Otherness in Oscar Wao: A Colonial interpretation

(this is rough draft 1.5 since i left my flashdrive in the computer at school, i plan on uploading the real 2.0 version tomorrow)

“People (I should put that word in quotes) visit (another quotable) the Dominican Republic because they want to experience certain kinds of packaged otherness…”-Junot Diaz, interview with publishers (Penguin 1).
Junot Diaz strongly evokes a constant state of “otherness,” an alienation from culture and nation, character and identity, and even a sense of literary distance between the reader and the novel. Other, “as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite,” is a direct result of colonization (Bhabha 126). In The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the effects of domination are present in the partial representation of language, and the partial psychological recognition of colonial discourse. The duality of being an immigrant brings about a consciousness that can be captured, or mimicked, successfully through writing.
Diaz structures the language in his novel around the idea of displacement- the concept of unintelligibility. “I wanted everyone at one moment to kind of feel like an immigrant in this book, that there’d be one language chain that you might not get…we tend to live in a world where a good portion of what we hear, see and experience is unintelligible to us,” (Diaz and Gross 5). There is a complex use of language ranging from: spanglish sentences, untranslatable phrases, science fiction references, colloquial vernaculars, superstitions, curses, sarcasm, historical footnotes, street slang, and even impressive English vocabulary. Enough to make the reader feel purposely overwhelmed. It takes an immigrant “enormous imagination and tremendous patience and strength to pick up a new language,” and this concept of unintelligibility is what the writer evokes in the reader (Diaz and Gross 6). Junot Diaz uses the language of colonialism against itself. It takes incredible conditioning to learn something new, especially of a different culture, and this is where Oscar and all the other main characters are- in between two fixed states, in a zone of otherness, lost in translations and interpretations.
“I was exposed to dozens of idioms…vernaculars…at home in my neighborhood we grew up with a very black Puerto Rican English. Then we had to go to an overwhelmingly, you know, mainstream school. In my house we spoke a very formal Dominican Spanish. But when we were hanging out with other people who spoke Spanish, it was very colloquial. Then we had all the pop culture stuff that knitted us together as a generation. Then we had the language we just used among our little group” (Diaz and Gross 4).

In America, we are surrounded by different languages, many immigrants, and various cultures, nonetheless every one speaks English. Not only is it difficult to appreciate another language without translation, but it is also disrespectful not to acknowledge the differences. The whole world is learning English and does this Americanize everyone as well? Neo-colonization is still present today in capitalist markets, making English one of the necessary tongues of business. Every one comes to America to work, just like Junot Diaz’s family did and as well as the de Leon family (“it’s a kind of survival guilt…the immigrant desire to work, to work really hard, to kind of honor your parent’s sacrifices for coming out to a strange country, in many ways giving up their entire lives (Diaz and Gross 7)).
“What does the Dominican Republic matter to the United States? …to somebody in Santo Domingo matter to a kid who was born ad raised in the U.S.? I mean in some ways those are the kind of questions the narrative is trying to wrestle with. And for me that was the question, even when I was growing up…I was far more worried about all the Michael Jackson lyrics than listening to my folks’ stories about what happened in Santo Domingo. And yet the shadow of the past has a way of casting its power over the present, even when we deny it” (Diaz and Gross 3).
In my opinion, art is the only way to preserve any culture. Writing can be a mode of rebellion against globalizing forces which unite all cultures into one. The effects of colonization can best be explained through mimicry. Junot Diaz uses language to mimic the colonization and U.S. backed dictatorship of Trujillo’s reign of the Dominican Republic.

In an essay by Homi Bhabha entitled “Of Mimicry and Men: Ambivalence in Colonial Discourse,” colonialism is viewed as a particular brand of domination which operates on two levels: a mental or psychological level, and a physical or hegemonic level. The colonized become inferior to those empowered, “castrated” (Bhabha 131). The disempowered are left with a double consciousness –racially, culturally and nationally. Colonization “problematizes the signs of racial and cultural priority, so that the ‘national’ is no longer naturalizable” (Bhabha 128). Bhabha claims that mimicry is a form of language. From the colonizer’s point of view, subjects should behave as much like the colonizer as possible. But, this exact replication can never happen, therefore the colonized are thought of as inferior. The argument that mimicry can operate as a means of undermining the colonizers through language confuses who is and who is not powerful. Therefore, language of colonization can be used against itself in order to show the world and those empowered the true effects of domination, colonization, and racism.
Bhabha offers writing as “a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simple mocks its power to be a model,” (Bhabha 128).
Since all culture is carried with the language, this theory proves effective. As a Mexican-American, I am capable of this double vision and also can vouch for the loss of my culture by the loss of the language. My family has been Americanized and associated into English speaking ways. This also happens with the de Leon familia when they immigrate to New Jersey from the Dominican Republic.
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The colonization of the mind and spirit of the Dominican people lives in the superstitious curse known as fuku. But, Diaz uses the fuku as a tool to trace the people’s misfortunes back to Christopher Columbus, Africa and the ideal concept of colonization. In The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the curse can be interpretated as magical realism but in reality, colonial aftermath is present in assimilation or in the Americanization of Lola and Oscar.For Bhabha, language is the primary vehicle of domination. It carries culture: law, custom, conduct, social class, and more. Therefore, language must be used against itself. By mimicking the colonizer, the boundaries between who is, and who is not powerful blur. But, it is tricky not to replicate new forms of totality. Ownership is a difficult power to dodge, but Junot Diaz excels masterfully in this novel.
“In my youth the only people who really seemed to be interested in exploring dictatorlike figures were the fantasy and science fiction writers, the comic-book artists. You didn’t see much about that aspect of the world in the mainstream culture, so as a kid who was the child of a dictatorship I had to find analogs in the genres, and since that was the language that explained to me the scope and consequences that kind of power has on people (on myself), that was the language I deployed to explore those very questions in my own book,” –Junot Diaz, same interview mentioned in intro.
Diaz tells the story of Oscar Wao, not in chronological order, nor with any insight into the mind of Oscar, but with distant narrative structure. The narrator is a secondary character whom the readers meet towards the middle. (Think about the reader experience if the story was told from beginning to end in order). In this style, Diaz uses his authority to exert a dictorial way of telling his readers the life of Oscar Wao. Diaz mimics Trujillo by acting dictator of the book, of how the story unfolds. In fact, the title is misleading in that most of the book is dedicated to three generations of the de Leon women, also connected to the generations of the U.S. backed dictatorship.
The alienation of the women in each difficult era of Trujillo’s reign is shown in the physical and psychological issues each woman deals with.