for Hauntology class, 2023
A Word
In Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the protagonist Oscar de León reads and writes genre fiction (Fritz) and specifically seeks to become known as a “Dominican Tolkien” (Díaz), and references to and concepts from genre fiction frequently find their way into the text through the words of Yunior de las Casas, the narrator (and diegetic writer of the book). In that nerdy spirit, channeling J.R.R. Tolkien as Díaz habitually does in this text, I shall begin by inventing a word – which does, admittedly, channel the linguist aspect of Tolkien, while Díaz tends to channel other aspects of the Professor’s work (Schulenburg; Sepulveda; Tait).
I shall borrow a concept from genre fiction where living beings – typically, but not exclusively, villains – control, or attempt to control, the dead, or the undead, to their own purposes. In genre fiction[1], this is typically referred to as necromancy, which is, it turns out, too etymologically imprecise for my purposes.
-Mancy, typically, refers specifically to divination or telling the future, from the Ancient Greek manteía, prophecy. Necromancy, then, is, most strictly, learning about the future by asking the dead (the Greek prefix necro- referring to death) about it – which is perfectly in line with, or perhaps even relies upon, the conception of ghosts as atemporal beings who begin by returning, for whom “time is out of joint” (Derrida). Hereafter, I will use necromancy exclusively to refer to divination by means of ghosts.
Which does, of course, leave a bit of a lexical gap. Control of the (un)dead for purposes other than divination is a concept found in genre fiction, and which I will explore here, and, having excluded it from the scope of necromancy, we require a term for it. By analogy with theurgy and thaumaturgy, I will pull out the suffix originating from the Greek érgon, meaning work, and refer to control of the (un)dead for one's own purposes as necrourgy.
This invention of a word is not simply a gimmick of pedantry; by extracting works of power and control from the traditional word and depositing it in a new one, I leave knowledge as the sole domain of necromancy. In relation to this text, there is a real distinction to be drawn, one which few observers have recognized: in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, it transpires (with some potential twists) that the work of necrourgy, in the form of fukú in the text, is the domain of villainous characters; necromancy granting knowledge, in the form of zafa, is the domain of heroic ones (or at least the less actively villainous).
The Fukú
"No matter what you believe, fukú believes in you." (Díaz 5)
Running as a theme through The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the fukú, described on the first page as “generally a curse or a doom of some kind”, originating in Africa, “carried in the screams of the enslaved” (Díaz 1), delivered to the Americas by Christopher Columbus: “a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles […] it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since […] we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not.” (Díaz 1-2).
Regarding the fukú as a ghost, as something dead or undead, is perhaps to blur concepts together that would be better off left unblurred. One might more reasonably describe it as a sort of black magic, an evil entity or sorcery, not necessarily related to the dead in particular. Blurring this concept so, so soon after being so pedantic as to invent a whole new word to satisfy my gratuitous pedantry, admittedly appears inconsistent on my part.
Still, the fukú is described as an almost consciously malevolent entity, “a demon” (Díaz 1) among other things, and as a Faceless Man who appears several times over the course of the text. Moreover, humanity has never been particularly fussed about the taxonomic classifications of spirits – peruse the etymology of ghost and behold the breadth of what its linguistic ancestors and close relatives have meant, from demon to human to angel and everything in between (Harper, Etymology of ghost).
Even setting that all aside, the fukú is, in the first sentence of the text, described as “carried in the screams of the enslaved [and] the death bane of the Tainos,” (Díaz 1) so it certainly may have something to do with somebody having died.
Even speaking of the fukú is dangerous. "To say [the Admiral's] name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours." (Díaz 1) This taboo avoidance calls to mind the linguistic origins of bear – the original European name of the bear may have been arkto, but fell out of use and was forgotten in Germanic languages: bear comes from proto-Indo-European terms meaning brown or wild animal, because to say the brown one's true name was to invoke its terrible coming. (Harper, Etymology of bear)
The fukú was “[a]lso called the fukú of the Admiral [Columbus] because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite ‘discovering’ the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing […] divine voices.” (Díaz 1) Did Columbus deliberately, fumblingly invoke or attempt to harness or deploy the fukú? Or was he simply a sort of bystander, Patient Zero in a plague of dooms?
The fukú is deliberately harnessed and employed by Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, president of the Dominican Republic 1930-1961, “our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator” (Díaz 2). Or, more specifically, “[n]o one knows whether Trujillo was the Curse's servant or its master, its agent or its principal, but it was clear he and it had an understanding, that them two was tight.” (Díaz 2-3)
Shit was so tight that many people actually believed that Trujillo had supernatural powers! It was whispered that he did not sleep, did not sweat, that he could see, smell, feel events hundreds of miles away[2], that he was protected by the most evil fukú on the Island. (Díaz 226)
(Yunior does, at least once, describe the harnessing of the fukú as “the necromantic power of El Jefe” (Díaz 158), but this is presumably because he is not so linguistically precise or pedantic as I am choosing to be.)
Anyone who opposed Trujillo wound up encountering a terrible doom, up to and including U.S. President John F. Kennedy Jr, who allegedly green-lit Trujillo’s assassination (which assassination perhaps incorporated Trujillo himself into the fukú, a ghost to haunt future generations), and was promptly assassinated himself two years later – not by “the mob or LBJ or the ghost of Marilyn Fucking Monroe [or] aliens or the KGB or a lone gunman [or] the Hunt Bruthers of Texas or Lee Harvey or the Trilateral Commission” (Díaz 4), but by the fukú of Trujillo.
The character Abelard, grandfather of the eponymous Oscar, is made subject to the fukú: "Most of the folks you speak to prefer the story with a supernatural twist. They believe that not only did Trujillo want Abelard's daughter, but when he couldn't snatch her, out of spite he put a fukú on the family's ass. Which is why all the terrible shit that happened happened." (Díaz 243)
On the other hand, Abelard is thought to have constructed a book describing Trujillo’s control of the fukú – “an exposé of the supernatural roots of the Trujillo regime! A book about the Dark Powers of the President, a book in which Abelard argued that the tales the common people told about the president – that he was supernatural, that he was not human – may in some ways have been true. That it was possible that Trujillo was, if not in fact, then in principle, a creature from another world!” (Díaz 245) – and to have been made a target of the fukú because of that.
Either way, Abelard is arrested by Trujillo, and “[a]las, the grimoire in question (so the story goes) was conveniently destroyed after Abelard was arrested. No copies survive.” (Díaz 245) In fact, none of Abelard’s books or publications, not one trace of his handwriting, was allowed to survive, a sort of damnatio memoriae executed by Trujillo or by the fukú or both.
In, among other places, chapter Six, Oscar’s lifelong depression, which drives many of his actions and the plot, is attributed to having inherited the fukú on Abelard (Díaz 263-307).
The Zafa
“Even now as I write these words I wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of sorts. My very own counterspell.” (Díaz 7)
The antidote to the fukú is the zafa. In its primary sense, the word zafa itself suffices – “anytime you mentioned or overheard the Admiral’s name or anytime a fukú reared its many heads there was only one way to prevent disaster from coiling around you, only one surefire counterspell that would keep you and your family safe. […] A simple word[:] Zafa.” (Díaz 7)
That this sole practical protection against fukú would be a word is in line with traditional conceptions of the supernatural as being linguistic, or language as being supernatural – for example, going back in Christianity to the first passage of the book of John, where “the Word [logos] was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1), or, for another example, the entire intertangled cluster of etymology leading to English words like grammar, glamour, and grimoire, through words signifying concepts pertaining to words, learning, incantations, and magic spells (Harper, Etymology of grammatical).[3] In the text, it turns out that in practice the zafa is more consistent with magic as knowledge and magic as story than magic as language – a subtle distinction, to be sure, and applying such clear distinctions to something so woolly as magic may be foolish.
In this sense, prima facie, the zafa is on the same order of magic as the fukú: a deliberate invocation of supernatural powers, albeit protective instead of harmful – where “[f]ukú works in an active fashion” (LeBlond), zafa is protective and reactive.
More specifically, throughout the book, the actual zafa that appears, most commonly taking the form of a golden mongoose, trends towards the necromantic, not the necrourgic. The mongoose does not typically defend against the fukú directly; more precisely, it grants knowledge of how to defend against the fukú.
A turn of wit allows Abelard to protect his daughters from Trujillo for a time: cleverness inspired by “a Numinous Being.” (Díaz 223) The golden mongoose comes to Oscar’s mother Beli after she is beaten by goons in a cane field, and leads her to safety. (Díaz 149-150)
Oscar’s great-aunt, La Inca, receives several messages and instructions from her late husband in dreams, instructions which serve to counter the fukú. One instructs her to find Beli; another reveals that she should send Beli to New York for safety (Díaz 157).
Oscar’s sister, Lola, is said to congenitally have the ability to harness supernatural powers for knowledge: “For as long as you've been alive you've had bruja ways; even your mother will begrudge you that much. Hija de Liborio she called you after you picked your tia's winning numbers for her and you assumed Liborio was a relative.” (Díaz 53)
The golden mongoose comes to Oscar, as Oscar is about to jump to his death from a train bridge onto the highway, and may be what guides him to fall on a concrete divider, instead of into traffic, saving his life (Díaz 190-191).
Indeed, Oscar himself is a ghost haunting the text – he never speaks directly, and his story is (necromantically) told after his death by others, chiefly by Yunior. Through writing the book (in part for Oscar’s niece, who is presumably subject to the fukú), Yunior conjures Oscar’s spirit as a guiding, storytelling, informing zafa against the fukú that “just happens to be the one that’s got its fingers around my throat.” (Díaz 6) Yunior – and Oscar – take the role of heroes, invoking zafa with their writing (Mahler).
In nearly all cases, the power of the zafa comes in the form of knowledge granted by – or anyway acquired from – the spirits – necromancy. In one of the few cases where the zafa does something other than grant knowledge, La Inca prays so hard for Beli to recover from a beating that it works: “Through the numinous power of prayer La Inca saved the girl's life, laid an A-plus zafa on the Cabral family fukú (but at what cost to herself?).” (Díaz 155) I feel it would be not entirely honest to claim the zafa merely vouchsafed methods of healing to La Inca which saved Beli, so this stands as a counterexample to my assertion.
This necromancy of the zafa occasionally fails, or is incomplete, as in the case where the mongoose tells Oscar, “— — —” (Díaz 301), cases of páginos en blanco explored satisfactorily by other authors (O'Brien).
One might observe that Trujillo’s powers are described as possibly also having included uncanny knowledge – “that he could see, smell, feel events hundreds of miles away” (Díaz 226) – but I would contend that Trujillo’s powers of knowing were more likely purely mortal – after all, the “[d]ude had hundreds of spies whose entire job was to scour the provinces for his next piece of ass” (Díaz 217), and his non-ass-oriented spy network was even more extensive – “he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyones who lived in the States […] you could say a bad thing about El Jefe at eight-forty in the morning and before the clock struck ten you’d be in the Cuarenta having a cattleprod shoved up your ass.” (Díaz 225)
Other Considerations
One other noteworthy point of intersection – be it similarity or opposition – between necrourgy and necromancy in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is that the mongoose usually seems to come to people willingly, bestowing its wisdom unsolicited (La Inca’s days of prayer for a zafa notwithstanding), while it is left deliberately unclear whether Trujillo is master of the fukú, or works in tandem with it, or even works subordinate to it: “[n]o one knows whether Trujillo was the Curse's servant or its master, its agent or its principal, but it was clear he and it had an understanding, that them two was tight.” (Díaz 2-3)
One might also observe that the zafa usually plays a reactive role, helping mortals defend against the depredations of the fukú (in literature, a tendency more traditionally reserved usually for heroes), while the fukú more actively seeks to bring about its victims’ doom (actively seeking change being a tendency reserved more usually for villains). And yet, the fukú can also be defensive or reactive, as, for example, when it retaliates against Kennedy for his role in the death of Trujillo (Díaz 3-4), so this is not a particularly strict dichotomy.
Works Cited
Bethesda Game Studios. "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim." Bethesda Softworks, 11 November 2011.
Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx. Routledge, 1994. Print.
Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. Print.
Fritz, Robert K. "Gender and Genre Fiction in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Chasqui 48.1 (2019): 206-223. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26795323>.
Harper, D. Etymology of bear. 6 October 2022. 3 March 2024. <https://www.etymonline.com/word/bear>.
—. Etymology of ghost. 7 December 2018. 25 March 2024. <https://www.etymonline.com/word/ghost>.
—. Etymology of grammatical. 7 December 2020. 26 March 2024. <https://www.etymonline.com/word/grammatical>.
John. "John." The Bible. King James Version. n.d.
LeBlond, Lisa. "From Plátano Player to Questioning Chronicler—Historiography in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2023).
Mahler, Anne Garland. "The Writer as Superhero: Fighting the Colonial Curse in Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 19.2 (2010): 119-140. <https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2010.494928>.
O'Brien, Sean P. "Some Assembly Required: Intertextuality, Marginalization, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 45.1 (2012): 75-94.
Schulenburg, Chris. "Nerd Nation: La breve y maravillosa vida de Óscar Wao and Life in Tolkien’s Universe." MLN 131.2 (2016): 503-516.
Sepulveda, Fremio. "Coding the Immigrant Experience: Race, Gender and the Figure of the Dictator in Junot Diaz's "Oscar Wao"." Journal of Caribbean Literatures 7.2 (2013): 15-33. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/43672608>.
Tait, Connor. "There and Back Again: Tolkien's Work in Diaz." ENG621 at Buffalo State University. Buffalo, 14 December 2023.
[1] And at least once in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao itself (Díaz 158).
[2] More on this in the next section.
[3] If The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, one of the most popular video games of this millennium, had already been published when The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was written, certainly Díaz, Oscar, and Yunior would all have been familiar with the concept of the draconic language in the world of Elder Scrolls (conceptualized for Skyrim), which contains inherent magical power, so much so that dragons do not draw a distinction between debate and battle – a concept which falls firmly in the same tradition of isomorphism between magic and language. (Bethesda Game Studios) Alas, Skyrim came out some four years after The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao did.
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