his habit of cheating. He tells Yunior that Lola loves him and asks him
why he continues to have sex with other girls. When Yunior replies that he does not know why
he does it, Oscar says: “Maybe you should try to find out” (Díaz 313). After Oscar’s death,
Yunior finally vows to change his ways, realizing what a fool he was to jeopardize his
relationship with Lola: “I have a wife I adore and who adores me […] I don’t run around after
girls anymore. Not much, anyway” (Díaz 326). Yunior does not change his ways overnight, but
Oscar has at least made him realize that cheating causes pain to his wife and that it does not
make him less of a man if he shows genuine love and affection.
These loves are: Jack Pujols, the Gangster and Oscar and Lola’s father. Beli meets the father of her children on
the plane to New York and Yunior tells the reader that he only stays with Beli for two years before leaving her
and their children (Díaz 164). No further mention is made of him and it is unclear why he plays such a small role
in the narrative.
4
35
It is my belief that Oscar Wao displays a critique on the Dominican stereotype of hyper
masculinity, but Elena Machado Sáez, professor of English at Florida Atlantic University,
argues instead that hyper masculinity remains the norm in the novel. In her article “Dictating
Desire, Dictating Diaspora: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao as
Foundational Romance” Machado Sáez argues that due to Yunior’s exclusive narration he has
the power to silence Oscar’s objections to Yunior’s masculinity and write his own ending in
which Oscar finally adheres to the Dominican heterosexual norm by having sex with Ybón
(534). Though it is true that Yunior holds the narrative power in the novel, it is a much too
simple conclusion to see Oscar as powerless and unable to offer criticism. Not only does Oscar
quite literally criticize Yunior during their confrontation concerning Yunior’s cheating habits,
but more subtle criticism shines through between the lines. In many ways Oscar appears the
better man due to his devotion to love and his unwillingness to change his personality and
interests just to fit into Dominican stereotypes. Moreover, Yunior’s inability to stay in a
relationship with Lola, the woman he truly loves but will never marry because she refuses to
tolerate his cheating, shows a clear critique of hyper masculinity.
Machado Sáez furthermore writes that “Oscar emerges as a devirginized, unsentimental
hero who is delivered into authenticity through Ybón’s body” (538). In Oscar’s final letter to
Yunior – the closing scene of the novel – Oscar reveals that he has had sex with Ybón during
the one weekend that they managed to leave Santo Domingo while the police captain was away.
Yet this scene to which Machado Sáez refers does not appear unsentimental at all. As Oscar
clearly states, it is not the actual sex that makes him feel like a changed man, but “the little
intimacies” like combing hair and telling secrets (Díaz 334). He even finishes his letter with
“the beauty! The beauty!,” which surely rings true to Oscar’s sensitive nature (Díaz 335).
Authenticity for Oscar is not about being able to brag that he has had sex, but knowing that he
can love and be loved in return. By including these two examples of Dominican-American
36
young men with vastly different masculine identities Díaz shows that the Dominican stereotype
does not have to be a part of Dominican-American culture as well. They have a choice in their
behavior and it is my opinion that by modeling Oscar as the hero of this novel Oscar Wao
presents Oscar’s attitude as praiseworthy and a valid critique on hyper masculinity as a norm.
As stated above, Oscar Wao ends with Oscar’s description of his loving (and finally
consummated) relationship with Ybón about which he exclaims: “the beauty! The beauty!”
(Díaz 335). In “Reassembling the Fragments,” Monica Hanna recognizes the intertextuality in
this scene: “The letter closes the novel in a way that is the antithesis of Kurtz’s proclamation
(‘The horror! The horror!’) in Joseph Conrad’s colonial literary classic The Heart of Darkness”
(515). However, Hanna does not go on to analyze the significance of this reference, which is a
missed opportunity. What exactly it is that Kurtz refers to with his dying words has been a
subject of debate for decades, but on the most obvious level “the horror” relates to what Kurtz
has seen while in colonial Africa; the devastation that European imperialism has brought to
Africa. With his narrative fueled by fukú, Díaz likewise emphasizes the detrimental
consequences of European colonialism, but his protagonist’s conclusion stands in stark contrast
with Kurtz’s exclamation. One difference is certainly that Conrad lived in the middle of the
colonial exploitation while it was still taking place, whereas Díaz lives in the postcolonial era
and has more of an opportunity to reflect on colonialism. By referencing The Heart of Darkness,
Díaz acknowledges the European literary take on colonialism and shows how his novel builds
on this literary foundation to create new works of fiction that tackle the complicated issue of
colonialism from a New World perspective. By having Oscar utter “the beauty!” rather than
“the horror!,” Díaz may be signaling that Oscar has managed to find joy in his life despite all
the hardships resulting from the fukú, which is a hopeful vision of the possibilities for breaking
free from the colonial hierarchies that still exist in the world.
37
Lola is perhaps the character who most actively tries to escape the colonial hierarchies
that she sees around her through her eagerness to travel beyond New Jersey and the Dominican
Republic. As explained in the previous chapter, Trujillo’s dictatorship and the Plátano Curtain
that he raised kept Dominicans in the nation as much as it kept the rest of the world out. By
maintaining cultural connections to both the Dominican Republic and the United States,
Dominican Americans are already more aware of different cultures, but Lola takes this a step
further with her desire to become a global citizen. Already as a young girl Lola knows she wants
more than the life she has known so far: “I wanted the life that I used to see when I watched
Big Blue Marble as a kid, the life that drove me to make pen pals and to take atlases home from
school. The life that existed beyond Paterson, beyond my family, beyond Spanish” (Díaz 55).
As an adult she studies in Spain and temporarily lives in Japan. Rather than marry someone
from her own Dominican-American community, Lola marries a Cuban man she meets in
Miami. Yet ultimately she does move back to Paterson, which may be interpreted as Lola
finding peace with her Dominican-American identity. For so many years getting away from
Paterson and the Dominican-based expectations was just as much about escaping from her
domineering mother. Her mother’s death and her own growth into adulthood have made it
possible for her to maintain her interest in the rest of the world while also accepting her heritage.
Lola is not the only character who struggles with multiple cultural affiliations. One of
the most poignant scenes in the novel, in which Ybón expresses her fears related to the romantic
relationship between herself and Oscar, concerns this issue:
I don’t want you to end up hurt or dead. Go home.
But beautiful girl, above all beautiful girls, he wrote back. This is my home.
Your real home, mi amor.
A person can’t have two? (Díaz 318).
38
As Kristian van Haesendonck writes in Caribbeing, home is a relative concept for those who
are part of the Caribbean diaspora (7). Is home the country of origin, the adopted country, or
can it be both? Oscar chooses the latter. Yet there seems to be more to Oscar’s statement than
only a confirmation of his cultural bond to both nations. The conversation between Ybón and
Oscar seems to suggest that Oscar sees home as a place where he experiences a sense of
belonging through love. He is home when he is with Ybón. Oscar had already “refused to
succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that
says You do not belong” (Díaz 276). He is now capable of deciding for himself what home and
belonging mean to him, regardless of what others might say. Full of confidence in the presence
of his lover Ybón, he embraces his identity without waiting for anyone’s approval or
permission. During Oscar’s final trip to Santo Domingo and his continued relationship with
Ybón, all his family members (Beli, Lola, La Inca and Yunior as well) try to make him do what
they want, namely return to the United States. However, Oscar refuses: “Something had
changed about him. He had gotten some power of his own” (Díaz 319). He no longer feels like
a lonely coward who has to live up to the expectations of others; he can create his own goals
with love as his guide. Oscar does not need anyone to tell him whether or not he is Dominican
or American, since he has found his own interpretation of Dominican-American identity.
Part of Oscar’s journey towards self-acceptance lies in his acknowledgement of fukú,
since this is such an integral part of his family’s, and on a larger scale Dominican, history. After
his brutal beating in the cane fields, Yunior describes how Oscar finally reflects on fukú: “it
dawned on him that the family curse he’d heard about his whole life might actually be true.
Fukú. He rolled the word experimentally in his mouth. Fuck you” (Díaz 303). By recognizing
this English-language phrase in the Dominican curse he shows how his two cultural spheres are
connected. Oscar also chooses to, quite literally, curse the curse. He chooses to defy it by
standing up for what he wants, which is Ybón’s love. Lola and Yunior also seem to find an
39
acceptance of Dominican traditions. Lola provides her daughter with three azabaches
(traditional charms meant to protect the wearer from the evil eye) that used to belong to Oscar,
Beli and herself. Yunior acknowledges the role fukú plays in the lives of Dominicans and
Dominican-Americans and reflects on his role as narrator: “Even now as I write these words I
wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of sorts. My very own counterspell” (Díaz 7). By recognizing
the power of fukú and detailing its role in the lives of the Cabral clan he provides a virtuous
power to counter it: zafa.
The different factors discussed in this chapter, from pop culture to Dominican traditions,
are mixed together by Díaz’s characters to construct their own understanding of DominicanAmerican cultural identity. For Oscar, science fiction and fantasy offer solace and a means of
escape from his lonely childhood. He is unable to adapt to the Dominican norm of hyper
masculinity which leads to even further alienation. Yet through his love for Ybón he gains the
courage to stand up for himself and claim the type of Dominican-American identity that he
wants, not what others expect from him. Lola ultimately also finds peace in her Dominican
background and honors Dominican traditions while retaining her interest in the world beyond
the Dominican diaspora. Yunior displays the greatest difficulty in battling his insecurities
surrounding his identity. He adapts to each situation, whether it be with his friends at Rutgers
or with Oscar, and chooses the identity that best matches the environment. Yet by writing this
text he confronts the colonial curse that haunts his Dominican heritage, namely fukú, and
reflects on his ability to fight it. The end of the novel, in which Yunior announces his
reconsideration of hyper masculinity and his commitment to spreading zafa through this
narrative, suggests that Yunior is on his way to choose his own understanding of DominicanAmerican cultural identity.
40
Conclusion
“Right before I headed out, he said: It was the curse that made me do it, you know.
I don’t believe in that shit, Oscar. That’s our parents’ shit.
It’s ours too, he said” (Díaz 194).
Oscar Wao opens with two epigraphs: one from the Fantastic Four and one from
Caribbean-born author Derek Walcott’s poem “The Schooner Flight,” thereby representing the
American and Dominican/Caribbean cultures that shape the characters’ lives. The quote from
the Fantastic Four is: “Of what import are brief, nameless lives … to Galactus??” (Lee and
Kirby qtd. in Díaz). In the context of the novel it is an easy step to liken Galactus (a supervillain
in the Fantastic Four universe) to Trujillo. By telling this story Yunior shows how one life,
Oscar’s life, does matter and can be relevant to many, as well as the lives of all the individuals
oppressed by Trujillo. The excerpt from Walcott’s poem is the story of a Caribbean man with
a mixed heritage and it ends with the line: “either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation” (Walcott qtd. in
Díaz). Like the Fantastic Four quote, the Walcott epigraph reflects on the apparent irrelevance
of an individual life. Yet individual experiences can reflect larger issues at play in a nation,
which is exactly what Oscar Wao does.
As the Fantastic Four epigraph demonstrates, Oscar Wao utilizes pop culture to make
sense of Dominican culture and history. Yunior places his narrative about Trujillo and Oscar
within the context of science fiction, fantasy and comic books. Trujillo is portrayed as a
supervillain, on the level of Galactus from the Fantastic Four and Sauron from The Lord of the
Rings, and Yunior sees Oscar as an X-Man. By using pop culture to explain the difficult issues
in the lives of his Dominican-American characters, Díaz offers a modern interpretation of the
immigrant narrative. In a similar way, Díaz uses untranslated Spanish in Oscar Wao to illustrate
41
the immigrant experience of mixing languages while at the same time confronting Englishspeaking readers with the fact that Spanish is a major language and that the dominance of the
English language should not be taken for granted. On the one hand Díaz thus shows how
American cultural dominance can be challenged, but on the other hand he makes his characters
question elements of Dominican culture as well. Oscar chastises Yunior for his adultery and his
insistence on macho behavior, and after Oscar’s death Yunior seems to realize the pain he has
caused Lola with his cheating habits. By presenting Oscar as his sentimental hero who could
not be hyper masculine even if he wanted to, Díaz confronts the hyper masculine norm in
Dominican culture and questions its validity.
By depicting the lives of Afro-Dominicans, particularly the life of Beli, Díaz opens a
discussion on black self-hatred and the pain it has caused and continues to cause both
individuals and the nation at large. His text appears to call for an acknowledgment and
acceptance of African heritage in order to rebel against existing racial and colonial hierarchies.
Lola in particular, who shaves her head as an act of rebellion against her mother and the
Dominican race-related beauty standards she upholds, refuses to deny her African background,
thereby moving away from the Trujillo negrophobia. The element of fukú in the text relates to
the acknowledgement of African heritage since the fukú is a colonial curse that harks back to
the time of African enslavement. In order to make peace with their cultural identity, Yunior,
Oscar and Lola must acknowledge how the fukú affects their lives. In an interview Díaz stated
about fukú: “For me, though, the real issue in the book is not whether or not one can vanquish
the fukú—but whether or not one can even see it. Acknowledge its existence at a collective
level. To be a true witness to who we are as a people and to what has happened to us” (Díaz
qtd. in Danticat). By writing down Oscar’s story, Yunior confronts the fukú that affects not only
Oscar but the entirety of the Dominican nation and diaspora. In his final letter before his death,
Oscar writes that he has figured out the ultimate zafa to put an end to the fukú and that he will
42
send his findings to Yunior, but the package never arrives. This may be interpreted as a sign
that there is no perfect, all-encompassing cure to the colonial curse; there is only continued
questioning of colonial hierarchies and injustices to change people’s frame of mind on these
issues.
Oscar Wao depicts elements that feature strongly in Dominican-American culture, such
as the use of Spanish and the expectance of hyper masculinity, but each character interprets
these elements in a different way to create the Dominican-American cultural identity that best
represents who they are as an individual. By confronting their Dominican cultural background,
Oscar, Lola and Yunior become more secure in their personal identities and in turn can play
their part in challenging stereotypes and cultural expectations.
43
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