Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao explores the lasting effects of colonial violence on a people through the engagement with toxic masculinity and gender violence. The novel skillfully interweaves historical facts with narrative prose in order to draw a connection to an original source of colonial violence to explain its lasting negative effects on the people of the Dominican Republic. The ramifications of the association of a people with the land they inhabit as a means of dehumanizing leads to a snowball effect of a continued search for power from men through violence towards women among a colonized people. Meaning, colonial violence becomes gendered violence when operating within a patriarchal society. Furthermore, the connection …show more content…
The loss of power within the colonized/colonizer relationship creates a need for men within a patriarchal power structure to find power elsewhere. Being a typical Dominican man then, effects the ways the characters think about masculinity as the national identity becomes intertwined with gender. When talking of Oscar, Yunior says, “[He] [h]ad none of the Higher Powers of your typical Dominican male, couldn’t have pulled a girl if his life depended on it. Couldn’t play sports for shit…had no knack for music or business or dance, no hustle, no rap, no G. And most damning of all: no looks” (Diaz 19). Good looks, ability to get women, athleticism, rhythmic abilities, and business acumen are then characteristics associated with masculinity. As Melissa Gonzalez states in “‘The Only Way Out Is In’: Power, Race, and Sexuality Under Capitalism in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” “There is no law passed stating that masculinity must be violent and hypersexual in order to be successful; rather, such socially ingrained attitudes are the productive, creative residues of power as it has been deployed in the Dominican Republic and its diaspora” (281). The violent state of masculinity is productive because people fear it and obey it rather than risk being hurt because of it. With the ability of the Trujillo regime to cement a strong identity of masculinity means that a future generation will always contain a residual aspect of these core values. Due to the fact that this type of masculinity is continually rewarded, the identity continues and thus within a patriarchal society, the ramifications of the dehumanization of a colonized people snowballs into a search for power and a rewarding of exaggerated forms of masculine prowess seen through Trujillo regime. Socially engrained attitudes become the most difficult attitudes to overcome as they
In the opening page of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao the narrator, Yunior, defines Fukú as “... a curse or a doom of some kind” (1). He exposes us, the reader, to the origin of the Fukú and what it’s capable of doing. He explains that “ anyone who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fukú most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond” (3). For Abelard and his family that was the case, the Fukú affected them so far for three generations. The effect of the Fukú could be seen first with when Abelard was imprisoned, then Beli’s miscarriage, and lastly the killing of Oscar.
According to the Oxford American Dictionary, a bildungsroman is “a novel dealing with one person 's formative years or spiritual education.” In an interview with Slate.com, Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and creative writing professor at MIT, and author of The Brief and Wondrous life of Oscar Wao, describes his book as a “textual Caribbean”(O’Rourke). He elaborates on his statement by saying how the work was supposed to be, “Shattered and yet somehow holding together” (O’Rourke). He embeds this concept of a textual Caribbean in The Brief and Wondrous life of Oscar Wao through the theme that disjointed occurrences eventually breed clarified understanding. Given the genre of this book as a bildungsroman, Diaz makes evidence for the preceding theme through the epiphanic encounters of the following two characters in The Brief and Wondrous life of Oscar Wao: Oscar and Beli.
There’s a direct relationship between the canefields and violence in the book, there had to be a reason for this. The canefields in the Dominican Republic was where the slaves worked when the Spanish colonizers came to the country, they were the cotton fields of the Dominican Republic. This is also when the fuku, or curse, was brought over the Dominican Republic from Europe as the narrator claims. ”It is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since” (page 1). This must mean that canefields are part of the fuku the Europeans brought along.
The groundbreaking novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao explores many different aspects of life. The story is told by narrator, Yunior, focusing on Oscar De Leon and his family’s Dominican experience during the Trujillo regime. Oscar isn’t the typical Dominican male and is isolated as a result of the gender roles that are so heavily relied on and seen in the Dominican culture. The idea and execution of gender roles has been around for many years. These roles are based on the values and beliefs about gender within groups or societies.
From the very first pages of the novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Díaz, the readers are deliberately shown an overview of fuku, a bad curse. It has caused many tragic consequences to Cabrals family; especially to Oscar. He is the main character of the story who is an overweight nerd trying to find the love of his life, but due to a family “fuku” or curse Oscar is having a lot of trouble doing so. In addition, the story actually portrait the darkness time of Cabral's family under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo’s regime. As Diaz mentions that “anyone who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fuku most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond”(3), Oscar’s family always unfortunately face tremendous situations
In the memoir, The Prince of Los Cocuyos, the performance of masculinity of the people is illuminated. This is seen with most of the men conforming to the gendered expectations of a man, some confidently defying and conforming at the same time, and Riqui not daring to disturb the universe, but having a hard time conforming to all the expectations. As a child when it was just his grandmother giving him a hard time about acting and looking like a man, Riqui defied many of the gendered expectations. However, when these expectations started coming from friends then he started to attempt to act like he was expected. Riqui defies gendered expectations of a boy through his interest in the girly things like Cinderella, dolls and makeovers; however,
Discuss the ways in which Rosario Castellanos challenges and subverts gender stereotypes in her work? In this essay I am going to examine and discuss the work of one of Mexico’s most important literary figures, Rosario Castellanos, with particular emphasis on her feministic beliefs and the ways in which she used her writing to catapult her views into the forefront of society. Her writing reflects bitterness regarding the desires and misfortunes of the female population of her nation. Castellanos used poetry, novels and plays as a platform to voice the many inequalities that she deemed prevalent in society at that time.
The stories of Junot Diaz feature various elements of social and personal issues that are highly prevalent in young Latinx men, primarily the compulsion and adverse effect of machismo, the poignancy of being an outcast in one’s community, and the lack of a father figure in a boy’s life. The first set of short stories prominently feature Ysrael, a Dominican boy whose face was disfigured by a pig when he was an infant. In “Ysrael”, he is the object of Yunior’s fascination, and the victim or Rafa’s (Yunior’s brother) torment.
In this novel, Drown, women are simply perceived as objects. The inevitable gender norms dictate what behavior is socially acceptable, specifically for women in the Dominican Republic society, but also encourages the practices of machismo. Machismo is defined as a strong sense of masculine pride; this umbrella term has become the explanation for the actions of males in Latin American countries like the Dominican Republic. Though machismo does not identify the women as inferior, it defines the man as superior. Gender roles in the Dominican Republic set the males as the providers and ultimate decision-makers, whereas women are seen as the caretakers of the home and family.
In the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the Dominican culture is told through a stereotypical Dominican named Yunior. As stated in the title, the novel discusses Oscar Wao’s brief life through his family’s curse called Fukú. The history of his family is presented through their downfalls in love, which overtime accumulates into a burden for Oscar to experience the same events his family members had once experienced. This Fukú that has been lurking within the Cabral family’s history from the Dominican Republic to the United States is commonly found through dysfunctional relationships between men and women. The known concept in relationships called love transforms into a corrupted power source for abuse based on the
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao writer by Junot Diaz. This book was published in 2007, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and recognized for one of the best books of 2007. The story is about Oscar Wao personal life, including his sister Lola, mother Hypatia Belicia Cabral, Yunior de Las Casas and Abelard.
We usually grow up with abuelo and abuela (grandpa and grandma) as they serve to be types of role models to us. It is this older generation also that raised prior generations to millennials. With these strict upbringings comes a strong sense of machismo. Toxic masculinity isn 't a myth, especially in the Latinx community. It is a social phenomenon that many of us have witnessed in our own
As constant as change, historical development of masculinity and gender stratification in Mexico and for Mexican Americans had been continuously occuring. Lies behind that development are myriad of factors and concepts that can be acceptable to many however prone to create critiques to others as well. In a working-class neighborhood in Sto Domingo Mexico, where Matthew Guttman conducted his ethnographic field work to delve into the changing males identities, several factors lead to a deeper understanding of this dramatic tranformation of what it really means to be a man and or a woman. Gender relations is always brought back by the shadow of historical past, which can only be revealed by tracing the roots using the national and cultural histories of Mexican Culture and exploring the differences particularly on how male and female played a significant role. Masculinity had been always synonymous to the word macho.
The Decolonial Imaginary, an undoubtedly challenging book that makes the reader question not only their knowledge of history and theory but also the way in which it has been told through the centuries. Emma Pérez, a Chicana historian with her bachelors, masters, and doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles, put into perspective the ideas of Freud, Foucault, archeology and genealogy to lead the reader through the deconstruction of Chicana feminist historiography. Pérez then reconstruct history in a way that breaks the destructive cycles of patriarchy. She crosses many boarders as she takes nationalist history and traverses it into a Chicana Feminism, and by doing so she rewrites history from the perspective of a decolonial imaginary.
Masculinity (also called boyhood, manliness or manhood) is a set of attributes, behaviors and roles generally associated with boys and men. But the culture doesn’t end at the definition, it starts from there. The first thing to come to mind when the word masculinity is heard is usually a man flexing his gigantic muscles, as the word might sound to suggest, and that right there is the current culture of masculinity because sadly, in the world we live in, not everyone has a “muscular body”. So far we know the concept of masculinity, but the culture is what is truly hampering.