Junot Díaz’s 2007 debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a genre-straddling story that brings together a variety of different forms of writing, including “the highbrow New Yorker aesthetic; the immigrant novel; the family saga; the secret history; the Latin American novela del dictador (dictator novel); the growing body of Dominican American literature; and, as Díaz points out in an interview with Callaloo, also ‘the African Diaspora tradition’ (Céspedes and TorresSaillant 904)” (Miller 92). At the heart of this generically complex work is the narrative of one family, whose migration from the Dominican Republic to the United States allows the novel to engage with a wide variety of social and political issues and circumstances. Although the novel is narrated by Yunior, a Dominican American man with nerdy interests but a macho exterior, it follows the de Leon family. This family consists of our titular character, Oscar, an internally and externally nerdy, virginal, US-born Dominican boy, as well as his proud sister Lola and their difficult mother Beli, whose epic and troubled family and personal history in the Dominican Republic takes up a significant portion of the novel and is shown to greatly affect the lives of Oscar and Lola. This essay will focus on Oscar Wao as a novel of migration. In particular, it is a novel that explores the ways that the past and the ancestral homeland influences the lives of the children of immigrants through an engagement with myths. There are several different kinds of myths in the novel, including traditional folkloric concepts of curses and blessings, mythical reconstructions of the distant and recent history of the Dominican Republic, family mythologies, and what I call “myths of the future”: comic books and science fiction.

Díaz’s novel has attracted a great deal of critical attention in the years since its publication, approaching it from a number of standpoints. This diversity reflects the richness and multifaceted nature of the text. Much criticism of the novel is, unsurprisingly, concerned with genre, particularly in relation to science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism (Bautista, Lopez-Calvo, Miller, Hanna, Nielson). Daniel Bautista proposes that the novel creates a new genre he calls “comic book realism,” which “irreverently mixes realism and popular culture in an attempt to capture the bewildering variety of cultural influences that define the lives of Díaz’s Dominican-American protagonists” (42). Bautista sees this new genre as a reworking of magical realism, a genre of literature that is particularly associated with Latin America. Some well-known magical realist writers are Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and Jorge Luis Borges. Bautista usefully points out that many writers and critics see the mystical elements of magical realism as authentic representations of traditional and indigenous beliefs’ influence on Latin American society (Bautista 42-43). Bautista argues that Oscar’s position as the child of Dominican immigrants gives him a complicated relationship to the Dominican Republic. For Bautista, this complicated relationship sets Oscar as a character apart from those found in Latin American magical realist novels and the novel itself apart from the magical realist genre. Bautista also defends the novel’s use of speculative fiction and fantasy, arguing that it is more than window dressing and denying that it is implicitly anti-nerd, as another critic, Henry Wessell, accuses it of being (Bautista 42). He does not, however, see speculative/science fiction and fantasy as mythologies in their own right. This chapter attempts to contextualize the novel’s fantastical elements as mythological in a way similar to the more traditionally mythical aspects of the text, identifying science/speculative fiction particularly as myths of the future.

Some of the other criticism focuses on the political and historical implications of the text, some in order to praise the novel’s contributions to conversations about Dominican history and diasporic politics (Rader) and others to critique the novel’s political lens or a perceived lack of it (Neilson). José David Saldivar’s “Conjectures on ‘Americanity’ and Junot Díaz’s ‘Fukú Americanus’ in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” uses the novel’s concept of the fukú americanus, a kind of curse that will be discussed in more detail below, to consider the novel’s interventions into the silenced histories of oppression in the Caribbean. While Saldivar makes some excellent points about the novel, he does not address the mystical elements of the fukú. Elena Machado Sáez sees the novel as a “foundational fiction for the Dominican American diaspora” (523). She also sees the novel as failing to confront the relationship between the novel’s narrative structure and the Dominican hypermasculinity that the novel critiques. Dixa Ramirez also critically engages the novel’s depiction of masculinity; she connects the hypermasculinity so present in the text with the “a distinctly circum-Atlantic discourse of magic” (384). I will be engaging more fully with Ramirez’s argument below.

To ground my discussion of myth in this essay, I draw on the ideas of the Caribbean writer and theorist Wilson Harris. He describes fable and myth as “variables of the imagination” (Harris 18) and builds a strong connection between myth and metaphor; myth’s figurative nature creates within and outside of texts a way of seeing that is made clearer through comparison. He also draws out the inherently creative, meaning-making nature of myth, which is a significant aspect of how the term myth is traditionally used. This can be seen even in its Oxford English Dictionary definition: “a traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification for something such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon” (“Myth”). Myth helps people to make sense of the world, particularly those aspects of it that are most difficult to understand. There are two main parts of Harris’s way of thinking about myth that make it relevant to this essay: the way that myth changes when it is moved across spaces and places and the claim that myth can help the oppressed understand and build on the past, more so than even counter-histories.

Myths migrate with the people who believe them. This movement can cause change in both the myths themselves and the ways that people relate to their myths. Wilson Harris explores this change by comparing West African and Caribbean vodun (popularly known as voodoo) practices. He points out that West African vodun practices are conservative in that they are focused on maintaining unchanging ties with ancestors, while Caribbean vodun self-consciously goes against cultural norms (Harris 26). Because vodun in the Caribbean was actively suppressed during the colonial period and even afterwards, and because it was the result of not just one community’s traditional beliefs but a mixing of many groups’ religious traditions, it was necessary for it to be adapted to these particular circumstances. For Wilson, this “re-assembles an inter-tribal or cross-cultural community of families” (27), a myth that creates new kinds of relationships in the diaspora. The kinds of mythical concepts and figures found in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao come from this kind of mixed heritage. Díaz points this out early in the novel, when the narrator is explaining the fukú, the novel’s most central mythological concept. The fukú is not distinct to the Dominican Republic; versions of it can be found all over the Caribbean: “The Puetrorocks [Puerto Ricans] want to talk about fufus, and the Haitians have some shit just like it. There are a zillion of these fukú stories” (Díaz 6). The fukú is not only something that exists in several places, it is actually created by migration.

In this novel, the fukú, “generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World” (Díaz 1), is born out of the suffering of enslaved Africans and brought to the Americas where it becomes “the death bane of the Tainos” (1), the indigenous people of Hispaniola, the island which contains the Dominican Republic and Haiti, as well as several other islands. Critically for this novel, the fukú is not just contained in the Caribbean; it travels. The narrator even suggests that the fukú was what killed John F. Kennedy and lost the Americans the Vietnam War (4-5). But the fukú comes in two sorts, little and large (1). The little version, which is the fukú’s more general definition as “a curse or doom of some kind,” follows its subjects wherever they go. Thus, when Oscar’s mother Beli moves to the United States, the fukú is not left behind but continues to resonate in her life and the life of her children. This migration creates another set of changes to the relationship between the fukú (as well as other mythical concepts) with those who inherit its legacy.

For Harris, myth can be a more helpful and powerful way of understanding the past than counter-histories, by which I mean the writing of history from the perspective of the oppressed. While official history refers to historical narratives that support the views of those who have power, such as governments and ruling classes, counter-history refers to historical narratives that try to center the experience of common people and those who lacked political power. Harris argues that counter-histories use all the same techniques and premises as official history and therefore cannot really challenge it (Harris 23). Instead, Harris states,

Oppressed writers and artists are empowered by a turn to the mythical, the legendary, and the epic. Harris contends that “the true capacity of marginal and disadvantaged cultures resides in their genius to tilt the field of civilization so that one may visualize boundaries of persuasion in new and unsuspected lights to release a different apprehension of reality, the language of reality, a different reading of texts of reality” (50). So, for Harris, using myth and mythical language can open up new ways of looking at the world that not only helps us to understand the past better, but also to build a better future, a future that creates “the hope for a profoundly compassionate society committed to freedom within a creative scale” (28-29).

Díaz seems to share Harris’s belief in the power of myth as he weaves numerous mythical concepts and ideas into his story to explore Dominican history as well as contemporary American culture and society. Importantly, Díaz’s novel does not suggest that myths need to be believed in for them to be powerful, for either good or ill. As our narrator, Yunior, says, “It’s perfectly fine if you don’t believe in these ‘superstitions.’ In fact, it’s better than fine—it’s perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you” (Díaz 5). This passage can be read as suggesting that whether or not you believe in curses, bad things still happen to you, but it also seems to suggest that it is in the best interest of the curse for you not to believe in it. Perhaps this is because the fukú, if you accept that it exists, also has an antidote: the zafa. The zafa is described as a “surefire counterspell that would keep you and your family safe” (7). A curse of mythical proportions requires a mythical defense against it. It is significant that this defense is “a simple word” (7) as this text is deeply invested in the power of language. Indeed, the book is framed in relation to this concept: “Even now as I write these words I wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of sorts. My very own counterspell” (7). By framing the novel in these terms, Díaz suggests that recognizing a “curse” is necessary for coming to terms with it, and that to have any hope of overcoming it, a creative force is required.

As I have pointed out, the concept of the fukú is grounded in the specific historical context of Hispaniola. The fukú is associated with Christopher Columbus, “the Admiral” (Díaz 1). The fukú americanus is associated with Columbus in two ways, as it is “also called the fukú 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” (1). The novel’s beginning therefore provides an alternative way of reading the history of the Dominican Republic, an alternative that emphasizes the supernatural. This novel is not a realist or realistic counter-narrative. Instead, it takes on the language of myth to produce a different vision of the past of the island that makes clear the ways that the past and the island maintain an influence on even those who spend their lives away from it. But the novel also reveals the ways that distance, both physical and emotional, shapes different ways of understanding and dealing with the difficult legacies that the novel addresses. Saldivar rightly points out that Díaz’s “remarkable framing of the fukú americanus as an alternative unit of analysis beyond the unit of the nation-state further allows him to think through the US and Eurocentric structures of hegemonic thought and representation that continue to dominate the globe today” (133); the fukú is not contained by Hispaniola even if it is born there.

The fukú is also associated with another important figure from the Dominican Republic’s history: its long-reigning dictator, President Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, most often known throughout the text as Trujillo, although also as “El Jefe, the Failed Cattle Thief, and Fuckface” (Díaz 1). He was president from 1930 to 1938 and then from 1942 to 1952. According to Yunior, “no one knows whether Trujillo was the Curse’s servant or its master, its agent or its principal, but it was clear he and it had an understanding, that them two was tight” (2-3). A significant chunk of the novel tells the story of Oscar’s ancestor Abelard Cabral’s struggles under Trujillo, who brought about the once-prosperous family’s destruction. Yunior gives three possible explanations for this destruction: “an accident, a conspiracy, or a fukú” (243); one banal, one realistic but more complex, and one supernatural. Yunior notes, “Most of the folks you speak to prefer the story with a supernatural twist. They believe that not only did Trujillo want Abelard’s daughter, but when he couldn’t snatch her, out of spite he put a fukú on the family’s ass” (243). This supernatural reading of the event makes Trujillo seem powerful, but it also makes him seem evil; it supports Dixa Ramirez’s claim that “Oscar Wao echoes the larger Dominican society’s adoption of a magical ‘shorthand’ for discussing the machinations of unjust power” (386). In the Dominican Republic of Oscar Wao, supernatural explanations provide a language for power.

The novel also uses another sort of language to explore its themes: the language of speculative fiction and fantasy. At first, it seems to make a distinction between the mythical and the speculative but then turns around to question whether this distinction really holds. Yunior questions whether Oscar would have liked his classification of the story as a fukú story, suggesting that Oscar would have seen it as more sci-fi or fantasy. After all, Yunior imagines Oscar asking, “What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles?” (Díaz 6). Yunior’s response, “But now that I know how it all turns out, I have to ask, in turn: What more fukú?” (6), at first seems to suggest that he sees the mythical as a more appropriate lens through which to see the events of Oscar’s life and the Dominican Republic as a place. Saldivar refers to “Oscar’s double sciences—the Global North’s science fiction and Césaire’s Global South’s new science or discipline of négritude” (131), the latter of which I argue can be seen as including the language of myth, growing from an Afro-Caribbean spiritual cosmology, that is weaved into the novel. Yet, Yunior continues to use science fiction and fantasy allusions throughout the narrative. One of the novel’s epigraphs is even from a Fantastic Four comic: “Of what import are brief, nameless lives . . . to Galactus??” (emphasis in the original). This choice of epigraph is not just a signal of the novel’s use of comic book language; it also sets up one of the major themes of the novel. Galactus, a supervillain, does not care for brief and nameless lives, but this novel raises one such life to mythical proportions. The language of speculative fiction and fantasy are in keeping with Oscar’s role as a nerd; he is a child with Star Trek dolls (Díaz 13), a teen “painting his D&D miniatures or reading the latest Stephen King” (18) and eventually a young adult planning to write “a quartet of science-fiction fantasies that would be his crowning achievement. J.R.R. Tolkien meets E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith” (269). But Oscar is not our narrator; Yunior is. It is Yunior who names Oscar’s eventual killers Solomon Grundy and Gorilla Grod after two DC Comics villains (294). Indeed, Yunior actually acknowledges his inclusion of these discourses in the novel; “I know I’ve thrown a lot of fantasy and sci-fi in the mix” (285) he admits. The inclusion of speculative language in the text’s narrative is just as purposeful as the use of what is considered more obviously mythical language, such as the fukú.

The narrative’s use of science fiction and fantasy allusions and illustrations suggests that both approaches, the traditionally mythical and the speculative, are valid. Indeed, it seems to suggest that they are even more productive when used together. Bautista acknowledges this coming together when he states that “the notion that Oscar’s love for the speculative genres actually help [sic] him connect with older Dominican and familial beliefs represents an important reconciliation between what had first seemed like two very distinct traditions in the novel” (49). Myth is generally seen as concerned with the past and science fiction as concerned with the future, while fantasy can work in either direction, but generally on an alternate plane. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao suggests that the modern world is not where myth goes to die but rather to be reborn. The novel makes clear that comic books and science fiction are myths just as much as the fukú—myths of the future rather than myths of the past, but nonetheless myths that tell us important things about ourselves, what we think, what we value, who we are, who we want to be, and who we fear being. Even as Yunior is applying the logic of the fukú to the death of Columbus and the US’s defeat in Saigon, he is comparing the inescapable nature of the fukú to “Darkseid’s Omega Effect” and “Morgoth’s bane” (Díaz 5), the former a DC Comic’s supervillain and the latter an evil character from the fantasy works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Díaz ties together the mythology of his ancestors and the mythology of comic books, fantasy, and science fiction so that they cannot be separated. Both sets of mythical language are a means of interpreting the present, one oriented towards the past and one oriented towards the future, and both shaping his characters’ reading of the world. This is significant because it reminds us of the Janus figure, facing the past and the present, and its associations with migration and diaspora. The consistent relevance of more traditional mythical language does not undermine the fact that the reality of the immigrant and second-generation characters’ lives lends itself particularly well to being expressed through the language of the speculative genres: “You really want to know what being an X-man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest” (22). Speculative language gives insight into racialized second-generation experiences.

For the immigrant and second-generation characters of the novel, the power of language and the language of power are important parts of how they can understand their own lives and pasts as well as the lives and pasts of others. Importantly, for these diasporic characters, this understanding does not have to concern only blood relations. While the protagonist of the novel is Oscar, the narrator is Yunior, who tells the story of Oscar and his family. When writing about the silence that surrounds the Cabral family’s past, Ramirez argues that “the mystery of the Cabral family tragedy that begins with Abelard’s imprisonment becomes a traumatic silence that cannot be broken, despite Oscar’s attempts to write his family’s history” (390). But Yunior does write the story of the Cabral family, even if his telling of it is incomplete. The family story is transmitted, just not by a blood relation. As an outsider to the family but involved in its present moment through complex social bonds—ex-boyfriend, sometimes roommate, biographer—Yunior can hold the story for the family’s next generation, Lola’s daughter Isis, who is the imaginary recipient of the novel. Yunior has his own family, and he hints that they too had their run-ins with Trujillo, but it is Oscar and his family’s story that has its “fingers around [Yunior’s] throat” (Díaz 6) and which he chooses to transmit intergenerationally. Regardless of what we might consider to be his own reasons for needing to tell Oscar’s story, Yunior’s storytelling resists the silencing of the past, a silencing that is a direct result of the power Trujillo had over the people and the discourse of the Dominican Republic.

By planning to transmit the stories of not only the Cabrals but also of Oscar to Isis through the language of myth, Yunior can imagine a future in which the American-born third generation daughter of his ex-girlfriend can transcend the difficult past that comes before her. Yunior’s hope in Isis is not only for Oscar’s family; it is also for himself. His investment in her is deeply personal; he states, “[she] could have been my daughter if I’d been smart, if I’d been ----” (Díaz 329). This silence is one of the moments in the text that reveals Yunior’s simultaneous realization of the consequences of his toxic masculinity as well as his inability to express it or to avoid acting on it. Yet despite his flaw, or perhaps because of it, he sees the importance of Isis even without a blood-relationship as the lack of it “makes her no less precious” (329). The text suggests that intergenerational relationships need not be based on bonds of blood in immigrant families; they can be based on a larger, more unstable, but also more inclusive sense of connection. In Isis there is the coming together of all of the mythical discourses that make up the novel. She is the wearer of three “azabaches,” jet amulets, “the one Oscar wore as a baby, the one Lola wore as a baby, and the one Beli was given by La Inca upon reaching Sanctuary,” which Yunior describes as “powerful elder magic. Three shields against the Eye” (329). Thus, she is protected by a connection to her ancestors as well as by traditional magic objects. This is “backed by a six-mile plinth of prayer. (Lola’s not stupid; she made both my mother and La Inca the girl’s madrinas [godmothers]). Powerful wards indeed” (329-330); the spiritual legacy of La Inca, who raised Beli, shored up by that of Yunior’s mother, who is occasionally mentioned throughout the novel, is also present for Isis. All of this, however, is not enough to protect her forever.

Yunior ominously predicts that “one day, though, the Circle will fail. As Circles always do. And for the first time she will hear the word fukú. And she will have a dream of the No Face Man. Not now, but soon” (Díaz 330). Just as Oscar, Lola, and Yunior were not free from the forces that shaped their parents’ lives, neither is Isis. The fukú and its physical form, the No Face Man, who appears to Beli, Oscar, and Lola at various points in the text, persist and still need to be grappled with even at yet another remove from their origin. The difference, this section of the text seems to suggest, is that the second generation has already created some of the groundwork for coming to terms with this complicated legacy, work that can be completed by the third. When Isis comes “looking for answers” (330), Yunior plans to be ready. This penultimate section of the novel is written as a projection into the future; there is no guarantee that these events will take place, just hope. Yunior imagines that Isis will come, and he will show her everything he has kept: “I’ll take her down to the basement and open the four refrigerators where I store her tio’s books, his games, his manuscript, his comic books, his papers” (330). He will have set up the basement in such a way that she can stay with all of these things as she needs to, as many nights “as it takes” (330), but as it takes to what? Yunior’s great hope is that “if she’s as smart and as brave as I’m expecting she’ll be, she’ll take all we’ve done and all we’ve learned and add her own insights and she’ll put an end to it. That is what, on my best days, I hope. What I dream” (330-331). It is significant that he expects that she will come to his home to see Oscar’s things; he does not plan to give them to her but rather to have her visit with them. Yunior volunteers to bear the weight of Oscar and his family’s struggles so that it is available to Isis, but she is not burdened by it. She will take with her the knowledge and the spiritual legacy of her forebears, blood-related or otherwise, but without having to drag their literal baggage behind her.

After Yunior has presented his imagined future meeting with Isis, he turns once again to one of the comic books that most prominently features in the novel: Frank Miller’s Watchmen. Yunior produces a sort of false ending for the novel through quoting the actual ending of the comic. While he has expressed hope that Isis will “put an end to it” (Díaz 331), the “it” presumably referring to the fukú, he once again seems to question his belief that this is possible, through his repetition of the comic’s ending. Adrian Veidt asks Dr. Manhattan for validation for his act of killing a sizable portion of New York City’s population in order to save the world by bringing people together against a common enemy, saying, “I did the right thing, didn’t I? It all worked out in the end” to which Dr. Manhattan replies, “In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends” (331). This ominous suggestion leaves the novel’s perspective of the future ambiguous; both the imagining about Isis and this invocation of Watchmen are stories, one imagined when Yunior is feeling hopeful and the other turned to when he feels “downtrodden or morose” (331). Neither is, yet, real. Oscar fell victim to the fukú, should you choose to believe in it, and Yunior is not free of it either, whether you believe in it or not. Added to this are the two stories of the final section. One is the never-delivered package of the things that Oscar wrote while in the Dominican Republic, what he claimed was “the cure to what ails us . . . The Cosmo DNA” (333). Like the book his grandfather Abelard wrote (246), his own analysis of the Dominican condition is lost. What does reach Yunior is the final story of the novel, the story of Oscar and Ybón’s weekend away. This feels like a very strange way to end the novel. Machado Sáez sees this ending as Yunior “resolving” the uncomfortable queerness of Oscar (548). However, I would argue that by ending the novel in this space of intimacy—and not just sexual penetration but

and yet having this space be so disjointed, a supplement to the part of the text that seemed complete—suggests instead an imaginative act of wish fulfilment, a gift from Yunior to Oscar of what he most longed for, not what Yunior wanted him to have. Perhaps this story is the only way that Yunior could end his zafa; knowing as the reader does that it is his relationship with Ybón that gets Oscar killed, perhaps the novel is making clear that fukú and zafa cannot be separated from one another and that within every fukú lives the seed of its own zafa and, more unsettlingly, within every zafa is the seed of the fukú.

Like many novels focused on immigrant characters, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao splits its narrative between the ancestral homeland and the site of settlement. The origins of Dominican identities and worldviews are central to the novel, but so is the Dominican American experience and the second-generation American experience more broadly. This is particularly reflected in the novel’s use of both deeply Dominican mythical discourses and deeply American mythical discourses. Just as any form of the Dominican American experience is necessarily affected by both of those places, so is this Dominican American novel. Just as immigrant and second-generation lives are greatly influenced by the past, particularly the past in the ancestral homeland, they are also very much invested in the future in the site of settlement. This simultaneous grappling with the past while trying to face and prepare for the future is reflected in much immigrant writing, and Junot Díaz is able to masterfully display these two priorities through his use of both myths of the past and myths of the future.