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Literatures
Fremio Sepulveda
University of Buffalo
In 1982 when Gabriel Garcia Marquez delivered his Nobel Prize speech titled
"La Soledad de América Latina," he spoke of the insufficiency of language
capture a "disproportionate" Latin American history and the inability of a Eur
centric epistemological frame to ever adequately represent the struggles of Lati
Americans. According to Márquez, conventional European paradigms, instead o
making Latin America intelligible to the rest of the world, prevent Europe an
North America from comprehending Latin America as a product of its own live
historical experience, and as a result render the region even more unknowable
Marquez alludes to dictators like Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, who ordere
the massacre of thousands of peasants in El Salvador, and to the civil unrest affe
ing much of Latin American history since the beginning of colonialism in order
emphasize the region's unique, and often tumultuous, politico-historical trajector
which poses an immense challenge to Latin American writers who strive to conv
a reality without "conventional means [by which] to render our lives believable.
This search for novel means to adequately represent the experiences of a peop
informs Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a novel that frustrates
facile genre categorization; Diaz's novel formally echoes the marginal status of
"low" mainstream genres to the "high" literary forms as analogous to the pos
tion of the marginal and immigrant Cabral family to the dominant and normati
Anglo-Saxon U.S. society.
I begin this essay by first situating Diaz as a Dominican- American writer in
long tradition of diasporic Latino writing. Then I seek to construct an intertext
reading of the novel to unpack the significance of Diaz's use of other literary texts,
particularly J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Jack Kirby's and Stan Lee'
Fantastic Four. I argue that Diaz strategically adapts them to construct a narrat
that intervenes in Dominican history to critique and subvert the official nation
Like most of the critical commentators on the novel, Alice O'Keefe's review
in The New Statesman lauds Diaz's novel for its ability to adeptly switch from
the vernacular to the academic, for its fusion of multiple linguistic registers and
cultures:
O'Keefe praises the novel's narrative voice for transcending, while drawing
from, a multiplicity of transnational sources, that is, interconnecting Latin Ameri-
can and U.S. cultural and literary traditions, languages, and histories. Yet her dep-
recatory classification of the employment of Spanish within Diaz's novel situates
it as a minor language of affect, as simply "rhythm." In contrast, I view Diaz's
writing in Spanglish as fundamental to his linguistic politics. He writes from the
glo-dominant society and its disciplinary institution. Aware of the prohibition and
punishment of Spanish-speakers within the classroom and the larger U.S. society,
Diaz expresses in an interview that his writing is indeed politically motivated by
his personal experience as an immigrant who gained English at the expense of his
mother tongue. For Diaz to translate and mark Spanish as minor would contradict
both the centrality of Spanish in his writing and the status of Spanish as a major
language of the western hemisphere: "Spanish is not a minority language. Not in
this hemisphere, not in the United States, [and] not in the world inside me head. So
why treat it like one. Why 'other' it?" (904).
By claiming Jose Marti as an avant-garde figure in diasporic Latino writing,
Laura Lomas' writing makes possible tracing the development of this literary tra-
dition as far back as the 19th century. According to Laura Lomas, Marti 's writing
sets out to battle dominant languages through articulating how Spanish has been
remade and given new meaning in Latin America. For example, Lomas notes how
Marti catalogues in one of his early manuscripts new Latin American words, as in
la caña to refer to "a great difficulty to be overcome in Santo Domingo" which
leads her to conclude that: "By breaking and remaking the existing rules that gov-
ern these words' meaning, his [Marti 's] America had appropriated and reinvented
the significance of a colonial language" (29). Similarly, Diaz writes in an American
English that he sets to a new tune by infusing it with a distinctly Dominican Span-
ish speech and rhythm. Consider for example how back in the Dominican Republic
Lola jokingly points out to her mother that she has attracted the gaze of the waiters
because "they probably think you Haitian" to which Beli retorts "La unica haiti-
ana aqui eres tu, mi amor"(276). While Beli's comment can at surface appear as a
simple deflection, its troubling racial content reveals a deep-rooted anti-Haitianist
discourse at the heart of racial identification within the Dominican community.
Diaz's novel eschews the conventional immigrant narrative tropes of upward
mobility and assimilation for a discontinuous storyline consisting of episodes that
alternate between the Dominican Republic during El Trujillo's rule and the mod-
ern-day lives of the Cabral family in New Jersey. The novel shows how unlike Eu-
ropean immigrants who could easily assimilate into white, mainstream America,
for recent, predominantly black Caribbean arrivals, coming into the U.S. almost
always translates into relocating into ethnic enclaves where they encounter stag-
nant socio-economic prospects and similar racial constraints and struggles similar
to those of black Americans, whose racial otherness is essential to the reproduction
of whiteness. Unlike elite Dominican authors who have since colonialism stressed
the Dominican Republic's Hispanic heritage and white ancestry "to obscure the
overwhelming reality of African presence" (Torres-Saillant, Caribbean Poetics
48), Diaz's novel ruptures this cultural tradition by foregrounding his characters
Afro-Dominican identity. The narrative signals an interest in stressing Oscar as
an anti-hero, a Dominican nerd engrossed by his avid interest in comic books,
fantasy and role-playing games, but fundamentally an outcast because of his dark
complexion: "You really want to know what being an X-Men feels like? Just be a
smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto" (22). As in his much
acclaimed Drown, Diaz narrates TBWL through the voice of Yunior, a figure who
embodies the stereotypical Dominican machismo that Oscar wishes to emulate and
who also constantly subjects Oscar to ridicule and racist epithets. For example,
Yunior, who only befriends Oscar out of interest for his sister, Lola, demonizes
him because of the color of his skin: "Unlike me who would have hidden from a
Caliban like that, she [Lola] loved the dork" (171). By making Yunior the one who
marks Oscar as "Caliban," Diaz positions the narrator as the oppressive creator
figure in his novel, as Prospero, while Oscar, in turn, figures as the dehuman-
ized and colonized Other. Like Prospero from Shakespeare's The Tempest, Yunior
places himself as the authority within a master/slave binary that recalls a history
of European domination and exploitation of the Caribbean, and while Diaz's novel
focuses on the story of a modern-day family in diaspora it also clearly has an inter-
est in emphasizing the long and complex colonial history that has given rise to a
community's self-destructive allegiance to colonial relations and paradigms.
Whereas Silvio Torres-Saillant embraces Caliban as a figure of hope for the
Caribbean, Diaz's novel resists the unequivocal association of hope with the Do-
minican diaspora to the United States. Rather than confirm Torres-Saillant's hope
that Caliban, as a symbolic figure of Caribbean decolonialism, may undergo a
sort of spiritual rebirth that might put him on the path to a "restorative future"
{Intellectual History of the Caribbean 229), Diaz's narrative opposes the roman-
ticized notion of migration as a linear trajectory toward progress and immanent
wealth. Rather, his depiction of the Dominican community reveals how Domini-
cans within the U.S. perpetuate the home country's anti-Haitianist racial discourse,
which is further complicated by a bipolar racial grid within the U.S. that tends to
homogenize Latino communities to a simplified black or white dichotomy despite
vast ethno-racial differences.1 In brief, Dominicans, who perceive that only Hai-
tians count as black subjects, ironically become subject to anti-black prejudice
upon arriving in U.S. shores. The Dominican Republic is, however, certainly not
alone in its repression of the importance of its African heritage, the U.S., as author
and critic Toni Morrison expresses in Playing in the Dark, has historically used
an "Africanist presence" to ideologically maintain and foreground an image of
itself as an individualistic, stable, and white nation-state.2 According to Morrison,
this "Africanist presence" within U.S. literature and culture acts as a potent liter-
ary tool, serving effectively as a means for "contemplating chaos and civilization,
desire and fear, and [as] a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of
freedom" (7). As a consequence, a deeply amnesiac U.S. society problematically
conceals the intrinsic importance of the black experience and culture to its eco-
nomic and social construction. Furthermore, in the late 19th century, when North
American imperialism aimed to annex strategic land in the Caribbean, this domes-
tic contempt and erasure of blackness facilitated the racist rhetoric of the U.S.,
which propagated the alleged instability of self-governing mestizo or mixed-blood/
multi-cultural Caribbean societies as a means to support invasion and occupation
of other sovereign states. Within the Dominican Republic specifically, U.S. anti-
black rhetoric fueled an already entrenched disdain for blackness within the upper
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. And he said over and over again, but I am. Soy
dominicano. Dominican soy. (49)
This short passage merits fleshing out in terms of how it illuminates the con-
struction of a racialized subject. First, under the gaze of white subjects Oscar's
black body is a body in excess, the site of the external projections of others who
dissect, categorize and (re-)construct the body. Oscar's experience here recalls
Martinican intellectual Frantz Fanon 's experience as a black French citizen liv-
ing in France where the whites, as he states in his seminal text Black Skin, White
Masks, overdetermined him "out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories"
(91). In the book, Fanon documents his experience as a colonized black man under
a scrutinizing white gaze that reduced him to stereotypes and phobias, that cut
him open and deprived him of human freedom and integrity, which leads him to
become overwhelmed by nausea and the resounding external voices of those who
have infiltrated beneath his skin: "The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the
Negro is wicked ... the lovely little boy is trembling because he thinks the Negro
is trembling with rage, the little white boy runs to his mother's arms: 'Maman,
the Negro's going to eat me'" (93). Fanon, like W.E.B. Du Bois, experiences the
"double-consciousness" of the colonized black man who begins to see himself
through the eyes of others, who perceive him not as a man amongst men, but as a
problem inspiring both fear and disgust. The sense of being a devalued Other sim-
ply because of the color of his skin results in Fanon 's split subjectivity.
In Oscar's case the overdetermined black body is also read as a failure to per-
form Dominicanidad. His body becomes ocular proof of his difference or other-
ness (the text often emphasizes his very large, black body), and while he attempts
to articulate his in-between status as a second-generation Dominican-American
caught between two cultures/languages, he is nevertheless excluded from belong-
ing to either. Second, the "kids of color" judge and determine that his mode of
speaking and moving somehow negate racial identity: here racial identification
is divorced from culture or national origins, instead one's ability to claim inclu-
sion requires a certain demeanor that Oscar manifestly lacks. As an antidote to his
troubles, Oscar's uncle insists that he force himself onto any girl to prove his mas-
culinity, which he equates as synonymous with Dominicanidad. He tells Oscar:
"Listen palomo , you have to grab a muchacha y meteselo. That will take care of
everything. Start with a fea. Coje that fea y meteselo (24, italics mine). Commenc-
ing with the pejorative "palomo," signifying an effeminate male, Oscar's uncle
prompts Oscar to affirm his masculinity through an act of sexual violence. Force
yourself upon any girl, begin with an ugly one, he suggests. Consequently, objec-
tifying and conquering women become inseparable from a universal and compul-
sory model of masculinity that rests on an entrenched misogyny and the erasure of
the possibility of homosexuality.
Tormented by his non-conformity and lack of human intimacy, Oscar turns
to contemplate Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and wonders what "If we were ores,
wouldn't we, at a racial level, imagine ourselves to be elves?" (171). This desire,
on the one hand, reveals the psychic turmoil caused by a culture that denigrates
blackness and on the other hand the flight into fantasy that is not merely a desire
for adventure but indicative of Oscar's distorted self-image and colonized position.
Whiteness (becoming white like elves) is seen as the panacea for all his troubles
and thus the (pre-)condition for being looked upon as a man, as a valuable person.
Like Fanon's feeling of nausea at being objectified by a piercing white gaze, Oscar
after having read most of Tolkien's trilogy - "one of his greatest loves and great-
est comfort" - is beset by physical ailments particularly when he comes across
the line "and out of Far Harad black-men like half-troll" (307) which instead of
allowing him to escape into an imaginary world where he can find solace from his
quotidian troubles reinforces a Europeanist bias and causes him to relive the afflic-
tion caused by his own community's deep-seated color prejudice. In short, while
racism arises out of the perceived difference of another's physical being, rather
than remain at the surface, at the level of skin, it leaves its most indelible marks
upon the psyche.
While Tolkien's Lord of the Rings reinforces for Oscar a virulent racism, the
narrator reads the immigrant experience of dislocation, migration, and arrival
through fantasy, comic superhero narratives, and a New World curse to relate to
the readers the history of struggle and survival of the Cabral family. The narrator
marks the decline of the Cabral family with the imprisonment of the patriarch, Abe-
lard Cabral, who after being denounced for uttering slander against Trujillo loses
his estate and eventually his own mind. This also marks the beginning of the fam-
ily's personal fiikú, the bad luck that has plagued them for generations and which
not even diaspora can eradicate. The fiikú functions as the narrative thread since
the genesis of the New World, not as the conventional idyllic discovery of earthly
paradise but as a violent rupture that ushered in the destruction of pre-Columbian
cultures and modes of living and the start of a massive and unforeseen enslavement
of African peoples across the Atlantic. In the prologue, Diaz expresses that the
fukú's genesis is inseparable from the origin of the Americas and the slave trade:
The fukú curse illustrates how the people of the Caribbean have used folk
stories and legends in order to construe and explicate the history of colonialism,
the end of the European imperialistic enterprise, and the ongoing struggle to form
independent nation-states. Moreover, the fukú acts as a unifying force within the
novel, connecting the family through the multiple generations of bad luck and trag-
edy. To Dominicans living under a state-sponsored apparatus of terror and violence
even pronouncing Trujillo's name carries a fukú. Writing about the power of this
folk belief, Yunior notes the superstitions that have developed in the Dominican
community and writes: "If you even thought a bad thing about Trujillo, fua, a hur-
ricane would sweep your family out to sea, fúa, a boulder would fall out of the clear
sky and squash you . . ." (3). The fukú captures how a people have come to explain
their historical experience under the eradicating force of a madman, who not only
renamed cities after himself (turning Santo Domingo into Cuidad Trujillo) but who
silenced, when not destroying, all opposition. Here I think Ariel Dorfman 's analy-
sis of Gabriel Garcia Marques 's One-Hundred Years of Solitude can be fruitful to
understanding the response that results in the mythological transformation of the
dictator into legend. Dorfman writes that the " immediate exaggeration of what is
happening to us forces those circumstances into memory, ensures that they will not
be forgotten . . ." (26). In brief, the mythologizing of the dictator can be seen as a
strategic mechanism, that is, people aggrandize the dictator to encode their current
lives unspeakable tyranny into a legendary tale that immediately captures the now
Trujillo and Company did not leave a paper trail - they didn't
share their German contemporaries' lust for documentation. And
it's not like the fiikú itself would leave a memoir ... on all matters
related to Abelard's imprisonment and to the subsequent destruc-
tion of the clan there is within the family a silence that stands
monument to the generations, that sphinxes all attempt at narrative
reconstruction. A whisper here and there but nothing else (243).
The lack of historical facts and documentation obstructs giving voice to a his-
tory marred by fragmentation and colossal silences. The narrator's allusion to the
"German contemporaries" is Diaz's way of referring to a widely documented his-
torical genocide - the Holocaust - and effectively pointing out the general oblivi-
on about Caribbean histories, which furthermore "sphinxes" the task of the author-
historian. The interesting use of sphinx as a verb reveals the enigma posed for the
author-historian who seeks to transmit into narrative form a Dominican history
lacking in retrievable historicity. Instead the manifold of paginas en bianco - the
blank pages - thwarts the author's project and leads him to search for new and
creative literary means to re-construct into an epic story a history marred by omis-
sions. Because of the lack of historiography, Diaz must construct with the collec-
tive memory of a people the stories, curses, and legends that circulate alongside
the official and legitimate history: "There are still many, on and off the island, who
offer Beli 's near fatal beating as irrefutable proof that the House Cabral was indeed
victim of a high-level fukú, the local version of the House Atreus" (152). While
there is very little historicity to give meaning to the past the narrator reveals the im-
portance of folk stories for re-constructing the history of the Cabrais, who become
local legend and equated with tragic Greek heroes, for they too seem incapable of
altering their impending doom. As a side note, Diaz provides much of this informa-
tion about Trujillo in the form of extensive footnotes, which serve as a supplement
to the main narrative and a pedagogical and subversive purpose, often portraying
Dominican history in a tone that is both comic and satiric.
Yunior's narrative uses of satire and allusions to Tolkien's Lord of the
Rings further demythologizes Trujillo and thus creates a counter-discourse to those
that depict Trujillo as an inscrutable "cosmic force" (204) and impresses upon his
readers the magnitude of Truj ilio 's absolute dominion. Diaz insists on merging
fantasy and an ancient New World curse that unlike Marquez's so-called magical
realism in One-Hundred Years of Solitude does not render this history or the deeds
of Trujillo as fantastic or supernatural. On the contrary, rather than perpetuate the
conventional narratives which construct and characterize Trujillo as a supernat-
ural force, as someone "born to a special destiny" (204), the narrator deflates the
dominant historiography promoted with familiar intimidation by Trujillo 's regime,
one that operated through a mixture of torture, propaganda and the brutal suppres-
sion of opposition. The narrator comically describes Trujillo, the caudillo-turned-
statesman, as "T-illo" and as a "portly, sadistic pig-eyed mulatto who treated the
country like it was a plantation and he was the master" (1). This description reduc-
es the image of Trujillo from the proportion of supernatural force to nothing more
than a self-hating madman who assumed the role of master and treated his people
and the nation like his property, therefore perpetuating the hierarchies of the for-
mer colonial system.4 Diaz furthermore achieves disrupting a historiography that
championed Trujillo as an untouchable, keeping in flux what exactly is objectively
historical and what is spun by the narrator. The text suggests that Trujillo similarly
forged his own narrative as the author of a self-aggrandizing, national mythology.
The narrative compounds fiction and history to blur the division between the two
and to lead the reader to question the official national discourses as themselves
narratives, and as such susceptible to lies, omissions, and forgery. The impeding
lack of historicity and the insufficiency of language is in part why the characters in
the novel all seem to have a counterpart, another by which we come to understand
them: Trujillo as Sauron, Oscar as Caliban, Yunior as The Watcher, and the island
as his private Mordor. These are not simply hyperbolic metaphors, but an attempt
at narrating a story stymied by the very silence it attempts to counter and shape into
a meaningful narrative. Nevertheless this surrealism paradoxically captures more
accurately the "real."
The novel abounds in references associating the Dominican Republic under
Trujillo with the fantasy world of Middle Earth created by Tolkien to capture the
absolute terror caused by Trujillo's regime. Trujillo as Sauron, the name of the ar-
chetypal villain from the Tolkien trilogy, suggests the kind of influence that Trujil-
lo wielded through his iron-clad rule and his grasp on the imagination of a people.
By the end of his life in 1961, Trujillo's absolute control of the island spanned over
three decades, in part sustained, re-enforced, and even consecrated by his absolute
control of the media and the people; he took any woman he desired and killed any-
one who stood against him. The narrator elaborates adding that Santo Domingo ".
. . was his own private Mordor, not only did he lock the country from the rest of
the world, ... he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like he owned ev-
erything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers,
mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then
would brag about 'the great honeymoon' he'd had the night before" (225). This
comparison is more than an appendage to the realism of the narrative; it is there
to effectively underscore a brutal history of totalitarian power and to suggest that
the history of the Cabral family demands more than a reliance on the conventions
of realism. By repeatedly alluding to Tolkien's fantasy universe, Diaz emphasizes
a traumatic historical reality that continues to haunt the Dominican community,
for even after death Trujillo's malevolent influence persisted: "At the end of The
Return of the King, Sauron 's evil was taken by a 'great wind' and neatly 'blown
away,' with no lasting consequences to our heroes; but Trujillo was too powerful,
too toxic a radiation to be dispelled so easily. Even after death his evil lingered '
(156).4
I have chosen to include her words at length because I aim to further examine
under what conditions Yunior establishes this "freedom." As I have begun to show,
Yunior's sexist rhetoric and authoritarian control of the narrative in fact reinforces
the very patriarchal and imperialist mindset he aims to dismantle and at times ob-
jectifies the very subjects he wants to speak about.
Yunior is both the compassionate authorial voice and literary historian of the
epic journey of the Cabral family and a figure incorporating the worst attributes of
El Trujillo: objectifying women and perpetuating a virulent imperialist discourse
which instead of buttressing an anti-colonialist discourse serves to maintain a
troubling status quo. Diaz's alter ego speaks to the affinity between dictator and
author, in the silence imposed by terror and the false sense of multiple perspectives
and voices that appear within a novel like his own. Ultimately, Yunior is the only
one who speaks, and while he endeavors to speak for the entire Cabral family with-
in his novel, he, not them, narrates, shapes and constructs into a text their lives.
Like Trujillo, who embodied the Latino macho stereotype, Yunior uses women as
"symbolic capital" (Derby 1113). In "The Dictator's Seduction," Derby asserts
that for Trujillo women became useful for garnering social and political status,
and as a result for many men and women Trujillo embodied "the tigre, the quintes-
sential Dominican underdog, who gains power, prestige, and social ascendance,
extra-institutional wits, force of will, sartorial style, and cojones (balls)" (111 6).5
Following Trujillo's footsteps, Yunior gives value to his much vaunted masculin-
ity by writing the woman as spectacle, as an object that attracts and demands male
attention. For example, Yunior writes that Beli had "A culo que jalaba más que una
junta de buey. Dios mío. Even your humble Watcher, reviewing her old pictures,
is struck by what a . . . babe she was!" By presenting Beli as a sexualized object,
an animal ("buey" meaning ox) to gaze at and possess, Yunior degrades her to
mere fodder for his insatiable appetite, to a sexualized figure that simultaneously
shores up his masculine identity and reinforces oppressive sexist attitudes. This is
not simply, as Anne Garland Mahler suggests, the inherent flaw of anti-colonialist
projects mired by the use of the same system of signs as those of oppressive, to-
talitarian discourses nor the fact that "ink as an instrument links colonial and anti-
colonial forces inextricably together: they share the same tools of expression and
are therefore merged in the same symbolic field" (133). To take this a step further,
while Yunior obviously opposes Trujillo's writing with his own counter-discourse
he does not present any critique of the patriarchal structure he undeniably rein-
forces as he displays women as consumable objects for his libidinal drive.
ized superhero-esque figure that becomes the object of trauma, but not a subject
with the agency to claim and speak her own experience.
Within the United States Beli, grappling with the unresolved memories of a
savage beating, retains the fury of her ordeal and transfers her trauma, literally
meaning wound, to the next generation in the form of domestic violence. Like their
mother before them, Beli 's children, Oscar and Lola, yearn to escape the confines
of home and community and desire above all else to write a narrative of their lives
positioning them as creators, as agents rather than victims. Unaware of the trau-
matic history that has profoundly altered the life of their mother and transplanted
them into to the United States, they inevitably suffer the transmission of a trauma
that unites them all. According to Cathy Caruth, the repetition of trauma testifies
to how its singular experience cannot simply be repressed and put aside: "The
story of trauma, then, far from telling of an escape from reality - the escape from a
death, or from its referential force- rather attests to its endless impact on a life" (7,
italics mine). While Beli survives her traumatic experience, she neither liberates
herself nor her family from its repetition, only her body, burned and scarred, bears
testimony to her experience under a despotic regime that wanted to obliterate her
and erase any traces of the nation's African ancestry. It is to this history that the
narrator is so deeply entangled, and which he controls to attain narrative mastery
over another who cannot possibly make known her story. Beli, therefore, is not one
who writes the self; she figures as a marker or token of power that gives value to
Yunior's masculinity while simultaneously enabling him to occupy his authorial
position as the mouthpiece of her trauma, her body, and her family's history. Yunior
replicates moreover Trujillo's macho ideology when he repeatedly reduces Beli to
her body, to an object that attracts and demands to be looked at and possessed.
In short, the woman becomes a masculine fantasy and ego-inflating commodity.
Yunior's writing is nevertheless with a difference, as it becomes a force for unset-
tling racist discourses and totalitarian power, yet he fails to turn to explicitly and
critically question how his virulent sexism and negrophobia implicates him within
Beli's history and trauma, which essentially makes possible the novel he authors.
Yunior's narrative recognizes the continual impact of trauma on a family as it
implicitly links Beli's own imposed amnesia about her lived experience as a girl
orphaned and then beaten by Trujillo's minions with the family's inability to find
through diaspora a new beginning. Beli callously and violently repeats her own
abuse and torture by crushing and disparaging her daughter and in effect extends
the impact of her trauma to her family. The brutal insults Lola experiences force
her to flee from the mother whose sole aim was "to keep her crushed under her
heel" and who, if not absent, "never had anything positive to say" (55). This is
not a mere generational conflict but one symptomatic of a festering wound: Lola's
physical abuse, like her mother's own beating, is the result of unresolved memor-
ies. Lola, like her mother before her, expresses her own desire to escape with
words taken from the repertoire of the superhero narratives: "I was going to run as
fast as my long legs could carry me. I was going to run past the boardwalk . . . out
of Wildwood, out of New Jersey, and I wasn't going to stop. I was going to fly"
(145). The past, however, lingers into the present, transferring to the next genera-
tion a legacy of violence instead of a successful renewal of life.
Towards the end of the novel, Yunior narrates in the language of the heroic
quest Oscar's return home, which is also a return to the site of trauma and its
repetition. Yunior describes Oscar as "our cosmic explorer: eyes wide, lashed to
his accelerator couch, hand over his mutant heart" (271). When Oscar decides to
leave New Jersey for the Dominican Republic rather than remain in what for him
has become like a ruined nightmarish world in which he "searches for parts of his
crashed rocket ship, but all he encountered were burned out ruins, each seething
with new debilitating forms of radiation" (269). The entire family's visit to the
Dominican Republic becomes the scene of a spectacle, in which Beli "looking
so-dolled up and elegant" and assuming airs of sophistication blatantly strives to
convey how far removed she is from her homeland. Back at his ancestral home
Oscar, now called Huascar by his relatives, begins a relationship with a woman,
Ybón, who has ties with a corrupt policeman. Oscar's unrelenting desire to keep
seeing a woman with ties to a possessive and corrupt police officer tragically leads
to his inevitable destruction: he is beaten and tortured under direct orders from el
capitan, taken into the utter darkness of cane fields where he finds a kind of heart of
darkness, a place where slaves were once similarly beaten under a colonial system.
Oscar's last moment uncannily mirrors his mother's experience of state-sponsored
torture, but unlike Beli, who survives to rebuild a new life, Oscar is killed and
burned.
Ultimately, Yunior 's telling of the Cabrais' story reveals the entanglement of
the past with the present and Yunior's own haunting. By the end of the novel he
confesses that he has suffered from nightmares in which he and Oscar are "in some
kind of ruined bailey that's filled to the rim with dusty books. He's standing in one
of the passages, all mysterious-like, wearing a wrathful mask that hides his face
but behind the eye holes I see a familiar pair of close-set eyes. ... It takes a while
before I notice that Oscar's hands are seamless and the book's pages are blank"
(325). The blank text, without signification, represents the absence of Oscar's sub-
jectivity, of his own narrative voice and bodily presence; by the end he is no more
than a specter in Yunior's unconscious. Abjectly colonized by the narrator himself,
who is guilty of subjecting him to racist epithets and to imperialist constructs, Os-
car re-appears with a "wrathful" look in a dream that attests to Yunior's guilt and
to the unalterable reality of his death by fire. It becomes clear then that the novel
we hold in our hands is the product of a haunting: Yunior is tormented by Oscar's
ghost and the impossibility of ever hearing or speaking to the other he denigrated.
This haunting is therefore the catalyst to the story that Yunior tells about the Cabral
family. The novel becomes as Yunior tells us, his Zafa, his way to ward off the
fiikú, and lastly his confessional.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Laura Lomas whose comments, encouragement and
readings of this essay were instrumental in making this possible. I would also like
to thank Jason Cortes and everyone at Rutgers who provided me with invaluable
feedback.
' For more on anti-Haitianism in the Dominican Republic see Ginetta E.B. Candelarios's
book on Dominican racial identification Black Behind the Ears: Racial Identity from Mu-
seums to Beauty Shops where she examines the complex history that informs how Do-
minicans negotiate race. According to Candelario, "Dominicans use language that affirms
their "Indian heritage "-Indio, Indio oscuro, Indio claro, trigueño- and signals their resis-
tance to foreign authority, whether Spanish or Haitian, and their autochthonous claims to
sovereignty while accounting for the preponderance of medium to dark skin tones and
complexions in the population" (5). This spectrum of racial identification reveals both
an investment to conceal blackness and the long history that informs racial coding in the
Dominican Republic, from Spanish colonialism, Haitian invasion and immigration, to U.S
imperialism. According to RAE, the official Spanish language dictionary, trigueño, the lat-
ter ambiguous term, means entre moreno y rubio/ color de trigo [between dark and blond or
of the color of wheat]. For more on race in the Dominican Republic also see Silvio Torres-
Saillanťs An Intellectual History of the Caribbean.
2 Toni Morrison speaks in passing about the growing body of literature focusing on the stra-
tegic use of an Africanist presence not just within U.S. cultural studies but throughout the
Americas, France and England, which employ, as she points out, their own construction
of a black Other.
3 For more on magical-realism see Ariel Dorfman 's essay "Someone Writes to the Future,"
in which he brilliantly examines Garcia M arquez' s One-Hundred Years of Solitude and ex-
presses why he opposes the term "magical realism" to describe the work of Latin American
authors like Marquez.
4 For more on the life and politics of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and his family
see Robert D. Crassweller's Trujillo: The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator , Jona-
than Hartlyn's The Struggle for Democratic Politics in the Dominican Republic , Roberto
Cassá's Capitalismo y dictadura , and Lauren Derby's "In the Shadow of the State: The
Politics of Denunciation and Panegyric during the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Re-
public, 1940-1958."
5 Lauren Derby's "The Dictator's Seduction: Gender and State Spectacle during the Trujillo
regime" examines Trujillo's use of women to garner prestige and power. Derby argues that
"[fļeminine imagery acts as a foil for the dictator's multiple masculine identities" (1113)
and provides in her essay multiple examples of how Trujillo adorns and places women on
pedestals to serve as conduits who display his power throughout the land.
6 1 am greatly indebted to Amy Novak's work on "Gendering Trauma: Ariel Dorfman Nar-
ratives of Crisis and Reconciliation," in which she provides a critique of the figuration
of women in Dorfman 's work which "draws attention to the dissociation and discursive
erasure of women's experience in narratives of national trauma and trauma studies" (295).
I take from her essay her use of the term masculinist narratives which "refers to a narrative
I deployment that is not necessarily tied to male or female identity, but rather seeks to cohere
social (and thus patriarchal) power and control the privileges that go with it . . ." (315).
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