Revealing the Páginas En Blanco

Kiera Prusmack

Africana Studies 292G

Professor Keith Jones

22 May 2017

Revealing the Páginas en Blanco

        The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Junot Díaz focuses on the viewpoint of diaspora in the Dominican Republic and explores the detailing curse that has plagued Oscar’s family for generations.  The novel shares the story of Oscar Wao, whose real name is Oscar de Leon, who never fits in and tries to assert his own identity and find love in the process.  In the characters eyes, Dominican men are known to be strong, handsome, brave, etc.  Meanwhile, Oscar, not living up to his expectations as a Dominican, is the exact opposite as he is an overweight, “ghetto nerd” of Dominican descent from New Jersey “with romantic ideas about the world” (Hanna 515).  This coming of age story is not only a journey into Oscar’s adulthood, but also an understanding of his life experiences.  The narration of the novel is split between multiple characters, but the primary narrator isn’t introduced until halfway through the book.  Through the eyes of different narrators, the point of view is consistently bouncing between first, second, and third person.  Throughout the book, Diaz carefully places footnotes at the bottom of the pages as an elaboration or a further explanation of the stories being told.  It ultimately manifests the submerged stories of the minor, insignificant people and their history, which deems the question: How is it that marginal things can represent the heroic?

        Yunior, the predominant narrator, is defined as the true Dominican ladies’ man and embodies the Latin American stereotypes of masculinity. He’s too much a product of his cultures not to go off about how hot the ladies are, or rag on Oscar to a cruel degree.  Yunior opens by affirming that Oscar “never had much luck with the females,” which is “very un-Dominican of him” (Díaz 11).  Oscar’s virginity is a product of his sentimentality, and these factors invalidate his Dominican masculine identity.  It actually “delegitimizes his masculinity and his identity as a Dominican” (Sáez 535).  However, Yunior didn’t let his machismo in the way of his relationship with Oscar.  In spite of his peripheral relation to the de Leon family, he has incorporated all of the stories of Oscar and his family as his own.  The novel fluctuates between colloquial vernacular, formal language, and a form of Spanish slang.  The creolization of language and the neologisms created throughout the book create the effect of Yunior trying to imagine what is supposed to be unimaginable.  He continuously refers to the background story of Oscar’s mother and grandfather as they suffered during the Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina regime, the dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930-1961.  Trujillo conquered nearly every aspect of the Dominican Republic, and ultimately “treated the country like it was a plantation and he was the master” (2n.1).  Oscar’s grandfather, Abelard, and the reason that the Cabral line is cursed, was never able to meet his youngest daughter Beli, Oscar’s mother.  Living through the Trujillo regime, Abelard and his family lived “through a potent mixture of violence, intimidation, massacre, rape, etc.” (2n.1).

        Diaspora from the Dominican Republic is highly focused on in this novel.  Yunior provides a mix of the History of the United States and Dominican history.  Although the characters are physically separated from their country of origin, there is still a strong connection being displayed.  The nation itself is sometimes represented in the individual; the epigraph emphasizes this with the words of Derek Walcott “either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.”  Yunior is torn between identifying himself or Oscar as diasporic subjects, which also challenges the academic formulation of diaspora.  Considering the fact that the diaspora is conditioned by the logic of a nation, Yunior’s narrative lens reveals that a silencing can occur.  This is proven in Beli’s story when Yunior says “What she doesn’t yet know: the cold…the loneliness of Diaspora” (Díaz 164).  Throughout the novel, “the essence of diasporic consciousness becomes defined as Other, as purely marginal,” when it is compared to that of the nation (Sáez 525).  The novel contests the binary opposition between diaspora and nation, which ultimately shows how a common connection of exclusion and oppression links these two communities together.

        Blank pages recur throughout the novel, sometimes as pieces of paper that are literally blank and sometimes as writing that has been lost or erased.  Yunior uses the metaphorical empty spaces or gaps in history as a muse for imagining and telling personal and collective stories.  In describing the absences in both family and national history, he uses the phrase “páginas en blanco” which is described as a “blank page…to be filled in with the truth” (90n.9).  Yunior refuses to accept the possibility of recovering a complete story because the information has been suppressed and hidden in silence.  The information he receives is fragmentary at best which he confesses when he writes “[w]hat’s certain is that nothing’s certain.  We are trawling in silences here” (Diaz 243).  This relates to the fact that Yunior believes that there cannot be one singular truth to the Cabral-de Leon family and their history, or any part of history in that matters.  The second generation characters struggle to find their background, as their parents don’t speak very much of their lives in the Dominican Republic.  The enlargement of the context of whitewashed History is located in the footnotes of the book, especially when he explains the true reign of Trujillo.  The various páginas en blanco scattered across the novel represent the broken and fragmented stories and histories of the people who hold no power.