Diaz’s 2008 novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, there are two words from that define the purpose and contents of this book. Fuku and Zafa. These words come from the Dominican Republic, where most of the story’s setting takes place. Fuku is a curse, and Zafa is a counterspell. The novel’s main character Oscar Wao and his family, the Cabral family, are said to have been cursed with the fuku, and while they may have had their better times with zafa, fuku is the most powerful in their lives. Exploring
“FUKÚ” is an atavistic deadly curse that follows the De León family, and everything that can go wrong for them does. However, I believe that the fukú is only a consequence of their actions and a way for them to rationalize their misfortunes. The characters are using fukú as a crutch in place of taking responsibilities for their own actions. This is because they don’t want to accept the fact that things don’t always go the way they want them to. So they choose to blame the fukú for making their problems
great influence; they write for many reasons including to inform, express an emotion, or even to persuade. With skill in rhetoric, writers may have the power to convince readers to succumb to their beliefs. In the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz displays this great influential power of a writer and compares it with the ideas of dictatorship. Díaz uses two types of dictators in the book: a Dominican dictator named Rafael Trujillo and the narrator of the story, Yunior. Both hold
Past history reveals the various tragedies of many lives lost while under the rule of the dictator, Trujillo. “The Farming of Bones” and “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” were two different stories of innocent characters who lived and were affected during Trujillo’s reign. These stories targeted the central problems that the characters went through and the amount of impact it caused them through this cruel leadership. During that time, many were oppressed and were forced to cope with the life
Junot Díaz’s The Brief Life of Oscar Wao explores the intricacies of colonial politics as they repeat in different iterations throughout the centuries. The novel traces the conception of colonial politics and its subsequent evolution and change from the moment Christopher Columbus sets foot on Hispanolia to the current imperial influences of the United States in Latin America and the dictators that influence allowed to flourish. This transmogrification of colonial power and force over half a millennium
by introducing the concept of fukú and zafa to create this sort of surrealness. Fuku is known as a curse. To work against this fuku, you have to use zafa, which can be defined as being the opposite, hence good luck. The narrator ,Yunior, suggests that his narrations of the stories in this novel is sort of this zafa, which he wishes will help get rid of the fuku that is dwelled within the protagonist,Oscar. In the novel, Yunior points out that the arrival of fuku into the Dominican Republic is
of different racial categories. In addition, the strained and chained dislodgment of millions of indigenous Africans by white hegemony immensely added to the current racial hybridity of the Americas. Junot Diaz’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao brilliantly illuminates the struggles of the immigrant as he tries to find a sense of belonging in a new environment whilst carrying a heavy, culturally inherited baggage that is part of an individual identity. In this particular case, Diaz applies
she comes into contact with his wife, Trujillo’s sister and, thus, the fuku. She almost dies at the orders of La Fea, but is saved with the help of the Mongoose. She escapes to the US, but the move does not take “her any further away from the fukú, since the source of the curse is imperial power itself” (Mahler 127). Which brings us our superhero and the last instance of the fukú as described in the Cabral story, Oscar. Oscar also experiences the racial politics that his mother experiences, because
migrated to the United States. Yet while Diaz relies on the fiction as a zafa to call out this imperialism on Dominicans, Gomez-Barris draws from personal testimonies of Chilenos exiles and their children. And to reenact the violence, rather than write a book, she and a group of 9 chilenos creates a performative art project. In conclusion, Oscar Wao is a three layered plot that chronicles the life of a young Dominican boy, Oscar Wao. As a hybrid text, it uses footnotes to provide a historical narrative
No other image in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is so central to the novel’s purpose than Yunior’s dream near the end. In this dream, he witnesses a figure that looks like the deceased Oscar except with a mask, and on occasion without a face, holding a blank book open. This image is a metaphorical representation of the reason why the novel is being written at all, and why Yunior took on the task of writing it himself. Like many dictatorial regimes, the Trujillo administration sought to eliminate