Fukú and Zafa: Oppression and Redemption through Language in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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2013
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Abstract
In Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the romantic failures of an overweight Dominican nerd are attributed to an all-encompassing curse that is passed through generations and across national borders. Intrinsically tied to the violent legacy of slavery, colonialism, greedy dictatorships, and political corruption, the curse, referred to as the fukú, is much more than a supernatural entity in the novel; the fukú and its antidote, zafa, function as conceptual mechanisms through which characters engage with their worlds and make sense of their diasporic experiences. By first elucidating the restrictive and liberating effects of the fukú and zafa, respectively, on the characters’ mentalities and then showing how these same dynamics are repeated in the language of the novel, this essay posits that the dialectic between the fukú and zafa reveal both the imprisoning and freeing effects of discourse and narrative in the construction of life stories.