Literature
A Dominican Curse and Death
By Sidik Fofana—SeeingBlack.com Contributing Writer
Jan 30, 2008, 13:19

In the cane fields of the Dominican Republic, a band of vindictive hoodlums murder a man named Oscar. This pivotal scene in Junot Diaz’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a direct allusion to the assassination of the Mirabal sisters, three women killed by the dictator Rafael Trujillo for their efforts to overthrow his fascist government.

“I also want to break the rules,” said Diaz in an interview with Callaloo literary magazine. “People tell you you can’t write a political story,” he added. Diaz is right that political stories can be problematic but his novel about a ghetto nerd from New Jersey is not a political story. It's a personal tale with political overtones. Diaz uses the motif of the fuku, the family curse, to show how Trujillo's tyrannical reign follows a Dominican family all the way to a Patterson, N.J, apartment where they settled.

Trujillo's rule has long since ended and the only accounts are mostly in historical text. Yet, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Diaz suggests that Trujillo's legacy has transformed into a force, an underlying source of bad luck for anyone who dared to disrupt his reign. "Everybody has a fuku story knocking around in their family," Diaz writes. For the Cabral family, the curse starts with Oscar's grandfather Abelard, who commits an act of treason by not letting Trujillo sleep with his daughter. The strife unlocks a generational curse which explains, all in one family, breast cancer, destructive adolescence, and suicidal inclinations. Rather than give a timeline or complete history of Trujillo's vicious reign, Diaz depicts the horror of the political era through a single, isolated account.

This is not to say that the fuku is not redemptive. Every time the curse hits a member of the Cabral house, he or she miraculously overcomes it.. In one chapter, Oscar’s mom survives an assault as a teenager: "Cursed people, after all, tend not to drag themselves out of cane fields with a frightening roster of injuries and then happen to be picked up by a van of sympathetic musicians in the middle of the night..." Oscar's sister Lola bounces back from a long rebellious stage, after joining her school's track team and enrolling at Rutgers. Oscar, who is arguably the most doomed, finds love before his demise. His redemption mirrors that of the Mirabal sisters, who were persecuted by Trujillo in 1960; they suffered when they went against the government but ultimately became martyrs.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao makes the personal political. Diaz shows how a treacherous regime can impact one family's destiny. The fuku turns out not to be a supernatural force, but a natural unfolding of history. Political events diffuse into individual stories and political strife affects seemingly disconnected lives.



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