“The family claims the first sign was that Abelard’s third and final daughter… was born black. And not just any kind of black. But black black – kongoblack, shangoblack, kaliblack, zapoteblack, rekhablack – and no amount of fancy Dominican racial legerdemain was going to obscure the fact. That’s the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child’s black complexion as an ill omen.””
During the early stages of this project on Afro-Latin@s, I had a conversation with my cousin about Dominican racial identity. My cousin worked at a bank and often perplexed Dominican clients when she asked them to mark their race. “Dominican,” they’d respond. “No, your race.” The confused client would look at the list in front of them for a moment, read past the more common designations: White… Black, and self-identify as “Indio.” Not Black. Not White. Indio.
I recently had a similar conflict filling out the U.S. Census for me and my son. After looking over the list for far too long, I circled “other” and wrote “Hispanic/Dominican.” Dominican, and especially Dominican-American racialization is a complex subject mixed with a variety of understandings and histories.[i] Ginetta E.B. Candelario notes that “for much of Dominican history, the national body has been defined as not-black, even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. In the place of blackness, officially identity discourses and displays have held that Dominicans are racially Indian and culturally Hispanic.”[ii]
To many observers, this racial identification is a denial of what is visually undeniable (“Dominicans are Black”) and proves that Dominican histories, social hierarchies, and political policies have and continue to contribute to Dominican anti-Black sentiment - see Haitian immigration and citizenship in the Dominican Republic. Historians, sociologists and ethnographers have substantiated this claim to one degree or another. Literature also provides a unique lens to examine Dominican racial identity and its role in establishing anti-negritud (anti-Blackness) in our people. This article will consider the topic in conversation with the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscao Wao by Dominican-American author, Junot Díaz.[1]
The novel tells the story of Oscar de León, an overweight Dominican nerd living in Patterson, New Jersey. The novel goes to great lengths to explain that Oscar was not a “normal Dominican.” And yet his story unfolds within the landscape of the Dominican experience. Though he is the protagonist of the story, his story is told alongside the stories of his sister Lola, his mother Beli, and his abuelo Abelard Luis Cabral. Our characters are set in New Jersey, then in Dominican Republic and back again. And because this is a Dominican story, Rafael Trujillo and el Trujillato (The Era of Trujillo) shape the lives of our primary characters. But this isn’t typical historical fiction. This story is a Fukú story.
The Fukú: A Curse on Black Bodies
The narrator of the story is Yunior, a “proto-typical” Dominican who ends up dating Lola and rooming with Oscar in college. Yunior provides commentary throughout the story. In the first chapter he explains the prevailing belief in Fukú in Dominican culture. “Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú – generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World.”[iii] The Curse came from Africa, but to Dominicans, Rafael Trujillo is its high priest. Yunior helpfully notes, “It was believed, even in educated circles, that anyone who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fukú most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond.”[iv] So this is a story about a family that crossed Trujillo so badly, they had incurred a Fukú for at least three generations. Given our limited space, our focus will be on the curse itself rather than Abelard’s offense against Trujillo.
Throughout the novel, two realities are linked together. Our primary characters have black skin, and the unfolding of their lives suggests that a generational curse has in fact been placed over their lives. With the exception of Abelard and La Inca, attention is given to each of our primary characters’ black complexion. In school, Beli’s black complexion is noted by a classmate. “You black, [a classmate said], fingering Beli’s thin forearm. Black-black.”[v] Lola observes that she has her mother’s complexion which means “[she] is dark.” In D.R., a boyfriend calls her “his morena.” Oscar too is notably of dark complexion. His afro, along with his other “non-Dominican traits” confuse those around him and they question whether he actually is Dominican or not. Alone, these descriptions might seem insignificant: evidence of family resemblance. But they serve a more significant role in the novel and its examination of Dominican racial identity.
To family members, Beli’s dark complexion was evidence that the family had been cursed. Shortly after her birth, her mother stepped in front of a moving truck and her two sisters each died under unusual circumstances. Beli was left an orphan. “She was so dark [that] no one on Abelard’s side of the family would take her… and no one outside the family wanted the darkchild to live.”[vi] Beli was eventually sold to strangers to work as a servant girl. She’s eventually rescued by La Inca, a cousin of her father who discovers that the girl is alive and being kept in a chicken coop after she is burned by hot oil for “skipping out on work to attend classes.”[vii]
A few years later, Beli falls for Dionisio who is married to none other than Trujillo’s sister. When la hermana Trujillo discovers the affair, she has Beli taken out to a sugar cane field where she is nearly beaten to death. Yunior reports that “they beat her like she was a slave. Like she was a dog.”[viii] While laying there she slides into a deep lonliness “[where] she would dwell forever, alone, black, fea.”
These descriptions are not accidental. The author intends for us to recall the slaves who worked the sugar cane fields during early Spanish Colonialism. During the Spanish conflicts with France and England, the economy of the Island of Hispanola collapsed. Eventually many Spanish Whites left the island. In their place descendants of White men and Indigenous and African women “ascended the social ladder.” Together with freed Blacks they became the “blancos de la tierra.” The term black “came to be used in Santo Domingo only in reference to those who were still enslaved.” Beli and later Oscar, in his final moments, become stand-ins for the the histories of Blacks who received violence in Sugar Cane fields on this island.[ix]
The lives of these primary characters seem to confirm a sinister truth: our Black protagonists were under the fukú; they were cursed. It isn’t always clear whether their Blackness was the Curse itself or the evidence of their being cursed, but the problem remained. They were Black, and black bodies in the Dominican Republic have often been subjected to marginalization, violence, and trauma.
The novel also demonstrates another side of the Dominican racial imaginary: the identification as non-Black and more importantly non-Haitian. Throughout the novel, to be Haitian is viewed as an insult. When Oscar returns from his first trip to Santo Domingo, his uncle greets him, “Great… now you look Haitian.” Later, on his return trip to the Island, Oscar notices a group of peddlers on the street. “So dark,” he noticed, and his mother said, dismissively, “Maldito haitianos.”[x] On that same trip, Lola and Beli have an interesting exchange at a restaurant. The waiters look at their group strangely, Lola teases her mother and says “Watch out Mom… they probably think you’re Haitian.” In response her mother retorts, “La única haitiana aquí eres tú, mi amor.”[xi] Anti-Haitian rhetoric was a strategy implemented throughout Dominican Republic’s history, especially during Trujillo’s reign. Haitians were Black, not so Dominicans.
Fukú vs Zafa
Yunior began the story by framing it as a fukú story. But at the end of the first chapter he introduces a second folk word: the zafa, or the counter spell. The novel, as a whole, is tragic. Upon first reading, one is left with the impression that the fukú will remain over this family for generations to come. But when Lola’s daughter is introduced in the final pages of the novel, Yunior hints at the possibility of a more powerful magic: a zafa of sorts. Lola’s daughter is dark like her mother, uncle and grandmother before her. But on her neck she wears three pendants: “the one that Oscar wore as a baby, the one that Lola wore as a baby, and the one that Beli was given by La Inca… powerful elder magic.” Yunior is not completely convinced it will work. He imagines eventually she will hear the word fukú. Maybe then, he imagines, she will come to see him and he will bring out old photographs and papers. Yunior doesn’t name it, but I suspect behind this little dream of his, is the counter spell itself. In those photographs and the pendants is connection and memory.
Together the opening and close of the novel suggests a way out from under the Curse of the New World. The Curse isn’t Blackness. It is the racialization that we’ve experienced and participated in throughout our histories. The Curse is the trauma and the silence of a people who experienced violence and marginalization under Trujillo and then again in the Diaspora. The Curse finds expression in our loss of memory and our erasure of all of our history, especially our African history.
Junot Díaz has often noted that his life and writings have been shaped in large part by silence caused by trauma.[xii] Throughout the novel, his characters are also made silent. Beli never says a word about her childhood trauma. She never tells her children about Dionisio, nor about the night she was almost beaten to death. Oscar doesn’t get the chance to finish his own story. His last correspondence to Yunior and Lola are lost. So what is the counter spell? The counter spell is connection and memory. Yunior is right when he suspects that the book is his own sort of counterspell. The act of storytelling, when it is honest and embracing of the good and the bad parts, can become our counterspell.
Our racial histories are complex. How can they not be when we are the fruit of the “new world?” How can they not be when we are the heirs of Trujillos’s Santo Domingo? How can they not be when we are the Diaspora, seeds planted in United States and all over the rest of the world? We cannot deny our afrodescendencia. Nor can we deny our own complicity in anti-negritud. So we must speak the counter curse. We must break the silence of our past traumas and our own acts of violence and tell our full history.
About Kerwin A. Rodriguez
Kerwin A. Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of Pastoral Studies at Moody Bible Institute. He teaches in the areas of preaching, cultural dynamics, spiritual formation, and Bible interpretation. He is currently a PhD in Preaching student at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary. His doctoral research will be on Caribbean Latin@ preaching with a particular focus on the Dominican Republic. Kerwin and his wife, Meredith live in the Humboldt Park neighborhood in Chicago with their son Ezra Joél, where they serve in their local church, Good News Bible Church.
Footnotes
[1] Note: It should be acknowledge that in May 2018 Junot Díaz was accused of sexual misconduct and verbal abuse by multiple women. In a statement made to the New York Times, Díaz stated, “I take responsibility for my past.” He later amended his statement and told the Boston Globe, “There is a line between being a bad boyfriend and having a lot of regret, and predatory behavior.” This article is not the place to give extensive commentary on the serious allegations made about Junot Díaz’s conduct. It should be noted that shortly before the allegations were made public he wrote about his own experience as a victim of sexual abuse, and a prominent theme throughout his writings is the relationship between sexuality and trauma.
[i] Milagros Ricourt, The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016).
[ii] Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 18.
[iii] Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 1.
[iv] Díaz, 3.
[v] Díaz, 84.
[vi] Díaz, 252.
[vii] Díaz, 255.
[viii] Díaz, 147.
[ix] Ashley Kunsa, “History, Hair, and Reimagining Racial Categories in Junot Diáz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 54, no. 2 (2013): 211–24.
[x] Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 273.
[xi] Díaz, 276.
[xii] Junot Díaz, “Junot Díaz: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma,” The New Yorker, accessed October 12, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-silence-the-legacy-of-childhood-trauma.