Otherness (work in progress)

“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 in
Junot Diaz strongly evokes a constant state of “otherness,” an alienation from culture and nation, character and identity, and even a sense of distance between the reader and the novel.
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.
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.
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 overwhelmed? In an interview with Junot Diaz, he says he wrote the book to make the reader feel like an immigrant “unable to understand huge chunks of the language…which provokes action to want to know.” As the de Leon familia move to New York from the D.R., so shall the reader. 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. 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.
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.
(Compare and Contrast Belicia and Lola’s lives by looking at their physical appearance, experiences as teenagers, and beliefs. And Lola as the example of the Diaspora generation as someone who moves around regularly.)
Observe the race/color & social acceptance, the differences in sexual and family love (as polluted by the reign of the infamous dictator), and how power affects every one, generation, writer, tyrannical literature, stereotypes and expectations…