The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years. It would have been one thing if like some of the nerdboys I’d grown up with he hadn’t cared about girls, but alas he was still the passionate enamorao who fell in love easily and deeply.” 

Growing up, Oscar is faced with the worst of both worlds. His romantic and sexual appetites are on par with those of a man like Yunior, yet his ability to successfully fulfill those appetites is practically nonexistent. As Oscar learns at the end of the novel, however, what he really craves isn’t sex, it’s intimacy. One of the central tragedies of the novel is that it takes him his whole short life to realize this.

“The next day at breakfast he asked his mother: Am I ugly? She sighed. Well, hijo, you certainly don’t take after me. Dominican parents! You got to love them!”

At no time in Belicia’s life as a mother is she seen as a warm presence for Oscar or Lola. This role stems from her own experience as a child, during which she received nothing but abuse until the age of nine. Thus, by the time the Cabral “curse” reaches the de León children, there is little that is supernatural about it. Rather, it is simply the same kind of generational trauma that afflicts millions of families in which a parent has been the victim of abuse. 

“She was this peculiar combination of badmash and little girl—even before he’d visited her house he knew she’d have a whole collection of stuffed animals avalanched on her bed—and there was something in the seamlessness with which she switched between these aspects that convinced him that both were masks, that there existed a third Ana, a hidden Ana who determined what mask to throw up for what occasion but who was otherwise obscure and impossible to know.” 

This description of Ana can be extrapolated to capture the entire Dominican American experience as Yunior sees it. For him, to be Dominican American is to navigate a sea of cultural incongruities. Mandates of toughness, nerdiness, passion, and propriety must all be maintained in varying degrees and in varying contexts. Thus, Yunior’s identity is neither Dominican nor American; it is a third hidden part of himself that decides which part he will play depending on circumstances.

“There was the initial euphoria of finding himself alone at college, free of everything, completely on his fucking own, and with it an optimism that here among these thousands of young people he would find someone like him. That, alas, didn't happen. The white kids looked at his black skin and his afro and treated him with inhuman cheeriness. The kids of color, upon hearing him speak and seeing him move his body, shook their heads. You're not Dominican. And he said, over and over again, but I am. Soy Dominicano. Dominicano soy.” 

While Lola has mastered the art of code-switching, and while Yunior has successfully buried his pain and insecurities to project the kind of conventional masculinity needed to navigate these spaces, Oscar is unable to do either. Too nerdy to be accepted by his Dominican peers and too Dominican to be White, Oscar fails to locate the tribe so many other high school outcasts mercifully find once they reach college. It is one of the book’s central tragedies that Oscar, whose lineage carries the deep scars of the Trujillo regime, is denied his Dominican identity because of how he looks and speaks.

“And as soon as she became sick I saw my chance, and I’m not going to pretend or apologize; I was my chance and eventually I took it. If you didn’t grow up like I did then you don’t know and if you don’t know it’s probably better you don’t judge.” 

When Belicia is diagnosed with breast cancer, Lola views her illness as a way out. Contrary to reflecting heartlessness on Lola’s part, her attitude reflects the extent to which being Belicia’s daughter is difficult for Lola. Abused herself as a child, Belicia takes every opportunity to tell Lola she is fat, ugly, or stupid. Having grown up in a household without love, Lola doesn’t believe she owes Belicia anything, not even when the woman gets cancer.

“Beli had the inchoate longings of nearly every adolescent escapist, of an entire generation, but I ask you: So fucking what? No amount of wishful thinking was changing the cold hard fact that she was a teenage girl living in the Dominican Republic of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated. This was a country, a society, that had been designed to be virtually escape-proof.” 

In some descriptions, Trujillo is depicted as a source of supernatural evil, the Sauron in Yunior’s mythology of the Dominican Republic. Here, however, he is seen in all his toxic—and entirely human—masculinity, depicted as an abusive husband or father from which there is no escape. This practice of cutting off a country’s citizenry is common to authoritarian regimes, from the Soviet Union to the Khmer Rouge in 1970s Cambodia.

“The downside of this of course was that she was completely alone. (It wasn’t like In the Time of the Butterflies, where a kindly Mirabal Sister steps up and befriends the poor scholarship student. No Miranda here: everybody shunned her.)” 

This is a reference to Julia Alvarez’s biography of the Mirabal sisters, In the Time of the Butterflies, which, along with Oscar Wao, is one of the most influential and widely read books about the Trujillo era. In that book, a young Minerva Mirabal befriends a classmate named Sinita, a poor girl who is there at the prestigious school on scholarship like Belicia. While this story may have a real-life analogue, Yunior rejects that kind of sentimentality in his telling of Belicia’s upbringing.

“Telling Beli not to flaunt those curves would have been like asking the persecuted fat kid not to use his recently discovered mutant abilities. With great power comes great responsibility...bullshit. Our girl ran into the future that her new body represented and never ever looked back.” 

For Belicia, the attention she now attracts from men constitutes her first taste of power—yet that “power” facilitates her downfall. First, it leads her into a tryst with Jack Pujols, which in turn causes her to lose her scholarship. The Pujols affair is merely a dress rehearsal for Belicia’s involvement with the Gangster, which leaves her on the brink of death in the canefields and later forced into the Dominican diaspora. Amid the toxic masculinity of Trujillo’s dictatorship, the power granted to a woman because of her body is largely illusory.

“Had she forgotten the suffering that she had endured in her Lost Years in the pursuit of education? The costs? The terrible scars on her back? (The Burning.) Perhaps she had, perhaps the prerogatives of this New Age had rendered the vows of the Old irrelevant.”

It is ironic that Belicia, having risked her life at age nine to attend school against her abusive Azua guardians’ wishes, now rejects education entirely to work at a Chinese restaurant. As Yunior points out, perhaps it is a reflection of how much Belicia changes as she moves further into young adulthood, and how the power she perceives herself to possess outweighs the power she could ever amass through education. An alternative explanation, however, is that this is the same old Belicia, this time rebelling against a parent who insists on education—La Inca—as opposed to one who prohibits it. 

“There it was, the Decision That Changed Everything. Or as she broke it down to Lola in her Last Days: All I wanted was to dance. What I got instead was esto, she said, opening her arms to encompass the hospital, her children, her cancer, America.” 

Unlike Lola, who attributes her hardship to generational trauma, and unlike Oscar and Yunior, who believe in curses, Belicia blames her misfortune on one man: the Gangster. Whether the agent of misfortune is the Gangster, a curse, or inherited trauma, the answer always goes back to Trujillo. This quote also reveals just how poorly Belicia thinks of her life after leaving the Dominican Republic and joining the diaspora.

“Not a day passed when he did not fulminate against Batista (That ox! That peasant!) or Castro (The goat-fucking comunista!) or CIA chief Allen Dulles (That effeminate) who had failed to stop Batista’s ill-advised Mother’s Day Amnesty that freed Fidel and the other moncadistas to fight another day. If Dulles was right here in front of me I’d shoot him dead, he swore to Beli, and then I’d shoot his mother dead.” 

This passage reflects the extent to which Trujillo was utterly alone near the end of his reign, having alienated Cuba’s old leader Fulgencio Batista, Cuba’s new leader Fidel Castro, and most of all the United States. At this time, the CIA under Allen Dulles was sending arms to anti-Trujillo revolutionaries in the hope that they would successfully assassinate the dictator. It was only a matter of time before Trujillo was out, making Belicia’s downfall as much a matter of bad timing as anything else.

“Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.”

Yunior makes this observation when discussing Belicia’s attitude toward her pregnancy and her behavior in its wake. Had Belicia simply kept her joy to herself and delivered the baby quietly, she might never have been forced to leave the Dominican Republic, yet her joy doesn’t feel real unless she shares it with her friend, who spreads the information around the neighborhood, inadvertently dooming Belicia. 

“There are those alive who claim that La Fea had actually been a pro herself in the time before the rise of her brother, but that seems to be more calumny than anything, like saying that Balaguer fathered a dozen illegitimate children and then used the pueblo’s money to hush it up—wait, that’s true, but probably not the other—shit, who can keep track of what’s true and what’s false in a country as baká as ours—what is known is that the time before her brother’s rise had made her una mujer bien fuerte y bien cruel; she was no pendeja and ate girls like Beli like they were pan de agua—if this was Dickens she’d have to run a brothel—but wait, she did run brothels!”

Amid all the bloodshed and oppression, Yunior points out the utter absurdity of life under Trujillo. There is a “stranger than fiction” vibe to this era of the Dominican Republic that simultaneously repulses and attracts Yunior, given his love of storytelling and literature. This passage, which blends truth, rumor, and myth, is representative of Yunior’s broader approach to telling the story of the Trujillato.  

“Even your Watcher has his silences, his páginas en blanco. Beyond the Source Wall few have ventured. But no matter what the truth, remember: Dominicans are Caribbean and therefore have an extraordinary tolerance for extreme phenomena. How else could we have survived what we have survived?” 

Though as “Watcher” it is Yunior’s job to fill the páginas en blanco of the Dominican people, there are mysteries like the mongoose that are beyond his sight, occluded by the “Source Wall”—which, in DC Comics lore, only an individual as intelligent as Lex Luthor can pass through. This quote also plays into the theme that a nation will often lean on supernatural explanations to cope with collective trauma. This is certainly true of Yunior and Oscar, who are both amenable to the idea that Trujillo is an alien or spirit imbued with ancient cosmic power.

“Hail, Dog of God, was how he welcomed me my first day in Demarest. Took a week before I figured out what the hell he meant. God. Domini. Dog. Canis. Hail, Dominicanis.” 

These are Oscar’s first words to Yunior when he moves into the dorm room. They show him to be funny, without embarrassment, and proud of his Dominican heritage, three qualities that define Oscar at his best. In addition to being Yunior’s first impression of Oscar, the quote is the reader’s first impression of Oscar since the darkness of his high school days. 

“You think people hate a fat person? Try a fat person who’s trying to get thin.” 

The ridicule Oscar faces as he jogs through campus is relentless. With this is mind, it is entirely understandable why Oscar quits Yunior’s exercise regimen only a few weeks into it. For Oscar, it isn’t only about the physical pain or the immense difficulty of changing biologically and psychologically ingrained habits. It is the emotional pain of having his peers compound his already-significant shame over his body image.

“These days I have to ask myself: What made me angrier? That Oscar, the fat loser, quit, or that Oscar, the fat loser, defied me? And I wonder: What hurt him more? That I was never really his friend, or that I pretended to be?”

Yunior’s fury at Oscar’s decision to quit his exercise regimen is best understood as an expression of toxic masculinity that hides deep insecurities. To be defied by a “fat loser” is to Yunior an unforgivable attack on his fragile masculine ego. Not unlike Trujillo, Yunior feels the need to dominate everyone, man and woman, in a zero-sum system he views as fundamentally adversarial.

“That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.” 

Unlike Oscar and Yunior, Lola doesn’t believe in curses. Her reason is simple: human behavior and unjust systems are capable of causing just as much misery as a hex or even the Eye of Sauron. Just because Lola rejects the existence of fukú, however, that doesn’t mean she is capable of breaking the cycle of pain that continues to afflict the descendants of Abelard Cabral. For Lola, a cycle of inherited trauma rooted in authoritarian oppression is even harder to break than a mystical curse; there are no magic words that can remove the spell.

Unlike Oscar and Yunior, Lola doesn’t believe in curses. Her reason is simple: human behavior and unjust systems are capable of causing just as much misery as a hex or even the Eye of Sauron. Just because Lola rejects the existence of fukú, however, that doesn’t mean she is capable of breaking the cycle of pain that continues to afflict the descendants of Abelard Cabral. For Lola, a cycle of inherited trauma rooted in authoritarian oppression is even harder to break than a mystical curse; there are no magic words that can remove the spell.

Here, Yunior explores the ambiguous and mysterious nature of zafa and fukú. From Belicia’s perspective, this pregnancy would seem to be an act of zafa; after all, if Socorro never became pregnant, Belicia wouldn’t even exist. On the other hand, Belicia is doomed by fukú to endure a lifetime of pain—pain she passes on to her children. As with the mongoose that saves her life only so she will experience more suffering, the lines between zafa and fukú are far blurrier than Yunior presents them at the beginning of the novel.

“What can I tell you? In Santo Domingo a story is not a story unless it casts a supernatural shadow [...] Oscar, as you might imagine, found this version of the Fall very very attractive. Appealed to the deep structures in his nerd brain. Mysterious books, a supernatural, or perhaps alien, dictator who had installed himself on the first Island of the New World and then cut if off from everything else, who could send a curse to destroy his enemies—that was some New Age Lovecraft shit.” 

To accept the existence of a figure like Trujillo without attributing his evil to supernatural forces is difficult for the Dominican people, says Yunior. This is particularly true of Oscar, whose pop culture diet has conditioned him to view systemic injustices and personal trauma as the consequences of some cosmic battle between good and evil, rather than the consequences of toxic hyper-masculinity and racism projected on a national level. Of particular note here is Yunior’s mention of H.P. Lovecraft, a highly influential horror writer whose work is nevertheless informed by his deep racism and homophobia. 

“They drove past a bus stop and for a second Oscar imagined he saw his whole family getting on a guagua, even his poor dead abuelo and his poor dead abuela, and who is driving the bus but the Mongoose, and who is the cobrador but the Man Without a Face.” 

This is the last time the Mongoose will appear to Oscar. The vision leaves him with a grim impression of his entire family being driven to their doom by a figure who is increasingly associated with fukú. This vision further confirms the suspicion that the Mongoose—ostensibly an agent of zafa but arguably the opposite—works in concert with the Man Without a Face, who is unquestionably an agent of fukú. (Cobrador means ticket-taker in Spanish).

“Ten million Trujillos is all we are.” 

Throughout the entire book, the characters struggle against the cultural incongruities that stem from having one foot in America and one foot in the Dominican Republic. With this conclusion, however, Lola severs the ties that bind her to the Dominican Republic. This decision comes after the Dominican government refuses to prosecute the capitán or his goons for Oscar’s murder. Though Trujillo has been dead for over 30 years by this point, his legacy of blood and injustice persists, and Lola wants no part of it.

“In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.” 

These are the final lines spoken by Dr. Manhattan in Alan Moore’s The Watchmen. They come after Adrian Veidt “saves” the world from a nuclear war that would kill billions by engineering an extraterrestrial attack that kills millions. According to Yunior, it is the only panel in any of Oscar’s comic books that he has ever circled in ink. This line suggests that Oscar has come to terms with the fact that the cycle of trauma and bloodshed—whether it is fukú or plain old human injustice—is unbreakable. It is a grim conclusion and one that Yunior cannot shake.