Abelard’s love for Jacquelyn pushed him to defy Trujillo, but it also caused a fukú to be put on the family. “Abelard… needed help in the prophecy department…His luck ran out earlier than anyone expected” (pg. 227). His attempt to save Jacquelyn and Astrid, caused the death of them and the temporary slavery of Beli. “Most folks figured that she had sold the girl to some other family. Back then...the buying and selling of children, common enough” (pg. 253). This sets Beli up for a lifetime of not receiving love from those who should have given it to her.
Beli looks for love in all the wrong places. Jack Pujos, the gangster, and her husband all disappointed her. The gangster used her for sex and had no real intention of keeping her. “When he met Beli, he jumped on her stat…He was a complicated …man who treated Beli very tenderly and with great consideration, and under him” (pgs. 123-125). Beli eventually realizes, but only long after she’s been broken by the Gangster. She understands that his love is not true and that he was using her for sex. This situation broke Beli and the spark she had before she met the Gangster.
Oscar spends his entire life in the pursuit of love. He believes that having a girlfriend will provide him happiness. “He would notice how everybody else had a girl but him and would despair” (pg. 25). The fukú didn’t only make him fall in love for the wrong reasons, it also drove him to hopelessness. Oscar was driven to attempt suicide because he was alone. The irony is that when Oscar finds someone who loves him, that love kills him. “They walked him into the cane and then turned him around…He told them about Ybón and the way he loved her” (pg. 321). Oscar knew the risk of love and yet decided to continue to love Ybón. In the end, he sacrificed it all for love. The fukú won.
Diaz uses fukú to show that love is painful, but lack of love is just as painful. Although fukú is more traditionally Dominican, the idea that love hurts is universal. By showing how this is in multiple generations, we see it isn’t really fukú. Human nature makes us love and we don’t always see the pain that love brings. Fukú might be a traditional Dominican idea, but through what the fukú brings to the Wao family, we can relate to and understand the Dominican culture.
The fantastical element of fuku reappears numerous times throughout the novel, as the majority of the main characters endure horrific situations that seem to be related to their family curse. However, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” creates a controversy between fuku and zafa, particularly in Beli’s life, as she miraculously survives a brutal beating.
ReplyDeleteWhen Beli falls in love with the Gangster, it appears that her family’s fuku has followed her, as she is destined for the same fate as her family, serving ,”as irrefutable proof that the House Cabral was indeed victim of a high-level fuku...two Trjui-lios in one lifetime—what in carajo else could it be” (152). The morbid description of Beli’s beating in the canefield upholds this notion, as she suffers multiple wounds and loses the child she was carrying. However, Beli’s survival and the description of the situation juxtaposes fuku with zafa. As the narrator describes, “Cursed people, after all, tend not to drag themselves out of canefields with a frightening roster of injuries and then happen to be picked up by a van of sympathetic musicians in the middle of the night who ferry them home without delay to a ‘mother’ with mad connections to the medical community. If these serendipities signify anything, say these heads, is that our Beli was blessed” (152). This controversy causes readers to question which magical force is stronger, making a statement about the supposed bad luck of the Cabral family.
Nicole, I really connected with your focus on the traditional Dominican belief in “fuku” and the way in which this curse drives the novel’s plot. Like you, I believe that the “fuku” of the characters is represented through their hamartia - romance. As you mentioned, Beli’s relationship with the Gangster provides a very fitting example of this. When evaluating this love endeavor, it’s crucial to emphasize that Beli’s feelings towards the Gangster were described as completely out of her control. After meeting him, she says, “She tried to keep him out of her mouth but it was hopeless…she could feel his hangdog eyes on her everywhere” (p.117). Beli’s inability to control her emotions mirrors the heartache she was unable to contain throughout her juvenile years. She described it saying, “Despite the trove of men…who marched into the restaurant intent on winning her hand in marriage, she never had a thought for anyone but Jack Pujos” (p.109). Readers see this theme repeated in a similar way through the character of Yunior, who exhibits a lack of sexual restraint and monogamous tendencies. When questioned about why he doesn’t simply change his ways, Yunior admits that he doesn’t know why he does the things he does, but that he can’t figure out how to stop (p.313). In showing such an inability to influence their romantic will or actions, these characters reveal that a force much greater than themselves – a romantic “fuku” of sorts – is at play.
ReplyDeleteFuku in this novel is really prevalent. It is used to describe every wrongdoing that has happened to anyone in the novel. If something bad were to happen, everyone would state that it was fuku’s doing and it was never chalked up to the fact that someone actually caused something to go bad; it was karma.
ReplyDeleteI do like the way that you mentioned love with everything. I think that it was not fuku that was causing everything in this novel to go wrong, but in fact it was love. Beli was in love with the wrong guy as you stated. This love for the wrong person caused to to be beaten to an inch of her life, but she did not stop right away. She believed that it was not his doing that she was beat, but rather his wife’s doing.
Next is Oscar. Oscar was so obsessed with finding love that whenever he did think that he finally found it, he didn’t know what to do with it. When he fell in love with the girl during college he went on a rampage after she started sleeping with another guy, causing him to lose all faith in humanity and tried to commit suicide. Then again he falls in love in the Dominican Republic and what happens? He is beat up by none other than her boyfriend’s friends. Although he doesn’t lose his life right away from it; his persistence in loving her is ultimately what signs his death certificate.
These are two of the reasons that I believe that fuku was not actually the cause of anything that happened in this novel; it was love for the wrong person, or even too much love for a person, as in Abelard’s case.