Yesterday I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It is a powerful book, an amazing book, a tragedy. There is no “life is wonderful” moment in this novel, but there is survival. Survival and surrender. Oscar Wao is a misfit, an X-man mutant in the Dominican Diaspora culture, a non-macho. Yet in the end it is this misfit, this mutant, who overcomes what all the other Dominicans in his world cannot overcome: their historical and personal culture of persecution and personal impotence.
This is a novel about what a culture of oppression and fear will do to the people living and breathing and imprisoned by that culture. It is the history of the Dominican Republic, told through the history of a family, the generations preceding and including Oscar Wao. Narrated by one voice, the sometime boyfriend of Oscar’s sister Lola, and telling the story of Oscar, Lola, his mother Beli, and Yunior, the boyfriend, the story twists together to become the story of all of them. All four of them are trapped in the web of oppression and fear perfected under Dictator Trujillo’s regime in the twentieth century (and, Diaz demonstrates with his story of the murdered Indian beauty Anaconda, beginning at the birth of the Dominican Republic). Trujillo ruled by instilling fear and by emasculating every male head of every family: he could and he did take what he wanted, in terms of material goods and in terms of anything female, and there was no recourse for a father, a brother, a son. Torture, murder, or imprisonment awaited anyone who objected to Trujillo’s literal and figurative rape of the Dominican Republic.
That culture of oppression and fear and emasculation led to the very machismo that DR is so famous and infamous for. Bereft of control, the Dominican male controlled what he could, the women under him and the blacks beneath him; to protect their loved ones, families resorted to violence and threats; in schools, students bullied weaker students. To prove one’s manhood, one had to be dominant and rapacious and voracious. No one could admit to a connection of intimacy and affection: such connections were too vulnerable and too weak to withstand the exigencies of a murderous culture.
Diaz explores through this novel not only the loss of intimate connection under a culture of oppression but also the loss of history that occurred when one person dictated the story of a nation (and so Diaz calls dictators “like” writers: creators of history). Trujillo controlled the history of DR, leaving blank those pages of horrors even he could not bear to admit to. Blank pages, the man without a face, and blank spaces in sentences in the novel where the narrator cannot fill in the truth for the pain it will cause, whether due to unspeakable horrors or unspeakable — impossible — love, are all devices Diaz uses very effectively to show the power that oppression has to silence and to empty history, to create a void.
Oscar, his sister, and his mother, all feel the void but they don’t understand what it is they are missing; they only know they are hungry for something different. Lola calls it a “scary, witchy” feeling: “I tried to keep it down but it just flooded through all my quiet spaces. It was a message more than a feeling, a message that tolled like a bell: change, change, change.“ For Beli, even when she is rescued from slavery by her aunt La Inca, she “cannot abide” her existence, “[e]verything about her present life irked her; she wanted, with all her heart, something else.” For Oscar it was a search for love: “[i]t had the density of a dwarf-motherfucking-star and at times he was a hundred percent sure it would drive him mad. The only thing that came close is how he felt about his books; only the combined love he had for everything he’d read and everything he hoped to write even came close.”
Oscar, maligned by family and friends for not being macho, for being fat and a geek and a nerd, will in the end be the one who seeks to fill the void, to complete the history of his own family, and to find intimacy in a love with another person. He will struggle to overcome the blank spaces and become the hero of his own history, the writer of his own destiny, and the force that will forever remove the curse against his family. But this is no fairy tale, no fantasy fiction or science fiction, and the price that Oscar pays is both final and awful. He does not find happiness or success as a writer or even real love. But he does fill the void, and that is accomplishment.
Diaz explores the idea of fuku (an evil curse) and zafa (the force against the evil curse). Oscar’s family became cursed when his grandfather sought to avoid the Trujillo tentacles reaching for his eldest daughter; the curse passes down in cycles of bad luck for his mother, his sister, and for Oscar himself. They are cursed by that inner longing for something more than what life has given them; they are cursed by wanting, needing, and being deprived of simple love, of the intimacy of affection and caring. A force of goodness against the curse is the good abuela La Inca. She alone loves all three intimately: she has scenes with all of them were she touches them and her touching is healing and gentle, asexual and comforting. But it is Oscar who is the ultimate antidote to the curse because he goes out and attempts to undue what the curse has done: it has taken away their history (every word the grandfather ever wrote was destroyed) and their ability to be intimately connected to anyone. Oscar will find a way to recover their history and connect with the woman he loves.
This is a novel about connection. I have written again and again that all great novels are about connection and this is a great novel. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is about what happens when there is no connection, when one is alone. Oscar is the ultimate dis-connect, friendless, a virgin, and obsessed with role-playing games and Japanimation. Dominicans, under the culture of fear, were also disconnected souls. What connection there is in the novel is only made through violence: children are loved violently, sex is a violation, revenge is violent and grief is violent. Intimate connection is shackled by oppression, whether it be oppression by family or regime or culture. Diaz utilizes the distancing of his characters — we only get brief (but powerful) moments of internal thought, the rest of the story is observed action — to underscore their own inability to be intimate, connected, and secure. Oscar strives for connection and finds it, briefly. Beli and Lola find a kind of connection, finally; even our Lothario narrator grows up enough to understand the value of loyalty, commitment, and connection. Oscar paved the way. It takes Oscar, the most un-macho, most un-Dominican (people in the novel are always questioning his Dominican-ness), of people, to finally strike out in defiant search for both the truth about his family and for the amor of his life. That is the “wondrous” part of his life: his final stand against the culture that oppressed him throughout.
I love the way Diaz writes. His writing is fluid and fresh, and absolutely genuine no matter whose story he is recounting. I am grateful that I know Spanish and D&D lingo, and that I have read many of the books referred to (I have even reviewed Octavia Butler and Watchmen in these pages), because of Diaz’ constant, fast-paced use of all these facets — and facts — of Oscar’s existence in telling his story. But even without the benefit of these references, Diaz has written a rich, complex, and moving story of a very wondrous life.
