The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a tragedy. It is a tragedy of generational trauma, one rooted in the arrival of Columbus, and made most terrible by the dictator Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo is emblematic of the excesses of masculinity in Dominican culture. His cruelty, his pride, and most of all, his treatment of women. This is the curse, the
fuku. That men feel the need to abuse women, and women feel the need to accept it. Yunior is the obvious symbol of this behavior, he hunts girls, cheats on them, and throws them away. Oscar is less obvious, he's the fat virgin nerd with all the charm of a rattlesnake, but he too is under the
fuku. The
fuku is not in his lack of women, but how he sees them, as princesses to be won with little sacrifice. It is a curse that ensnared even the author himself. Junot Diaz is both its victim and its purveyor.
Oscar Wao has a critical reputation that far exceeds anything in the book. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize. A poll of literary critics in BBC Culture named it the best novel of the twenty-first century so far. Were I to suggest candidates for best novel of this century, I'd propose Cormac McCarthy's
The Road, Yann Martel's
The Life Of Pi, and Murakami Haruki's
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years Of Pilgrimage, but it's still too early in the century to make such pronouncements. All of which surpass
Oscar Wao in both prose and plot. The effusive amount of acclaim garnered by this book tells me that literary critics are easily impressed by nerd culture references. Ernest Cline's awful prose in
Ready Player One was also well-received for stuffing in as many nerd references as possible. This isn't to say that
Oscar Wao is a bad novel, far from it. Diaz's prose is direct and sharp, littered with Spanglish that readers will either find endearing or frustrating. Some of the nerd references work in Wao's perspective, since he's so nerdy, the narrative reflects his sad, insular world, "After college, Oscar moved back home. Left a virgin, returned one. Took down his childhood posters (Star Blazers, Captain Harlock) and tacked up his college ones (Akira and Terminator II). These were the early Bush years, the economy still sucked, and he kicked around doing nada for almost seven months until he started substituting at Don Bosco. A year later, the substituting turned into a full-time job. He could have refused, could have made a "saving throw" versus Death Magic, but instead he went with the flow. Watched his horizons collapse, told himself it didn't matter" (Diaz). They also work for Yunior. For me, Diaz is at his best when he brings life to Dominican culture with his regular flourishes of slang and español. While Diaz certainly isn't the
only voice of Dominicana, he
is a voice, that carries equal parts love, pain, and disgust. Take for instance,
his colorful image of the motherland,
"After his two initial weeks on the Island, after he'd got somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up in another country, after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You Do Not Belong, after he'd gone to about ten clubs and, because he couldn't dance salsa or merengue or bachata, had sat and drunk his Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own on Malecon, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin to get home, after he'd watched shirtless, shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after the family visited the shack in Baitoa where his moms had been born, after he had taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corncob, after he's got somewhat used to the surreal whirlwig that was life in the capital--the gaugas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Pizza Huts, the tigueres selling newspapers at the intersections, the snarl of streets and shacks that were the barrios, the masses of niggers he waded through every day and who ran him over if he stood still, the mind-boggling poverty, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the Friday-night strolls down Avenida, the mind-boggling poverty--after he'd gone to Boba Chica and Villa Mella, after the relatives berated him for having stayed away so long, after he heard the stories about his father and his mother, after he stopped marvelling at the amount of political propaganda plastered up on every spare wall, after the touched-in-the-head tio who'd been tortured during Balaguer's reign came over and cried, after he'd swum in the Carribean, after Tio Rudolfo had got the clap from a puta (Man, his tio cracked, what a pisser! Har-har!), after he'd seen his first Hatians kicked off a guagua because niggers claimed they "smelled," after he'd nearly gone nuts over all the bellezas he saw, after all the gifts they'd brought had been properly distributed, after he'd brought flowers to his abuela's grave, after he had diarrhea so bad his mouth watered before each detonation, after he'd visited all the rinky-dink museums in the capital, after he stopped being dismayed that everybody called him gordo, after he'd been overcharged for almost everything he wanted to buy, after the terror and joy of his return subsided, after he settled down in his abuela's house, the house that the diaspora had built, and resigned himself to a long, dull, quiet summer, after his fantasy of an Island girlfriend caught a quick dicko (who the fuck had he been kidding? he couldn't dance, he didn't have loot, he didn't dress, he wasn't confident, he wasn't handsome, he wasn't from Europe, he wasn't fucking no Island girl), after Lola flew back to the States, Oscar fell in love with a semiretired puta." All in a single sentence.
That passage also alludes to how Oscar sees himself, as a failure, a failure to live up to the Dominican ideal of machismo. When you are born into a culture, people both outside and inside of it expect certain things from you. Oscar doesn't live up to those expectations. He's a sheep in wolf's clothing. He aspires to be a writer, the Dominican Tolkien. He spends hours writing science-fiction novels that will never get published. Many can relate to Oscar's plight to get a girlfriend and the frustration, jealousy, and loneliness that comes along with it. However, sympathy for Oscar can only run so deep. I read in an essay collection about gender, a theory that men subconsciously feel emasculated by writing, since the practice has long been considered a feminine pursuit. To compensate for this, they find other ways of excessively signaling their masculinity. Mark Twain roughing it in the woods. Ernest Hemingway hunting game. Hunter S. Thompson's obsession with guns. Norman Mailer beating his wife. I can't say that I agree with this theory all the way, but I hold it in the back of my mind. Oscar also has his own ways of lashing out. He chooses self-loathing misogyny. He chases a goth girl, well after she rebuffs his advances, to the point where the university has to get involved in restraining him. It also didn't help that he called her a whore. Instead of reflecting on why girls flee from his stares and stalking, he revels in the self-pity of being a victim of fate. This behavior, while not as openly masculine as Twain, Hemingway, Thompson, or Mailer, it is its own way of asserting dominance. He demands women, and when he is denied, turns his fury at the world. Oscar isn't interested in women as human beings, but as objects of his desire. Yunior may be a sexist jackass, but at least he
does something with himself. He even tries to help Oscar out, but it doesn't succeed. One can't help but think he
wants to stay a virgin for the victimhood status. Were
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao limited to the
New Yorker excerpt, the gross and awkward struggles of a Dominican nerd trying to get laid, it'd run by me easier. If the sentimental nonsense with Ybon were cut out, it could stand as an interesting exploration and critique of the Sisyphean problems with sex many nerds find themselves in. Diaz's domain is the short story, it is where he is most compact and precise. Novels stretch things out, and by stretching out this story, he dilutes it of perspective.
The problem is that Oscar's quest to get laid is juxtaposed with the lives of his relatives who are going through worse traumas. The initial spin in perspectives adds depth and nuance to the family and it's history, but makes Oscar's self-inflicted whines of no girlfriend all the more petty. The first is Oscar's older sister Lola, who is by no means perfect, she can be abrasive and selfish. However, Lola was also raped in the sixth grade, and has adopted this rough persona as a means of coping. She wants to show the world that she's tough, that she's over it. She dates men who cheat, men like Yunior. She can't relate to her family. Oscar, in his own little world. Her mother, Beli, controlling and distant. The conflict between Lola and Beli is the emotional meat of this section. Were this one of those sappy, family drama's, Lola would tearfully reconcile with Beli before the book's end. This never happens. Lola does run off, only for her mother to take her back. She cries into her mother's lap on the plane, but that's about it. In no time at all, the two are back to hating each other. Even as her mother is dying of breast cancer, their mutual hate remains. The mother's strictness comes from her own upbringing in Trujilo's Dominican Republic. She had an open sexual life, as Lola did, but was shamed for it. Here, Diaz vividly captures the oppressive misogyny that pushes women into sex and attacks them for the act. Beli is eventually kidnapped and beaten within an inch of her life. In a moment of magic realism as spellbinding as the golden carp from Rudolfo Anaya's
Bless Me, Ultima, a golden moongoose appears before Beli, giving her the strength to escape and live on. The novel then goes further back to Beli's father, Abelard, a man determined to keep his daughter and wife out of the lustful gaze of Trujillo. We get a sense of the intimate sexual terror that Trujillo inflicted on every woman in the state. For his evasive schemes, Abelard in thrown into prison, tortured to the point of mental insanity.
For as strong as Diaz's prose is in recreating the horrors of Trujillo, I found myself distracted by the awkward intrusions of nerd culture references. Diaz uses Tolkien to describe Trujillo the same way liberals use Rowling to describe Trump. In both cases, the subject of the comparison is made cartoonish and cheap. Some examples: "Santo Domingo during Trujillato was a lot like being in that famous
Twilight Zone episode"(224), "Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor" (224), "the regime was like a Caribbean Mordor in many ways" (226), or even in reference to Beli's sexual discovery, "Power. Like the accidental discovery of the One Ring. Like stumbling into the wizard Shazam's cave or finding the crashed ship of the Green Lantern!" (94). These references made sense in Oscar's story, since they reflected his geeky mind, but with Beli, and
especially Abelard, they feel out-of-place and condescending, as if we're too stupid to understand these subjects without the filter of fantasy and comic books.
Diaz's defense, it turns out, is just that, "No one can write a straightforward political novel about the Trujillato and capture its phantasmagorical power. That's another reason I had to go hard-core nerd. Because without curses and alien mongooses and Sauron and Darkseid, the Trujillato cannot be accessed, eludes our "modern" minds. We need these fictional lenses, otherwise It we cannot see," (O'Rourke). Somebody tell Solzhenitsyn.
So what is it, exactly, that makes Oscar's life so brief and wondrous? It's Ybon, a prostitute in a relationship with a corrupt cop. Oscar lusts after her and she takes some pity on him Her abusive boyfriend doesn't like that none too much and beats Oscar into a coma Oscar eventually recovers from his injuries only to return right back into the arms of Ybon She falls for him sleeps with him but cannot protect him Her boyfriend returns to kill Oscar as he warned but Oscar dies with some pride that he was at last able to stand up for someone he loved What Diaz might expect us to take from this is that Oscar was able to break from the "toxic" masculinity of Yunior and Trujillo. He was able to see a woman as human. I'm not very impressed. Oscar only succeeded in having something of a healthy relationship with another woman because she reciprocated his desires. This was good of him to do, but it is also an easy thing to do. Anyone can love those who get loved back. It would be a greater triumph, were Oscar to show a similar level of compassion towards women who don't sleep with him, but by the end of the day, what mattered most was that his desires were fulfilled. Even his relationship with Ybon, while a relief to her, only came about after his constant stalking. Oscar's victory, for what it is, looks very small in comparison to the trauma of his sister, mother, and grandfather.
These are the people who should be celebrated, not Oscar and his delayed virginity loss. The success of this text has also convinced me that literary critics are easily impressed by stories of men who can't get laid.
Oscar Wao is, ultimately, a weak critique of machismo, which is surprising, given that Diaz knows first-hand of its excesses. In the
New Yorker,
he wrote a harrowing and moving essay about being the survivor of rape as a child, and how it disrupted his life "While other kids were exploring crushes and first love I was dealing with intrusive memories of my rape that were so excruciating I had to slam my head against a wall" (Flood).
One of the most resonant passages in the essay, is where Diaz finally comes to terms with the violation and what it did to him, "No one can hide forever. Eventually what used to hold back the truth doesn't work anymore. You run out of escapes, you run out of exits, you run out of gambits, you run out luck. Eventually the past finds you" (Diaz). Diaz's essay is important because like the testimonies of Terry Crews, Brendan Fraser, and Anthony Rapp, it includes awareness of male victims in this #MeToo moment. Diaz is a victim, but he is also a purveyor. The trauma from his rape made him lash out and hurt women he loved, "I would meet intimidatingly smart sisters, would date them in the hope that could heal me, and then the fear would start to climb in me, the fear of discovery, and the mask would feel as if it were cracking and the impulse to escape, to hide, would grow until finally I'd hit that Rubicon - I'd either drive the novia away or I would run" (Dzhanova). Those women, it appears, have spoken out.
Author Zinzi Clemmons lobbied the first accusation on Twitter, alleging that as a graduate student, she invited Diaz to a workshop on issues of representation, and he "used it as an opportunity to corner and forcibly kiss me" (Danielle). Diaz initially seemed to admit guilt in his first statement, which read in part, "I take responsibility for my past" (Ebbert).
However, in an interview with the Boston Globe, Diaz claims that he felt pressured to make that statement, and denies any forcible kissing, "I did not kiss anyone. I did not forcibly kiss Zinzi Clemmons. I did not kiss Zinzi Clemmons" (Ebbert). Clemmons has since replied to the
Boston Globe article by calling into question the journalistic ethics of one of its authors, Stephanie Ebbert. It appears that Ebbert did not consider Diaz's unwanted kiss a sexual assault, or even real misconduct.
Clemmons alleges that Ebbert told her, "Did he kiss you on the mouth or the cheek?"and "it could've just been a friendly greeting",
explicitly telling Clemmons in an email, "What made this a #MeToo story rather than an inappropriate farewell?"
Now, I don't think every unwanted kiss is a sexual assault. It's not until very recently that we have made it the norm to ask before kissing. Before then, it was expected that a man would be able to read the mood and go in for a kiss. The very act of asking was considered unsexy, and in some quarters, it still is. Ideally, the asking part is only for the early stages of dating, until you're comfortable enough with your partner's body language to be able to tell when they're ready for a kiss. So I can imagine that there are those who have mistakenly gone in for a kiss, when it wans't warranted. I want to make it clear that it's a
good thing that we're making it a norm to ask before kissing. We will all be better for it. However, we must make distinctions between men who plant their kisses on women, irrespective to their desires, and those who may misread signals on a date and go in for one. What Diaz did does not sound like the latter.
Clemmons describes walking Diaz through an enclosed stairwell, and him "pushing me up against the wall." Further,
Clemmons reveals that BuzzFeed reporters had long been chasing the Diaz story, with one tip in common with a Facebook post she wrote on Diaz. The email says, "One of the tips we recieved sounds very similar to the "Pulitzer-prize winning person" you mentioned, so I wanted to see if you might be comfortable sharing a little bit more information with me on the phone."
Another serious accusation was made shortly after Clemmons by author Alisa Rivera. She first told of the encounter on Twitter, "When I met him, he told me that I had the face of the oppressor and needed to darken up to look like a real Latina. Then he pulled me into his lap and hit on me. I got away from him but I couldn't stop crying."
Rivera expanded on this in an article for The Rumpus, "Junot grabbed my wrist and pulled me out of my seat and into his lap, wrapping his arms around my waist. Apart from whatever gratification he got from feeling my body, I think what he really wanted was to feel my pain, to envelop himself in the grief, shock, and shame that he'd inflicted on me" (Rivera). Diaz responded to accusation in the
Boston Globe "I just don't drag people onto my lap against their will." He didn't deny the racial slurs. I don't find this accusation too difficult to believe, given that you can hear Diaz making snide comments about white people in his talks. This accusation does seem like consistent behavior with someone who forcefully kisses people.
Another ugly, though less severe case came by the author Monica Bryne.
In a Facebook post, Bryne claims that she was invited to a talk and dinner Diaz gave. They were debating statistics in publishing when Diaz made an analogy to rape, notably shouting the word "rape." She further describes Diaz as talking over her and ignoring her whenever she tried to talk about women in publishing. She referred to his behavior as "verbal sexual assault." Though I'm not fond of the phrase "verbal sexual assault", I think Diaz's bizarre actions could be construed as "verbally abusive." While Diaz's alleged acts don't construe any physical sexual assault, they come off as real shitty, and if true, could constitute a pattern of bad behavior around women.
On the other hand, I also agree with Ebbert that not every unpleasant interaction a woman has with a man should be classified as sexism, let alone be put under the label of #MeToo. While I believe that #MeToo can allow for a spectrum of abusive behaviors, we need not make the spectrum so wide that we can no longer see the different colors. There's a difference between making distinctions between the behaviors of Harvey Weinstein and Aziz Ansari, and lumping in otherwise innocuous behaviors under the veil of misogyny. Lest you think I exaggerate, let me point out the case of author Carmen Maria Machado.
Not long after Clemmons accused Diaz, Machado also chimed in on Twitter. She claimed that at a talk about Diaz's latest book This Is How You Lose Her, she criticized Yunior's unhealthy relationships with women. She claimed that he "went off on her", became "enraged", and warned of "how easily he slid into bullying and misogyny, when the endless waves of adoration ceased for one second." By this account, Diaz sounds like a real asshole who can't take criticism. This account, however, has been disputed by audio of the event, in which Diaz, if anything, looks good. At no point does he raise his voice or say anything that could be construed as bullying or misogynistic. He defends his vision, yes, but in a calm and reasoned way, even suggesting that Machado may be right on a few things. Instead of admitting her error, Machado doubled down, accusing her critics of "gaslighting", referencing Diaz's "body language" and the audience's "nervous laughter." She doesn't go into detail about the body language, and what laughter I heard on the recording hardly sounded nervous. If there's anyone "gaslighting" here, it's her. It seems to me that Machado is more angry that Diaz didn't agree with her opinion on his work than anything else. Her hyperbole was well described by
Jesse Singal in Reason,"There is what feels like a growing tendency, in some lefty circles, to use language that has traditionally been employed to describe actual violence to describe more quotidian forms of conflict or disagreement. Dip a toe in such communities and you will often find claims that a given perspective was erased because it wasn't represented on a panel or in a book, or that a scientific claim is "violent" because it could be used to justify the marginalization of certain groups. Sometimes, things that might otherwise be called annoying or unpleasant are instead laced with the language of trauma." Now, I should note that many have come to Diaz's defense. His former girlfriend, Wendy Walsh, the first to accuse Bill O'Reilly of misconduct,
wrote in the Boston Globe that she couldn't believe that Diaz was guilty of any wrongdoing, offering a more complicated portrait using his Oscar Wao characters,
"The greatest truths can only be told in fiction. He is the Iothario, Yunior, one whose understanding of women, according to Diaz, " is pretty....limited." And he's Beli, who is not ashamed by her enormous breasts because they endow her with the power to get people to do what she wants. And he is Oscar, the Dominican kid in New Jersey who suffers from depression. He's also the father, lying in the hot prison yard in the Dominican Republic with the cinched, drying rope around his head, slowly damaging his brain, to save the women in his life. You don't need tarot cards, it's all there." This may prove Diaz's innocence, but it does portray a similar struggle that he wrote about in his essay. A man at war with himself. Yet she doesn't see his flaws as rising to the level of predator. More defense came from an open letter in
The Chronicle of Higher Education, signed by many academic women of color, criticized the media coverage of Diaz as sensational, and falling into racist stereotypes that "cast Blacks and Latinxs as having an animalistic sexual "nature."" At no point do they cite any examples of this so-called "sensationalism" which throws doubt onto their motives. It smells more like a defensive, "this'll make our community look bad" move. It's reminiscent of when Tariq Nasheed proclaims Bill Cosby's innocence because he's accused by white women. Further, the
Boston Review and MIT, where Diaz has worked, both did internal investigations on his conduct and cleared him of any misconduct. The Pulitzer Prize investigation is still ongoing. These outcomes could mean many things. A) Diaz is innocent and his accusers are wrong. B) These groups botched their investigations to defend one of their own. C) Diaz may be guilty of misconduct, but not during his time working at these organizations. D) The misconduct allegations, true or not, did not rise, in their eyes, to fireable offenses. The truth is certainly muddied, and probably more going on than the public currently knows.
How does all of this come back to
Oscar Wao? The tragedy, the
fuku of Oscar Wao, of Yunior, Trujillo, of Junot Diaz, and of far too many men, is the struggle to outgrow sexist influence. Diaz is a complicated man. He is one who seems to sincerely believe in feminism in theory, but not always in practice. He's treated women with care as well as contempt. He struggles with his demons and has been a demon to others. When you have been raised your whole life with all the wrong ideas about women, it can be difficult, radical even, to make a paradigm shift. For years, many men adopted the label "feminist" in the political sense, and only thought of it in terms of pro-choice legislation, gender abuse, and discrimination. They did not think of their girlfriends, their sisters, or their wives. The personal was not political. If "feminism" is to bring about any lasting equality, its ideals cannot be reduced to a checklist. It is, in the fullest sense, treating women like human beings, with empathy and respect. This is why "male feminists" like Joss Whedon and Aziz Ansari saw no hypocrisy in their shitty behavior towards women, and their lofty proclamations. They saw their goals for women's equality and their personal relations as separate spheres, but they were really one and the same. How one treats the women around them is more important than any protest.
We are all fighting with this
fuku, but it can be overcome, it has to be, for man and woman's sake. Whether Diaz can win the battle against himself is still an open question, but it doesn't have to be for us. The personal is political. The spheres are not separate. These are times for men to be humble, to listen, and reflect. Let our actions match our ideals.
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