Life as Fukú and Zafa

"[...] and I, Shabine, saw

when these slums of empire was paradise. 

I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,

I had a sound colonial education,

I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,

and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation."

Derek Walcott

Days have become weeks, and the weeks have become months. Maybe the story began much earlier, but the feelings of vulnerability, the crushing need to move, to do something, to swim, increased in the last few months. And when people are too far away, no matter how near they are, to understand you, when you get swallowed by your own angst, you stop moving. Stop speaking, stop feeling the other world, stop listening to your inner self, stop reading, stop writing. Just working. 24/24.

The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the first book that I have managed to finish after a long period of time, and the best that I have read this year. Not that there weren’t things in it which I disliked, but that kind of easy book which plays with (low) culture, with the reader, and the history of the Dominican Republic. I started it on a plane and while I was travelling, I managed to read half of it. What I really enjoyed was not the main character, Oscar – who is rather lame and not so well shaped – but the female characters that take control of the narrative in several chapters, the voice of the daughter who hates the abusive mother, the voice of this mother who tells the events of the past, and her journey to America, the voice of the warm grandmother/tia, who keeps the history of this cursed family and never leaves the Republic.

I also think that Junot Diaz, knowingly or unknowingly, plays with mirrors in this novel. I believe that Oscar’s family’s fukú (=really bad luck, curse) or Zafa (the counterspell of fukú) is a reflection of a simple definition of ordinary life (since the Dominican family portraited here is an ordinary one), that Trujillo’s lusting wishes, that cause so much damage to the Dominicans, are also a mild reflection of Oscar’s hopeless attemps in finding love and sex, that Lola the daughter, who makes everything to rebel against her mother, is a vivid image of Beli before being a mother.  

Oscar Wao is not a book about Oscar – thank God to that! – but a book which can be easily read on Sundays afternoons, when you are unable to read anything and you are lost in your own thoughts and want to escape your own mind. It is about life in the Dominican Republic and the Dominican spirit, about chasing the American Dream as a woman, about surviving in two different cultures.