Junot Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, his novel about a Dominican family haunted by a fukú, a multi-generational curse. Like his protagonists, Díaz has split his time between the US and the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispañola with Haiti.
Haiti is a bit of a disaster right now, to say the least, and probably the least safe place to travel anywhere in the world. Christopher Columbus claimed and named Hispañola for Spain in 1492. Spain ceded the western part of the island, Haiti, to the French. The Haitians threw off the French, the Dominicans threw off the Spanish, and then the Haitians conquered the Dominicans. In 1861, the Dominicans asked to rejoin the Spanish Empire, then overthrew the Spanish a few years later. This relatively small island, population 10 million, has experienced what seems like a millennium of political upheaval about two hundred years. A dictatorship was overthrown in 1961, a new president was elected in 1962 and overthrown in a coup in 1963, the US intervened in 1965, another president was elected in 1966, and then he stayed in office for 30 years. Since 1996, the government has been democratically elected, but this has made it difficult for people to feel safe, for businesses to become established, and for the economy to grow. And that’s why so many Dominicans have ended up in the United States.
Do you blame them? The DR is more stable than Haiti, but that’s not saying much.
Meanwhile, the Dominican Republic has its own migrant issues, with people coming from Haiti and Venezuela seeking more stability than they have in those countries.
This book has a hero: Oscar de Leon, born in 1974 in New Jersey. He loves reading, writing, and science fiction. He wants to be successful with women, and he wants to be a successful writer. He fails at both, ending up as a substitute high school teacher who falls in love with Ybon, a Dominican American woman with a nasty boyfriend.
Oscar mostly lives in New Jersey, but he takes two trips to the DR in search of Ybon. In addition to Oscar’s story, the novel flashes back to the story of his grandfather, who was imprisoned while trying to protect his family, and his mother, who was an orphan and who fell in love with a married, politically connected, man. She moves to the US in the aftermath of that affair.
There’s a lot going on in this book: immigrants trying to make a home; a diaspora of folks with feet planted in two countries; young men trying to grow up. I liked it.
