“The world is full of tragedies enough without [people] having to resort to curses for explanations.”
These words jumped out of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao and slapped me awake.
Too educated for their own good and cosmopolitan, equally religious and superstitious. That’s my family to a tee. For most of us, there is no dissonance in this state of being. As a Hindu-spiritual scientist myself but decidedly more western, I find this modern-day entertainment of old-world beliefs equal parts deliciously syncretic and irritating. Of the whole bunch, the irrationality that bothers and seduces me the most is the evil eye, or kannu in Tamil, and the casting of said evil eye, or kannu podardhu, by those envious of one’s lot in life.
Kannu is by no means a concept alien to most of you, it’s found in a lot of cultures. Almost every Jewish household I’ve entered has a hamsa or ten affixed to its walls to ward off ayin hora, Sicilians keep away mal occhio with jettatore and even the old English and Scots believed in overlooking (looking at someone or something covetously and for too long).
There are things going on in my life right now, and so weirdly so, that make me wonder who the caster of the evil eye is, and how I am going to disembowel him or her when I find out. And then Oscar Wao comes along, Dungeons-and-Dragons-nerdy, set in America and the Dominican Republic, wrestling with spirituality and superstition, filled with history and modern pop-culture. The novel’s narrator is the quintessential Dominican-American, like all of us immigrants and kids of recent immigrants, with one foot in America and the other firmly planted in the old world of our people’s memories. As we have kannu and other curses, Diaz’s Domos have fuku, a family curse that swims in their DNA like color, bad teeth and high cholesterol do in ours. And just as I am respectful of religion, religiosity and shibboleths and simultaneously dismissive of them, the book points out the glaringly obvious: The world, our luck and our choices are so messed up already without our self-indulgence placing the blame on another’s envy. If human nature dictates that we are too self-centered to really care for others, we are also too selfish not to care.
Kannu is a lazy out. Life is what it is. Or is it? Here lies the eternal struggle of the Hindu scientist: how much of our lives are free will, i.e. personal and directed effort and what portion predetermined? My mother concludes that it’s both and living is figuring out the balance. Happy Friday the 13th!
I’m a follower of your blog and very much enjoy all of your posts. To my surprise today when I read this, I was thrilled!!! I finished Oscar Wao a month ago and have passed it on to my friends but only those who speak spanish – which I do! I work in Latin American studies at Tulane and a friend of mine and I (who is Cuban American, been to the DR and worked with me in the center) were discussing the book and whether or not we would recommend it to those who don’t speak spanish. . . there’s quite a lot of slang/spanglish in it. So my questions: do you speak spanish and if you do, what do you think about this? If you don’t, what did you think of all the spanglish? and how did you feel about how that might have interacted with your interpretation of the book? I’d really like to know what you think. Please feel free to email me at my address.
I love your blog! Thanks!
Val, thanks for your kind words. I will email you with an answer, but am leaving my opinion here as a response to those who say they did or didn’t enjoy Oscar Wao because of the Spanglish: I wholeheartedly recommend the book to every English speaker on this planet. Without the Spanglish, the book is almost nothing.
While I’ve spent time in Mexico and Spain and get by in Spanish (because of familiarity with Romance languages in general), I’ve never studied it formally and don’t presume to speak Spanish at any decent level of fluency. That said, I grew up speaking four different languages and have a knack for picking up language and slang. There is much that cannot be explained in one language alone and words from other tongues are better suited.
Oscar Wao is an American book; it’s written from a Dominican-American perspective, but that doesn’t make it any less American. And, all books, even ones whose every last word is written in English, have a cultural context, one not readily accessible to someone not from that culture (as if we all lived in Austen’s England, Gatsby’s East Egg, Allende’s South America or Achebe’s Nigeria), so the reader has to work that much harder to absorb the book. In this day and age of multiculturalism and the internet, it is not (should not be) difficult for people to pick up words and slang or look up those words online if they don’t understand something. Most of the words I understood easily based on context or the emotion with which the author was headed somewhere, but I pulled up an online Spanish-English dictionary for the unknown ones. The experience left me that much more fulfilled and involved with Oscar Wao, instead of instantly gratified and not thinking about the book while reading it.
Those who don’t think much of Oscar Wao or any book because of its use of Spanish and Spanglish are lazy. They’re missing out on a great read and the opportunity to learn more about the America and the world around them. It has as much right to exist unchanged as any other work of American literature.
By all means, recommend away. A good book is a good book is a good book.
I’ve finally gotten around to responding. I am very glad to have another opinion about this and will begin to recommend the book to my fellow readers who don’t speak Spanish. And I wholeheartedly agree – this is an American book!!! Although my definition of “American” is definitely much more than most in just the United States (btw, i consider new orleans a Caribbean city, not U.S. but that’s a topic for another discussion). So to any who read these comments – please read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. And if you think you don’t like footnotes – endure them – they are essential to the book IMHO although you don’t HAVE to read them.
And Maitri I’m so sad to read you are leaving New Orleans although do not blame you. Good luck with your next geographical destination and it is true that you do know what it is like to miss New Orleans and you will, you will.