October 15 - 18, 2008 

When Fukú renders history a footnote: Voluntary Forgetfulness and Involuntary Remembering in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Daniela Rogobete

Department of Department of English and American Studies

University of Craiova, Dolj

Romania

This paper tries to analyse the problematic juxtaposition of different layers of history and accordingly, of historical and political memory as presented in Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The paper attempts a disambiguation of the terms colonizer and colonized in the Dominican space described by Diaz and focuses upon the efforts to recuperate the “history-from-below” by endowing the Other with an audible voice and by re-inscribing his/her erased or silenced stories into the main narrative of History. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a novel that makes the reader commute between different geographical and cultural spaces (The Dominican Republic and USA), between different historical periods (the Spaniards’ conquest, colonial and postcolonial times and (post-) Trujillo Era), between fantasy and reality – giving rise to a continuous process of contrasting recorded vs. remembered historical truth. By merging family saga and Dominican history, Diaz emphasizes the discrepancy between the officially recorded History and the experienced History, and the ensuing clash of discourses and ideologies. People seem to be caught in this gap, filling it with personal and collective stories, with myths and superstitions, and with their conflicting versions of history. All these approaches relativise the historical truth which is banished at the bottom of the page as a footnote or trivialized within the text under the guise of rumours, “bochinche”, hearsay. The paradox comes from the fact that in the end, people’s memory, however subjective, biased and prone to superstitions as it might be, is more reliable than the official records. Escaping the gap created by the overlapping layers of colonial, postcolonial, neo-colonial history represents the general movement in Diaz’s novel. It is represented by a dual process of distancing and alienation – on a spatial level by embracing the exile and becoming part of the Diaspora and on a mental and spiritual level by cultivating some mechanisms for achieving voluntary forgetfulness. When historic events become too dreadful, too irrational to be logically explained, el fukú seems to emerge as a possible solution, offering a pattern of interpretation, a surreal explanation which appears to be more satisfying than the political truth. Finding a zafa, an invincible counter spell to the fukú, becomes the most powerful method of inducing forgetfulness; it acquires different forms for different characters in the novel: denial generated by a naïve idealism, self-sacrifice in the name of the Family, search for identity and love or ultimately, as a desperate solution, the escape into a parallel world of fantasy and SF. Diaz’s novel offers the reader a major challenge and that is to find his way inside a narrative labyrinth of intertextual references and historic events, where colonial and contemporary occurrences subtly echo each other, among memories and official records, among erased stories and footnote histories, and finally decide: Fukú or Zafa? Remembering or Forgetfulness?

About Daniela Rogobete

Daniela Rogobete got her PhD in Postcolonial Studies. A particular focus of her research is placed upon issues of diaspora and exile as major factors in shaping and redefining national identities. She is currently involved in a project concerning the authenticity and legitimacy of diasporic writings in English, based on an analysis and redefinition of Indianness in the light of the new remappings of political, geographical and cultural spaces. Her most important publications include: When Texts Come Into Play – Intertexts and Intertextuality (Universitaria 2003), Metaphor – Between Language and Thought (Universitaria 2008); Sweet Taste of India…in “Mapping Appetite: Essays on Food, Fiction and Culture” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007): articles in various journals: Mapping Alternative Spaces in (Euresis – Cahiers roumains d’études littéraires et culturelles, 2005), Out of the Labyrinth: Textual and Visual Representation in Alasdair Gray’s Short Fiction (Almeria, 2005), Pickled Stories and Eclectic Voices in S. Rushdie’s Fiction (University of Bucharest Review, 2006); literary translations: Grimus, Salman Rushdie, 2008

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