Junot Diaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Daz

2007

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This is the long-awaited first novel from one of the most original and memorable writers working today.

Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku the curse that has haunted the Oscars family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.

Daz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Daz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.

PART I

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tanos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fuk americanus , or more colloquially; fuk generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the fuk of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite discovering the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best (what Oscar, at the end, would call the Ground Zero of the New World), the Admirals very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fuk, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours. No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuk on the world, and weve all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fuks Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not.

But the fuk aint just ancient history, a ghost story from the past with no power to scare. In my parents day the fuk was real as shit, something your everyday person could believe in. Everybody knew someone whod been eaten by a fuk, just like everybody knew somebody who worked up in the Palacio. It was in the air, you could say, though, like all the most important things on the Island, not something folks really talked about. But in those elder days, fuk had it good; it even had a hypeman of sorts, a high priest, you could say: Our then dictator-for-life Rafael Lenidas Trujillo Molina.

For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history: Trujillo, one of the twentieth centurys most infamous dictators, ruled the Dominican Republic between 1930 and 1961 with an implacable ruthless brutality. A portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulato who bleached his skin, wore platform shoes, and had a fondness for Napoleon-era haberdashery, Trujillo (also known as El Jefe, the Failed Cattle Thief, and Fuckface) came to control nearly every aspect of the DRs political, cultural, social, and economic life through a potent (and familiar) mixture of violence, intimidation, massacre, rape, co-optation, and terror; treated the country like it was a plantation and he was the master. At first glance, he was just your prototypical Latin American caudillo, but his power was terminal in ways that few historians or writers have ever truly captured or, I would argue, imagined. He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up. Famous for changing ALL THE NAMES of ALL THE LAND MARKS in the Dominican Republic to honor himself (Pico Duarte became Pico Trujillo, and Santo Domingo de Guzman, the first and oldest city in the New World, became Ciudad Trujillo); for making ill monopolies out of every slice of the national patrimony (which quickly made him one of the wealthiest men on the planet); for building one of the largest militaries in the hemisphere (dude had bomber wings, for fucks sake); for fucking every hot girl in sight, even the wives of his subordinates, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of women; for expecting, no, insisting on absolute veneration from his pueblo (tellingly, the national slogan was Dios y Trujillo; for running the country like it was a Marine boot camp; for stripping friends and allies of their positions and properties for no reason at all; and for his almost supernatural abilities. Outstanding accomplishments include: the 1937 genocide against the Haitian and Haitian-Dominican community; one of the longest, most damaging U.S.-backed dictatorships in the Western Hemisphere (and if we Latin types are skillful at anything its tolerating U.S.-backed dictators, so you know this was a hard-earned victory, the chilenos and the argentinos are still appealing); the creation of the first modern kleptocracy (Trujillo was Mobutu before Mobutu was Mobutu); the systematic bribing of American senators; and, last but not least, the forging of the Dominican peoples into a modern state (did what his Marine trainers, during the Occupation, were unable to do).

No one knows whether Trujillo was the Curses servant or its master, its agent or its principal, but it was clear he and it had an understanding, that them two was tight . It was believed, even in educated circles, that anyone who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fuk most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond. If you even thought a bad thing about Trujillo , fu , a hurricane would sweep your family out to sea, fu , a boulder would fall out of a clear sky and squash you, fu , the shrimp you ate today was the cramp that killed you tomorrow. Which explains why everyone who tried to assassinate him always got done, why those dudes who finally did buck him down all died so horrifically. And what about fucking Kennedy? He was the one who green-lighted the assassination of Trujillo in 1961, who ordered the CIA to deliver arms to the Island. Bad move, capn. For what Kennedys intelligence experts failed to tell him was what every single Dominican, from the richest jabao in Mao to the poorest gey in El Buey, from the oldest anciano sanmacorisano to the littlest carajito in San Francisco, knew: that whoever killed Trujillo, their family would suffer a fuk so dreadful it would make the one that attached itself to the Admiral jojote in comparison.

You want a final conclusive answer to the Warren Commissions question, Who killed JFK? Let me, your humble Watcher, reveal once and for all the Gods Honest Truth: It wasnt the mob or LBJ or the ghost of Marilyn Fucking Monroe. It wasnt aliens or the KGB or a lone gunman. It wasnt the Hunt Brothers of Texas or Lee Harvey or the Trilateral Commission. It was Trujillo; it was the fuk. Where in coazo do you think the so-called Curse of the Kennedys comes from?

Heres one for you conspiracy-minded fools: on the night that John Kennedy, Jr., and Carolyn Bessette and her sister Lauren went down in their Piper Saratoga, John-Johns fathers favorite domestic, Providencia Pardes, dominicana, was in Marthas Vineyard cooking up for John-John his favorite dish: chicharrn de polio. But fuk always eats first and it eats alone.

How about Vietnam? Why do you think the greatest power in the world lost its first war to a Third World country like Vietnam? I mean, Negro, please . It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.) A smashing military success for the U.S., and many of the same units and intelligence teams that took part in the democratization of Santo Domingo were immediately shipped off to Saigon. What do you think these soldiers, technicians, and spooks carried with them, in their rucks, in their suitcases, in their shirt pockets, on the hair inside their nostrils, caked up around their shoes? Just a little gift from my people to America, a small repayment for an unjust war. Thats right, folks. Fuk.

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