The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“But in those elder days, fukú had it good; it even had a hypeman of sorts, a high priest, you could say. Our then dictator-for-life Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina.” 

To Yunior, Trujillo is the living embodiment of fukú, the curse unleashed onto Caribbean peoples with the arrival of “the Admiral” Christopher Columbus. Although Trujillo is Dominican, his policies prioritize Whiteness through the disenfranchisement and outright murder of Haitians of African descent and dark-skinned Dominicans. He is also a figure of rank and destructive masculinity who views every Dominican woman as his sexual property, if he so chooses. Thus, while fukú is technically a supernatural concept, it also reflects very real strains of racism and sexism that inform authoritarian power structures.

“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.