Throughout The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz changes narrators, time periods, languages, dialects and jargons, often fluidly and without warning. Taken individually, code-switching, mixing popular culture and intellectual jargon, or blending elements of fantasy with reality do not challenge modern literature; Latino/a writers have long used Spanish and English in the same texts, critics like Chuck Klosterman and Roger Ebert have analyzed TV and film with academic rigor, and magical realists routinely conflate the supernatural with the everyday. The striking quality of Diaz’s language is how he merges this range of discourses in one narrative, creating a unique voice and forcing the reader to adapt to ever-shifting linguistic ground. In Oscar Wao, Diaz’s language supersedes literary purpose and performs a political function, providing not only the complex framework of the narrative, but making pointed commentary on the novel’s historical and ethnic content.
Consider first the most expected (if not the most comprehensible) language-blending in Oscar Wao, Diaz’s code-switching. Code-switching, here used to describe the toggling between English and Spanish in the same sentences, technically describes a “worldwide phenomenon”; there are thirty times more languages than there are countries, and so the boundaries of speech invariably intersect around the globe (D’Amore 86). Often, Diaz’s code-switching reflects the typical language pattern of native Spanish speakers talking in English, where Spanish “interjects” into an English sentence (87) when emotions flare – like when Beli confronts the Gangster’s wife and barks, “Còmeme el culo, you ugly disgusting vieja,” (Diaz 141) – or when a Spanish phrase comes more naturally or says something more precisely – terms like “ciguapa,” “chacabanas,” “chabine,” and “cibaena[1]” (151). In terms of expressing identity, code-switching allows speakers (or writers) to indicate their social ties to more than one community (89). For Diaz, ascription to Dominican Spanish, street English, fantasy (“Genre”) jargon, and academic discourse simultaneously expresses a discrete voice, as well as the aggregate voices that constitute the singular language of America.
Superficially, Diaz’s (and Oscar’s) obsession with Genre seems to undermine any effort to connect with real American culture; mainstream readers may get many of the TV and comic book references, but the sci-fi and role-playing allusions frequently confuse the reader and only seem to emphasize Oscar’s “otakuness”[2] (Diaz 21). In an effort to explain the pervasiveness of fantasy references in Oscar Wao, Diaz elaborates on the parallels between Oscar’s life in the Dominican Republic and then in New Jersey in one of his many unconventional footnotes[3]. In moving from Santo Domingo to Paterson, from the Third to the First World, Oscar (and one can assume Diaz) could relate to the experiences of fantasy literature, where heroes often face strange new worlds unlike anything they’d encountered before. “You want to know what being an X-Man feels like?” Diaz asks the reader, “Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary US ghetto” (22). So when Diaz calls Trujillo “our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid,” he isn’t trying to make the dictator more relatable or realistic to American readers, but more unfamiliar, more inhuman[4]. The rub, then, is that Trujillo was real, and his behavior bore an uncanny resemblance to these fictional despots, from the commanding of soulless henchmen like Belaguer (90) to the complete erasure of individuals like Abelard Cabral (246) to the isolation of the entire nation behind a forcefield-like “Platano Curtain” (224). Unlike most authors who make pop culture references, Diaz doesn’t incorporate sci-fi elements to make Dominican history more comprehensible to the average American, but to highlight how Americans “who missed [their] mandatory two seconds of Dominican history” (2) understand the DR and its past about as well as they grasp the nuances of Star Trek.
From the beginning of Oscar Wao, Diaz establishes the historical and supernatural elements of Dominican culture with a crash course in Trujillo and fuku; we see right away how much truth and fantasy blend together in Oscar’s community. Early on, Oscar fits perfectly into his family’s expectations of Dominican-ness: outgoing and flirtatious with girls, the typical little macho. Still, the aspects of his personality that made him an outsider began to show even at seven; he tried to impress two girls, Maritza and Olga, by acting like his favorite superhero, Shazam, and when Maritza broke his heart, Oscar sulked at home in front of Herculoids and Space Ghost cartoons (14). Oscar’s retreats into the imaginary worlds of cartoons, comics, and role-playing games grew more frequent as he passed through adolescence, seemingly his only comfort after failing to measure up to the standards of manliness so fiercely thrust upon Dominican boys. The curse dooming Oscar to his outcast fate, his dose of fuku, affected not only him, but those around him as well. Olga, the girl he dumped in retaliation for Maritza rejecting him, ended up “huge and scary, a troll gene in her somewhere,” (17) much like Oscar “grew fatter and fatter” (16). Meanwhile, Maritza, “the hypotenuse of our love triangle,” became “the flyest guapa in Paterson” faster than you could say “Oh Mighty Isis” (17). Even in that brief passage, the patois of intellectuals, street slang, and comic book allusions run together indiscriminately, a linguistic mixture of various social strata, spanning cultures but loyal to no single one. Inevitably, the reader feels left out or confused at certain points, either by the Spanish, the ghetto slang, or the fanboy references; Diaz uses all this code-switching to make sure no one is completely comfortable reading Oscar’s story, that everyone eventually feels like a pariguayo (20).
Diaz attempts to unravel the roots of Oscar’s obsession with books and comics, attributing some of his attraction to nerd-lit to the sci-fi nature of Dominican stories (replete with ghosts and curses and “el Cuco”) and the dramatic shift from life on a Third World island to a First World nation, from want to plenty, from failing to be Dominican to failing to be American (22). To find a sense of power and belonging somewhere, Oscar sank deep into his imagination, envisioning himself as a heroic savior, wealthy from writing like Stephen King, or mighty like a “platano Doc Savage,” saving the girls he admired from afar from the apocalyptic future he dreamed up (27). Through language, Oscar hopes to recast himself as someone heroic, in a future no longer beholden to the oppressive realities of the present.
Eventually, Oscar comes close to a relationship with a girl, one who actually reciprocates his interest. Ana shares Oscar’s tastes in movies and reading, so they’re able to talk about the same things. However, Oscar speaks in such a formal fashion (“I think she’s orchidaceous,” he tells his sister, Lola (35)), whereas Ana speaks coarsely and directly to the point – when Oscar mentions his crush on Maritza, Ana blurts out, “I know that cuero! Oh my God, Oscar, I think even my stepfather slept with her!” (40). Even though they can talk about anything, they don’t really share language.
Later, when Diaz switches to Lola’s point of view, he drops most of the sci-fi references, but continues to uses street Spanish and English frequently. When Nena Inca recounts Beli’s youth before Oscar and Lola, the voice and language shift again, using more contemporary allusions and Dominican phrases to fit the setting. Still, whenever Diaz interjects as Diaz (or “The Watcher” as he calls himself), anything goes.
When Diaz recounts Trujillo’s assassination, all his linguistic registers chime in. He begins with formal prose (“The black Chevy flashes its light innocuously, asking to pass, and Zacarias, thinking it’s the Secret Police, obliges by slowing down”), switches to street slang once the shooting starts (Antonio de la Maza’s gun “goes boo-ya!”), brings in Spanish terms and expressions (after Trujillo is shot by de la Maza “escopeta” he shouts, “Cono, mi hirieron!”), mentions several pop culture figures (fictional drug lord Tony Montana and action director John Woo) and describes Trujillo’s fatal injuries in Dungeons and Dragons terms (“suffering from four hundred hit points of damage”) (155). Diaz even brings in words he invented, calling Trujillo “a consummate culocrat to the end” (154). Diaz deliberately uses language to create a certain voice in each section, but why such often inscrutable language?
Naturally, language differences are a major issue for anyone moving from one culture to another. Still, Diaz doesn’t settle for the typical code-switching of a Hispanophone living in urban America; he provides a precise view of a very particular, perhaps completely one-of-a-kind, individual. The Paterson patois, the DR phrases, and the litany of real and fictitious characters paints a specific era, and seems destined to grow less approachable over time. As counterintuitive as this may seem for an author to do, this may enhance Diaz’s intended goal: portraying Oscar’s impenetrable isolation. Oscar is a man from an island who is an island, distanced from his peers and surroundings by his own choice as much as theirs. Lola tries to convince him to back off Ana once he finds out she has a boyfriend, but he doesn’t listen (Diaz 43); Yunior later attempts to improve Oscar chances with the ladies by telling him to “stop hollering at strange girls on the street, and don’t bring up the Beyonder more than necessary” (174). Yunior eventually gives up when he realizes “trying to talk sense to Oscar about girls was like trying to throw rocks at Unus the Untouchable” (174). We hear about Oscar through references he would grasp, but we never hear from Oscar regarding his perspective. For all Diaz’s nods towards Oscar’s many dialects, his depiction of Oscar holds a certain distance.
Not only does this blending of argots define Diaz’s voice and provide much of the unique energy of the novel, but it also serves to define and isolate Oscar, a Dominican relocated to New Jersey and belonging neither place, nor seemingly anywhere. The narrator changes between English and Spanish, formal and informal registers, and weaves historical and fantastical references throughout the story, often without explanation or translation; the language of the book reflects the character of Oscar, who ascribes to many groups, but fits in to none. He is, to paraphrase Derek Walcott, either no one, or a nation.
Another striking characteristic of this mash-up of codes is the democracy of its presentation: no quotes, no italics, nothing that makes one language or genre privileged or marginalized. English flows right into Spanish, which runs into nerd-speak. The footnotes meld academic reality and sci-fi references freely. Diaz’s choice to incorporate the variety of vernaculars he grew up with into Oscar Wao reflects his belief that every American, immigrant or otherwise, has multiple linguistic levels, from how they talk with their families, to how they talk with friends, to how the talk at school (“Junot Diaz” NPR). By melding all his idioms into one story, Diaz emphasized his assertion that “a basic part of communication [is] unintelligibility,” and he sought to remind mainstream readers that “if you’re an immigrant, you’re so used to not being able to understand large chunks of any conversation, large chunks of the linguistic, cultural codes” (“Junot Diaz” NPR). Diaz deliberately employed an array of languages in Oscar Wao to disorient and confuse the reader, or at the very least make readers conscious of how much they skip over phrases they don’t understand or rely on context in communication. However, he didn’t aim to simply frustrate readers; Diaz wanted to incite readers’ awareness of what they don’t comprehend, and compel them to seek out more information or “start a conversation” (“Junot Diaz” NPR) about the immigrant experience, or life under Trujillo, or the ongoing effects of diaspora.
If Diaz stopped innovating there, and followed standard formatting for his Spanish phrases and dialogue, he would still have made an impact, but perhaps a less forceful or consistent one. The fact that Diaz also leaves his Spanish phrases romanized rather italicized and doesn’t use quotes for dialogue pushes his political and personal message in an unprecedented way. In mainstream American writing, non-English expressions appear in italics, as if to say to the reader “This is not English, don’t expect to understand it.” This differentiation marginalizes non-English languages, and gives English primacy in communication. In Evelyn Ming-Nien Ch’ien’s Weird English, Diaz explained the political motivation for this stylistic decision:
Spanish is not a minority language. Not in this hemisphere, not in the United States, not in the world inside my head. So why treat it like one? Why ‘other’ it? Why de-normalize it? By keeping the Spanish as normative in a predominantly English text, I wanted to remind readers of the fluidity of languages, the mutability of languages. And to mark how steadily English is transforming Spanish and Spanish is transforming English. (204)
By democratizing languages, Diaz conveys a truly American view of discourse, one where everyone’s thoughts and expressions are legitimate and equally worthy of consideration. More specifically, he asserts that Spanish belongs in American writing at the same level as English (204), and the voices and experiences of Hispanic people deserve the “understood” tone that English implicitly carries in the US (as evidenced by expression such as “I said it in plain English!” and “That’s all Greek to me.”). In other words, dominant-culture writers present language in a way that puts the burden of understanding on the reader; American authors writing in English[5] do not generally clarify their references, translate their idioms, or put their culturally defining ideas in quotes. If the ethnic American reader does not grasp what this writer has written, the reader must make the effort to decode or research what the author implied.
In essence, Diaz consciously uses his language to bring awareness to the Dominican experience, to legitimize Spanish/fantasy/street discourse, and to reveal the similarities between science fiction and reality. The central purpose of Diaz’s literary act, however, spans all these intentions, or rather unites them in a singular role. If Oscar’s story is a story of fuku, Diaz considers his book a sort of zafa (7), a counterspell against the supernatural curse that has haunted Dominicans since Columbus “discovered” Hispanola and once seemed like force behind the Trujillato. His language choices function both politically and supernaturally, binding the past with the present, and forcing readers to grapple with the involvement of the American government with Dominican oppression, with the unbelievable lengths the powerful really go to when they want to maintain control. Such as dictating which language has the final say in a society (if any words, in certain cases, are permitted at all).
Which invites mention of Diaz’s counterpoint to his excessive languages: the times when he uses no words at all. Most of the time, Diaz uses a variety of languages to reach those cracks and corners any single language fails to cover, to provide texture where English (or Spanish or realism) falls flat. When no language suffices, Diaz invokes the dash – when the Mongoose speaks Oscar out of his coma (301), when Yunior contemplates the words that could have saved his relationship with Lola (323), or if he “had been ––––” (329). Perhaps most tellingly, Oscar’s death ends with a dash, when he answers “what fuego means in English” with “fire” (322). Through the act of translation, Oscar is undone.
Diaz’s panoply of language communicates as much as it confounds, alternating between discourses and dialects relentlessly. Yet even this confusion makes a point: being a Dominican in America is steeped in confusion, in lack of clear communication. The average American understands as much about Dominican (or any other nation’s) culture as it does about the nerd subcultures within its borders. The history of both the Dominican Republic and the United States runs deeper than a dozen languages could convey, but so often goes unspoken of. By telling Oscar’s story so multilingually, Diaz reveals how DR and US history weave together in a unified tangle, and invites the reader to put the effort into unraveling it.
Work Cited
Ch’ien, Evelyn Ming-Nien. Weird English. Boston: Harvard UP, 2005.
D’amore, Anna Maria. Translating Contemporary Mexican Texts: Fidelity to Alterity. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2009.
Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.
Eng, Lawrence. “The Politics of Otaku.” CJAS.org. July 5, 2009. Web. Dec. 12, 2010. < http://www.cjas.org/~leng/otaku-p.htm>
“Junot Diaz Discusses his ‘Wondrous’ Debut Novel.” NPR. May 2, 2008. Web. Dec. 11, 2010. <http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=90111248>
“The Annotated Oscar Wao.” Annotated-Oscar-Wao.com. Web. Dec. 13, 2010.
[1] “Ciguapas” are mythical Dominican monsters in the form of dark-skinned women with feet facing backward. “Chacabanas” are the dressy shirts Dominican men wear. “Chabines” are Afro-Caribbean women of mixed race with light, freckled skin, crinkly fairish hair, and sometimes green eyes. “Cibaenas” are people from Cibao, a term that indicates socio-economic and cultural qualities comprehensible only to true Dominicans (“Annotated Oscar Wao”). For all his verbal bombast, Diaz has a great economy with words!
[2] “Otaku” literally means “homebody” in Japanese, but today carries the added pejorative connotation of a shut-in who loves Japanese culture (manga, anime, J-horror, etc.) but doesn’t belong to it (Eng “The Politics of Otaku”). Diaz’s use of the term provides yet another linguistic layer to the text, and deftly reinforces his implicit argument that other languages can often express ideas more clearly (or succinctly) than English, so why not err on the side of conciseness?
[3] In yet another subversive stroke, Diaz uses footnotes oftentimes tell the bigger story, making the primary narrative seem marginal.
[4] Sauron, of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, brutally ruled the dark lands of Mordor and its monstrous inhabitants, commanding them to take over the surrounding countries of the Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits by seizing the powerful Ring controlled by Frodo Baggins. Arawn is the god of death in Welsh mythology, and appears as evil sorcerer in charge of an undead army in Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series. Darkseid serves as one of the New Gods in the DC Universe, and possesses superhuman strength, speed, intelligence and powers (the most intimidating of which is his Omega Effect, which Diaz mentions early in the book). I would cite these explanations, but I too am so well versed in nerd culture that I actually knew this stuff already.
[5] I would like to note that I struggled to define “normal” American writers – “English writers” didn’t work because American authors aren’t usually from England, they just use that language (much like “Spanish writers” in this hemisphere rarely come from Spain). The need for an elaborately specific title for “the norm” makes me long for the precision of Spanish (or the disregard for delicacy the Amish have when they call all non-Amish “English.” I’m German-Irish, damn it!)
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