The Politics of Cultural Trauma and Violence in Junot Díaz's the Brief

Home , Our Mothers

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The Politics of Cultural Trauma and Violence in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Jana Lee Wong, B.A.

A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English

California State University Bakersfield

In Partial Fulfillment for the Degree of Masters of English

Spring 2013

Jana Lee Wong

2013

Acknowledgments

I owe my deepest gratitude to Drs. Monica Ayuso and Carol Dell’Amico. Their instruction and encouragement has greatly contributed to my success in improving my critical writing skills. I would also like to thank my husband, Wellington Wong, for his continued support of my educational and scholarship endeavors.

Abstract

This thesis, entitled “The Politics of Cultural Trauma and Violence in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” asserts that transgenerational trauma takes place in the aftermath of the 1930-1961 reign of Dominican president Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. A history of genocide, highlighted by Diaz’s book, is also closely linked to American politics. As the main character, Oscar Cabral de León , tries to reclaim his Dominican past from his place of exile, the United States , he tries to blunt the spell of his family’s curse. This process compels him to tell his family history as part of a strategy of providing testimony. Through the recording of stories of many voiceless victims, Oscar reclaims their lost culture and lost power. Once in America, where Oscar’s family is forced to assimilate and work under extreme conditions to survive, they must find their collective history in order to face the injustices of the past and the present. This thesis also juxtaposes the fictional and historical narratives and motifs of Diaz’s novel with psychological studies that demonstrate that personal and political violence shape racist discrimination and that violent politics disrupt positive notions of self and cultural community.

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Table of Contents

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1

The Collective Identity and Collective Memory………………………………..……………….15

Politics and Transgenerational Trauma…………………………….…….....…………………...38

Fragmentation and Rebirth in Science Fiction and Magic Realism……………………………..52

The Witness: Testimony and Transference………..…………………………………………….70

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………78

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years when Belicia was brutally beaten keep her from empathizing with her son Oscar, and her

daughter, Lola. Belicia Cabral, otherwise known as Beli, is brutally honest with her children.

When Oscar asks his mother if he is ugly, she replies, “Well hijo,” in between sighs, “you sure

didn’t take after me” (Díaz 30). Oscar’s sister, Lola, is sure to explain that their mother lacks affection toward her children when she states, “You know, ..we colored folks talk plenty of shit about loving our children but we really don’t” (Díaz 35) On the same page, Oscar tries to put a hand on his sister’s shoulder to sympathize with her, but she does the only thing she has been taught to do—she shrugs it off.

This dysfunction in the family is seen in the collective Dominican culture as well. All of

Oscar’s Dominican girlfriends are beaten by their boyfriends, and even Yunior, the main narrator of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, reveals the misogyny that runs deep within the community when he states the fact that Oscar had “pimp-liness” (the ability to date many girls) only when he was a boy. It was only then that he was “a normal Dominican boy raised in a

‘typical’ Dominican family” (Díaz 11). According to Yunior, something goes terribly wrong when Oscar is deemed unworthy of attracting the opposite sex. Oscar tries to acculturate into the

Dominican “pimp” lifestyle, but fails each time because it is in his heart to love only one girl, not to play Don Juan. Unfortunately for Oscar, it is always the wrong girl. Oscar’s trouble is minimal in the United States when he dates girls who already have boyfriends, but when he travels to the

Dominican Republic, he finds a web of government control that is violent and unjustified.

Oscar’s consequence for dating the wrong woman in the DR is death without justice, the first sign of a tyrannical government.

The more control a government exerts over Oscar’s family, the more marked the cycle of trauma and violence that spreads from generation to generation. This force is embodied in the

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KXPEOHUHYHDORQFHDQGIRUDOOWKH*RG¶V+RQHVW7UXWK,WZDV7UXMLOOR´ 2QWKHVDPH 5 page, the author describes this revelation came about only after the realization that the US was illegally invading Santo Domingo in order to fulfill its corrupt goal in the “democratization” of the Dominican Republic. Once the US secures its financial influence, it seems to ignore the mass genocide which takes place there. It is important to discuss the shared national identity of the characters in the novel to better understand how identity can be formed through traumatic events caused by political corruption.

Critics such as Sandra Cox and Ignacio Lopez- Calvo discuss cultural trauma and national identity as it relates to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Cox asserts that “Díaz’s narrator shows that the ideological apparatus of the Trujillato performs across class and generational barriers to graft disparate populations together through a shared fear of the mystical qualities of the head-of-state” (107). When there is a “mystical” fear of Trujillo, the Trujillato performs his dirty work, and no one is safe except those few who escape his wrath. The tragic stories of the murders of loved ones are passed down from generation to generation, creating a bond, albeit a bond with barriers. In the novel, one of the barriers inside the DR includes the distrust of one’s own neighbor and the indoctrination of violence. Lola, for example, is raped by an acquaintance at the young age of 9. Yunior narrates that this is the reason she has becomes so tough when he says, “When she was in fourth grade she’d been attacked by an older acquaintance, and this was common knowledge throughout the family (and by extension a sizable section of Paterson, Union City, and Teaneck), and surviving that urikán of pain, judgment, and bochinche had made her tougher than adamantine” (Díaz 25). A tragic and brutal attack becomes the fault of a nine year-old only when a culture accepts the degradation of women and the dysfunctional and cruel stereotype of a girl being asked to be raped, and labeling her a whore, all of which fall into seriously flawed reasoning.

While Cox discusses the barriers created by the fear of violence, Lopez- Calvo discusses the cultural loss and loss of identity through stereotyping when he writes, “This personal search for the true essence of Dominicanness . . . is not exempt from stereotyping and essentialism.

Overall, [Díaz’s novel] defines Dominicans [and especially their historic leaders like Trujillo and

Juan Balaguer (1960-1996)] as irredeemable racists who are ashamed of their own African heritage” (76). Cultural loss, then, I argue, begins in the DR when historic leaders such as these mentioned above diminish the importance of heritage and pride of one’s culture by instating racism through political terror of those who do not look European.

This thesis takes Cox and Lopez-Calvo’s analyses a step further by analyzing the

Dominican politics during the Trujillo years and the imagery of Díaz’s novel which portrays the post-immigration and transgenerational trauma of characters like Oscar and his mother, Belicia, his sister, Lola, and his friend, Yunior from a psychological and political view by tracing their family’s journey from the DR to the United States and connecting that history to the formation of their identities. This thesis further illustrates how the trauma of Dominicans forced to emigrate to safer parts of the world is exacerbated by a renewed trauma when they are not heard and become invisible, or when they must once again struggle to survive in a new political world and economic environment which exploits them. The remnants of this exploitation can be found in the novel’s racist language. For example, when Oscar returns from the DR to the US, Yunior narrates a scene where Oscar’s uncle picks him up from the JFK airport in New York saying,

“Great, his Tio said, looking askance at his complexion, now you look Haitian” (32). Oscar’s uncle cannot resist associating a Haitian look with a curse after living in a Dominican culture that discriminates against Haitians and was known to have carried out their mass murder. The terror

of losing life due to one’s appearance causes discrimination based on fear of losing voice and

power, a central theme of Díaz’s novel.

This loss of voice and power of the main characters is accounted for in Monica Hanna’s

“Reassembling The Fragments,” where she discusses the function of Diaz’s novel: “[Díaz]

includes footnotes … These notes relate the stories of dissenters whose voices were also

drowned out by the [Trujillo] regime. So while Trujillan history is only concerned with the

powerful, Yunior‘s history includes the stories of those who resist despite their lack of power”

(504). But a lack of agency and a lack of economic security drive Díaz’s characters into a new form of slavery inside their adopted country. For example, Oscar’s mother, a first-generation

immigrant to New Jersey, works multiple jobs in order to provide basic necessities. From her

children’s perspective, she is only home long enough to dictate orders and set confining

standards. Oscar thus depends on his sister, Lola, to take care of him by cooking and cleaning.

When Lola runs away from this responsibility, Oscar is left in a state of confusion. This

confusion deepens when his mother and Lola engage in a violent struggle of power. His mother

sends Lola with their grandmother, La Inca, back to the Dominican Republic, where Oscar’s

quest to break the cycle of violence begins. His destiny, he feels, is to find bigger answers to his

familial crises which ailed his family long ago. The geopolitical situation of the DR then

becomes central to the effect of trauma on Oscar’s family dynamics.

According to trauma theory, these family dynamics have a specific relationship to not

only the Dominican culture, but to the train of thought that is tied to collective identity. Kahli

Tal first coined the term trauma theory as “that cultural-political theory [which] inquires

primarily onto consciously lived life and that such an inquiry makes its major moves back and

forth between some individual train of thought or action or sensibility and the larger, collective

cultural and political world” (3). Around the same time, in her book, Unclaimed Experience:

Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth refers to trauma theory when she writes: “In

modern trauma theory…there is an emphatic tendency to focus on the destructive repetition of

trauma that governs a person’s life” (63). Applying trauma theory serves as the basis for a larger

argument that suggests identity is formed by the intergenerational transmission of trauma. This

helps us to understand the root of the major political themes and symbolic motifs in The Brief

Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It also expands on the cause of the fragmentation of the identities

of characters in the novel.

Sigmund Freud’s work lays the basis of trauma theory as it relates to political desires for

dominance. According to Freud, politicians exert dominance over other countries in order to gain

political and economic control. This oppressive and violent state occurs, according to Freud in

The Future of an Illusion, so that “men’s relation to each other, and in particular the distribution

of the attainable riches, may be regulated” (Freud 9). Freud argues that the desire for material

wealth and psychological control will lead a nation to ruin when greedy and unscrupulous

leaders exert their power over the masses or when leaders submit to the unscrupulous desires of

the masses: “There are present in all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural tendencies, and that with a great number of people these are strong enough to determine their behavior in human society” (11). For this reason, Freud warns that it is dangerous for a society to fall under the influence of culture and religion (45). For instance, some people follow customs because the customs were followed by their ancestors, but Freud questions the proof of customs like religion and tradition along with the fact that it is taboo to question religion and tradition at all. In the same way, thoughts about cultural organization should not be followed for the sake of

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to the next. When countries exploit others, they receive the curse of the goods they take. When

countries are exploited, they repeat the violent actions against them. When exploitation causes

forced immigration, there is lost culture which produces depression.

For instance, the cocaine curse mentioned in the book is an illustration of the

unscrupulous behavior of the American government which comes back to haunt the people of

America. According to the Federal Office of State Affairs (ONDCP), in 2010, 19,000 people

were treated for cocaine addiction in California alone. The same report states that 3,800 people

were treated for cocaine addiction in the state of New Jersey, where Oscar is raised. It’s clear

that the problem of drug addiction in America is one of the curses which Diaz speaks of in his

novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

The second curse is the protagonist’s obesity brought on indirectly by the unscrupulous

sugar cane industry’s exploitation of native and enslaved people. Oscar is obese and lethargic.

He also carries the curse of the fate of being dark-skinned in a racist world. The irony here is

that Oscar’s ancestors were forced to toil in the sugarcane fields and were enslaved, while Oscar

suffers from the American curse of a diet rich in sugar which causes endocrine malfunction. This

malfunction leads to the exasperation of Oscar’s obesity, which in turn leads to social rejection

and then to his depression and suicide attempt. Oscar’s fatal flaw is that he does not recognize

the source of the curse because he does not understand the entirety of his cultural history.

Furthermore, Oscar’s curse is linked to far more than the effects of sugar-loaded

American snacks. Oscar’s curse is a fight against a society that loathes obesity and differences.

It is a curse which is linked to the discrimination which permeates the psyche of everyone who shares the color of his skin and the story of his Dominican history. For instance, when Oscar’s grandmother, La Inca, tries to recover her lost niece and Oscar’s mother, the family tells her,

“She can’t be your family. She’s a prieta” (Díaz 257). The word “prieta” is a Spanish word designed to describe a person with dark skin. Overt racism is entrenched in the very thoughts and actions of the characters in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In the novel, it is clear that racism is used as a tool to keep the less fortunate poor dependent upon the servile jobs of others who are more fortunate to have European ancestry. This demarcation of people of different ethnicity creates traumatic damage to the characters’ identities. The war which Trujillo enacts on the Haitian people, for instance, leaves psychological scars which ignite further violence and trauma. In a 2004 interview, Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American author, spoke about how past political terror is still seen in the DR in the form of racism:

People are still repatriated all the time in the Dominican Republic to Haiti. Some tell of

being taken off busses because they looked Haitian, and their families have been in the

Dominican Republic for generations. Haitian children born in the Dominican Republic

still can’t go to school and they are forced to work in the sugarcane fields. It isn’t really a

memory…the massacre is something that people always fear can happen again. (qtd. in

Barsamian 3)

The sugarcane fields represent not only the exploitation of Haitian children and people who are forced to work there under the weight of a capitalist society which demands the resource of sugar, but it also represents the current racist discrimination used to employ political terror over the lives of people who “look” Haitian. When citizens must worry about deportation based on the color of their skin, they experience an everlasting trauma caused by the anxiety of their lack of safety and lack of economic stability. The effects of anxiety from discrimination and longing for a place to belong can be seen when Oscar tries to commit suicide in the US after he returns from the DR still a virgin. Yunior describes the racist actions Oscar sees inside the schools while he is

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VXJDUFDQHILHOGVEHFRPHDUHSHWLWLYHPRWLIXVHGWRV\PEROL]HWKHXQMXVWWUHDWPHQWRIDOOZKRDUH 13 forced to cut cane, whether it is under the condition of physical or economic enslavement. The tall stalks, where Beli is beaten nearly to death and where Oscar is beaten to death remind readers of the historical brutality of forced labor. Yunior focuses on the canefields when he narrates, “This time Oscar didn’t cry when they drove him back to the canefields . . . the cane had grown well and thick and in places you could hear the stalks clack-clack-clacking against each other . . . . The smell of the ripening cane was unforgettable” (Díaz 320). The sound of the heavy sugarcane is personified to foreshadow the violent act to come. Oscar is murdered when he makes the fatal choice to stay in the DR to see Ybón after he is warned not to.

This recurrence of violence by government officials represents the cycle of trauma that— the novel says— is difficult to break. Oscar’s grandmother, La Inca, tells the family the story of

Oscar’s death and her futile struggle to obtain help from the Dominican government to obtain justice. History repeats itself: Oscar’s grandparents are murdered by government officials; his aunts are murdered in a mysterious fashion reminiscent of the murders of The Mirabal Sisters, three political activists who were found burned in their automobile, and Oscar himself is murdered in the sugarcane fields at the novel’s conclusion.

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, racism that exists today is caused by the exploitation of human lives and another country’s resources. Racism is a tragic tool used to gain complete control over minority groups who are not equipped to fight against it. Where government can gain control of another country’s economy, it can also gain complete control politically and psychologically. Thus, The United States took control of Dominican finances in

1905 when their investments of sugar, tobacco, and cocao grew (Veeser 731). This exploitation exists today and is seen in Diaz’s novel when the DR’s economy is controlled by the capitalist market. The worst kind of exploitation is seen when Oscar’s sister is led in desperation to sell

14 herself in the DR for $2,000 dollars. The organization of capitalism changes the DR by separating a once egalitarian society into a society with social class systems.

The exploitation of social class systems inside the Dominican Republic is exasperated by the absence of adequate education for the lower classes of today. “UNESCO and the World

Forum, international organizations that assess the quality of education, released information in

2010 ranking the Dominican Republic's primary education as the worst in the Central American and Caribbean region” (Education International). It is well known that Dominicans must be able to afford high tuition prices to afford to go to private schools with adequate resources. Without a proper education, young people are vulnerable to exploitation by being forced to work dangerous jobs and prostitute themselves.

The revolt against human exploitation is an historic battle. The Haitian Revolution of

1791 – 1809 has been directly tied to immigration into the United States when many Haitians revolted against the French at St. Domingue, forcing both white Acadians and their loyal Haitian slaves to immigrate into the southern state of Louisiana (Parham 24). This case of violent revolt against the dominant and unjust white culture where many French people were massacred further traumatized both groups of people, causing a fragmentation of separate cultures and an attempt to fuse a unification of culture, which is especially seen in cities like New Orleans where Haitian culture and French culture are united. In the novel, Oscar blends his Dominican culture with a love for American science fiction. His collective identity is representative of his knowledge of his mother’s past, his hardship as a fat and dark Dominican-American in a racist world, and his power within to change it all.

Collective Identity and Collective Memory

The marginalization of the Haitians in the DR is strongly noted in Díaz’s novel, The Brief

Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, when Yunior narrates a description of a trip he takes with Lola

back to Santo Domingo: “It’s one big party for everybody except the poor, the dark, the jobless,

the sick, the Haitian, their children…the kids that certain Canadian, American, German, and

Italian tourists love to rape” (272). Yunior’s passage implies that there is less opportunity and

less justice for the Haitian-looking Dominicans. The collective memory of past degradations

forms a collective identity. In the DR, Oscar’s mother values the light-skinned Jack Pujols

because he is white and collectively valued as the most beautiful boy on campus. As a result,

Jack sees the opportunity to sexually exploit Beli by promising to marry her, even though he is

already promised to another rich, light-skinned girl.

The sex exploitation of young women and children is seen in the novel throughout. When

Beli hits puberty, she develops large attractive breasts and men start to openly desire her. Beli thinks that Pujols loves her and wants to marry her, but when they are caught having sex in the broom closet, Pujols is punished and sent away to the army, never to be heard of again. Beli is heartbroken, but it is only the first of three heartbreaks she will endure over Dominican men who use her for sex. The first two, Jack Pujols and The Gangster, belong to the upper Bourgeoisie class among whom it is socially unacceptable to marry below their social rank. The third man

Beli meets on a plane to America and marries. She has two children with him, but he abandons her like the rest. It is unclear whether he returns to the DR to a previous family, but he is never seen again, and Beli is left to raise two children as a single parent. The common occurrence of abandonment is marked by the many Dominican characters in the novel who grow up without fathers.

Díaz links Beli’s exploitation to the long history of gangster politics resorts to the abandonment of women. After Beli finds out that her gangster lover is married to Trujillo’s sister, Díaz reminds readers of Balaguer’s infamous morality when he writes, “Balaguer fathered a dozen illegitimate children and then used the pueblo’s money to hush it up” (139). The recurrence of male figures impregnating women and then leaving them to raise children as single parents is central to the theme of lost identity. Beli has no male figure to identify with while growing up (except for the abusive man who burned her as a child). Her son, Oscar, has no male figure to identify with because his father has abandoned him. The narrator, Yunior, has also been abandoned by his father and has no male figure to identify with. What’s more disturbing to their ego is that not only do they suffer from abandonment issues, but they lack parental affection from their parents who struggle to survive as single parents. The damage to the collective identity is noted in Oscar’s sister Lola’s narration: “That’s white people for you. They lose a cat and it’s an all-points bulletin, but we Dominicans, we lose a daughter and we might not even cancel our appointment at the salon” (Díaz 66). Lola notes her mother’s lack of attention to her running away from home as part of the collective Dominican culture of not caring enough for children.

The curse of abandonment takes a psychological toll on all the characters in the novel, but namely on the male characters. Oscar, who never feels loved, becomes helpless. He subconsciously latches on to psychologically damaged characters who cause him further humiliation. Even Yunior allows his comrades to verbally abuse Oscar with racist undertones.

When speaking of Oscar, Yunior admits his own taunting of Oscar when he narrates,

Who the hell, I ask you, had ever met a Domo like him? Halloween he made the

mistake of dressing up like Doctor Who, was real proud of his outfit too. When I

saw him on Easton, with two other writing-section clowns, I couldn’t believe how

much he looked like that fat homo, Oscar Wilde, and I told him so … Melvin

said, Oscar Wao, quien es Oscar Wao, and that was it, all of us started calling him

that. (Díaz 180)

This type of harassment is reminiscent of the racist taunting in the novel that becomes

part of the collective culture. Racism is so tightly engrained inside Díaz’s novel that it becomes

overlooked by his characters. The racialization of those with darker skin continues in the DR today and in the United States through the US exploitation of other countries whose inhabitants

possess darker features. Understanding discrimination within the Dominican culture is central to

the Machiavellian politics of Trujillo, his Trujillista party, and the future structure of politics in

the DR.

Diaz chooses to obsessively relate so much of his Dominican past in order to teach his

readers an alternate history, one readers won’t find in the history books, a history from the native

perspective in order to reinstate a new collective memory. He reasserts the theme that corrupt

political campaigns create violence and trauma when he reminds his readers of the history of

Christopher Columbus (not from a European perspective) but from the perspective of the Tainos, who were slaughtered for their resources of gold and fertile soil. Díaz explains with his original

blend of history and popular culture:

When the Euros started going Hannibal Lecter on the Tainos, they killed

Anacaona’s husband…And like all good warrior women she tried to rally her

people, tried to resist, but the Europeans were the original fuku, [curse] no

stopping them. Massacre after massacre after massacre…after a bogus trial they

hung brave Anacaona…on the eve of her execution she was offered a chance to

save herself: all she had to do was marry a Spaniard. (Díaz 244)

Díaz uses the genre of historiography, or the rewriting of the past in narrative form, to uncover the distant political trauma caused since the time of Columbus. The Spanish conquest is reinterpreted as the cane fields become a repetitive motif which represents the exploitation and massacre of native people throughout the ages, and the cosmic irony, the unknown force which causes perpetual doom, is represented by the ancestral mongoose which serves as a warning derived from the collective memory. But the warning is never heeded by Oscar who succumbs to the present trauma caused by police and government corruption.

Nevertheless, the mongoose serves as a fable-like creature designed to teach the characters a lesson. When Oscar’s mother, Beli, dates a married man who happens to hang out with the three “witchkings: Johnny Abbes, Joaquin Balaguer, and Felix Bernardino”(122), the mongoose appears to her when she is beaten nearly to death in the cane fields: “There appeared at her side a creature that would have been an amiable mongoose if not for its golden eyes and the absolute black of its pelt . . . [it] placed its intelligent little paws on her chest and stared down at her... You have to rise now or you’ll never have the son or the daughter” (Díaz 149). Here the mongoose encourages Beli while it teaches her that she must fight to survive. Later, when her son, Oscar, tries to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge onto a train track, the mongoose appears to warn Oscar of making such a rash decision: “He would call it the Golden

Mongoose…instead of taking note of the vision and changing his ways the fuck just shook his swollen head . . . (and) threw himself down into the darkness” (Díaz 190). Instead of dying,

Oscar is saved by landing on a garden divider. His family’s curse seems temporarily broken by

19 the Mongoose, a cosmic force which works against evil. The Mongoose appears as a mighty motif, its imagery always opposing the image of the man without a face.

The loss of voice and loss of collective identity is symbolized by the man without a face. For instance, the image of a man without a face appears to remind readers of the 1937 genocide of

Haitian laborers on the Dominican-Haiti border who were massacred with machetes in the sugarcane fields by Trujillo’s orders. Many Haitians were dismembered or lost their faces in the horrific mass murder. The iterative nature of the faceless man represents the anonymity of the torturers and the subjugated silence of the victims.

Collective memory and collective identity are the result of the repetitive nature of trauma and the anonymity of those who inflict crimes against humanity. No one is ever arrested for nearly beating Beli to death or murdering Oscar. For instance, just before Oscar’s mother, Beli, is attacked by the Trujillista in the sugarcane fields, the faceless man appears. Diaz writes, “The colmadero sent for his cousin or the skinned goat or dimmed memories of her Lost Years (in

Azua), but our girl could have sworn that a man sitting in a rocking chair in front of one of the hovels had no face and he waved at her as she passed but before she could confirm it the pueblito vanished into the dust” (Díaz 135). The way in which the faceless man disappears is reminiscent of the ghosts from Beli’s past, ancestors who were disfigured and murdered at the Haitian border when they tried to flee out of the Dominican Republic during Trujillo’s reign. They are ghosts who remind the characters about the importance of remembering their past tortures and the perpetrators that were never brought to justice.

The faceless man also reappears in the novel after the United States drops the two atomic bombs on Japan, signifying the violent defacing of identity of all those who are victims to the political hounds who enact war on innocent victims. Oscar’s grandmother, Socorro, becomes a

20 victim to Trujillo’s political hounds. She dreams about the faceless man before her husband is taken to a death camp and before she and her oldest two daughters are murdered under mysterious circumstances under Trujillo’s reign (Díaz 236-237). Here the facelessness is the representation of the inability of the Dominican people to speak against the hated ruthless ruler,

Trujillo. As a result, their collective identity is lost.

Furthermore, the faceless man reappears to Oscar in the DR just before his abductors take him to the sugarcane fields. Yunior laments Oscar’s last days in the DR: “He stared out into the night, hoping that maybe there would be some U.S. Marines out for a stroll, but there was only a lone man sitting in his rocking chair out in front of his ruined house and for a moment Oscar could have sworn the dude had no face” (Díaz 298). The reference to the U.S. Marines gently reminds us that the United States has a presence, not for the protection of Oscar or any other

Dominican civilian, but for the protection of the Dominican resources the United States depends on. This presence is also faceless and untouchable. Finally, the faceless man reappears when

Dominican officers take Oscar the second time to murder him (Díaz 321) and is even present after Oscar’s death when Oscar becomes faceless in the narrator’s dreams (Díaz 325). This last representation of the faceless man signifies the fact that people do not really exist under a free democracy when they have no power over the nations that are currently controlling their resources and finances. Díaz’s allusion of the faceless man brings to mind the stripping of identity when immigrants come to America seeking The American Dream, but are instead faced with enslavement in a capitalist world where they are voiceless to state any real changes.

In Díaz’s novel, the loss of identity is central to the character, Oscar Wao. The narrator,

Yunior, is Oscar’s foil, different from him in every way, and with a lesser moral composition. He explains how Oscar fits into neither the mainstream American culture nor the Dominican culture.

Instead of watching football like the other DoYos (Dominican New Yorkers), he reads science

fiction like Dune (Díaz 39). Oscar does not fit into Dominican culture because he does not have

a cuerpazo (sexy body), and he has inherited his mother’s dark features. This bashing of dark

skin is tied into the political terror of Oscar’s family’s past when Trujillo tortured and murdered

their Haitian-looking grandfather and other family members.

When Oscar’s grandfather, Abelard, is imprisoned and dies at the infamous Nigua death

camp, and when his grandmother and aunts are murdered, his mother is abandoned by the rest of

the family because of her dark skin as well. The collective Dominican fear of dark skin can be

pinpointed to Díaz’s mention of the Dominican history of political terror when Trujillo ordered

his soldiers to shoot or hack to death anyone who could not twirl their “r’s” when pronouncing

the word “perejil” (parsley) or anyone who looked “Haitian.”This traumatic history is

highlighted in the footnotes of Díaz’s text when he writes:

In 1937, for example, while the Friends of the Dominican Republic were

perejiling Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans and Haitian-looking Dominicans to

death, while genocide was in fact in the making, Abelard kept his head, eyes, and

nose safely tucked into his books . . . and when survivors staggered into his

surgery with unspeakable machete wounds, he fixed them up as best as he could

without making any comments as to the ghastliness of their wounds. Acted like it

was any other day. (215)

Oscar’s depression can be linked to a culture of an accepted violence started by Rafael

Trujillo in the 20th century. Trujillo’s genocide of Haitians or Haitian-looking people along the

Massacre River (a river which divides the Dominican Republic from Haiti to this day) was further fueled by the US involvement and invasion of The Dominican Republic. The machete

massacre of 1937 was ordered by Trujillo and was well described in literary works such as The

Time of The Butterflies (1994) by Julia Alvarez, Song of The Water Saints (1995) by Nelly

Rosario, and The Farming of Bones (1998) by Edwidge Danticat. The most recent novel before

Diaz’s to describe the DR’s genocide, The Feast of The Goat (2000) by Mario Vargas Llosa especially highlights the lasting psychological effect of the Haitian genocide (Ayuso 52-53).

Oscar’s grandfather, Abelard, whose skin color is dark, is tortured and later dies for his decision for refusing to bring his beautiful virgin daughter to Trujillo’s parties in which the tyrant was known to kidnap young girls for the purpose of raping them. Though tragedy befalls the entire family for opposing Trujillo, Oscar’s mother, Belicia, survives, but is rejected by her family because of the dark color of her skin. She is sold when she is a baby to another family who uses her as a servant.

The poverty- stricken state that Trujillo’s regime leaves the island in is desperate, leaving children like Belicia in intolerable conditions. Belicia is starved, tortured with scalding oil, and placed in a chicken coup, in order to take all her human dignity away from her the same way

Trujillo has taken all dignity away from the citizens of the DR. Díaz writes: “The girl, though, was immensely stubborn, and the parents who weren’t her parents flipped when the girl kept skipping out on work to attend classes, and in the ensuing brawl the poor muchachita got burned, horribly; the father, who was not her father, splashed a pan of hot oil on her naked back. The burn nearly killed her.” (Díaz 255)

This description of Belicia’s childhood torture and the lack of justice for her shows

readers how Trujillo’s political reign of terror violates not only the nation’s sense of stability,

but it also violates the most basic human rights of its children. Díaz refers to Outer Azua, the

neighborhood where Oscar’s mother is found abused, when he writes: “in the early fifties these

precincts were full of smoke, inbreeding, intestinal worms, twelve year-old brides, and full-on

whippings…The girl’s burns were unbelievably savage…A bomb crater, a world scar like those

of hibakusha” (Díaz 256-257).

Diaz compares Belicia’s terror to that of the survivors of the nuclear bombings of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This connection reveals the cycle that political trauma breeds on the

individual. The reference to a horrific act of war caused by the US suggests an American

connection which causes the perpetual trauma of victims in the DR, especially when American

tourists come to rape Dominican girls, as the narration suggests in one of the most shocking

revelations of the novel. These horrible secrets cause Oscar’s mother to “embrace the amnesia

that was so common throughout the island, five parts denial, five parts negative hallucination.

Embraced the power of the [Antilles]. And from it forged herself anew “(Díaz 259).

As horrific as Oscar’s mother’s past was, it was La Inca’s love that changed her. Diaz

artistically juxtaposes hope and despair and the footnotes to the text so that two voices can be

heard from two different perspectives, each equally important to the retelling of history. The

narrator’s voice is heard primarily in the text, while the author’s voice is primarily heard in the

footnotes, the narrator telling the story from the outside and the author explaining Dominican

history from the inside perspective of his Dominican point of view.

The juxtaposition of the two voices from the past and present shows how the political trauma of genocide is engrained in the psyche of the characters in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar

Wao in their everyday thinking into the 21st century. Jacques Derrida, philosopher and co-author of Philosophy in a Time of Terror, explains that “terrorist acts try to produce psychic effects

(conscious or unconscious) and symbolic or symptomatic reactions that might take numerous detours, an incalculable number of them, in truth…If intellectuals, writers, scholars, professors,

24 artists, and journalists do not, before all else, stand up together against such violence, their abdication will at once be irresponsible and suicidal” (Derrida 107-125). Although Derrida’s philosophy is wrapped around the terrorist acts of 9/11 during the fall of the twin towers, his description of the “psychic effects” and “symbolic or symptomatic reactions” fits cohesively with the terrorist acts of the Trujillato and the psychological aftermath of the people who survived. Furthermore, as a writer, Díaz is compelled to “stand up against such violence.”

Through The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Diaz stands up to the violence of the past genocide in the DR as well as the transgenerational trauma that has been implanted into the psyche of millions of the descendents of those families who faced the terror of the Trujillato. He stands up by writing the testimony of the oppressed voice, and by doing so, he enlightens the masses of the continuance of political terror and racism, and how it affects both the Dominican

Republic and the United States. The documentation of cultural trauma depends on its witnesses and the children of witnesses. Like the characters in Díaz’s novel, their tragic conclusions and the toll it takes on the remaining lives of others reflects the severe fragmentation of a culture.

The characters in the novel experience a collective loss of identity. The novel’s depiction of racism within the Dominican group is more poignant, leaving a traumatic effect which is the fragmentation of the self-image which brings on post- traumatic stress symptoms; this broken identity causes symptoms from sex addiction to abandonment to inter-familial racism and violence.

Oscar is not the only character whose identity has been broken. Racism resounds throughout the narrator’s racist tone with the repeated use of the word “nigger” throughout the book. The effects of racism on the collective community’s identity is tied to exploiting politics which cause the central problem of fragmentation of identity. This fragmentation forces both the

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Oscar can never run away in Diaz’s novel, even though he tries to do so to find his true

identity. His sister, Lola, tries to explain the impossibility of running away from her identity. She

analyzes her past and being raised by a mother who shows no affection. The feeling of being a

slave is brought to point through her perspective when she says about her mother,

She was my Old World Dominican mother and I was her only daughter, the one

she had raised up herself with the help of nobody, which meant it was her duty to

keep me crushed under her heel…You don’t know the hold our mothers have on

us, even the ones that are never around—especially the ones that are never

around. What it’s like to be the perfect Dominican daughter, which is just a nice

way of saying a perfect Dominican slave. (Díaz 55-56)

Díaz’s illustration points to the variety of ways in which a culture continues to practice a

form of slavery (and other abusive parenting tactics). The difficulty of breaking such a cycle

becomes more complex when it is justified by the collective culture. This justification can be

seen in the expression “perfect Dominican daughter” or in the term “Nigger,” which Yunior

repeats 44 times in the novel. If society accepts that a perfect Dominican daughter is a “slave” or

that the derogatory term “Nigger” is acceptable within the members of a culture, then the racism

implanted within the Dominican culture can be just as traumatic as racism which comes from

outside of the Dominican culture. Lola must fly from New York to Miami (across the nation) to

break away from the cultural racism that her own mother and Yunior subject her to. Admired for

his faithfulness to Oscar, Yunior becomes the anti-hero in the novel when Lola breaks up with him for cheating on her. Oscar, who takes on the protagonist role, must try to commit suicide to escape the racism he endures from his Dominican- American neighbors (Díaz 190-191).

This inner-cultural racism is painful for Oscar. The face of abuse gradually changes in

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao from the white “cool kids” back to the kids of color.

Yunior narrates the racist abuse that Oscar witnesses :

Every day he watched the “cool” kids torture the crap out of the fat, the ugly, the

smart, the poor, the dark, the black, the unpopular, the African, the Indian, the

Arab, the immigrant, the strange, the feminine, the gay—and in every one of these

clashes he saw himself. In the old days it had been the white kids who had been

the chief tormentors, but now it was the kids of color who performed the

necessaries” (Díaz 264).

In Díaz’s novel, the children of the immigrants who were bullied learn the tactic of torture through immersion in a demented American subculture in which bullying is the norm.

The consequence of not immersing oneself into the American culture is to be bullied; thus, the other option is to become the bully. With options like these, the children of immigrants feel forced into assimilating into American culture; hence, the feeling of cultural trauma is exasperated by the loss of power to choose. For example, the fat Olga, an early girlfriend of

Oscar’s, bullies him by calling him a “cake eater” after he breaks up with her and she is bullied by other Dominican-Americans for looking like a troll (17).

Maria T. Miliora asserts that cultural racism disrupts the feeling of grandiosity or pride in oneself: “Cultural racism leads to the disenfranchisement and erosion of sense of self”… How one imagines himself or herself is related to one’s personal and social history (Miliora 53).

Miliora calls this phenomenon a “vertical split” that causes disassociation. She further states that this disassociation is symbolized in literature with fantasies that are shared by a large segment of the culture (Miliora 47).

The response to cultural loss is difficult enough. Add rejection from the inner culture sub- group and the outer-culture mainstream group, and Oscar feels as if he was born on another planet. The representation of self- identity through the sci-fi hero helps him cope with this rejection. Rejection due to racial discrimination can be seen in our societies today in the willing segregation of communities, churches, university clubs, and gangs who try to assimilate a sense of positive identity in order to be protected from racial discrimination and disenfranchisement.

The segregation of ethnic groups brings the return of the collective memory of culture, which can be shared in the form of the oral tradition.

Once in America, Yunior can’t help but reflect on how much of the Dominican culture and knowledge was forgotten. Yunior says, “It really was astonishing how much he had forgotten about the DR: the little lizards…and the roosters in the morning…the cries of plataneros (banana sellers)…the bacalao guy and his tio Carlos Moya, who smashed him up that first night with shots of Brugal…But what he had forgotten most of all was how incredibly beautiful Dominican women were” (Díaz 274-275). By juxtaposing the beauty of the Dominican women next to the beauty of the DR, Díaz points to the beauty of the Dominican culture which is lost by immigrating to the United States. Oscar can only retrieve this knowledge by returning to the DR, something that is life-threatening for him because of the Dominican hatred for Americans.

The loss of culture of Dominican immigrants is documented by The United States

Surgeon General’s 2001 report which states, “According to a landmark study by the World

Health Organization, the World Bank, and Harvard University, mental disorders are so disabling that, in established market economies like the United States, they rank second only to cardiovascular disease in their impact on disability” (Satcher 17). The “market economy” mentioned by the Surgeon General has in the past sought its gains through the brutalization of

native people in order to obtain its resources and control over the indigenous people who live

around those resources.

In the same study, the Surgeon General comes to a disturbing summary after reviewing

several qualitative studies. He states that “Racism and discrimination adversely affect health and

mental health, and they place minorities at risk for mental disorders such as depression and anxiety” (38). Both racism and discrimination are clearly portrayed in the novel, The Brief

Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao when the narrator repeats the word “nigger” to represent the

Dominican with dark skin or the American with dark skin: “Still plenty of niggers in Bani, old customers, who remember her with fondness” (Díaz 107), and “Every family has stories about niggers who take love too far, and Oscar’s family was no different” (Díaz 45).

The repetition of the word “nigger” signifies that a long history of racism has deemed the word acceptable enough for the narrator to use throughout. Even Yunior’s girlfriend, Lola, stays with him after acknowledging his racist attitude, which indicates that she is no stranger to discrimination in the United States. Her own mother calls her “fea” or ugly (Díaz 100) even though Lola has no trouble attracting boyfriends. After a return to the DR, Beli discriminates against the Haitians there when her son, Oscar, notices how dark they are. Despite the fact that she is dark-skinned herself, she says, “Maldito haitianos” or damn Haitians (Díaz 273). It is as if

Beli blamed the Haitians for her own dark skin and the discrimination she must endure because of her complexion. The collective memory of the past traumatic and political events has cemented a collective racism toward the dark-skinned person. This is another part of the curse or

(fuku) which Díaz mentions 58 times in his novel. The cause of the curse, Trujillo, whose politics were supported by the U.S. in exchange for resources, is mentioned 75 times. The problem is, once Díaz’s Dominican character, Beli, escapes the DR, she and her children

experience cultural loss in America. Díaz uses his talent for pathos to inscribe a longing for

things past that cannot ever be recovered when he writes, “[Belicia], like her yet to be born

daughter, would come to exhibit a particularly Jersey malaise—the inextinguishable longing for

elsewheres” (77). Neither can they feel at home in the Unites States or in the Dominican

Republic, yet the dream of fitting in somewhere else remains.

According to a recent study on trauma and cultural loss, the more different the culture is

to mainstream American culture, the more post-traumatic stress symptoms are experienced (B.H.

Stamm et al. 92- 102). Diaz shows the PTSD symptoms of his characters when they obsess over finding love. While the narrator, Yunior is caught cheating on girlfriends obsessively, the main character, Oscar, obsesses about fitting into the mainstream Dominican American culture.

Oscar’s mother, Beli, obsesses over the behavior of her children, even though she has told the stories of her own recklessness growing up. The reader assumes that Yunior is only able to relate

Beli’s most intimate secrets because Oscar has told Yunior what he knows by listening to his

mother’s stories.

Cathy Caruth further explains the connection of traumatic events from the past to the present

and between political cultures. In her book, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, she asserts, that

“in a catastrophic age…trauma itself may be the link between cultures: not as simple

understanding of the past of others but rather, within the traumas of contemporary history, as our

ability to listen through the departures we have all taken from ourselves” (Caruth 11). This

departure from the self is illustrated not only when we forget atrocities, but it is illustrated in The

Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao when Belicia breaks into a violent rage toward her daughter,

Lola. Díaz writes, “Lola, Mami’s going to kill you… I screamed but it was too late. My mother

already had me in her hands…Muchacha del diablo, she shrieked. I managed to haul her out of

31 the coffee shop and when she pulled back her hand to smack me I broke free”(Díaz 67-69).

Belicia’s past traumatic experience caused by the politics of the Trujillo regime repeats itself in the politics of her own family. Monica G. Ayuso explains how political violence affects people for generations: “Trujillo led his country in economic and political ruin. Proposing to restore the dignity of the nation, his oppressive government pervaded all aspects of life” (51). Many citizens are abused or obliterated in ways that include the psychological transference suffered by generations to come.

This transference of trauma works its way into the nuances of maternal and paternal interaction or lack thereof, and in the same way that Trujillo takes Belicia’s father’s human rights away, she takes the human rights away from her own daughter by abusing her in order to try to reassemble her own power. Belicia’s mother, La Inca, is the last direct witness alive to tell her story of Trujillo’s ruthless reign, but the dysfunction in her family makes it difficult to connect the pieces of trauma to the present. Beli’s history of physical and verbal abuse leads her to long for positive words , even if it is from a gangster. “For the first time I actually owned my own skin, like it was me and I was it. He made her feel guapa and wanted and safe, and no one had ever done that for her. No one” (Díaz 127). Her power is reassembled, but only temporarily, until he leaves her.

This dysfunctional reassemblance of power is also seen in the behavior of the young

Dominican men in the novel who have immigrated to the United States. They continue to reassemble their power over women sexually. Even Díaz’s sensitive narrator, Yunior, is not impervious to the curse of womanizing. Díaz writes, “One night she [Lola] called, asking where

I’d been the night before, and when I didn’t have a good enough excuse, she said goodbye…I

32 was just too much the mess.” Even Lola warns the readers on the same page, “Ten million

Trujillos is all we are” ( Díaz 324).

Lola’s words are significant, and they signify the damage that politics have incurred on the whole Dominican culture. Even Oscar, who breaks the cycle of misogyny, is caught up in the curse when he returns to the Dominican Republic and is murdered by the Capítan for sleeping with his prostitute girlfriend. The narrator explains the turmoil of trying to find justice for Oscar’s murder when he states, “Four times the family hired lawyers but no charges were ever filed. The embassy didn’t help and neither did the government” (Díaz 323). The book implies that the Dominican government will not get involved with justice for Oscar’s death because they are directly responsible for it. The corruption of the Dominican government runs so deep that it cannot be fixed or justified. This absence of human rights, and the trauma caused by the lack of justice causes a fragmentation of character identity.

Monica Hanna further explains this fragmentation when she states, “It is a historiography characterized by silences, denials, and the violent repression of voices that might contradict the official narrative of heroic nationalism and the continuity of progress” (Hanna 504). Instead,

Díaz “emphasizes the role of quotidian experiences of national subjects [whose stories were never told] in the national story” (Hanna 516, emphasis mine). The fragmentation occurs when families are torn apart, and it happens when history omits the Other’s story inside their history books. Díaz emphasizes this loss in the novel when he writes: “You didn’t know we were occupied twice in the 20th century? Don’t worry, when you have kids they won’t know the U.S. occupied Iraq either” (Díaz 19). Connecting two histories together, Díaz makes the reader more aware of another central political message in the novel, the message which reminds us that political control is first exercised by deception.

This government control leads to violence which induces trauma for many who experience either being a victim of violence or a witness to it. What follows is silence for fear of further retaliation. In her book, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth helps us to understand that such silence evolves from the crisis of survival. The silence occurs after the traumatic event is too traumatic to express fully; therefore, it must be written later by someone who refuses ‘to be silent in the face of the unsayable” (Caruth 10). Thus, the diasporic writing of the Dominican trauma is left to writers like Diaz, who take on the act of writing the testimony of political atrocities of the past. Like Oscar’s manuscripts, his novel becomes a relic for future generations. The recording of such a relic can only take place in a nation which upholds freedom of speech.

The freedom of speech is absent in the DR during and after the Trujilato. Inside The Brief

Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz’s main character, Oscar, writes pages in the DR which are lost in the mail, signifying that the government has managed to control the voices of those who oppose it. Junot Díaz, who succeeds in filling the “paginas en blanco” that history has failed to record, admits this is part of the healing process, his attempt of creating a zafa (cure) of sorts – repairing what has been lost from the curse. In his introduction before the novel begins, Diaz writes, “Even now as I write these words, I wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of sorts. My very own counterspell” (Díaz 7). If it is not a counterspell, it is certainly the testimony to the lost and traumatized citizens of the Dominican Republic who opposed what Trujillo was doing politically and personally.

This testimony is the first stage of trying to repair psychological trauma. In the book,

Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature, E. Ann Kaplan helps us understand the process of silence and the need to repair psychological wounds after

34 oppression toward the Other when she states, “there is an urgency for a focus on transnational conflict with a view to developing understanding among people. There is a need to transfer difference into something other than trauma” (Kaplan 23). I argue that Díaz, and other diasporic writers, have filled the need for the testimony which begins the transformation by writing their own historiographies, but I disagree with Kaplan on one point: it is not the writer’s difference which invokes the need to create— it is the political trauma incurred which inspires writers to write testimonial historiographies.

Nevertheless, Kaplan is right to assert that “trust in the social institutions and cultural practices that structure experience and give meaning to human lives must be reconstructed for healing to take place…[and] silence is a breeding ground for the return of shameful secrets on the level of individuals, families, the community, and possibly entire nations”(Kaplan 67-68).

Politics can corrupt the individual, the family unit, and entire cultures, but forgetting that the corruption ever existed is harmful to the process of cultural healing.

This is apparent in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao when the Oscar’s mother refuses to reach out for help. Before the characters can make something of the fragments of their lives, the turmoil of political terror continues to haunt the family with memories of transgenerational violence and tragedy which ends in a continued cycle of violence when Oscar sleeps with the Capítan’s prostitute girlfriend and is murdered for it. This poignant tragedy reminds the reader that as long as politicians control the lives of people, violence will continue to exist, forever shaping our nation.

What Díaz calls the counterspell is the counteraction of continued traumatic events caused by politics. Díaz’s work represents a cyclical curse of violence, set apart from other

35 diaspora writers by the use of mixed genres of science fiction, magic realism, and historical fiction.

The use of such genres allows Díaz to “present an amplification of Dominican and

United States historical reality” (Hanna 516). This reality is that the Dominican Republic and the

United States are now forever linked through their politics as seen in the novel, The Brief

Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. As Oscar and his family immigrate into and emigrate out of both the Dominican Republic and the United States, they find themselves irretrievably tied to both nations. Furthermore, each time they are plucked from their original nation, they experience the confusion of their sense of identity. As the children of an immigrant, Oscar and Lola are forced to understand new social and political protocols because their native social and political protocols are rejected both in the DR and in the US.

Ramon Saldívar explains that this cultural loss requires political representation and acknowledgment when he writes,

In the twenty-first century, the relationship between race and history requires these

writers to invent a new imaginary for thinking about the nature of a just society and the

role of race in its construction. It also requires the invention of new forms to represent it.

Race can no longer be considered exclusively in the binary form, black/white, which has

structured racial discourse in the US. (Saldívar 574-575)

This discourse moves beyond the postcolonial discussion of trauma to the post-race discussion of economic opportunity and breaking the cycle of political and social violence. This discourse is not, as Saldívar suggests, accomplished through turns of 180 degrees, quickly, but in the rising power of mass economic influence and ideologies of the immigrant, as has been seen in our own history with leaders like César Chavez and Barack Obama passing legislation like

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himself” (Díaz 320-22). Like the Haitians who innocently sealed their fates in the DR with their

Haitian accent, Oscar innocently seals his fate in the DR with his American accent. Here the

issues of race and nationality are used to trump other fears. Trujillo used the Haitian people as a

scapegoat for his fears of the declining economy. The Capítan and his men used Oscar’s

nationality for a fear that he would take over a Dominican woman. Both Trujillo and The

Capitan are parallel characters who use threats to control their fears and desires.

Sandra Cox emphasizes that the above referenced scene is “framed by racial discourse.”

She highlights the point at which the Capitan’s men are about to kill Oscar, and she asserts that

“Oscar’s Spanish was good for once in spite of the policemen’s perception of his norteamericano

privilege” (Cox 121). This privilege is the ability to seek justice. In the DR, each time the

Capitan threatens to chop him to pieces, Oscar “recorded the time and then phoned the embassy

and told them that Officer ______had threatened to kill him, could you please help?” (Díaz

318). Nothing happens. Oscar is murdered. Apparently, the justice Oscar is seeking can only be

found in a society that is not corrupt, and once in the DR, justice and the ability to be heard are

lost.

The lack of the individual voice is a universal theme we all can understand. This is what I

refer to as the second trauma of immigration, caused by cultural loss and racist inequality.

Racism is a part of US culture that is dysfunctional. The need to project a voice in the new

world is central to Díaz’s zafa or counterspell. The author creates a voice for the indigenous

people of the Caribbean, the Haitians, for Oscar’s grandparents, and for Oscar. For example,

Oscar tries to create that voice when he writes a book. He writes to his friend and the narrator,

Yunior explaining what his book entails: “It’s the cure to what ails us, he scribbled in the

38 margins. The Cosmo DNA” (Díaz 332). The book is lost and the cure is unattainable without his voice being heard. Racism prevails even in the narration of Díaz’s novel.

Scholar Ignacio Lopez-Calvo reflects on Díaz’s overtly racist tone in the novel: “This personal search for the true essence of Dominicanness . . . is not exempt from stereotyping and essentialism . . . the irredeemable racists who are ashamed of their own African heritage”

(Lopez-Calvo 76-77). The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao highlights the racist ideology of viewing dark skin as an omen and light skin with beauty, all of which harms a culture psychologically. Díaz’s blatant use of colloquialisms for dark skin—morena, black-black, nigger, darkie— helps readers to understand how the “force field” of corrupt politics affects more than those inside the native nation. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao helps us identify “human” problems within our mixed culture; thus, it helps us to analyze these corrupt political and social protocols for future generations who may one day break the transgenerational problems of trauma.

Politics and Transgenerational Trauma

The cause of the fragmentation of characters is evident when Yunior explains his background and why he obsesses over cheating. He says, “A heart like mine, which never got any kind of affection growing up, is terrible above all things. Was then, is now” (Díaz 185). The past trauma of Yunior’s life (the lack of affection from his parents) tends to repeat itself in the self-making traumatic experiences he incurs with the loss of love and the attacks of jealous

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The stress and chronic difficulties of living in societies in which racism is present both at individual and institutional levels may well contribute to ongoing distress and violence. One explanation for the high rates of PTSD in women could be their vulnerability to violent acts like rape and forced prostitution. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, most of the Domnican female characters who Oscar dates are abused by their boyfriends. Oscar’s friend, Ana, for example laments helplessly that she doesn’t know what to do because even though her boyfriend abuses her, she “loves him.” Yunior narrates, “All they talked about now…was Manny and the terrible things he did to her, Manny smacked her, Manny kicked her, Manny called her a fat twat,

Manny cheated on her” (Díaz 44). Regardless of how many times Ana’s boyfriend violates her dignity, leaving him is not an option for her, and she further reduces her own self -worth by staying with him for sex. The subject of how women are exploited for sex is rampant throughout the novel.

Both Oscar’s mother and sister prostitute themselves to rich men out of the desperation which comes with extreme poverty. They too are subjected to violence. Oscar’s mother is first subjected to verbal violence when the gangster uses violent words to control her, “Don’t you know what the Communists do to girls like you? They’ll hang you up by your beautiful tits. And then they’ll cut them off just like they did to the whores in Cuba” (Díaz 130). Weeks later, she is set up by her gangster boyfriend, who sees her as nothing but a “whore” to be murdered when they trick her by arriving in his vehicle.

Lola too, cannot escape violence. Oscar’s sister repeatedly breaks up with a boyfriend

Yunior terms as “The Golden Glove,” an allusion to someone who is a violent fighter who abuses her (Díaz 46). Violence presents itself in every aspect of Lola and Oscar’s lives. Oscar

especially cannot help break from his own diminished sense of self, which may have partly been

caused by his father’s abandonment.

Like Oscar, studies show that Afro-Caribbean males are more likely to have been

separated from their fathers for longer than four years and thus patterns of diminished

attachment, diminished self-satisfaction, and underachievement may play a role in their lives

(Bhugra & Jones 22). Furthermore, qualitative studies over a period of ten years have shown that

trauma may be transmitted from generation to generation (Schechter 256).

What the researchers did not suggest, which I stress here, is that Afro-Caribbean people

come from politically torn nations. This political disruption may be exacerbated by American

involvement. Even today the United States is heavily invested in the Caribbean. The Central

American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) came into force in March

2007, providing over 46% or (9 billion dollars worth) of Dominican products such as ferronickel, sugar, gold, silver, coffee, cocoa, tobacco, meats, and consumer goods to the US without export taxes while the DR remains $16.33 billion in debt (CIA World Fact Book).

This debt causes a high unemployment rate which forces Dominicans to seek employment by emigrating to the US, often leaving their family members behind. The fragmentation of the family can cause any of the psychopathological symptoms in PTSD disorders ranging from anxiety, to introversion, to mood swings, to flashbacks and amnesia, to personality disorders (Adshead & Ferris 324). See figure below.

PTSD Anxiety Mood Dissociation Personality Chemical Disorder Imbalance

Symptoms Avoidance Sadness Flashbacks Anti-Social Low Cortisol Neuroticism Depression Amnesia Borderline LowMonoamine

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the main protagonist, Oscar, is described as depressed and anti-social with neuroticisms that range from obsessing over science fiction characters to obsessing over women whom he has no chance of attracting. Diaz writes: “Oscar was a social introvert who trembled with fear during gym class and watched nerd British shows like Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, and could tell you the difference between a Veritech fighter and a Zentraedi Walker, and he used a lot of nerd words like indefatigable and ubiquitous when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high school” (Díaz 22).

The content of the programs Oscar watches point to his ability to identify with comic heroes who have a similar sociological battle to win. Both programs Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 depict the adventures of mysterious aliens and time-travelers who travel in spaceships in order to solve problems, face monsters and right wrongs. It is clear at the end of the novel that Oscar is seeking the answer to the problem of the curse which plagues his family. He thinks the answer lies in “the Cosmo DNA” (Díaz 332). But the monsters he faces are the real-life monsters like the national police in the DR and others who do not accept him for who he is. He longs to right the wrongs that have harmed his family for centuries due to the continued colonization and racism that is engrained in his culture and society, and his symptoms could be read off the PTSD chart above.

In a compelling 2010 study entitiled, “Multigenerational Ataques de Nervios in a

Dominican American Family: A Form of Intergenerational Transmission of Violent Trauma,” a qualitative approach shows a Dominican American family that repeatedly experiences familial violence both in the DR and in the US. Nancy is the daughter of a Dominican immigrant who escapes an abusive relationship in the DR and emigrates to the US to find employment. Once in the US, both the mother and daughter experience Ataques de Nervios, a convulsive

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SHUSHWUDWHGRQWKH'RPLQLFDQ5HSXEOLF9LROHQW'RPLQLFDQKLVWRU\FDQEHWLHGWRHPLJUDWLRQWR 45 the US and the politics which follow there. For instance, the French committed atrocities over resources which sparked a Haitian Revolution from 1791-1809. Many Haitians and French were forced to flee to southern Louisiana (Parham 24). American President, Ulysses S. Grant

(associated with The Whiskey Ring by some historians) was trying to purchase The Dominican

Republic to include as part of the Union since 1869, and Theodore Roosevelt imposed a commercial takeover of the Dominican Republic from 1901- 1909 (Guyant 974-976). Diaz chooses to narrow his story of United States’ involvement in the D.R. to the Trujillo Years

(1930-1960) because these years directly traumatized his character’s family for generations with its ongoing Haitian genocide and ruthless murder of any opposition to Trujillo.

The problem is well-known that government corruption in the DR exists. The Los

Angeles Times reports that, “corruption is rampant in the D.R. In fact, responding to charges that the organizations supposedly in charge of fighting drug traffic and corruption were actually deeply involved in it” ( Goldstein & Rainey). In Diaz’s novel, the Trujillato place police blockades on streets to round up and taser and arrest young adults who were accused of organizing against El Jefe, a nickname for Trujillo. The government corruption is seen in the

Dominican prisons where prisoners never return, are either murdered or die from disease. Such is the place where Oscar’s grandfather dies for cracking a joke about Trujillo. The gangster, who is tied to Trujillo and who Oscar’s mother Beli, dates, lives a lavish lifestyle from his “business” that he can never explain (129). Historical corruption extends to contemporary times in the DR.

CNN reports that,

Castro and others said police and the military have been involved in organized

crime for a long time. ‘The evidence lies in the lavish lifestyles many of these

officials are able to sustain on a public salary… acts as a transit point for cocaine,

heroin, marijuana and ecstasy bound for the United States and Europe,’ said

Jane's Sentinel Security Assessment, a publication that offers country-by-country

risk analysis. "The main trafficking routes are by sea from South America, and the

drugs are then transferred by go-fast boats to islands such as Puerto Rico and St.

Martin, on the way to the U.S. (Brice)

This organized crime that is linked to the United States creates such a corrupt curse on the well-being of both the Dominican people and the global-market economies which are responsible for purchasing large quantities of dangerous illegal drugs. According to a 2012 article published in Contemporary Political Theory, promoting national unity requires “a spirit of understanding that would transcend the conflicts and divisions of the past…truth commissions are increasingly utilized as mechanisms to address human rights abuses…by marking an end point to a history of wrongdoing and providing the means for political and social relations to move beyond that history” (Walker 68). Two problems remain with this theory of transcending political conflict of the past: 1. when there exists the continued neo-colonization of countries who live under

American control of resources, these dominant countries and cultures marginalize other countries’ abilities to be independent and to peacefully co-exist with their own political voice, and 2. drug trafficking causes the further increase of violence and trauma, a problem no one has been able to solve completely. It also causes the further loss of voice because the ingestion of mind-altering substances disables a citizen’s ability to think clearly about his or her own oppression.

In a 2004 interview, Edwidge Danticat spoke about how past political terror is still seen in the DR in the form of racism:

People are still repatriated all the time in the Dominican Republic to Haiti. Some tell of

being taken off busses because they looked Haitian, and their families have been in the

Dominican Republic for generations. Haitian children born in the Dominican Republic

still can’t go to school and they are forced to work in the sugarcane fields. It isn’t really a

memory…the massacre is something that people always fear can happen again.

(Barsamian 3)

The sugar cane fields represent not only the exploitation of Haitian children and people who are forced to work there under the weight of a capitalist society which demands the resource of sugar, but it also represents the current racism used to employ political terror over the lives of people who “look” Haitian. When citizens must worry about deportation based on the color of their skin, they experience an everlasting trauma. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The faceless man haunts Oscar by day before his own murder, signifying a history of political trauma that is only revealed by the ghosts left to bear witness to such horrific events. By night, after

Oscar has been murdered, the faceless Oscar reappears to Yunior (Díaz 325), signifying that political terror exists in the present time and exacts its effects in the everyday life of those who survive it.

“Today the ebbs and flows (of immigration) over time are related to political —not economic—conditions and in recent years the number of nonimmigrant aliens exceeds the number of immigrants by approximately twentyfold”(Carter & Sutch 290-291). Once forced to emigrate to the US, immigrants tend to segregate themselves. Evidence points to more success in the transition of youth who get involved with the collective community. According to a study conducted by The National Research Council,

Many of the attributes of successful transitions of immigrants—including the acquisition

of an appropriate stock of social capital, the acquisition of prosocial values and the ability

to contribute to the collective well-being, and the capability to make choices through the

acquisition of a sense of self and a sense of personal competence. These rights are all part

of effective citizenship in its best sense. Furthermore, the rights and opportunities that

young people are granted and the agency they develop as part of the transition to adult

citizenship are often closely linked to the outcomes of other important transitions to

adulthood, including health, schooling, work, and the acquisition of adult roles in the

family, as well as the range of social spaces they are ultimately able to inhabit (Lloyd

346-347).

Clearly both social integration with family (a functional family) and integration with a range of people is absent from the lives of the characters in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar

Wao. The traveling back and forth from the United States to the DR inhibits the personal relationships of all the characters. After Oscar’s death, Lola permanently settles in Miami. She is able to find happiness, and therein lies the hope that she will break from the destruction of “Old

World” ways. This is only possible, Yunior knows, if Lola’s daughter has access to the collective memory of the past, the very thing her Uncle Oscar’s manuscript reveals (Díaz 331).

Thus, the problem becomes more difficult to solve as time passes and the collective memory is lost. This difficulty exists when there are no more primary and secondary witnesses who were physically and emotionally present to witness or testify to the traumatic events which took place. Part of the terror which occurs through political trauma is the marginalization of the witness who was not physically present or the lack of acknowledgement of a witness who was physically present during the time of the traumatic event.

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, literature itself acts as a recording of the horrific genocide which took place in The Dominican Republic under the leadership of Trujillo, and the murder which continues to take place there in modern times. These crimes of the political nation were either never recorded or all documentation was destroyed. Thus, the tertiary witness becomes the reader. Even though temporal distance separates us, the collective truth that unspeakable crimes occurred toward Haitians like Oscar and his mother, Beli, is made known on an emotional level as readers identify with the characters Díaz creates from the historical stories he has heard through the oral and written traditions of his Dominican culture. Unlike his stories,

Díaz’s footnotes point to real history. Díaz explains a scene regarding the thoughts of Abelard and the truth of the DR’s obsession over eugenics, or the science of controlling a population’s genes so that they are the desired color and intelligence. He writes, “In those days the Demon

Balaguer had not yet become the Election Thief . . . wanted to talk to Abelard about his theories.

The German theories . . . racial eugenics, he assured Abelard, were all the rage on the

Continent” (216).

This awareness of the political past highlights the continuance of racism for the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, two countries that are historically and politically tied to each other. Both the dark side of hopelessness and the supernatural or magic realist side of hope is metaphorically portrayed in Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao through the retelling of the Haitian genocide. “After Trujillo launched the 1937 genocide of Haitians and

Haitian-Dominicans, you didn’t see that many Haitian types working in the DR. Not at least until the late fifties. Estaban was the exception because he looked so damn Dominican, and during the genocide, Socorro had hidden him inside her daughter Astrid’s dollhouse. Spent four days in there, cramped up like a brown-skinned Alice” (218). Here the nightmarish magic of Alice and

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This obsession is the PTSD result of the psychological impressions that are left after the wake of violence and discrimination. This discrimination exists inside of the Dominican’s and

American’s fundamental culture, and no matter how hard Oscar tries to run away from it, he is overwhelmed by its evil force.

Jurgen Habermas calls the transference of evil, the religious and political fundamentalism around the world in every country. Fundalmentalist ideas are exclusionary ideas which serve as the basis for discrimination. Habermas says, “We are talking about violent reactions against the modern way of understanding…. Globalization has divided world society into winners, beneficiaries, and losers…the spiral of violence begins as a spiral of uncontrolled reciprocal mistrust, to the breakdown of communication” (Habermas 18-19). In Diaz’s novel, this breakdown of communication occurs when Belicia is forced to be separated from her family in the Dominican Republic because of the racist violence she faces in her native country during a time of globalization. What is unexpected is what happens after her entrance to America, where she becomes a slave to the American capitalist system by overworking herself in order to support her new family in an expensive New York, further challenging her ability to raise her children or communicate with them.

Her lack of control over her children leads to violent eruptions. After repeated physical and verbal abuse from her mother, Beli’s daughter, and Oscar’s sister, Lola, voices her frustration: “I would have disappeared. Like my father disappeared on my mother and was never seen again…I would have never had any children. I would let myself grow dark in the sun, no more hiding from it, let my hair indulge in all its kinks, and she would have passed me on the street and never

52 recognized me…But if the years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in” (Díaz 209). Lola comes to the realization that in order to survive in

America, she must run away from her mother’s old-world customs and transform herself into a woman who fits into the modern American culture. She cuts her hair, a psychological symbol of independence and severing ties with everything that doesn’t fit in with her emergence into her new world. She is the binary opposition to her brother, Oscar, who seeks to return to the

Dominican Republic.

Fragmentation and Rebirth in Science Fiction and Magic Realism

Díaz awakens his readers with the use of his non-traditional forms of expression by using science fiction and magic realism. The use of genre allows the reader to connect with the universal desire to be watched over and protected from evil. As Díaz suggests in his footnotes,

“It’s hard for a third worlder not to feel a certain amount of affinity for Uatu the Watcher; he resides in the hidden Blue Area of the Moon and we DarkZoners reside (to quote Glissant) on “la face cachée de la Terre [Earth’s hidden face]” (Díaz 92). The term “DarkZoners” is a mysterious reference to the Dark Zone in P&C Micros video games where the dark zones have little power compared to the U.S. “Ultra Zone” and the European “Mega Zone.” The fact that the DarkZoners live on the hidden face of the earth establishes that people south of the equator (namely the DR) are forgotten. The fantasy figures which represent good and evil become an intertextual science fiction metaphor in the book from the beginning. For example, the use of popular science fiction heroes sparks deeper meaning for the readers who remember their favorite characters in comic books and television programs. By obsessing over these superheroes who overcame their

obstacles, the reader roots for Oscar to overcome his adversity and for good to overcome evil.

The intertextuality of science fiction terminology and the Spanish and English languages help

weave deeper meaning where expressions cannot be found due to language barriers or the

absence of certain linguistic connotations.

Díaz opens with “Of what import are brief, nameless lives to …Galactus??”(n.p.)

Oscar’s journey is to find out that the nameless lives held an integral role in shaping history.

Oscar’s friend, Yunior, inherits the legacy to tell Oscar’s story and the story of all those nameless

lives who made an important difference, but who were forgotten.

Before Oscar dies though, the genre of science fiction allows Oscar to become superhero-

like in order to break the cycle of violence both in the DR and in the US. Unfortunately, Oscar

never achieves his dream to break the cycle. Instead, he is drawn into the cycle of violence again by returning to the DR, and Yunior attempts to retell Oscar’s story making readers aware of the problem of oppressive government and culture in the hope that the masses who read the book will fix the problem of racism for Oscar. In the meantime, an escape from the cultural trauma of racial discrimination is symbolized in Díaz’s novel by the comic book superheroes who overcome adversity. The narrator explains in his footnotes:

Where this outsized love of genre jumped off from no one quite seems to know. It

might have been a consequence of being Antillean (who more sci-fi than us?) or

of living in the DR for the first couple years of his life and then abruptly

wrenchingly relocating to New Jersey — a single green card shifting not only

worlds (from Third to First) but centuries (from almost no TV or electricity to

plenty of both) … 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. (21-22)

Similar to The Fantastic Four series of comic book heroes and Tolkien’s mythological world of Lord of The Rings characters, Oscar does not fit in. His journey is far, and he faces many evil obstacles, both internal and external conflicts which he must overcome. As the novel progresses, it is clear that “Galactus” is compared to the Dominican Republic, and that the “brief, nameless lives” are those of the family members of the Cabral/de Leon family, and tragic hero, Oscar, who fight the “the dark force” and anonymity. This dark force is very powerful because of its economic ties to the United States and other powerful western influences that are compared to all-powerful antagonistic villains. The true importance of the victims’ lives is connected to the present and how they shape culture both in the DR and in the U.S.

Magic realism is Díaz’s tool to access the supernatural or the unearthly. In Díaz’s novel, the science fiction characters from American mainstream media and a supernatural are used to represent the horror that an all-powerful government enacts on its people, and the ability of people to rise up and transform themselves into something new.

For instance, Trujillo is often referred to as the Dark Lord, a reference to the all-powerful and evil Darth Vader in Star Wars, because of his ability to disperse mayhem and murder everywhere through his “supernatural abilities.” Díaz writes: “Tellingly, the national slogan was

‘Dios y Trujillo’; for running the country like it was a Marine boot camp; for stripping friends and allies of their positions and properties for no reason at all; and for his almost supernatural abilities” (Díaz 3). As the author explains, Trujillo’s employment of a large percentage of the nation ensured the mass loyalty of the majority of Dominican people even in the face of genocide and the child-slave industry. Trujillo built himself up like a god, and because he had the power to murder anyone who opposed him, he was treated as such. Díaz quotes an article in La Nacion

Dominican newspaper: “Trujillo is irreplaceable. For Trujillo is not a man. .He is…a cosmic

force…Those who try to compare him to his ordinary contemporaries are mistaken. He belongs

to …the category of those born to a special destiny” (qtd. in Díaz 204). This sensationalism is used to sway the masses into believing that Trujillo was all-powerful. His destiny was to wipe as many Haitians off the earth as he desired, and to create a racist mindset where even black babies were given away.

The fate of Oscar’s Haitian-Dominican mother is told in an unbelievably callous tale wrapped up in the superstitious belief that a black baby was a bad omen:

No one outside the family wanted the darkchild to live.I know it’s taboo to make this

accusation, but I doubt anyone inside the family wanted her to live, either…the moms of

the family disappeared one afternoon with the baby, and when she returned to her village

the baby didn’t. …The tiniest negrita on the planet. Fuku, part three… The orphan (who

may or may not have been the object of a supernatural vendetta0 was sold to complete

strangers in another part of Azua. That’s right—she was sold (Díaz 252-253).

According to Diaz not only did Trujillo turn his back to child slavery, but he operated his own slave trade for sex. In exchange for sleeping with the upper- class daughters of his socialite acquaintances, he would not exact torture or murder them. Oscar’s own aunt is desired by

Trujillo when she is only a teen (229). Her father protests and thus goes against Trujillo:

“But this isn’t human!

‘When has this country ever been human, Abelard? You’re the historian. You of all people should know that” (Díaz 229). Abelard becomes the opposition to Trujillo by refusing to bring his daughter to Trujillo’s parties. Even though the family succumbs to Trujillo’s supernatural curse, Abelard’s only surviving grandson, Oscar, seeks the counterspell in the form of supernatural science fiction and fantasy heroes and villains throughout various pages of the

56 novel. The Fantastic Four (97) and Squadron Supreme (86) metaphorically represent those who opposed Trujillo’s ruthless actions and who finally assassinated him successfully in 1961.

Antagonists such as the Witchking of Angmar (120) and the Sycorax (84) represent Trujillo himself, while the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (98) represent the Trujillistas willing to carry out any of his evil orders. The Dungeon Masters (23) are those who exact orders of torture in the

Death Camps, and the Space Ghost (14) represents the hundreds of thousands of victims of the

Haitian Genocide. The Darkzoners (92) refer to those who live on the Dark Side of the Earth where Dominican atrocities were occurring before the Fall of Trujillo. The One Ring (94) is a symbol for U.S. greed for resources in the Dominican Republic while the trifids (320) man- eating plants represent the sugarcane fields and the violence and degradation of Haitians who were murdered and tortured there, and who still primarily are forced to work there for low wages today.

These American comic superheroes are vital as a message of hope for fighting the evil domination of other beings who have within the government seemingly unbreakable powers.

They represent the outcasts who seek equality in an overarching dominant culture which advocates bullying by their own actions in the geographical world. When Oscar is feeling powerful and accepted, he is compared to the Jedi Order, the Star Wars protagonists who hold the power to defeat the evil dark lord (Díaz 185). When Trujillo sends his Trujillista to murder someone, the soldiers who follow his orders are the Morgul Lords (Díaz 110). Uatu the Watcher is compared to an omniscient god who sees all the injustices of the Dominican people. The

Watcher is the witness to all unspeakable crimes against the D.R.’s victims during the time of

Trujillo and throughout time. See list below:

In summary, Oscar tries to find the blank pages of his history that are not there with his

newly found power. It is impossible without the collective memory of witnesses who are still

alive to share the experience the way Oscar’s “grandmother” La Inca does. The “Shazam”

moment (a name of a hero that gives people supernatural powers when they utter it) can be

represented by the actions people take after analyzing a lost history from the victims’

perspectives.

In order to contrast the traumatic events in the novel, Díaz combines Dominican folk

magic of the “Mongoose” with American fantasy figures like “Darkseid” to explain the far

reaching influence of Trujillo. Darkseid is among the most powerful new gods, sometimes

depicted with a variety of god-like abilities to dispose of anyone who opposes him, much like

Trujillo did when he devised The Platano Curtain to keep Haitians out. "The so-called ‘Plátano

Curtain’ is the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti that exists beyond maps, that is

carved directly into the histories and imaginaries of the people” (Díaz 224-225). Darkseid’s

main power, the Omega Effect, is a form of energy that he fires from his eyes as either a forcefield or a beam of disintegration, capable of transmuting or erasing most objects and organisms from existence much like Trujillo erased an estimated 35,000 Haitians from the DR

(Suarez 41). Darkseid’s power is also used to reform or resurrect in the same way that Trujillo reformed the DR into a fascist, westernized country. In the novel, the negative effects of this westernization is apparent when Abelard must hide in a doll house, and then is later arrested for cracking a joke against Trujillo, and also when young poor children must work in middle class families’ homes to support themselves. The state of these children is depicted in Yunior’s narration when he says, “Beli didn’t have much in the way of friends—only Dorca, the daughter of the woman who cleaned for La Inca, who owned exactly no pair of shoes” (Díaz 85). When

Dorca says to Beli that she would like to go to school, Beli replies, “You’re too stupid,” (Diaz

Díaz 86). The fact that Dorca does not attend school magnifies the separation of the classes.

Only those who can afford to own shoes and uniforms are allowed to go to school, and Trujillo

wants to keep it this way.

Díaz uses Darkseid from DC Comics to illustrate Trujillo's destructive power. The

author’s use of transformative fantasy figures also reflects the transformation of the people’s

culture and skin color as they inter-marry light-skinned spouses to save themselves from

persecution or murder, and it is a metaphor for a forced reform of the country from being self-

reliant Taino- ruled to being dependent on the all-powerful Euro-centric leaders. Díaz illustrates

this political antagonist’s curse when he writes, “Fuku doesn’t always strike like lightning.

Sometimes it works patiently, drowning a nigger by degrees, like with the Admiral (Trujillo) or

the U.S. in paddies outside of Saigon…It’s doomish in that way, makes it harder to put a finger

59 on, to brace yourself against. But be assured, like Darkseid’s Omega Effect …it always— and I mean always— gets its man” (Díaz 5). Juxtaposing Trujillo with the US, the footnote suggests the equally destructive power the U.S. exerts upon other nations during wars like The Vietnam

War. The U.S. Omega Effect is the military technology that is unleashed on a nation who refuses to trade under U.S. guidelines or who refuses to cease production of atomic weapons while U.S. military increases their military might. Once released, it always gets its man, including the innocent civilians in its wake.

Díaz also uses the genre of fantasy by extracting characters from the comic book series

X-Men to explain his main protagonist’s dichotomous qualities. When describing Oscar, he writes, “Trying to talk sense to Oscar about girls was like trying to throw rocks at Unus the

Untouchable. Dude was impenetrable. He’d hear me out and then shrug (and say) Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself” (Díaz 174). Oscar is both untouchable because of his sci-fi antics (girls don’t want to have sex with him) and admired by Yunior, who narrates his story, because of Oscar’s ability to overcome peer pressure that tries to change him into something he is not. No one (not even Trujillo) can touch Oscar’s brief, wondrous life, and not even his death can diminish the effect he has on the people who have come to know him or the people who are affected by his story when they read it.

Such literary heroism comes with a price. After Oscar’s first failed suicide attempt, he says to Yunior, “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). Because Oscar is allowed the last word, it also leaves us with the final thought that the cycle of trauma does not end with Oscar’s mother. Instead, the victims of trauma find ways to cope with the traumatic transference they experience. One way

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SDVWPXUGHUVDQGWRUWXUHVGXULQJWKH+DLWLDQJHQRFLGH KHWHOOVKLPWKDW³/RYHLVDUHDOWKLQJ 61 easily confused with a million other things…He told them that because of her love that he’d been able to do the thing that he had done…told them if they killed him…he wouldn’t be no fatboy or dork or kid no girl had ever loved; over there he’d be a hero, an avenger. Because anything you can dream (he put his hand up) you can be” (Díaz 322). Oscar refers to the 1960’s version of The

Avengers where science fiction and spy mystery combine to create brave heroes who save the world by avenging scientific villains.

In this passage the historical meets the futuristic, with a wish for a fulfilled society that accepts everyone and does not discriminate based on outward appearances. The past (in Díaz’s historical footnotes) is tied to fantasy of the afterlife to show that just as Trujillo discriminated against those of a darker skin color, so do Americans discriminate against those who are over a desired weight. Once Oscar finds a person who doesn’t discriminate against him, he is willing to die before he ever gives her up.

By equating the evil entity “Trujillo” with the evil entity “U.S.,” Díaz connects the effect of political terror around the world and makes his American readers take notice of the victim’s perspective. The repetition of the Mongoose’s appearance and the repetition of traumatic events in the novel lead the narrator to a state of mental deterioration. This deterioration is seen in the split personalities of the narrator, Yunior, who slips into a pattern of womanizing even though it will mean losing the only girl he ever loved, Lola. This pattern of misogyny is juxtaposed with

Trujillo’s misogyny and victimization of young women, leading the reader to believe that

Trujillo’s actions were contagious on an entire culture. Yunior presents himself as a loving boyfriend much in the same way that Trujillo presented himself as a married man, but Yunior acknowledges his “Dominican ways” as a promiscuous male in the same way that Trujillo is known to brag about his sexual conquests. Even after Lola has moved to Florida and married

62 another man, Yunior continues to hold the illusion that he will have a close relationship with her, even imagining showing her daughter Oscar’s manuscripts. In his mind, he is both loving boyfriend and single playboy. This illusion may help to protect him from his loss caused by his mental deterioration. Cathy Caruth explains in her collection of essays, Unclaimed Experience, that “In modern trauma theory…there is an emphatic tendency to focus on the destructive repetition of trauma that governs a person’s life. As modern neurobiologists point out, the repetition of the traumatic experience in the flashback can itself be retraumatizing; if not life- threatening, it is at least threatening to the chemical structure of the brain and can ultimately lead to deterioration” (Caruth 63). For instance, even after Yunior is married, he has a flashback in the form of a dream of being with Lola and having a chance to say the very words that would have saved their relationship: I love you. “ But before I can shape the vowels I wake up. My face is wet, and that’s how you know it’s never going to come true” (Díaz 327).

The loss of Yunior’s relationship to Lola is traumatic to him. Five years after the death of his friend, Oscar, he has flashbacks “about him or someone who looks like him. We’re in some kind of ruined bailey that’s filled to the rim with old dusty books…dude is holding up a book…it takes me a while before I notice that Oscar’s hands are seamless and the book’s pages are blank”

(325). The double horror of losing Oscar to murder, and the government’s response by covering the murder up and keeping Oscar’s book is reminiscent of the horror of Trujillo erasing the life and written work of Oscar’s grandfather, Abelard. For Yunior, this flashback is the most traumatizing because it reminds him of his loss and that cultural oppression will never change in his lifetime.

This state of mental deterioration can be seen not only in Yunior’s inability to maintain relationships and his fantasy flashbacks, but it is also seen in Oscar’s willingness to take his own

life over lost love. Before his death, Oscar envisions himself as a superhero of damsels in

distress. This split with reality can also be seen in Belicia’s desire to destroy her daughter who

she very much loves. The dichotomous split between love and destruction fills her life because

she is unable to escape the past trauma of her life in the Caribbean. ”Her whole life she had tried

to be happy, but Santo Domingo...had foiled her at every turn” (Díaz 163). Here Santo Domingo

has the cosmic power of a villain who destroys Belicia’s life. The multiple personality (one that

wants to live passionately vs. one that wants destruction) takes root in every aspect of her

survival and her son, Oscar’s. It is rooted in the Tainos fight for independence in the face of

death, and in Abelard’s adherence to close political ties to Trujillo in the face of his renunciation

of Trujillo’s terrorizing politics. For instance, Abelard attends Trujillo’s parties while at the same

time, he repairs the wounds of those Haitians who Trujillo has ordered to be murdered. He

withstands Trujillo’s racist remarks while at the same time he refuses to bring his daughter at

Trujillo’s request.

The multiplicity of genre is a semiotic tool in that it symbolizes the multiple

personalities in the novel. Oscar is part overweight loser and part superhero. His greatness is

symbolized by the science fiction references to comic heroes. His mother, Belicia is part

victorious single mother and part slave driver, symbolized by the historical fiction in the novel.

Magic Realism

Traumatic events in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are depicted through the use of multiple genres, one being Magic Realism, which is a style of literature in which imaginary and often unsettling images or events are depicted in a sharply detailed and realistic manner.

According to The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms, magic realism appeared first in essays

produced in Germany by Franz Roh in 1925 and in the Caribbean by Jacques Stephen Alexis in

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And that’s when it hit with the force of a hurricane. The feeling. I stood straight up, the

way my mother always wanted me to stand up. My abuela was sitting there, forlorn,

trying to cobble together the right words and I could not move or breathe. I felt like I

always did at the last second of a race, when I was sure I was going to explode. She was

about to say something and I was waiting for whatever she was going to tell me. I was

waiting to begin. (Díaz 75)

Lola’s ability to reconnect to her past heritage with all its pride and glory of her grandfather being a respected doctor helps her find pride in herself. It is as if the spirit of her grandfather touches her in the moment she looks at his photograph, causing her to rise from her depression. Through the use of magic realism, Diaz allows the marginalized and silenced histories to emerge, contest, and transform the political, ideological and cultural spaces of the

Dominican Republic. Díaz also attempts to recover the magical and mythic stories of his culture that were once dismissed by the Eurocentric hegemony. The magic realist images serve as a divine consciousness, encompassing and protecting the metaphysical truth and those who have the knowledge of it.

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the truth is the knowledge of past dictators

(like Trujillo) who are described by their magical forces as “the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants”

(Díaz 97). They became a cult of personality, their presence striking fear in the hearts of citizens while creating a dichotomous festive appearance at private parties, when the truth was evident by many that their evil was beyond that of the ordinary. The Trujillo “Brotherhood” fell under a spell of existentialist materialism, creating a society which overvalues productivity over sacred lives. This ethical distortion is also seen in the beginning of Díaz’s novel with the invasion of

The Bay of Pigs in Cuba and later under President LBJ’s “illegal” invasion of Santo Domingo in

68 order to take part in the “democratization” of that country on April 28, 1965 (Díaz 4). The curse to follow reaches out to the people of the DR as well as to the Americans who invade.

For instance, the Kennedy curse (named for the untimely deaths of many members in the

Kennedy clan) is used as a metaphor to describe the backlash of forcing such fundamental political views onto a once sovereign nation like the DR. The novel’s insistent use of the word

“fuku” (curse) emphasizes the repetition of traumatic events which occur when several imperialistic countries (English, Dutch, Syrian, American) take control over the DR. This globalization forces the generalization of all identity toward a Eurocentric hegemony, thus erasing individual cultural knowledge that is essential to Dominican happiness and identity.

Diaz emphasizes this theme of lost identity by comparing Oscar to the DR’s “paraguayo” or mythical Watcher who lives on the moon (20). The word becomes a magic realist element by illustrating Oscar’s omnipresence in the face of not being seen or acknowledged by others. For example, Oscar stands and watches as others dance. He listens to his many platonic girlfriends describe their relationship troubles as if he weren’t there. He reads voraciously and tries to express his metaphysical ideas when nobody listens. And yet he is held up as a man with a wondrous life because he is the seeker of native truth.

Magic Realism helps both Oscar and the reader disassociate from the harsh reality of the past and its consequences. The literary style allows the reader to connect Oscar’s tragic violence to the cultural Dominican history with its flaws and discrimination and its beauty and hope for the future. Díaz explains in his footnotes,

The Mongoose, one of the great unstable particles of the Universe and also one of

its greatest travelers. Accompanies humanity out of Africa and after a long

furlough in India jumped ship to the other India a.k.a Caribbean. Since its earliest

appearance in the written record—the Mongoose has proven itself to be an

enemy of kingly chariots, chains, and hierarchies. Believed to be an ally of Man.

(Díaz 151)

The Mongoose is capable of leading Oscar’s mother out of the cane fields after being badly beaten, allowing Oscar to land on a soft divider in a botched suicide attempt and saving him from death after his initial beating in The DR. Its golden eyes signify its magic and metaphysical power over all evil hierarchies who use violence to control others. Even the cane fields become magic. The inequality of the Dominican people is represented in the symbol of the sugarcane fields in Díaz’s novel. When Oscar’s mother, Beli, is kidnapped and attacked in the sugarcane fields, the cane takes on a magical power true to the magic realism genre. “The cane didn’t want her to leave, of course; it slashed at her palms, jabbed into her flank and clawed her thighs, and its sweet stench clogged her throat” (Díaz 150). The sugarcane fields themselves are a remarkable symbol of the inequality and harsh racism brought on by political terror which still plagues the Dominican culture to this day.

When coupled with realism, magic realism is an effective writer’s tool for imaginatively recording stories passed down through the oral tradition. In the novel, Oscar’s grandmother, La

Inca, tells the very real stories of the Cabral family’s persecution while at the same time she prays to the mystical powers to help her. Yunior explains the effectiveness of La Inca’s community prayer when he narrates,

Let me tell you, True Believers: in the annals of Dominican piety there has never

been prayer like this. The rosaries cabling through La Inca’s fingers like line

flying through a doomed fisherman’s hands. And before you could say Holy!

Holy! Holy! She was joined by a flock of women young and old… All hope was

gone, but then, True Believers, like the Hand of the Ancestors themselves, a

miracle…She came to in the ferocious moonlight (Díaz 144-148 ).

The prayers of La Inca work their magic to save Beli from death, and they also work their magic in her physical healing process. For instance, when Beli is burned, La Inca uses prayer to speed the healing of her wounds. When Beli is beaten, La Inca prays in the next room for her.

Through prayer, a type of magic takes place in the novel by its mystical, physical, and spiritual healing. Through the genre of magic realism, the mystical, physical, and spiritual is shown so that the reader sees the possibility of Oscar’s family and others to rise from the cultural ashes of trauma, and lift the veil of uncertain identity by reincarnating cultural history and pride.

The Witness: Testimony and Transference

It can take decades before a witness of political, traumatic events finds the ability to restructure and voice the events which have taken place in the past. Such is the case that Díaz and other second generation diasporic writers whose families have emigrated out of their countries to escape persecution have written testimonial fiction decades after the actual political crisis occurs. This testimony is often told to the next generation by either victims, witnesses, or the children of victims in the form of scholarly research, education, news, and creative writing.

Within the act of testimony, there is a fine line in the manner in which it should be divulged to the rest of the world.

In the book Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Claude Lanzmann, a victim of political trauma during the Holocaust shares a universal theme regarding trauma: “We are all victims of

71 this conspiracy of silence. There are many ways of being silent. There are some good ways, and there are some very bad ways as well. To talk too much about (political trauma) is a way of being silent, and a bad way” (Caruth & Lanzmann, et. al 208).

The inappropriateness of talking about trauma too soon or too much is often depicted with silence, and in the novel, Yunior, refuses to talk about Oscar’s death to Oscar’s young niece. Instead, when he sees Lola with her daughter in public, he only speaks of Oscar’s life.

Yunior imagines a more private setting when he can reveal Oscar’s writing to his niece to explain the truth about where her family comes from, both geopolitically and psychologically.

Díaz writes: “One day she will stop being afraid and she will come looking for answers…and maybe, just maybe, if she’s as smart and as brave as I’m expecting her to be, she’ll take all we’ve done and all we’ve learned and add her own insights and she’ll put an end to it” (Díaz 331).

Lola’s daughter will put an end to the psychological effect of the transgenerational curse that is handed down from generation to generation. It is only in a private setting, with the revealing of Oscar’s artistic writing, that she can understand why her grandmother verbally and physically abused her mother, Lola, calling her “Fea” or “ugly,” much in the same way that Beli was called “una prieta” or “dark-skinned girl” (Díaz 100).

This fixation on “the dark skin” is echoed in the words of Yunior when he describes Lola

(whom he loves) as “darker than your darkest grandma” (168). Lola rebuts his marginalized reference by refusing to sleep with him and by telling him, “Yo soy Prieta, Yuni…pero no soy bruta” (169). The English translation reads “I may be black, Yuni…but I am not dumb.” Even

Lola is left the psychological degradation caused by disparaging references to her dark skin, a prejudice which worked its way into Dominican culture from the time of slavery in the Americas when stereotypes were created in order to maintain control over the mass numbers of Africans

72 and Native Americans which outnumbered the early white settlers. What’s more, is the conception of the DR as being a “white country” has led recent race-nation politics. According to

David Howard’s article “Racism and Discrimination in the Dominican Republic,” an international development agency in Santo Domingo held a racialized conference of an anti-

Haitian immigration policy and the rejection of Haitian presence in the DR in 2006 that fueled violent racist attacks on its Haitian citizens (726). What begins as a company’s hidden racialized discourse ends with the continued terror of victims. The effect is similar to the effect of war, its victims riddled with PTSD and left in dire economic conditions.

The shattering of identity that accompanies the periphery of terrorism has an intensity no less violent than war itself, but the effect of trauna on identity is hard to perceive ( Kaplan 5).

The fragmentation of identity is symbolized in the fragmentation of Oscar’s family (when his grandparents and aunts are murdered, and when his father leaves his mother, never to return.)

Even their own family history is fragmented as the “paginas en blanco” or blank pages are never fully recovered from a politically torn time. The fragmentation of identity becomes more markedly abashed when Oscar tries to find his worth by trying to recover his past by returning to the Dominican Republic. What he finds is that he doesn’t belong there anymore and that unbeknownst to him, his Americanized cultural adaptation makes him a fresh target for victimization in the DR. The absolute corruption and control of his life drain every last bit of his power, even the power of his written words, which get conveniently “lost” in the mail. One letter makes it to Yunior who narrates: “In that letter he talked about his investigations and the new book he was writing… (It’s the cure to what ails us, he scribbled in the margins…) only problem was, the fucking thing never arrived” (Díaz 333-334).

The government which has control over its people’s words, prevents its citizens from recovering from trauma and rising up out of their oppression even after the assassination of

Trujillo. This erasure of history is personalized when Oscar Wao is compared to the great

Hatuey, a Taino chief who sailed to Cuba for reinforcements in order to declare war on the

Spanish invaders of the DR. Like Oscar, Hatuey is violently murdered when he returns, and like

Hatuey, Oscar Wao’s history is erased. The “paginas en blanco” is an effective trope for the lost

Taino history and the lost history of the Dominican people prior to Trujillo’s erasing of names of cities and monuments. Díaz rewrites the “blank pages” by divulging prior names. He writes, “For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history…[Trujillo is] famous for changing ALL THE NAMES of ALL THE LANDMARKS in the Dominican

Republic to honor himself. Pico Duarte became Pico Trujillo and Santo Domingo de Guzman… became Ciudad Trujillo (Díaz 2). The changing of names of cities is an orchestrated move on the part of the government to incite the amnesia of the cultural past.

E. Ann Kaplan explains that this “’forgotten” past is too dangerous to remember and that

“individuals and cultures, then, perform forgetting as a way of protecting themselves from the horrors of what one has done to oneself or others in one’s society” (Kaplan 74) The mongoose in

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao represents the symbol of the forgotten. It appears when

Oscar’s rights are violated, yet it is incapable of saving him unless he listens to its warning. By heeding the mongoose’s warning, Oscar would have listened to the traumatic history of his past and learned that in the DR, “Nothing ends…Nothing ever ends” (Díaz 331).

The author’s words “Nothing ever ends” hint to the fact that his testimony (in writing his family’s story) is only the beginning of the process of healing from the trauma they have experienced collectively since their departure from the DR and in the recent past with Oscar’s

74 murder. This brings to mind Paul Ricoeur’s work on Memory, History, and Forgetting. He states: “It is the work of mourning…the pair mourning and melancholia is to be taken as one block, and it is the tendency …and its difficulty in extracting itself from this terrible neurosis that will give rise to any subsequent reflections on the pathology of collective memory” (Ricoeur 71).

According to Ricoeur, this pathology takes on a sort of narcissistic quality when one obsesses over one’s own loss, and without forgiveness, it festers like an open wound.

Testimony takes time because it occurs at the end of an epistemological cycle when judgment has waned and more comprehensive analysis takes place. Even years after traumatic events take place, testimony can be judged by those who criticize the validity of a victim’s memory. Such denunciation can make forgiving and letting go impossible because the denial of genocide reopens the wound of victimization. This is why literary historiography is more important than history in many ways. Ricoeur analyzes the difference between the two by stating that history “lies in the secular indifference to the historiographical treatment of a culture itself”(Ricoeur 398), whereas historiography breaks down the barriers between the close and the distant. “It is therefore under guidance of a retrospective gaze that we can say we have learned, in effect, that meaning in history, memory of the past, and the writing of history are by no means to be equated” (Ricoeur 399). In other words, it is not through the writing of history from a singular view that we can become enlightened with the truth of traumatic events and the psychological effects of its victims, but it is through years of epistological contemplation and analysis whereby we begin to see the truth unfold and whereby we see the transgenerational transference of neurosis which continues to plague families and cultures.

As trauma theory suggests, breaking the cycle of violence is nearly impossible to do when it is so fully engrained inside of one’s culture. Yunior spells out the difficulty that Oscar’s mother, Belicia will encounter as a single mother once she has emigrated to the United States:

What she doesn’t yet know: the cold, the backbreaking drudgery of the factorias,

the loneliness of Diaspora, that she will never again live in Santo Domingo, her

own heart. What else she doesn’t know: that the man next to her would end up

being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together,

he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again

(Díaz 164).

The narrative suggests that this third experience with trauma and loss in Belicia’s life will affect the way she will be incapable of loving even her own children the way they need to be loved. Thus, Oscar longs to return to Santo Domingo to fulfill his mother’s wishes, thinking that this will bring him the happiness and love that he seeks. What he doesn’t know is that the curse of political violence which still exists in Santo Domingo will find him, and the cycle of trauma will be fueled once again, causing mourning and melancholia for his entire family and loved ones. Trauma then, is contagious, spreading its psychological effects.

Psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that, “Trauma is contagious. In the role of witness to disaster or atrocity, the therapist, at times, is emotionally overwhelmed. She experiences, to a lesser degree, the same terror, rage, and despair as the patient” (Herman 140). Oscar’s mother carries the weight of depression, thus Oscar must bear this weight of depression as well. This transference of trauma is even harder to distinguish when the atrocities are of a political nature because politicians keep their actions hidden away from the general population’s view. What

76 results is a multiplicity of ways to deal with political trauma due to the inconspicuous nature of the violence that occurs.

Gerald Taiaiake Alfred discusses the logistics of this political trauma when he states,

“Colonially-generated cultural disruption creates psychological, physical, and financial dependency on the state. This causes social suffering, unresolved psychophysical harm of historical trauma and the absence of opportunities to be self-sufficient on an individual and collective basis. This causes discord and violence named “systemic rage” (Alfred 42-43). This systemic rage can be seen in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao when Díaz writes, “The country was in an uproar after the failed (American) invasion of 1959. An underground conspiracy of youth had been uncovered and everywhere young people were being arrested and tortured and killed” (Díaz 112). First, the government reacts to the attempted takeover by exacting its revenge on its citizens. The culture is changed forever. People fear the spoken word and lose their sense of positive identity.

This loss of identity is shown when Oscar must argue whether he is truly Dominican or not to Yunior’s friends, but it is most poignantly shown when the narrator, Yunior, explains his own culture when he narrates, “Abelard’s third and final daughter…was born black. And not just any kind of black. But black black— kongoblack, shangoblack, kaliblack, zapoteblack, rekhablack…That’s the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child’s black complexion as an ill omen” (Díaz 248). Yunior’s narration illustrates further the disregard for girls in the

Dominican culture. “we Dominicans, we lose a daughter and we might not even cancel our appointment at the salon” (Díaz 66).

This disregard not only leaves the characters desperately looking for love, but it leaves

Oscar with eruptions of violent rage when women befriend him and then reject him because of

77 his obesity. When Oscar walks in on his friend, La Jablesse, who is pleasuring another man, he

“Called her a whore and attacked her walls, tearing down her posters and throwing her books everywhere…Oscar hollered (at Yunior who tries to stop him) Leave me the fuck alone” (Díaz

187). Oscar is seen as a friend, not a love interest by the women he chooses to befriend. His rage is exacerbated by the other Dominican men who tease him. They say to the overweight Oscar,

“You ever eat toto?...Probably the only thing you ain’t eaten, right?...Tu no eres nada de dominicano (You have nothing in you that is Dominican)” ( Díaz 180). This is the last thing

Oscar hears before he unsuccessfully tries to commit suicide. His identity is shattered by the

Dominican women and men who don’t accept him and abuse him with racist remarks. He is neither fully accepted by his inner Dominican group, nor is he fully accepted by the dominant

American culture since fans of science fiction were often seen as “nerds.”

This scene signifies another dysfunction in American culture: the rejection of those who are different from the mainstream athletic or socialite culture. American distrust of “the nerd” is a form of insecurity much as the distrust of the immigrant is. There is a fear of the scholar who becomes a dissenter, a fear of the hacker who illustrates an abuse or weakness in a system, a fear of the immigrant who values education and makes more money than a citizen. Like the mainstream culture, Yunior is cynical, and the thought of Oscar’s words bring sadness to him because of their unfathomable truth. He is unsure of the answer and pushes his last hope on

Lola’s happy daughter to figure it all out. The reader too, has to recognize the dysfunction of our own political culure and figure out Díaz’s ultimate message: that our world is not so strong without loving actions toward each other and other nations.

Conclusion

Díaz ends his novel five years after the tragedy of Oscar’s death and the continued

trauma which prevails within his inner circle of family and friends. The curse remains, yet there

is a ray of hope that the narrator, who calls himself “The Watcher” (228), reveals when he exclaims Oscar’s final words: “The beauty! The beauty !”(335) to be contrasted with Joseph

Conrad’s “The horror! The horror!.” Oscar’s beauty is the acceptance he receives and the feeling of being someone special. It is the beauty of love which has the power to heal. It is the transformation of society which takes place when we gain the cosmic power to stand up for what represents a loving world, free from the Trujillos and the violent capitalists of the world. It is the testimony of a deficient democracy which declares wars without the people’s consent. This wish is not a far stretch to the future. What is accepted as philosophy today can be reality tomorrow.

The fragmentation of identities can be rebuilt with education. The more we teach each other tolerance and respect of people’s cultures and ideologies, the more we will see others as an asset and not a hindrance. After all, this is why Yunior decides to tell Oscar’s story in the first place. He, like the author, realizes that hope lies in the future.

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