sundaram filling the blank page - people.fas.harvard.eduexpose/issues/issue_2010/pdf/2010... · for...

Sivakumar S. Sundaram 1

SIVAKUMAR S. SUNDARAM

Filling the Blank Pages in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Before 1951, our orphaned girl had lived with another

foster family, monstrous people if the rumors are to be

believed, a dark period of her life neither she nor her

madre ever referenced. Their very own pagina en

blanco. (78)

– Junot Díaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

UNOT DÍAZ’S NOVEL THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO

demands that its interpretation grapple with historical forces writ large. For as much as it purports to tell the story of a single, central family, it is thoroughly embedded in the vivid, unflinching, and tragic history of an entire country: the Dominican Republic. Indeed, to take the novel only at its face value – as a recounting of the history of the de Leon family stretching from the Dominican Republic under Rafael Trujillo to diaspora in New Jersey – is to rob it of vital context and some of its most compelling themes. That family history, the simplified main storyline, follows the overweight, sci-fi-obsessed Oscar de Leon1 as he struggles with his Dominican identity and his cruelly

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Filling the Blank Pages 2

unrealized desire for love while growing up in New Jersey. After vicious cycles of failure and depression, Oscar finally finds love in the form of a middle-aged prostitute in the Dominican Republic, only to meet death by gunfire at the command of her jealous boyfriend, a corrupt cop. Interspersed among the pieces of Oscar’s story are episodes from the lives of his grandfather Abelard and his mother Beli that trace out a calamitous family history haunted by the presence of a mysterious curse, the fukú. But even the most personal and individual of these storylines are always tied inextricably to the history of the Dominican people as a whole, a feat that Díaz accomplishes with frequent, discursive footnotes providing commentary and context. Accordingly, the life of Beli Cabral, who is both Oscar’s strong, imposing mother and the “orphaned girl” in the epigraph above, can be read as a microcosm of the larger forces of history and identity that pervade the book. At the beginning of her episode in the novel, Beli has spent the first nine years of her life estranged from her family, living as a house slave in a slum of the Dominican Republic. Having just been rescued by her aunt La Inca, Beli has no history and no identity save for those of oppression and cruelty. For her, the past is not a source of comfort and belonging. Instead, it is a “dark period” never to be referenced, a pagina en blanco (Díaz 78)2 or a blank page. While the images of darkness and this blank page may seem contradictory, their juxtaposition illuminates a critical distinction. Beli’s memories of that period of her life are not


simply lacking in brightness, dimmed and darkened by time. On the contrary, she and La Inca have attempted to eliminate those memories altogether; they have consciously sought blank slate. La Inca seeks to fill the void of the young girl’s past with stories of “her family’s illustrious history” (Díaz 78), hoping that she will adopt the mantle of her ancestry and restore the fallen “House of Cabral.” In other words, La Inca provides Beli with the source of a new identity via retellings of a shared family history. Crucially, these retellings are not simply dry, factual accounts of history; they are vibrant, impassioned recreations of “her Family’s Golden Glorious Past” (Díaz 81). This summary of the novel, and particularly La Inca’s project of retelling a shared family history, resonates strongly with Stuart Hall’s theory of identity formation undertaken by entire cultures. Hall, a cultural theorist who has also written on cultural hegemony and the evolving forms of diaspora, challenges the conventional notion that cultural identity arises naturally out of a constant, objective history shared by a particular group. Instead, Hall argues, this identity is actively and continuously constructed from mutable, subjective recreations of that history (237). For Hall, cultural identity is “grounded [not] in the archeology, but in the retelling of the past” (235). Hall develops this definition with particular regard to the cultural identity of the Caribbean peoples, a diverse group for whom the concept of a shared history centered on Africa is more myth than fact. His analysis, though focused on the Caribbean as a whole, applies


quite well to a subset of that group, the Dominican people, who take center stage in Junot’s novel. In fact, Hall’s theory of cultural identity provides a useful apparatus for teasing out one possible interpretation from Díaz’s fragmented novel. Like cultural identity, the novel is constructed in defiance of the notion of “fully rounded narratives” (“The Exploding Planet of Junot Díaz”). In this sense, we can read the novel as a history, one that seeks to describe and shape the cultural identity of its Dominican characters. But the novel also gives us insight into an unintended consequence of Hall’s theory of cultural identity. In Díaz ’s novel, then, cultural identity becomes a site of conflict and disruption, a site in which redemption is possible but never complete.

he theme of identity – its origins, its power, its pitfalls – pervades the novel, at both individual and collective levels. A

particularly salient thread in the novel, a thread that Hall’s insights will help us to analyze, involves the conflict lurking in the identity of the Dominican people at large. The history of this culture, scarred by the violence of colonialism and the horrors of slavery, mirrors Beli’s own experiences in The Brief Wondrous

Life of Oscar Wao; for the Dominicans who populate Díaz’s novel, the tortured past is, to some degree, a blank page, a dark period they prefer to be left unexamined. Consequently, the Dominican identity as rendered by Díaz is, like Beli’s identity, somewhat damaged, somewhat lacking. It seems ripe, then, for

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Hall’s dynamic process of reinvention. Indeed, an overarching plot of the novel concerns the consequences of the damage in the Dominican identity and opposing efforts to exploit or heal that damage. Hall may categorize the act of recreating the past by retelling it as a positive and primarily artistic effort, but in the context of Díaz’s novel, that act becomes a critical weapon for those who battle to redefine Dominican cultural identity. In the novel, the dictator Rafael Trujillo capitalizes on the conflict within his people’s identity by seducing them with a palatable if whitewashed retelling of their history; in this sense, their history becomes his. His opponent is Yunior de Las Casas, who befriends Oscar in college and narrates the novel many years after Trujillo’s death. Striving to undo the legacy of Trujillo’s erasures, Yunior presents the novel as a rigorously truthful history of Oscar’s family and the Dominican Republic. He writes his retelling in order to heal the identity of his people.

To see this cultural healing, we need to first understand the central problem of the novel’s characters. Here, Hall’s analysis of the Caribbean identity provides an effective lens to examine the nature of the original conflict in the Dominican identity as depicted in the novel. As Hall explains, Caribbean cultural identities contain, among others, three simultaneous presences: Présence Africaine, Présence Européenne, and Présence Américaine (240). In the novel, Présence Africaine – for Hall, “the site of the repressed” (240) – manifests itself in the mixed-race Dominicans’ disdain for, and denial of, their African origin.


So deep is the Dominican obsession with whiteness, or more critically, not-blackness, that at her birth, Beli’s dark skin is viewed as an “ill omen” (Díaz 248). This “racism of color” (Hall 242) in the novel can be read as a manifestation of what Hall calls Présence Européenne. This présence, he says, has caused the Caribbean people to view themselves through the eyes of their European colonizers. The qualities of “exclusion, imposition, and expropriation” (242) that Hall attributes to Présence Européenne appear in the novel in the form of the Trujillo dictatorship, marked by systemic racism and oppressive interference. Présence Américaine, Hall’s final presence, refers to the land of the New World as the space where the European and African worlds collided; it signifies for Hall displacement, marginalization, diaspora (243). For Hall, the coexistence of these Présences in Caribbean identity evidences the complex fluidity that subverts the view of identity as stable, singular, and anchored. We may be tempted here to read this dynamism as creating conflict, but in Hall’s view, this is not necessarily the case. However, we may well expect some negative repercussions or conflicts to emerge from such a troubled collective past; as mixed-race descendants of the colonists, the slaves, and the indigenous peoples, the Dominican people share a history of both hegemony and victimization. Indeed, in Díaz’s novel, unlike as in Hall’s real-world analysis, the instability and contradiction within the Dominican identity produces a major consequence: the fukú.


Simply described, the fukú is a curse. Over the course of the novel, however, the fukú develops a remarkable density of associations and potential meanings that never truly resolve, leaving its interpretation to inference. Yunior introduces the fukú in the preface to the novel, describing it as a curse unleashed by the European colonization of the New World, the cataclysmic event responsible for the conflict between what Hall would recognize as the three Présences (1). On one level, the fukú is simply a curse like other curses, bringing misfortune to a woman who had “been denied happiness because she laughed at a rival’s funeral” (Díaz 5). But the fukú is actually much more insidious. It transcends simplistic notions of cause and effect, consuming even the people who seem to wield its power. Yunior claims that Christopher Columbus “was both [the fukú’s] midwife and one of its great European victims” (Díaz 1); even Trujillo, the pinnacle of evil in the novel, may have been either “the Curse’s servant or its master” (Díaz 3). From these clues, we may deduce that the fukú represents both colonialism and its legacy, which brought the Dominican people into being and cursed their existence. The curse weighs heavily on the minds of the Dominicans in the novel; as Yunior points out, “everybody in Santo Domingo has a fukú story knocking around in their family” (Díaz 5). According to Hall’s theory of identity formation, the prevalence of the fukú in retellings of the past would signify the centrality of the curse to a collective Dominican identity. We can readily interpret the fukú as the manifestation of the conflict


between Hall’s Présences; consequently, we could argue that conflict is a part of the Dominican identity. While fukú stories are common within individual families, the story of the fukú’s ultimate origin, the unpleasant history of colonialism and slavery, is rarely told. Yunior accuses his people of a willingness to ignore the truth of a disagreeable past, to engage in an “amnesia that was so common throughout the Islands . . . the power of the Untilles” (Díaz 258-9). Applying Hall’s theory of cultural identity, it would seem that the identity the Dominican people have constructed is built from an incomplete retelling of the past, one that ignores an uncomfortable truth. And yet, the fukú lives on, both in their stories of the past and in their identity. Admittedly, the idea of the fukú as a literal curse does not follow directly from its origins in the struggle between the Présences; perhaps the curse is a punishment for the Dominican people’s hypocritical endeavor to forget the conflict that defines them. In this more supernatural sense, the fukú is the effort of inescapable history to force the Dominican people to recognize its existence.

hus can we see that Stuart Hall’s theory of cultural identity applies succinctly to the world of The Brief Wondrous Life of

Oscar Wao. But we can also see that Díaz’s novel complicates Hall’s perspective. The novel, in other words, allows us to see a troubling ramification of an unstable cultural identity: a conflict that resists the efforts of the Dominican people to deny it. We

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can therefore raise the question: how do various forces within the novel confront the damage within a Dominican identity represented by the fukú? The fukú as described by Yunior participates in an intimate but ambiguous association with Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic around midcentury. Given that the fukú

appears to be a historical force, we can begin to unravel the relationship between Trujillo and the curse by analyzing the dictator’s predilection for erasing history. Footnotes throughout the novel detail Trujillo’s relentless pursuit of dissenters and others who pose a challenge to the regime; common to all of these instances is Trujillo’s attempt to delete the past of his victims. After the imprisonment of Beli’s father Abelard, for example, Trujillo ensures that “not one single example of his handwriting remains” (Díaz 246). Another footnote tells the story of Joaquin Balaguer, a former member of the Trujillo regime who promises to reveal the identity of a journalist’s murderer via a pagina en blanco in his autobiography – a purposefully constructed hole in history – to be filled upon his death (Díaz 90). The history of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo is replete with such paginas en blanco, both figurative and literal. Even when the dictator does not interfere directly with history, the fear he engenders in his people does it for him. As a result, in trying to learn the truth behind Abelard’s story from his descendants, Yunior discovers “within the family a silence that stands monument to the generations . . . . A whisper


here and there but nothing more” (Díaz 243). So dominant is Trujillo’s power to erase the past that even a proud family history can vanish into whispers and silence once touched by the cruel fingers of his regime. The power of erasure held by Trujillo in the novel holds true to the real-life dictator’s method of rule. His regime sought to construct a false history designed to forge a new, “pure” cultural identity for the Dominican Republic, an identity that Yunior might describe as free of the fukú. Trujillo’s approach to recreating history is exemplified by a biography of the dictator written in 1957 by Abelardo Nanita, a former member of Trujillo’s cabinet. Nanita’s section on “Biographical Data” claims that Trujillo descended from “pure Spanish stock” and, on his mother’s side, from “the France of Napoleon,” side-stepping the fact that his maternal grandmother was half-Haitian (xiii). Nanita’s biography reveals the extent to which the historical figure of Trujillo erased part of his own genealogical history by replacing it with a narrative of European purity. In addition, Nanita sets up Trujillo as the ideal Dominican in helping to construct for his people a new identity, one that deifies whiteness and racial purity. His treatment of the history of Trujillo’s rise to power emphasizes the dictator’s utmost humility and patience while neglecting to mention his penchant for violence, and he conceals the truth in favor of a version of history more palatable as a story of origin for the new, Trujillo-centric Dominican identity (Nanita 39).


Indeed, the version of the past presented by the Trujillo regime is closer to founding epic than history. By focusing on Trujillo’s flawlessness and the idealized origins of his regime, Nanita’s biography conforms to what M.M Bakhtin calls the “constitutive feature” (13) of the epic: “the transferral of a represented world into the past” (13). In other words, the epic rests on an idealized version of the world projected into the past by people living in the present. For Nanita and Trujillo, this “represented world” lacks conflict and is marked by racial purity; in Bakhtin’s words, it possesses “a radical degree of ‘completedness’” (14), by which he means an unrealistic coherence and lack of ambiguity. The Trujillo regime records not factual history but history as it might have occurred in the untroubled “represented world,” providing an alternative narrative to the true history of violence and fragmentation. Such a narrative is crucial for the Trujillo regime’s goal of constructing a unified state out of a population fraught with division. Trujillo’s method of dealing with the embattled Dominican identity, therefore, is to conceal true history with a pagina en

blanco that naturally becomes the basis for an epic narrative of wholeness, whiteness, and purity. Out of this new narrative – in the words of Hall, a “retelling of the past” (235) – may arise a new cultural identity, similarly whole, white and pure, itself a blank page. Trujillo’s methods and success raise disconcerting implications for Hall’s conception of cultural identity. In the first


place, the instability of an identity comprised of so many conflicting Présences engenders a desire for wholeness, for a “certain imaginary plenitude,” as Hall puts it (245). As a result, the Dominican people are especially susceptible to Trujillo’s deceptive promise of an identity free of conflict. Willing to follow him, they further their “amnesia” in attempting to ignore their unpleasant history. Moreover, the means by which Trujillo accomplishes his seduction are precisely those that Hall attributes to the artist or storyteller; the dictator, in this instance, crafts an epic narrative. Hidden beneath the apparent democracy of cultural identity, defined by the people’s own re-imaginings of history, are the seeds of exploitation by political authority.

It seems, at this point, that the image of the blank page in the novel stands for repression, erasure, and concealment. Whether its cause is traumatic experience (as it is for Beli) or the interference of a dictator, blankness signifies an absence of viable history. In another sense, the blank page represents the false veneer of wholeness and purity concealing true, conflicted history. Viewed from such an angle, the dream that Oscar de Leon remembers following his vicious beating in the canefields on the Haitian border appears quite sinister:

An old man was standing before him in a ruined bailey, holding up a book for him to read. The old man had a mask


on. It took a while for Oscar’s eyes to focus, but then he saw that the book was blank. The book is blank. Those were the words La Inca’s servant heard him say just before he broke through the plane of unconsciousness and into the universe of the Real. (302)

The age of the old man and the setting of the dream in the ruins of a castle suggest that Oscar encounters the past, specifically a past of destruction. But the blankness of the book, a collection of paginas en blanco, suggests that the story of this past is untold, perhaps silenced by colonialism and dictatorship. Interpreted in this manner, the dream forces Oscar to confront the emptiness of a history suppressed by centuries of authoritarian rule and cultural self-deception.

Trujillo, of course, is not the only individual with the ability to recreate history; Yunior, too, as the novel’s narrator, has the same ability. Perhaps, then, we can consider Yunior’s narrative history (and, be extension, the novel itself) as a counterweight to the kind of history and identity forged by Trujillo. Putting these two forces together, and looking into possible ramifications for a theory of cultural identity, will help us piece together a better understanding of the novel’s cultural and historical place.

s Yunior’s narrative implies, the blank book signifies not only the suppression of the past but also the possibility of A


its recreation. Five years after Oscar’s death, Yunior begins to have a version of the blank book dream, this time with Oscar behind the mask. Yunior notices that Oscar’s “eyes are smiling” and thinks to himself, “Zafa” (Díaz 325), which, as explained in the preface, is the counterspell to the fukú. The preface closes with Yunior describing the book to follow as “a zafa of sorts” (Díaz 7), a fact that suggests a crucial connection between Yunior’s dream of Oscar and his own authorship of the book. When Yunior, waking up after yet another cocaine trip, finally responds to the dream, he says, “OK, Wao, OK. You win” (Díaz 325), implying that the dream is in fact responsible for Yunior’s writing of the book. The project of writing the book, of recording the history of the de Leon family, seems to have rescued Yunior from a dangerous life; more important, it seems to have come from Oscar. From this perspective, Oscar’s presentation of the blank book to Yunior is not a cruel reminder of the erasure of the past but instead an invitation to fill the book with the history that it lacks.

As a zafa, the book is more than a simple retelling of the past; it is redemptive. For Hall, who refrains from making value judgments about cultural identities, the concept of redemption through reimagining the past may be irrelevant. But Oscar and Yunior seem to believe that telling the history of the de Leon family will, somehow, counteract the fukú that haunts them. On his second return to the island, having recently seized on the fukú as “bigger game afoot” (Díaz 306) than his physical injuries,


Oscar spends much of his twenty-seven days researching and writing something, the nature of which is never explicitly revealed. But Oscar does drop several cryptic clues. In reference to his prolific writing, Oscar tells Yunior on the phone, “Almost had it”; later, during his impassioned address to the men who will kill him, Oscar alludes to “the thing that he had done, the thing they could no longer stop” (Díaz 320-321).

Given that all of this happens after Oscar has virtually the same blank-book dream as Yunior, it might be reasonable to conclude that the apparently critical task which occupies Oscar in his last days is the same task that he later passes on to Yunior; it is the task of filling the paginas en blanco with the history of his family and of the fukú. This project of retelling is explicitly a project of redemption. Just before his death, Oscar writes a letter to his sister Lola telling her to expect a package from him containing his writings, which he calls “the cure to what ails us . . . . The Cosmo DNA” (Díaz 332), referencing a wish-fulfilling machine from a comic book series. By the end, he believes he has uncovered the secret to stopping the succession of the fukú from generation to generation of his family. Even Yunior comes to share this belief, hoping that one day, Oscar’s niece will cull the work of her predecessors and add her own material “to put an end to it” (Díaz 331).

Still, an important question remains: how is Yunior and Oscar’s project of redemption to be realized via the retelling of the past? As usual, the novel offers no definitive answers, though


neither does Hall, who addresses only the functional effects of artistic representation of the past, not its intended purpose. However, it seems that a critical element of the effort is the act of revealing the truth, of recovering history and undoing its erasures. First and foremost, Yunior, as the narrator, sets himself up in opposition to the Dominican tendency toward amnesia in dealing with a troubled past. He never hesitates to relay the depressing circumstances of Oscar’s youth, and only once, in describing his grandfather Abelard’s time in a death camp, does he suggest that he withholds gory details for the sake of his readers (Díaz 250). Furthermore, Yunior goes to great lengths to uncover lost historical truth, unearthing with difficulty the “secret history” of Abelard’s downfall, an alternative account suppressed by the Trujillo regime (Díaz 245). Ubiquitous footnotes outlining the history of the Dominican Republic likewise attempt to reverse Trujillo’s suppression of historical truth. In fact, Yunior’s narrative project, cleaving closely to factual history, combats Trujillo’s legacy of half-truths and silences on behalf of the entire Dominican Republic. Only in this historical context does the full breadth of Yunior’s redemptive quest become clear. Yunior is less concerned with the fukú specific to Oscar’s family than with what he calls “the Great American Doom” (Díaz 5), the fukú that afflicts the Dominicans as a people. Consequently, his quest strikes at the heart of the fukú: the unwillingness of his people to accept their embattled history. Yunior forcibly thrusts the ugly


conflict between Hall’s three Présences into the reader’s awareness, highlighting among other things his own people’s continued use of criadas, or house slaves, and their hypocritical hatred of dark skin (Díaz 253). In so doing, he shatters the illusion wrought by Trujillo of a whole, white, pure Dominican identity. More critically, Yunior’s attack pierces beyond Trujillo to the origin of Dominican self-deception in the catastrophe of colonization and its consequence: the clash between Hall’s three Présences. Nowhere does he let the Dominican people remain free of blame. By retelling the “true” history of the Dominican Republic, Yunior strives to restore the identity of his people, filling in the paginas en blanco not with false wholeness but with an embrace of the truth. Here, it seems, lies the coherent narrative thread for which we have been searching, the novel’s own raison d’être. Yunior writes his narrative to redeem the storyteller’s tradition of reimagining the past from its corruption and exploitation at the hands of the likes of Rafael Trujillo.

y Hall’s same logic, Yunior’s retelling of the past can never decisively define the Dominican identity. One might argue,

of course, that Yunior’s steadfast insistence on the truth lends his history more authority than the narratives it attempts to replace. From this perspective, Yunior’s version of the past should supplant Trujillo’s with relative ease because the former is rooted in reality and the latter in deception. Adopting Yunior’s version of history, then, would be a simple reversion to the

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natural state of affairs, a state more likely to endure than delusion. But the novel challenges the possibility of an objectively true account of history. Yunior acknowledges his inability to provide the full story in all cases because the past is rarely recoverable; in the end, he says, “you’ll have to decide for yourself” (Díaz 243). Furthermore, as Hall suggests, the formation of cultural identity is not simply a matter of “archeology,” or the uncovering of historical truth; it is a matter of “production,” of reimagining and reinventing the past (235). The longevity and viability of a particular retelling of the past arise not out of its faithfulness to history but out of its value to the identity of a people. That value, however, is by no means a constant. As demonstrated by both the epic narrative constructed by Trujillo and the gritty, realistic account of Yunior, retellings of the past are powerful but short lived.

The lack of permanence of such attempts to redefine the Dominican identity in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao would likely not surprise Hall, for whom identity is “subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power” (236). On the other hand, Hall’s theory does not quite account for the ways in which, in this novel, the act of retelling the past becomes a weapon in a battle with heavy consequences. Hall emphasizes the relative freedom afforded by such a dynamic process of cultural identity formation, which allows a fragmented people to construct an identity that binds them together without denying their differences. Yunior’s truth-seeking narrative certainly


seems to fit with this hopeful perspective, but Trujillo’s manipulation of the past through his own narrative complicates Hall’s vision. Cultural identity for Díaz is a site of conflict, in which redemption is possible but never realized. In the world of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, as Dr. Manhattan says, “Nothing ever ends” (Díaz 331).

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Endnotes

1 Oscar de Leon is the character’s given name. “Oscar Wao,” from the title, is the nickname his tormentors give to him based on their mispronunciation of “Oscar Wilde.” 2 Throughout the novel, Díaz eschews the custom of distinguishing foreign language words via italics; this device is a crucial part of his self-described attempt “to forge a voice that had in it as many linguistic registers and idioms as [he] could fit” (“Junot Díaz: An Interview”). In this essay, however, foreign language words will be italicized for the sake of clarity but will appear in plain format in quotations from the novel.


Works Cited

Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. Díaz, Junot. “The Exploding Planet of Junot Díaz.” Interview by Evelyn Ch’ien. Granta. Granta Magazine Online, 2008. Díaz, Junot. “Junot Díaz: An Interview.” By Reese Kwon. Narrative. Narrative Magazine, 2008. Nanita, Abelardo R. Trujillo: The Biography of a Great Leader. New York: Vantage Press, 1957. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Theorizing

Diaspora: a Reader. Ed. Jana Evans Braziel et al. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Bakhtin, M.M. “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

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