K A T H O L I E K E U N I V E R S I T E I T L E U V E N

Reading Between the Lines:

Uplifting Silence in The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

FOU24A – English Literature : Reading America

PELEMAN Kristof

THEWISSEN Catherine

VERDONCK Katrien

Academic Year 2007-2008

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Table of Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 3

1. Oscar Wao: a multigenerational immigrant-family saga ................................................................. 3

2. Journey into the history of the Dominican Diaspora ....................................................................... 9

3. A journey through Oscar Wao’s narrative .................................................................................. 11

4. A journey through l’envers du décor ......................................................................................... 15

Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 16

Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... 17

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 18

Annexes ..................................................................................................................................... 19

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Introduction

Edward Said once wrote “America is an immigrant republic and had always been one. (…). Except for (…) the original Indians, everyone who now lives here as An American citizen originally came to these shores as an immigrant from somewhere else”1. Immigrants from all over the world were drawn to the “Mother of Exiles”2, the nurturing image of Liberty holding a “lamp” of “welcome”. Rejecting the “stories pomp” of the so-called Old World, the mighty woman embodies the promise of America for all its newcomers inviting from near and far. These “tired poor huddled masses” have become significant parts of the nation’s collective memory, parts of a potent cultural myth3. Like millions of others, Puerto-Ricans, Cubans and Dominicans came to America with “the America dream” of being able “to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations and unrepressed by social orders”4. Among this millions of others is Junot Díaz5, author of the acclaimed collection of short stories Drown, set in the Dominican Republic, Diaz’s birthplace, and northern New Jersey, his adopted home. Ten years later he presents his first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao6 (henceforth, Oscar Wao). What at first appears to be a new Catcher in the Rye7 for New Jersey’s Dominicans, turns out to be an exceptional account of a slice of the vast history of Santo Domingo and the intricate past and present of a doomed family. This “immigrant-family saga”8 deals with key issues of the immigrant experience – the link with the ancestral homeland, the understanding of the Diaspora that brought so many of the Dominicans to the United States, the duality of the immigrant experience. But at the centre of Díaz’s fiction is the concept of silence. “The most important things are the things I don’t say”, Diaz told us in an interview. This is confirmed later in Lewis’s interview with the writer: “What I write really well is silence, the things that characters don’t say, the gaps between people’s sentences, the ellipses between what we feel, what we see, and what we recognize”9. Which brings us to the question: What is it that the characters don’t say? What are the gaps and ellipses of the story? What is, in fact, the ideology behind these hidden depths, which is, to follow Diaz’s logic, “the most important thing”? Diaz relies on the reader to read between the lines and uplift the silenced depths of the narrative. The novel is explored along four main entry points: the plot, the history of dictatorship and Diaspora, the narrative and finally the themes. Let the journey begin.

1. Oscar Wao: a multigenerational immigrant-family saga

Let us first start our journey with the first axis: the plot of Oscar Wao. The titular hero of Diaz’s novel is “a nerd – a chronically obese, socially malformed virgin with an encyclopaedic knowledge of comic books, dime store sci-fi, fantasy epics, anime, and post-apocalyptic thrillers”10. The novel mainly concerns Oscar Cabral, who “was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about

1 Said, E., Thoughts about America, Counterpunch, 5 March 2002, http://www.counterpunch.org/saidamerica.html. This is further emphasized in Takaki, R., A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Boston: Little Brown, 1993. 2 Lazarus, E., The New Colossus, in .Rico, B. R. and Mano, S., American Mosaic: Multicultural Reading in Context, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, p. 10. 3 Rico, B. R. and Mano, S., American Mosaic: Multicultural Reading in Context, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, p. 4 4 Adams, J. T., The Epic of America, Boston: Little Brown, 1954, p.6. 5 At the age of 6, Díaz’s family left the Dominican Republic for northern New Jersey, to a “low-income neighbourhood fronting a landfill”. Ch’ien, Evelyn Nien-Ming. Weird English. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004, p. 221. 6 Díaz, J., The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Faber and Faber, 2008. 7 Salinger, J.D., The Catcher in the Rye, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980. 8 Grossman L., Review of The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1655968_1655989_1656010,00.html. 9 Lewis, M., Interview with Junot Diaz, http://www.webdelsol.com/Other_Voices/DiazInt.htm. 10 Stephens, P, Goodbye Columbus: Review of The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:, http://www.pajiba.com/brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-junot-daaz.htm.

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– he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock”11. Oscar is a fat, self-loathing, sci-fi-reading nerd. For a social introvert like Oscar, later called Oscar Wao (a mishearing of Oscar Wilde) high school became a “source of endless anguish”12. It was “the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put into stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits”13. He was a social introvert who “trembled with fear during gym class and watched nerd British shows like Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, (…) and he used a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like indefatigable and ubiquitous when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high school”14. In fact, “Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to”15. In addition, Oscar embodied the antithesis of Dominican masculinity. He had “none of the Higher Powers of your typical Dominican male, couldn’t have pulled a girl if he’s life depended on it. Couldn’t play sports for shit, (…), threw a ball like a girl. Had no knack for music or business or dance, no hustle, no rap, no G. And most damning of all: no looks”16. Because Oscar lacks the stereotypical features of the Dominican male, most people don’t even believe that he is Dominican. Because of his nerdiness and un-Dominicaness, Oscar was left out of adolescence, which means no first crushes and no first kisses. The narrator tells us “Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years”17. Oscar falls hopelessly in love many times but it is never reciprocated. Doomed to a life of perpetual embarrassment and humiliation, Oscar finds solace in the comforts of science-fiction, comic books, sci-fi movies, anime, and fantasy novels in the hope of becoming the next “Dominican Tolkien”18 or “Dominican Stephen King”19 or even “the Dominican James Joyce”20. Eventually Oscar’s misery sends him back to the homeland and his trip there ends as bloodily as his ancestors’ experiences. He is ostensibly a victim of the “Fukú americanus”21 borne stoically by his family since the time when his grandfather crossed Trujillo. The narrator makes a strong case for the existence of this supernatural blight. He writes “It’s perfectly fine if you don’t believe in these ‘superstitions’. In fact, it’s better than fine – it’s perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you”22. After all, “What more sci-fi than Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles?”23

The description of Oscar’s personality leads to the question: Why is Diaz pitting one stereotype

against another? Several explanations are possible. First, Stephen rightly argues that by playing with these stereotypes he’s found a way to further isolate his character24 and “to offer a commentary on the immigrant experience, the collision of Old World and New”25. In our view, Diaz gives the image of Oscar as an outsider among outsiders, a virgin and intellectual amidst an immigrant Dominican culture in which sex is the only thing “that never goes away”26. By choosing the creative paradigm of ‘outsider among outsiders’, Diaz is reinventing the typical paradigm of what Ferrero calls “cultural rebirth: from

11 Diaz, p. 11 12 Ibid., p. 19 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p 22 15 Ibid, p. 21 16 Ibid, p. 20 17 Ibid, p. 23 18 Ibid, p.192 19 Ibid, p. 27 20 Ibid, p. 68 21 Ibid, p.1 22 Ibid., p.5 23 Ibid., p.6 24 Stephens, P, Goodbye Columbus: Review of The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:, http://www.pajiba.com/brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-junot-daaz.htm. 25 Ibid 26 Diaz, p. 205

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alien to American”27. The writer goes beyond the conventionality of ethnic writing, beyond its subversion of convention and its determined creativity28. Diaz encourages us to rethink the stereotypes we commonly associate with a certain culture. What Diaz is inviting us to do is to think more critically about the processes of naming and categorizing, to inspect more carefully the cultural frames we all use to interpret and to assess our surroundings. He is hoping to challenge given definitions that allow all of us the opportunity to examine our own framing devices in order that we might be able to see and consider the possibility beyond those frames: Are Dominican men all peacocks? Are white boys all sci-fi, anime and Dungeons and Dragons fanatics?

Lola, Oscar’s beautiful sister, tries her best to help her brother. The character of Lola is described as a “Banshees-loving punk chick”29, as “a tough Jersey Dominicanas, a long-distance runner who drove her own car, had her own checkbook, called men bitches, and would eat a fat cat in front of you without a speck of vergüenza”30. Lola herself has a very difficult relationship with her “Old World Dominican mother”31, who is an angry, borderline-abusive immigrant matriarch wearing herself out with work and worry32. To make ends meet, her mother had to juggle two jobs, the underlying message referring to the plight of the immigrant to find a well-paid job and even to find a job at all. Lola, just like her mother before her, is characterized by an “inextinguishable longing for elsewheres”33. She is always imagining where she would run away if given the chance: to Japan, maybe, where she would track down Tomoko, to Austria, where her singing would inspire a remake of The Sound of Music”34 or even to Ireland where she would become the backup singer for U235. On the team to shape up Oscar, we also find Yunior, Oscar’s college roommate and Lola’s onetime boyfriend, who reveals himself to be main narrator of the story. Yunior is the “smooth-talking hip-hop Dominican who can’t keep from leaping into bed with every beauty who crosses his path, even when he doesn’t intend to”36. A first sight, Yunior reveals himself to be Oscar’s total opposite. While Oscar favours the science fiction genres, Yunior affects a bilingual b-boy flow. And while Oscar falls madly and chastely in love with a succession of not-quite-attainable women, Yunior is a chronic womanizer. And yet, Yunior knows Oscar intimately, decoding his moods, gestures and utterances as if delineating a shadow self revealing shades of uncoolness. Once again, Diaz silently challenges the categories people associate you with. Are you cool? Or are you a nerd? These are not hermetic structures but flow within each other to present a new reality altogether. Applying this thought to the immigrant experience, we argue that, for acculturation to be successful, a two-way exchange has to take place: not only would the immigrant learn the ways of the new country, but the new country would be enriched by cultural contributions made by the newcomer.

As the main character’s tale unfolds, Diaz moves backwards, looking at the lives of Oscar and Lola’s mother, Belicia Cabral, and grandfather, Abelard Luis Cabral, both of whom lived in the shadow of the Dominican dictator Trujillo. In course of the story, we get acquainted with the story of Oscar and Lola’s mother, Beli, a tough-talking woman whose hard-nosed street cred is rooted in a childhood of

27 Ferraro, Thomas J. Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993,

p. 1. 28 Ibid, p.4 29 Diaz, p.54 30 Ibid, p. 24-25 31 Ibid, p. 56 32 Scott, A.O., Dreaming in Spanglish : Review of the Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Scott-t.html. 33 Diaz, p.77 34 Ibid, p 57 35 Ibid, p.68 36 Stephens, P, Goodbye Columbus: Review of The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:, http://www.pajiba.com/brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-junot-daaz.htm.

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almost unimaginable pain and loss. The first encounter of the character of Beli shows her in the bathroom with her daughter Lola: “She was standing in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, naked from the waist up, her bra slung about her waist like a torn sail, the scar on her back as vast and inconsolable as a sea”37. The father of the foster family she was living with splashed a pan of hot oil on her naked back because she skipped out on work to attend her classes, the burn nearly killing her38. The powerful image of the scar reflects the immense trauma, pain and loss Beli had to undergo since her childhood. The immensity and permanence of her scar conveys the equally powerful image that she will remain emotionally and physically marked by her painful past and equally painful present condition as an immigrant. The image of the scar on the character’s back recalls Toni Morrison’s Beloved in which the main character Sethe carries a scar on her back symbolizing the ordeal she went through as part of the African-American slavery trade. Morrison writes, “I got a tree on my back. (…). I’ve never seen it and never will. But that’s what she said it looked like. A chokecherry tree. Trunk, branches, and even leaves. Tiny little chokecherry leaves. But that was eighteen years ago. Could have cherries too now for all I know”39. Diaz seems to be silently reminding the reader of the pain and loss that any immigrant, either of African or Dominican descent, has to go through.

Beli, “whose remarkable biography forms the novel’s true narrative backbone”40 was an orphan.

Her wealthy father, tortured and incarcerated by the Dominican dictator Trujillo’s thugs because he hid his beautiful daughter from Trujillo; her mother was run over by a truck after her husband’s imprisonment and her two sisters, dead in freak, suspicious accidents. The orphaned Beli was passed about, abused and beaten before rescued by her father’s kindly cousin, La Inca. As a teenage girl, Beli lived in the Dominican Republic of Trujillo, “the Dictatingest Dictator who ever dictated”41. Beli grew up into a dark-skinned, tall and big-breasted young woman, an object of lust and jealousy in her small Dominican village. Beli, just like her future daughter Lola, had an “inextinguishable longing for elsewheres”42. Diaz writes “Everything about her present life irked her; she wanted, with all her heart, something else”43. What Beli wanted more than anything was to escape her daily life: the bakery, her school, dull-ass Bani, sharing a bed with her madre, (…), the fact that her long-gone parents had died when she was one, the whispers that Trujillo had done it”44. What Beli really wanted to escape from was also “her own despised black skin”45. The characters often express rejection of their own black skin. Abelard’s wife, Socorro Hernández Batista, did not see too positively upon her own black skin. The narrator writes: “Abelard’s two daughters, Jacquelyn and Astrid, swam and played in the surf under the watchful gaze of their mother, who, unable to risk no extra darkness, remained chained to her umbrella’s shadow”46.

This rejection of one’s own black skin is what Morrison fought against in her novel The Bluest

Eye, which depicts the tragic life of a young Black girl, Pecola Breedlove – the name ‘Breedlove’ being ironic as the characters live in a society that clearly does not ‘breed love’ but rather hate of blackness and thus hatred of oneself. Pecola wants nothing more than to be loved by her family and her schoolmates. She comes to understand that the reason she is despised and ridiculed is that she is black and therefore ugly. Consequently, Pecola sublimates her desire to be loved into a desire to have blue

37 Diaz, p.51 38 Ibid, p. 255 39 Morrison, T., Beloved, Vintage, 1997, p.16. 40 Scott, A.O., Dreaming in Spanglish : Review of the Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Scott-t.html. 41 Diaz, p. 81 42 Ibid, p.77 43 Ibid, p. 79 44 Ibid, p. 80 45 Ibid, p. 80 46 Ibid., p.213

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eyes and blond hair, in other words white-skinned ideas. The characters’ attitude towards her colour reflected the vision that African-Americans had of themselves. There was a widespread notion that features of African-Americans suck as skin colour, facial features and hair were inherently ugly. Morrison writes, "Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty. (…). A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes”47. Morrison conveys the idea that the African-Americans themselves put this “cloak of ugliness”48 on them. She writes: “You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and each had accepted it without question”49. The message the writer conveys is that African-Americans should reject this “cloak of ugliness”50 they impose on themselves, this “exquisitely learned self-hatred”51 and open their eyes to “her beauty”52. They should embrace the fact that ‘Black is Beautiful’. Like Pecola of Morrison’s novel, Beli of Diaz’s novel carves for recognition, adoration and love. This she got from the Gangster. As the narrator argues, the Gangster adored Beli and that adoration “was one of the greatest gifts anybody had ever given her. (…). It shook her to the core. He made her feel guapa and wanted and safe, and no one had ever done that for her”53. However, that phase quickly passed as he turned out to be the one who catapulted her and hers into Diaspora54. This disastrous affair with this charismatic and dangerous man – one of Trujillo’s men who happened to be married to Trujillo’s sister – culminated in a savage beating in the cane fields, a beating that nearly ended Beli’s life and propelled her towards a new life in exile in the United States. Beli’s story “She happens to be the most remarkable character in the novel, an intense and determined woman who undergoes such suffering as would destroy almost anyone else, and each scene in the long section devoted to her youth – the days before she ran afoul of the Trujillo in her own right and had to flee the island – is unforgettable and indelible”55.

The plot of Oscar Wao already gives the reader relevant insights into the ellipses and gaps with

which Diaz surrounds his story. Diaz challenges the received stereotypes we commonly associate with a certain people: are you a Dominican macho? Are you cool? Are you a nerd? Everyone should be more critical about the processes of naming and categorizing. Realities are not closed boxes but tend to flow into each other to create new, more vibrant and enriching realities. This section entitled ‘Oscar Wao: a multigenerational immigrant-family saga’, we know turn to the second part of the phrase, namely Oscar Wao and the concept of ‘immigrant-family saga’. It becomes clear from the given account that Diaz’s novel is an immigrant family saga, in which many of its main themes and motifs are explored. Diaz deals with issues that are inherent to the various generations of immigrants. The first generation of immigrants we confronted, for example, with the fear of the unknown. Echoing La Inca’s words to Beli56, what did first generation Dominican immigrants know about immigration? What did they know about the Diaspora (and about the consequent cold, the heartbreaking drudgery of the factorías and the loneliness57)? What did they know about the United States? The only elements Beli knew about America was what she had learned at school: the names of the fifty states, she could ask for coffee, a bathroom, the time and where the post office was58. La Inca knew nothing of America. New York was a

47 Morrison, T., The Bluest Eye, Vintage, 1999, p. 54. 48 Ibid, p.28 49 Ibid 50 Ibid 51 Ibid, p.50 52 Ibid, p.35 53 Diaz, p. 127 54 Ibid, p.115 55 Hatch, J. Review of The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, http://www.curledup.com/oscarwao.htm. 56 Diaz, p. 160. 57 Ibid, p .164 58 Ibid, p. 54

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city totally foreign to her: “In her mind, the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a pais overrun by gangsters, putas and no-accounts”. The narrator goes on: Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüencería as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightness shaft of its eye”59. Clearly this last phrase is an implicit criticism towards the Unites States for the way in which they treated the new immigrants who were vulnerable to exploitation, both by government officials and by other immigrants themselves. An investigation of Ellis Island during Roosevelt’s administration exposed the corrupt practices of some immigration officials as well as those of commercial enterprises that had used unfair currency exchange rates to cheat immigrants. Employers would exploit immigrants, promising them impressive employment opportunities that turned out to be horrible work for little money60

While first generation immigrants were faced with the fear of the unknown and the trauma of going from one world to another, second-generation immigrants also have to face difficult issues. Among others, there is the issue of understanding and reconnecting with the past of the ancestral homeland creating their own patchwork quilt of reality, collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there to create a sense of history, of identity. The discovery of one’s identity through one’s past is a feeling that Lola experiences. Lola appears to carry with her a sense of incompleteness in her identity that she is desperately trying to fill. The narrator writes: It’s about that crazy feeling that started this whole mess, the bruja feeling that comes singing out of my bones, that takes hold of me the way blood seizes cotton”61. This feeling stays with her until the moment in the Dominican Republic when La Inca takes out old photos of her mother and other people standing in front of a Chinese restaurant. Lola tells us “And that’s when it hit me with the force of a hurricane. The feeling. I stood straight up, the way my mother always wanted me to stand up (…). She (La Inca) was about to say something and I was waiting for whatever she was going to tell me. I was waiting to begin”62. The feeling she had was one that urged her to complete her family history. Now she can begin.

Another important motif of immigrant literature such as Diaz’s is the duality of the immigrant

experience, living “in a situation of simultaneity”63. As Diaz explains, as an immigrant, “you couldn’t help but live in the Dominican Republic but also in the United States. You couldn’t help but live in the present and in the past, but also in the future. You have to have an amazing imagination to be an immigrant”64. Belonging to two cultures simultaneously, characters have to find their own personal path through the maze of identity. This duality and the difficulty of finding one’s place in this hyphenated world is illustrated through the character of Lola. Because Lola ran away, her mother decides to send her to the Dominican Republic where she would keep busy and out of mischief. While in the DR, she realizes that she belongs to a hyphenated culture. She writes: ““If you think it was tough being a goth in Paterson, try being a Dominican York in one of those private schools in DR. You will never meet bitchier girls in your whole life. They whisper about me to death. (…). I don’t let it get to me”65. In an effort to assimilate with the Dominican culture, she dresses up like a “real Dominican girl”66. She looks at herself in the mirror and says “I don’t know who I am anymore”67. The loss of the comfort about her sense of identity might lead her to a period of alienation and self-doubt.

59 Ibid, p. 158 60 Rico, B. R. and Mano, S., 161. 61 Ibid, p. 72 62 Ibid, p. 75 63 Lewis, M., Interview with Junot Diaz, http://www.webdelsol.com/Other_Voices/DiazInt.htm 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid, p. 71 66 Ibid 67 Ibid

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2. Journey into the history of the Dominican Diaspora

Our journey continues with uplifting the silence on the historical context of the Dominican Diaspora. For more than 30 years, the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930-1961) imposed a totalitarian dictatorship on the Dominican Republic during which the personal interests of the dictator were fused with those of the Dominican state itself. He had absolute control over the military, the economy and the people. To describe the extent of the dictator’s powers, Pons writes “Never before in the history of Latin America had a single ruler been able to impose such a comprehensive control over the minds and properties of his people”68. Through the character of Belicia Cabral in the novel, Díaz illustrates this hard-line dictatorship was “asphyxiating a whole generation of young Dominicans”69. The younger generation “was turning blue for want of air”70. They all felt trapped: “It was like being at the bottom of an ocean (…). There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But people had gotten so used to it that they thought it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above”71. He was the personification of Poe’s “Evil Eye”72. This is how Diaz describes the dictator:

“Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor, not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world, isolate it behind the Plátano Curtain, he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers, mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag about “the great honeymoon” he’d had the night before73

People who did not dare say or even think badly about the dictator, for fear of being arrested,

tortured, killed or have the fukú unleashed on you and your family. In fact it was believed that anyone who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fukú most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond. If you even thought a bad thing about Trujillo, a hurricane would sweep your family out to sea, a boulder would fall out of a clear sky and quash you, or the shrimp that you ate today was the cramp that killed you tomorrow74. Anyone who would not support the regime would be directly swept away, so quickly in fact that people believed that the dictator had supernatural powers: “Shit was so tight that people actually believed that Trujillo had supernatural powers! It was whispered that he did not sleep, did not sweat, that he could see, smell, feel events hundreds of miles away, that he was protected by the most evil fukú on the island”75. For example, one of Beli’s classmates got in “serious trouble”76 for writing a dissertation on democracy. That student wrote “in the crabbed handwriting of a future poet revolutionary: I’d like to see our country be a democracía like the United States. I wish we would stop having dictators. (…). The next day both he and the teacher were gone”77. Because of that situation, people were uneasy when it came to talking about the regime. Silence surrounds the dictatorship: the Dominican “páginas en blanco”78. The regime did not allow for anything to be written about the dictator or the dictatorship itself. In a footnote, Diaz clearly exemplifies the dictators hate for writers: “Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribbles are natural antagonists, but I think it’s too simple (…). Dictators in my opinion just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like”79.

68 Pons, F.M., The Dominican Republic since 1930, in The Cambridge History of Latin America Vol. VII, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 509. 69 Díaz, p. 81. 70 Ibid 71 Ibid 72 Poe, E.A., The Tell-Tale Heart, (1843), http://www.pambytes.com/poe/stories/heart.html. 73 Ibid, p. 225 74 Ibid, p. 3 75 Ibid, p. 226 76 Ibid, p. 97 77 Ibid, p. 97 78 Ibid, p. 119 79 Ibid, p. 97

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Abelard Luis Cabral tried writing a book about the “Dark Powers’ of the President in the hope of filling in the “páginas en blanco”. His grimoire was conveniently destroyed after Abelard was arrested. “No copies survived”80. The dictator destroyed every paper he had in his house; all the books he authored or owned were either lost or disappeared. Even creepier than that “Not one single example of his handwriting remains”, leading the narrator to believe that “That was more than thorough. You got to fear a motherfucker or what he’s writing to do something like that”81. This clearly shows the extent of the repression and the impossible attempts to fill in the blank pages of history. Diaz’s description of this hard-line regime recalls Edwige’s Danticat’s plight under the dictatorial Duvalier regime. In her short story Children of the Sea, which deals with story of a young couple separated by political strife in Haiti, she writes about how her people suffered at the hands of the dictator. She writes “i will never go outside again. not even in the yard to breathe the air. they are always watching you, like vultures. at night I can’t sleep. i count the bullets in the dark. i keep wondering if it is true. did you really get out”82. Written in the alternating viewpoints of the young man and woman, the reader experiences the situation from both characters' perspectives. Through this technique, Danticat demonstrates the danger inherent in any choice a Haitian makes, whether it involves standing up to the government and trying to gain political asylum in the United States, or complying with the regime's demands even if it means betraying others through silence.

During the Dominican dictatorship, Trujillo prevented anyone from leaving the island83. In the

words of the narrator, “This was a country, a society, that had been virtually designed to be virtually escape-proof. Alcatraz of the Antilles. There weren’t any Houdini holes in that Plátano Curtain. Options are rare as Tainos and for irascible dark-skinned flacas of modest means they were rarer still”84. Nobody could escape. This fact is confirmed by Grasmuck and Pessar, specialists on the Dominican emigration to the United States, who argue that during the Trujillo dictatorship, emigration was severely curtailed by a restrictive state policy that limited even the issuance of passports to Dominican citizens85. This resulted in the fact that a very low number of Dominicans - fewer than 1,000- entered the United States annually between 1951 and 1960. This situation changed radically after the end of the Trujillo dictatorship. Dominicans started going to the United States. The character of Beli, fearing for her life, left the Dominican Republic for the United States. Diaz writes “in another times it would have been impossible, but with El Jefe dead and the Plátano Curtain shattered all manner of escapes were now possible”86

The contemporary phase of mass emigration began a few years after the assassination of

Trujillo in 196187. This out-migration did not begin gradually, but, rather, rose sharply in the years following 1962. While fewer than 1,000 Dominican immigrants entered the United States annually between 1951 and 1960, the annual average for each decade climbed from over 9,000 on the 1960s to over 14,000 in the 1970s, and then to 20,000 in the first half of the 1980s88. Graph 1 shows that the sharpest increases occurred in the mid-1960s and then rose only modestly throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, with a dramatic increase beginning in 1978 and another large increase apparent in 198389.

80 Ibid, p. 246 81 Ibid, p. 246 82 Danticat, E., Children of the Sea, Krik?Krak!, Vintage, 1991. 83 Luis, W., Dance between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature written in the United States, Vanderbilt University Press, 1997, p. 266. 84 Diaz, p. 81 85 Grasmuck, S. and Pessar P.R., Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration, University of California Press, 1991, p. 19. 86 Diaz, p. 161 87 Grasmuck, S. and Pessar P.R., p. 19. 88 Diaz, p. 161. 89 Ibid.

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They belong to the most recent groups of Hispanic Caribbean people to head for the United States90, after the Cubans and the Puerto Ricans. The majority of Dominican immigrants resided in the New York/New Jersey area. In 1980, 91% of the Dominicans in the continental United States resided in three states: New York (77.6%), New Jersey – where Diaz’s novel is set – (8.4%) and Florida (4.2%)91. Once in the United States, writers and intellectuals could start revealing their past, one such example is Diaz’s novel. Lending an ear to these immigrant writers and their experiences was not such a straightforward fact as they thought. In America too they had to fight to express their voice. The Hispanic-Caribbean tradition, which is a relatively recent phenomenon, have benefited from political events, i.e. the Urban League, the National Council for the Advancement of Colored People, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements92, which have helped to promote aspects of this literature. This interest in ethnic novels has come to the fore thanks to the publicity received by the so-called “Boom of the Latin American literature”93, which during the 1960s brought Latin American literature to the attention of a world reader94. Given the recent character of Hispanic-Caribbean literature in the United States, there are but a handful of book-length studies on Latino Caribbean literature. For the most part, they concentrate on the Cuban and Puerto Rican experience in the United States. This is of no surprise given that Cuban and Puerto Rica writers were the first in the Hispanic-Caribbean to migrate to the United States. Dominican literature written in the United States has received very little critical attention. Up to today, no full-length study on Dominican American literature exists. It deserves much more attention from critics and readers of serious American literature that it has as yet received.

3. A journey through Oscar Wao’s narrative

Our journey now brings us to the narrative of the novel. We will attempt to find out whether hidden depths can be uncovered in the novel’s narrative and therefore could bring us closer to Diaz’s ideology. From the outset of the novel, the reader notices that the structure of the narrative is not based on the form of linear progression but rather on fragmentation. Are there nevertheless constant elements in the narrative? How is the time frame handled? What is the hidden ideology behind the effect of fragmentation? To have a basis on which to work on a structure of the narrative has been drawn. It can be found in annex 2 of this paper.

While the novel is fragmented, some constant elements are to be found in the novel. The story

is divided into three main parts, each one focusing on one representative of three successive generations. In Part I the reader gets access to ‘the three heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral’, Oscar and Lola’s mother. In Part II the reader moves on to the previous generation to hear of the plight of Beli’s father, Abelard Luis Cabral. Part III deals with the “final voyage” of Oscar himself. Oscar’s fate is to fall myopically, hopelessly in love with girls who will never work out. Like the another Dominican-American writer Alvarez in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, the two main part of Diaz’s novel unfolds backwards through progressive flashbacks, the various parts and chapters taking the reader further into the past. The author clearly favours a retrograde temporal movement. Similarly to Alvarez’s novel,

“The narrative technique complements the fundamental reversal in immigrant experience. In life, birth and childhood normally give way to and shape the adult achievement of autonomy and, often, self-knowledge. But for immigrants, this maturational sequence breaks down: suddenly powerless, without language and stripped of autonomy, they become, in effect, children again”95

90 Luis, W., Latin American (Hispanic Caribbean) Literature written in the United States, in The Cambridge History of Latin America, Vol.2, 1996, p.554. 91 Grasmuck, S. and Pessar P.R., p. 19. 92 Luis, W., 1996, p.526-556. 93 Luis, W., 1997, p.X. 94 Luis, W., 1996, p.526-556. 95 Cowart, D., Trailing Clouds : Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America, Cornell University Press, London, 1996, p. 42.

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The implicit meaning behind his choice of backward narrative is the immigrant’s need

understand memory, his past and construct a stable identity. While the book contains some constant elements, the novel is mainly fragmented. He breaks the narrative down into discrete titled segments, which gives the fragmented chaotic feeling to the novel. In a sense, it is no surprise that the novel is fragmented given that Diaz himself is “the product of a fragmented world”96. Ette devotes one of his papers on ‘The Fractal World of the Caribbean’. He tells us that the island metaphor leaves room for at least two interpretations97. It can both be seen as “a symbolizing an isolated separateness from the Other and as symbolizing the consciousness of a variegated relationship with the Other”. In his view,

On the one hand, in the clarity of its seemingly firm borders, the island is a world detached from the Other. This is the case in Thomas More’s Caribbean Utopia, which is under the sway of a single logic that has taken on a material and territorial form. On the other hand, the island is a place that perceived itself as one fragment among many, torn away, separated and at the same time in many ways still linked with a continent whose very etymology alludes to connectedness; be it as a linked continens of the Old World – Europe, Asia, and Africa – or be it as a self-contained general land mass like America or Australia”98.

In the view of Diaz’s fiction, it is more likely that he chose for the second option. The book takes the shape of an archipelago, a literary textual Caribbean, shattered and yet somehow holding together, somehow incredibly vibrant and compelling. The structure of the book is more in keeping with the reality of this history than with its most popular myth, that of unity and continuity. The fragmentation of the novel is important to the book’s main narrative as it symbolizes a form of resistance against the singularity of perspective that is often used to establish authority under a dictatorship. Writers and intellectuals crushed under the power of dictatorship tend to reject the assumption that there is one single voice capable of telling the whole story. This rejection of the singularity of perspective is found in another piece of fiction of Reinaldo Arenas Hispanic-Caribbean writer of Cuban origin. Arenas fiction which denounces events in Cuba under Castro and relates the cruel reality exiles must face in the United States, decentralizes the authorial voice and opens up the text to multiple interpretations. In doing so “he opposed all monolithic and unidimensional discourses of fiction and history and challenges the view that functionaries of the Castro government are the authorized interpreters of Cuban history and culture”99.

To show his opposition to a singular voice, and opening up his narrative to various voices, Diaz

will use in his narrative a double narrative voice: that of Lola, Oscar’s beautiful sister, and mainly Yunior, Oscar’s college roommate and Lola’s onetime boyfriend. The narrator gradually reveals himself as Yunior, so that Yunior is both the narrator as well as a character within the story. In other words, he is at the same time, inside and outside of the story, just like his Dominican-American protagonists are parts of the mainstream American society but rejected all the same. Oscar’s story is narrated by Yunior. And then Lola, who narrates a chapter regarding her tempestuous relationship with her mother Beli. Then Yunior treats us to Beli’s own story, a heartbreaking and drawn-out section explaining the same shame and abuse that brought her to America in the first place. By using that sort of narrative, Diaz conveys the message that each story requires another to place it in context. While the common belief is that the Other is a threat who needs to be kept away, Diaz emphasizes the fact that we need the Other to know ourselves better.

96 O’Rourke, M., Review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, http://www.slate.com/id/2177644. 97 Ette, O., The Fractal World of the Caribbean, in D’hulst, L. et al, Caribbean Interfaces, Rodopi, 2007, p. 111. 98 Ibid. 99 Luis, W. 1996, p. 536.

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The narrative used a double narrative voice, but also a double location framework as the narrative goes back and forth between the Dominican Republic and the United States. This motif of the double is pushed even further by the choice of a double time frame. On the one hand, there is the Trujillo-era in the Dominican Republic and on the other hand, the characters’ lives in present-day America. Even more interesting in the novel’s double narrative. The novel is filled with interruptions, sidebars and many (hilarious) footnotes. The book is full of footnotes, forcing the reader to break away from the narrative to take information that may or may not be external to the story. In our view these footnotes serve the function of introducing a double narrative: the footnotes, which are in the lower frequencies, challenge the main text which is the higher narrative. In a book that is all about the dangers about the dictatorship, Diaz challenges again the dangers of the single voice. The closer analysis of the footnotes shows that some of them tell us more about the history of the Dominican people and can be therefore qualified as “external” to the story, while others are important as they continue the main narrative itself. So comes the question what is low? Does the low belong to the high? Does it have a role to play in highbrow literature? Does the immigrant have a role to play in highbrow American life? Yes is Diaz’s answer.

What does the narrative structure tell us about Diaz’s hidden ideology? Diaz implicitly tells us

that, even though chaos and fragmentation is a bit part of the immigrants’ lives, there is a possibility of constancy and stability by going back to one’s roots and reconstruct one’s memory. His experience, just like the Caribbean islands themselves, reflect that although one keeps one’s individuality, one is linked in many ways to the mainstream culture. Doubleness is celebrated by putting forward the doubleness of the narrative, the double time frame and the double location. Once again, as it was implicitly argued for in the plot section, Diaz argues for a merging of cultures which allows for the individual to keep some of his/her ethnic characteristics. Before turning to the final part of the paper, dealing with a thematic analysis of the novel, we would like to devote some time to one of the most discussed aspects of Diaz’s novel: his mixing of genre as well as the hybridity of the language. Just to mention a few, Scott writing for The New York Times writes; “Within its relatively compact span, the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao contains an unruly multitude of styles and genres. (…): tropical magic realism, punk-rock feminism, hip-hop machismo and post-modern pyrotechnics”100. Michiko Kakutani writes” “Mr Diaz (…) writes in a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale: lots of flash words ad razzle-dazzle talk, lots of body language on the sentences, lots of David Forster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides”101. Many reviews praise Diaz’s use of two major elements: on the one hand, the genre of science fiction and on the other hand, the use of particular langue which mixes up Spanglish, nerd-talk, hip-hop body language music. Let us have a look at these two elements separately. Diaz motivated his choice for science fiction novel as follows:

“No one can write a straightforward novel about the Trujillo and capture its phantasmagorical power. That’s another reason why I had to go to hard-core nerd. Because without curses and alien mongooses and Sauron and Darkseid, the Trujillo cannot be assessed, eludes our ‘modern minds’. We need these fictional lenses, otherwise It cannot see”102

Diaz made use of that particular genre because, according to him, only through science-fiction

could he best reflect the immigrant experience. The emotion of the immigrant experience could be equivalent in his eyes to someone who is sent to another planet where the notion of ‘alien’, ‘the other’,

100 Scott, A.O., Dreaming in Spanglish : Review of the Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Scott-t.html. 101 Kakutani, M, Review of The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/books/04diaz.html. 102 O’Rourke, M., Review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, http://www.slate.com/id/2177644

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‘the female other’, ‘the lost world’ of the colonial discourse are clearly applicable. He says: “I have a sense of the Dominican diasporic experience and the American experience, all hooked together. It’s like a science fiction book, where an alien or creature or an artefact exists on two worlds, or on two different planes at one time. They’re not fixed in one place. They phase in and phase out”103. He continues:

The conventions of what is canonically known as literature can’t hope to encompass these radical experiences that you undergo when living in a Diaspora like the Dominican one. And sometimes the only way to describe these lived moments – the surreality and irreality of some of the things that people like myself have experienced – is through lenses like science fiction. (…). I think the narrative that would logically be most useful would be not only space travel – travelling between two planets – but time travel. Jumping between two entire existences, two entire temporal moments, is what it feels like. These conventions you find in science fiction are awesome in trying to discuss some of the tensions and weirdness of being a person of color, being a third world person travelling between the third world and the first world. And even terms ‘first world’ and ‘third world’ already intimate science fictive travel between planets.

Paradoxically, to render the most realistically the shock and the trauma the immigrant had to go

through on discovering his New World and all it entails of new experiences and disappointments, Diaz had to rely on the least realist of all genres, science fiction. Maximin104 devotes one of the chapters of her book to the supernatural in Caribbean literature. Maximin, who points at the scarcity of writers using that genre of science fiction in immigrant narrative, nevertheless mentions one Cuban writer. She writes: “Plus radicale encore, la science-fiction combine technologique et primitive. Les Cubains sont bien les rares à y faire incursion. Parmi eux figure l’auteur de Kappa 15, Gregorio Ortega »105. She continues to describe the general plot, where one cannot miss the parallelisms between the world of science fiction and that of the immigrant.

“Héros des temps modernes, que ses ennemis condamnent à errer dans l’espace, Kappa, dans une navette avec d’étranges monstres, visite diverses planètes. Alton 3, où des matrones se fond servir par des squelettes, le prive de la moitié de ses compagnons. Y découvrant une cité morte, il apprend peu après commet les femmes y ont conquis une position hégémonique. La révolte masculine fournit à Kappa l’occasion d’acquérir une stature héroïque. On voit se reproduire, dans le deuxième monde, ces rapports bipolaires, cette inégalité : splendeur du cristal/laideur des souterrains. Accédant par hasard à l’envers du décor, Kappa frappé d’horreur, contemple les bas-fonds – misère et maladie. Au terme d’une bataille sauvage et sanglante, Kappa et les siens échappent à cet enfer. (…). Fonder de nouveaux mondes et conquérir l’ailleurs tout en restant fidèle à la planète matricielle, telle est la tâche messianique qui est confiée au voyageur »106 (my emphasis)

When translated into the immigrant experience, the genre of science fiction takes on a new

powerful meaning in which otherness and alien become equally powerful images. This merging of the genre of science fiction with that of the novel encourages once again the reader to put the idea of categories into perspective and accept the more flexible and fluid outlook. In fact the merging of the two genres blend into an original, new and vibrant new voice, a statement that could be paralleled with the new reality of the Dominican-Americans. By creatively using the genre of science fiction, the text itself illustrates not only how art contains the power to renew itself. The second half of that question relates to Diaz’s use of vibrant, vigorous language of highbrow, lowbrow, ghetto English, Spanglish. His fiction allows for the convergence of diverse linguistic worlds, each populated by a different language: (1) homogenous or standard English (2) Dominican Spanish (3)

103 Lewis, M., Interview with Junot Diaz, http://www.webdelsol.com/Other_Voices/DiazInt.htm 104 Maximin, C., Littératures Caribéennes Comparées, Jasor-Kerthala, 1996, p. 87. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid.

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street-speak English (4) Spanglish and (5) nerd-speak107. Among this variety of languages, one is particularly touched upon by critics and scholars alike: his use of what has come to be know as Spanglish, a mixture of Spanish, the language of their ancestors, and English, the language of the nation in which they now reside. Diaz celebrates his use of Spanglish as he intents on bringing forth creative writing which touches on both his cultures or on bringing forth his one culture which is made up of two parts. Diaz also wanted to explore the way in which communities grow proximate to and distant from one another through language. This was a very smart move on his part. As a reader with no knowledge of Spanish, we can understand the unintelligibility with which the immigrant was confronted. The reader can put himself/herself in the position of an immigrant who is confronted constantly with the otherness of the language. He implicitly argues for the coexistence of cultures. The representation of another culture in another language should be hybrid, so as to avoid assimilation or erasure. By engaging in the art of assertive nontranslation, placing Spanish words side by side with English words without calling attention to them, without contextualizing them or grammatically indicating that Spanish is other, he is implicitly arguing for assimilation without erasure. In addition to his vibrant use of Spanglish, Diaz also resorts to the Dominican traditions of rhythm and dance. In his prose, the reader feels transported through the rhythm of the Caribbean. It’s not simply the rhythms of the Caribbean that underlie the language of Diaz. His prose is influenced by hip-hop and rap, these American rhythms pervade his prose. The text itself relies on a rhythmic aspect that resonates with music. It becomes a soul haunting and seducing the reader. The novel is a very rhythmic text that mixes colloquial English and rap/slang and thereby emphasizes the power of music/art. The focus on and interweaving of three forms of popular artistic expression, hip-hop comics – further participates in claiming the power of human artistic creation. As all these genres mix together, the author urges to reconnect with the power of the imagination and with the acceptance of assimilation without erasure. Through his hybrid use of language, Diaz reminds us that language is a socially plural construct, in which our own speech is never entirely and exclusively our own, but always heteroglossic and polyvocal, formed always in relation to the speech of others.

4. A journey through l’envers du décor

This final journey through Oscar Wao’s novel takes us to a more thematically-oriented analysis. At first sight, nothing seems to bind two apparently incompatible realities, that of the Dominican Republic, the ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams and America, or rather New Jersey, the land of freedom, capitalism, hope and no-so-shiny possibilities. However Diaz silently conjures the two worlds his characters inhabit. He does so by showing implicit parallels that in fact bind the two countries together. We have chosen one important parallel: that of the seemingly very American concept of ‘the Other’. Immigrant saga illustrate how the immigrant is considered as ‘the Other’, as the person who is different, dangerous and therefore to be kept away. This rejection of ‘the Other’ is clearly illustrated through Oscar and Lola’s experiences. After he left high school, Oscar applied for a place in various universities and finally got accepted at Rutgers New Brunswick, where he thought he would begin a whole new life. After the initial euphoria of finding himself alone at college, free of everything, completely on his fucking own and maybe of finding “someone like him”108, he realised that it wasn’t going to happen. The white kids “looked at his black skin and his afro and treated him with inhuman cheeriness”109. The kids of colour were not on his side either as they, upon hearing him speak and seeing move his body, didn’t believe that he was Dominican, again emphasizing Oscar’s status of outsider among outsiders. Lola too has to face racist remarks, even by the white boyfriend she was dating: “Aldo says: Do you know what Pontiac stands for? Poor Old Nigger Thinks It’s A Cadillac”.

107 Ch’ien, Evelyn Nien-Ming. Weird English. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004, p. 221. 108 Diaz, p. 49 109 Diaz, p. 49

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But who was he looking at when he told his punch line? He was looking straight at me”110. This seemingly very American concept is in fact applicable to the situation in the Dominican Republic. This is perfectly exemplified in the Beli’s school experiences in her native country. La Inca decided to put Beli in a school where the majority of the students were white-skinned. Clearly, brilliant doctor father or not, the narrator tells us, Beli “stood out in El Redentor”111. As a dark-skinned student, Beli had to face the 10,001 barbs directed at her each day by students and staff alike. She had to face “all those eyes gnawing at her duskiness like locusts – and she did not know how to handle such vulnerability”112. Beli quickly found herself exiled beyond the bonewalls of the macroverse universe, flung there by the Ritual of Chüd”113. This seemingly very America concept of ‘the Other’ is also applicable to the Dominican Republic and inversely the very dictatorial violence and pain of the Dominican Republic can be applicable to the United States. For Oscar, who is living in the United States, it appears to be the opposite. It’s in the native country that Oscar seems to be at his best. For him, the Dominican Republic is the ‘New United States’. We could call it reverse migration. The myth of the American Dream was that the immigrant was coming to the United States to get a better life. This also implies the idea that Diaz does not give a picture-perfect image of his native country, giving a more realistic feeling to the Dominican Diaspora.

Conclusion

Now that our journey through the book has come, we have come to decipher the message Diaz conveys to his reader. Diaz’s novel The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao stresses a truly multicultural approach. He prompts an interrogation of systems of thought to examine the power structures at their base. Diaz invites the reader to think more critically about the processes of naming and categorizing, to inspect more carefully the cultural frames we all use to interpret and to assess our surroundings. He gives us a story that challenges given definitions, that allow all of us the opportunity to examine our own framing devices in order that we might be able to see and consider the possibility beyond those frames. He encourages a multicultural commitment and urges the deconstruction of all dichotomized paradigms of the us/them, West/Rest type, and so undo mainchean allegories at every level. He encourages the freedom to unapologetically exist between two worlds, two cultures, two languages, and two ways of being. He is proud to paint the picture of his America with a diverse brush on the canvas of life. Let us finish this journey with the words of Langston Hughes114:

Being me, it will not be white.

But it will be a part of you, instructor.

You are white – yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.

That’s American. Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.

Nor do I often want to be a part of you.

But we are, that’s true! As I learn from you,

110 Diaz, p. 67 111 Diaz, p. 84 112 Diaz p. 83 113 Diaz, p.84 114 Hughes, L, Theme for English B, in Rico, B. R. and Mano, S., American Mosaic: Multicultural Reading in Context, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, p. 348.

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I guess you learn from me- Although you’re older – and white –

And somewhat more free

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Centre for American Studies115 for their help in our search for books, as well as the embassy of the Dominican Republic, Belgium116 for their helpful references on the Dominican Diaspora under the dictatorship.

115 Bd. de l’Empereur / Keizerslaan 4, 1000 Brussels 116 Ave. Bel Air, 12 , BrusselsBelgium , 1180

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Bibliography

A. Secondary literature

- Adams, J. T., The Epic of America, Boston: Little Brown, 1954. - Ch’ien, Evelyn Nien-Ming. Weird English. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004 - Cowart, D., Trailing Clouds : Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America, Cornell University Press,

London, 1996. - Danticat, E., Children of the Sea, Krik?Krak!, Vintage, 1991. - Díaz, J., The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Faber and Faber, 2008. - Ette, O., The Fractal World of the Caribbean, in D’hulst, L. et al, Caribbean Interfaces, Rodopi, 2007. - Ferraro, Thomas J. Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America. Chicago: U

of Chicago P, 1993. - Grasmuck, S. and Pessar P.R., Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration, University

of California Press, 1991. - Luis, W., Dance between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature written in the United States,

Vanderbilt University Press, 1997. - Luis, W., Latin American (Hispanic Caribbean) Literature written in the United States, in The

Cambridge History of Latin America, Vol.2, 1996. - Maximin, C., Littératures Caribéennes Comparées, Jasor-Kerthala, 1996. - Morrison, T., Beloved, Vintage, 1997, p.16. - Morrison, T., The Bluest Eye, Vintage, 1999, p. 54. - Poe, E.A., The Tell-Tale Heart, (1843), http://www.pambytes.com/poe/stories/heart.html. - Pons, F.M., The Dominican Republic since 1930, in The Cambridge History of Latin America Vol. VII,

Cambridge University Press, 1990. - Rico, B. R. and Mano, S., American Mosaic: Multicultural Reading in Context, Houghton Mifflin

Company, 1991. - Said, E., Thoughts about America, Counterpunch, 5 March 2002,

http://www.counterpunch.org/saidamerica.html. - Salinger, J.D., The Catcher in the Rye, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980. - Takaki, R., A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Boston: Little Brown, 1993.

B. Reviews and interviews

- Grossman L., Review of The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1655968_1655989_1656010,00.html.

- Hatch, J. Review of The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, http://www.curledup.com/oscarwao.htm. - Kakutani, M, Review of The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/books/04diaz.html. - Lewis, M., Interview with Junot Diaz, http://www.webdelsol.com/Other_Voices/DiazInt.htm. - O’Rourke, M., Review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, http://www.slate.com/id/2177644. - Scott, A.O., Dreaming in Spanglish : Review of the Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Scott-t.html. - Stephens, P, Goodbye Columbus: Review of The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:,

http://www.pajiba.com/brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-junot-daaz.htm

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Annexes

Annexe 1: Dominican Immigrants legally admitted to the United States

Dominican Immigrants Legally Admitted to

the United States

0

5000

10000

15000

20000

25000

30000

1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990

Year

I

m

m

i

g

r

a

n

t

s

Based on: Grasmuck, S. and Pessar P.R., Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration, University of California Press, 1991, p. 19.

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Annexe 2

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Structure of the novel

Title Topic Date

PART I

1. GHETTONERD AT THE END OF THE WORLD (Narrator Yunior)

1974-1987

The Golden Age In those blessed days of his youth, Oscar was a Casanova

The moronic inferno High school at Don Bosco tech, “a source of endless anguish” for “the fat lonely nerdy kid he was”

Oscar is brave Oscar focuses on his writing. “Those were some fucking lonely weeks when all he had were his games, his books, and his words”

Oscar comes close Oscar falls in love with a girl in his SAT prep class (Ana Obregon)

Amor de pendejo Oscar on a date with Anna but does not try anything

Oscar in love Ready to use a gun against Ana’s boyfriend Manny because he hits her. But doesn’t go through with it.

2. WILDWOOD (Narrator is Lola)

Lola tells of the relationship between her and her mother Beli: “Things had been bad between us all year. How could they not have been? She was my Old World Dominican mother and I was her only daughter”.

1982-1985

3. THE THREE HEARTBREAKS OF BELICIA CABRAL (Narrator is Yunior)

1955-1962

Look at the princess Story of Oscar and Lola’s mother

Under the sea “No amount of wishful thinking was changing the cold hard fact that she was a teenage girl living in the Dominican Republic of Trujillo (…). It was like being at the bottom of the ocean. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you”.

La chica de mi escuela When Beli was 13, La Inca landed her a scholarship at El Redentor, one of the best schools in Bani. She didn’t have much in the way of friends and often felt alone.

Kimota! She met her first boy.

Numero uno She had an interest in Jack Pujols, “the school’s handsomest (read whitest) boy” but she was invisible to him.

Hunt the light knight Jack Pujols finally takes an interest in Beli.

Amor! She got caught with Jack having sex in a closet: “A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men”

El Hollywood Beli decided to go dancing at the club ‘El Hollywood’ where she meets the gangster: “Here he is, future generation of de Leons and Cabral: the man who stole your Founding Mother’s heart, who catapulted her and hers into Diaspora”.

The gangster we’re all looking for

The gangster was in the service of the dictator: “the Gangster adored our girl and that adoration was one of the greatest gifts anybody had ever given her”. But then “the protective bubble about their idyll finally burst and the troubles of the real world came rushing in”

Revelation Beli learns that she is pregnant: “She placed her hand on her flat stomach and heard the wedding bells loud and clear, saw in her mind’s eye the house that had been promised, that she had dreamt about”

Upon further reflection She should have aborted the baby

Name Game Beli suggested the name Abelard (her father’s name) for the baby.

Truth and consequences 1 The gangster was married to another woman.

Truth and consequences 2 He was married to the dictator’s sister

In the shadow of the jacaranda Beli was attacked by Trujillo’s personnel and saved in-extremis by her former colleagues.

Hesitation Like everyone at that time, “she underestimated the depth of the shit she was in”.

La Inca, the divine La Inca prayed the whole time Beli was gone hoping that she would be

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saved

Choice and consequences “They beat her like a dog. Like she was a dog. All that can be said is that it was the end of language, the end of hope. It was the sort of beating that breaks people, breaks them utterly”

Fuku vs. Zafa Beli’s survival must be evidence that she was not cursed but blessed.

Back among the living She survived the beating but they killed her baby.

La Inca, in Decline La Inca was not the same after that night of intense praying. It cannot be denied that after Beli’s departure La Inca’s hair began to turn a snowy white. Beli had to leave the country.

The last days of the republic She left the Dominican Republic to establish herself in the U.S. The man next to her on the plane would end up being her husband and the father of her two children.

4. SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION (Narrator is Yunior)

Yunior was attacked and Lola was “the one who took care of my sorry ass. Cooked, cleaned, picked up my classwork, got me medicine, even made sure that I showered”. To please her, he decided to live with Oscar during his college years. During that time, Oscar met a nice girl, Jenni Munoz.

1988-1992

PART II

Lola in the Dominican Republic to visit La Inca: “I want you to do well at school. I want you to visit me when you can. I want you to remember where you come from”

5. POOR ABELARD 1944-1946

The famous doctor Abelard Luis Cabral was Oscar and Lola’s grandfather, a surgeon. In those long days, the Cabrals were numbered among the “High of the Land”. Abelard had two daughters Jacquelyn and Astrid and a wife Socorro Hernandez Batista. The dictator considered all the good looking girls as his property, including Abelard’s daughter.

And so? The doctor expected first to be on the front page of the news, “which was how the regime began the destruction of a respected citizen such as him”

Santo Domingo confidential The way Abelard saw it, he only had to keep his head down, his mouth shut, his pockets open, his daughters hidden for another decade or two”.

The bad thing The whole family, including wife and daughters, were invited and Abelard did not come with them.

Chiste Apocalyptus The doctor was arrested by the Secret Police.

The Fall He spent his last night with his mistress. Three Secret Police officers in their shiny Chevrolet winding up the road to Abelard’s house. Already it’s the Fall.

Abelard in chains Abelard is taken in custody: “Before Abelard knew what was happening he was being shoved into a general holding cell that stank of malaria sweat and diarrhea and was crammed into what Broca might have called the “criminal class”.

The sentence No matter what you believe: in February 1946, Abelard was officially convicted of all charges and sentenced to eighteen years. “Whatever it was, the shit started coming at the family something awful and there are some people who would say it’s never ever stopped”.

Fallout Everyone in the family has been killed by the regime: “With a dead mom and a dad in prison, with the rest of the family scarce, the daughters had to be divided up among whoever would take them. Jackie got sent to her wealthy godparents in La Capital, while Astrid ended up with relatives in San Juan (…). In 1948, Jackie, the family’s Golden Child, was found drowned in her godparents’ pool. The pool that had been drained down to its last two feet of water. Her sister, Astrid, wasn’t much luckier. In 1951, while praying in church in San Juan, a stray bullet flew down in the aisle and struck her in the back of the head”.

The third and final daughter The orphan was passed on from family members to other family members.

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The burning La Inca found the third and final daughter who got burnt because she kept skipping out on work to attend classes. “La Inca had stared into her wild furious eyes and seen Abelard and Socorro staring back at her. Forget the black skin – it was her. The third and final daughter. Though lost, now found”.

Forget-me-naut Of those nine years, Beli did not speak. She embraced the amnesia that was so common throughout the Islands, five parts denial, five parts negative hallucination.

Sanctuary La Inca became the mother she never had. She taught the girl who to write, eat, dress, ad behave normally.

6. LAND OF THE LOST 1992-1995

The dark age After graduation, Oscar moved back home. He is now teaching English and history at his former school, Don Bosco. IT is still the same nightmare for him.

Oscar takes a vacation Oscar goes back to his home town in the Dominican Republic. “Homeboy was, for the first time in ten years, feeling resurgent; nothing seemed to bother him, not his students (…), not his loneliness, not his endless flow of rejection letters, he felt insuperable”.

The condensed notebook of a return to a nativeland

Oscar describes the Dominican republic after 10 years of absence.

Evidence of a brother’s past He’s smiling a lot and he is not wearing his fatguy coat.

Oscar goes native Oscar goes back to his native roots and returns to his inner nature

La beba Oscar meets a girl he again falls in love with: Ybon. She was kind and nice to Oscar, which was a surprise to him: “It was an unprecedented change in fortune, as though his threadbare Skein of Destiny had accidentally goten tangled with that of a doper, more fortunate brother.

A note from your author I know I’ve thrown a lot of fantasy and sci-fi in the mix but this is supposed to be a true account of the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

The girl from Sabana Iglesia He became lovesick with her and once again started spending a lot of time with her.

La Inca speaks He actually met her in a cabaret.

Ybon, as recorded by Oscar She travelled a lot and for such people Santo Domingo becomes “the smallest place in the world” but she still stayed there

What never changes Of course “miracles go so far” and they did not have any physical relationship with her either.

Oscar at the Rubicon Ybon starts mentioning her boyfriend, the captain.

Last chance People started shooting at their house.

Oscar gets beat Oscar got his first real kiss from Ybon but he got beaten for it.

Clives to the rescue He found Oscar after he got beaten: “Unconscious and bleeding out of both ears and looking like he was one finger tap away from dead”.

Close encounters of the Caribbean kind

Oscar remembered a dream in which “he was younger and more optimistic”

Dead or alive Oscar had heavy bruises: “If they noticed the similarities between Past and Present they did not speak of it”.

Briefing for a descent into hell Oscar was out for three days. In that time he had the impression of having the most fantastic series of dreams.

Alive As soon as Oscar got the OK from the doctor, La Inca “called the airlines”

Some advice Travel light

Paterson, again He returned home. He lay in bed, he healed. His mother so infuriated she wouldn’t look at him.

PART III

Yunior recounts that “that last day on our couch he looked like a man at peace with himself. A little distracted but at peace”.

7. THE FINAL VOYAGE

He flew one last time to the Caribbean.

Curse of the Caribbean For twenty-seven days he tried to seduce Ybon. He laid out some plans

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to marry her and to take her back to the States.

The last days of Oscar Wao He got killed for going after Ybon.

8. THE END OF THE STORY

Oscar’s mother felt guilty for not protecting him enough.

As for us Lola left Yunior and met someone in Miami which was where she had moved. She was pregnant and was getting married.

On a super final note Years and years now I still think about him.

The dreams During ten years, Yunior went through some rough patches.

As for me Yunior now lives in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, teaches composition and creative writing at Middlesex Community College. He learned from Oscar and sees himself as a “new man”.

As for us Every now and then, he sees Lola again.

Lola’s daughter is a beautiful girl: “She climbs trees, she rubs her butt against doorjambs, she practices malapalabras when she thinks nobody is listening. Speaks Spanish and English”. “If she’s her family daughter – as I suspect she is- one day she will stop being afraid and she will come looking for answers”.

The final letter He reveals that he did have sex with Ybon and that it was wonderful experience: “The beauty! The beauty!”.