The Haunting of an Irredeemable Curse

          Junot Díaz, in his first novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), centrally ties the narrative and its characters to the past through its reflections on the tyrannical dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (El Jefe) over the Dominican Republic (r. 1942-1952). The chronology of this disjointed novel spans from 1944-1995, cycling through the experiences of three generations of the Cabral family. I want to argue that the concept of the “fukú,” a culturally driven and interminable curse for the Cabrals, is an unavoidable continuation of the past to such an extent that it drastically affects the destinies of the central characters in their present temporalities, ultimately leading to Oscar’s death. Furthermore, this curse coincides with Stephen Best’s thesis in “On Failing to Make the Past Present” (2012), in that the fukú epitomizes the inability, especially in terms of familial and racial ties, of receiving in the present some compensation for or redemption from the deleterious events of the past.
          To give a quick sketch of Trujillo’s bloody and oppressive reign, one need not look further than the Parsley Massacre (1937), in which Trujillo’s secret police murdered some 30,000 Haitians. Race (specifically blackness as undesirable), therefore, became something that permeated the social consciousness of Dominicans. Best concerns himself primarily with the rise of “the history of the black Atlantic… through loss [which] can in turn be sustained only through more tales of its loss” (458) and, moreover, the historical framework of the black Atlantic narrative that provides a progression that “forged a society from a human catastrophe” (457). Nonetheless, the historical representation of the undesirability of blackness in the Dominican Republic is a central concern in Díaz’s work, since slavery has a history outside of the Atlantic slave trade that is significant and irreconcilable. Belicia, Oscar’s mother, “was born black,” a terrible curse in its own right for Dominican children (Diaz 248) -- “and not just any kind of black. But black black... and no amount of fancy Dominican racial legerdemain was going to obscure the fact. That’s the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child’s black complexion as an ill omen” (Diaz 248). Because of her blackness, she was sold as a child menial into various abusive foster homes at an early age. As a result of this narrative, I find one of the central questions with which Best concerns himself to be especially applicable to Díaz’s novel. Best asks: “Through what process has it become possible to claim the lives and efforts of history’s defeated as ours either to redeem or to redress?” (454). The Cabrals, following “the bad thing” (Díaz 227) Abelard Cabral said about Trujillo during a drunken night at a bar with some of El Jefe’s thugs, are defeated and cursed indefinitely, leading to an irredeemable future. Interestingly, the moment that the fukú arises during Abelard’s imprisonment is the same moment that Belicia is born, further connecting blackness with accursedness.
          Conversely, Best’s claims, echoing the arguments of David Scott, that with such historically barred possibilities, “we have only our present conjuncture, only our current predicament” (Best 456), controvert the historical past (of the curse) that Oscar feels to be central to his being, which the narrator, Yunior, also slowly recognizes to be an inescapable truth. Yunior narrates: “On the outside, Oscar simply looked tired… Inside, he was in a world of hurt… He was turning into the worst kind of human on the planet… He didn’t want this future but he couldn’t see how it could be avoided, couldn’t figure his way out of it. Fukú. The Darkness.” (Díaz 268). History, then, becomes something for the Cabrals that is particularly irredeemable through accursedness, but also inextricably linked to their fate. Oscar’s sister, Lola, on one of her last intimate nights with Yunior, claims: “Ten Million Trujillos is all we are” (Díaz 324). Thus, she retroactively casts the curse not only on her immediate family, but on the diaspora of all Dominicans affected by Trujillo’s reign. In fact, in a nerdy (yet oddly applicable) reference to Tolkien, Yunior says, “Sauron’s evil was taken by ‘a great wind’ and neatly ‘blown away,’ with no lasting consequences to our heroes; but Trujillo was too powerful, too toxic a radiation to be dispelled so easily. Even after death his evil lingered” (Díaz 156). The adverse effects of Trujillo’s policies consequently amplify the results of the fukú upon the Cabrals, while simultaneously connecting the characters to their ancestral past.