The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Bearing the Unbearable: Pregnancy, Consumption, and Colonial Legacy in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Benjamin Zimmerman, Brown University

“A Ship under sail and a big-bellied Woman, / Are the handsomest two things that can be seen common” – Benjamin Franklin1

On the very first page of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, “one world perishe[s] and another beg[ins].”2 From the get-go, the reader is confronted with the harsh reality that, as the poet Frank Bidart writes: “All life exists at the expense of other life.”3 Nowhere in Brief Wondrous Life4 is

this calculus more conspicuous than in the novel’s treatment of pregnancy scenes, where characters who undertake to bring life into the world (such as Beli, Lydia, or Socorro) find themselves harried by the stultifying vestiges of colonialism. Careful examination of these scenes reveals a disconcerting connection between bearing children and being consumed—being used, then cast off, reflecting a disturbing continuation of colonialist practices of enslavement. Since pregnancy may be deemed a productive act within a system that commodifies the labor of individuals, it follows that children can be viewed as, in a sense, products. Therefore, looking at Brief Wondrous Life’s treatment of mothers (crudely: producers) and conceived children (products) reveals a significant facet of the novel’s ideological critique of postcolonial values—and, relatedly, the processes of colonization that brought about the internalization of those values in those colonized. And, as I hope to ultimately show, decoding pregnancy scenes in The

Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as an ideological critique of colonial value systems reveals the manifold ways in which those malignant systems persist into the novel’s postcolonial present. Viewing Brief Wondrous Life as an ideological critique of the pervasive and lasting effects of

1 Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard: The Almanacks for the Years 1733–1758 (New York: 1964), 29, as quoted in: Susan E Klepp, “Beauty and the Bestial: Images of Women”, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820, 128-78. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 128. 2 Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008), 1. All references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 3 Frank Bidart, “The Third Hour of Night” from Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 418. 4 As I will abbreviate the title from here on.

colonialism is not without precedent. Melissa Gonzalez, in her article “The Only Way Out Is In,” considers interpretations such as the decoding of fukú as a manifestation of the postcolonial legacy of rape or capitalism.5 While this essay will draw from Gonzalez’s emphasis on the capacity of colonial ideologies to “configure… characters’ desires and senses of self,”6 I amend Gonzalez’s conception of the operative ideology to the configuring of postcolonial values. This essay is predominantly focused on the capacity of ideology to prompt the commodification and instrumentalization7 of individuals. The issue is that these tendencies (to commodify and instrumentalize) are not really unique to capitalism, and so a critique of capitalism at large would not necessarily translate to a particularly pointed critique of colonialism. Brief Wondrous Life is a novel with an undeniable focus on the Dominican experience. Accordingly, it would be offensive to extrapolate a subtending critique that does not directly speak to (at the very least) the Caribbean experience. Additionally, it does not take special economic expertise to recognize that what made the colonialist praxis of capitalism so exceptionally objectifying was its reliance on enslavement, on practices by which “nature was converted into labor.”8 Therefore, when I look at pregnancy scenes as the potential basis of an ideological critique, what I will be analyzing is the extent to which the consumptive and instrumentalizing practices of colonial capitalism persist into Brief

Wondrous Life’s postcolonial present. For this analysis, I will examine two prominent motifs of pregnancy scenes: languages of consumption and reference to predetermined societal roles. Drawing out the presence and significance of these motifs through a close reading of the novel’s pregnancy scenes, I will connect the tendencies I highlight to fixtures of colonialist capitalism as characterized by Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. 9

Close review of all of the pregnancy scenes in Brief Wondrous Life uncovers a linguistic pattern

5 Melissa M Gonzalez,“‘The Only Way Out Is In’: Power, Race, and Sexuality Under Capitalism in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction,57, no. 3, 2016),280. 6 Ibid, 282. 7 In the sense of Immanuel Kant’s belief that it is morally wrong to treat other human beings as ‘instruments’ with no value beyond being an expedient to our own ends.a

a Robert Johnson and Adam Cureton, “Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2019), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ kant-moral/. 8 Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 185. 9 In particular, I will be drawing on Chapter 7: “The Empire of the White Man’s Will.” 7

of words that evoke consumption (viz., in the sense of eating, but at times in a more general sense). For instance, when Beli meets up with the Gangster after learning of her pregnancy with his baby, he remarks: “You smell good enough to eat, […] kissing the tender glide of her neck” (137). The Gangster’s diction reflects his treatment of Beli as something for his consumption. Interestingly, though, while the Gangster may be the one doing the consuming in his relationship with Beli, the hairs curling out of his own ears are, in turn, described as “starting to look like a particularly profitable crop” (137). The positioning of Gangster as the harvest of a crop field, calls to mind Frederick Douglass’s morbid assertion that the enslaved “are food for the cotton-field.”10 Yet a crucial caveat to the Gangster’s consumption of Beli is that, ultimately, neither character is able to escape consumption. Though in this moment the Gangster may be “consuming” Beli, both are indiscriminately consumed in the end, as is made apparent by the Gangster’s fate. Looking at a similar pregnancy scene involving Abelard and Socorro, we again see both the consumer and the consumed meet with the same fate. As in the previous scene, both characters are described with food language: “he [Abelard] felt for her [Lydia] the old desire, the one that nearly knocked him over the first time they’d met […] when they’d both been so slender and young and jam-packed with possibilities” (236, emphasis added). The words ‘slender’ and ‘jam’ forge an association between the two lovers and food, and here, too, a man who instrumentalizes his now-pregnant mistress as a sex-object11 will ultimately become an object for consumption within the same system that facilitated his own act of consuming. Clearly, the kind of consumption demonstrated by the Gangster and Abelard connects to the consumption characteristic of colonial capitalism. More than that, however, it is important to note how self-defeating Abelard’s and the Gangster’s acts of consuming are. Encouraged by the lingering colonial capitalist ethos, their urge to consume can be connected to Johnson’s description of the processes by which “slaveholders converted black hunger into white supremacy.”12 The Gangster

10 Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, as quoted in Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 176. 11 To be sure, both Abelard and the Gangster exhibit somewhat strong feelings for their respective mistresses, but, nevertheless, both men lack sufficient consideration for the wellbeing of their partner and so may fairly be said to instrumentalize them. 12 Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 187.

and Abelard inadvertently perpetuate the vicious cycles that entrap the Dominican people as they struggle to cast off the spectral yoke of colonialism and enslavement. The ways in which Brief Wondrous Life insinuates its ideological critique through consumption language go beyond the context of conception. Beli, perhaps the character most often described with consumption language, provides for two more particularly noteworthy instances of the linguistic motif, further establishing the connections developed in the previous paragraph. The first is when her birth is described: “To make matters worse, she [baby Beli] was born bakiní—underweight” (252, emphasis added). While an underweight baby might raise parental concerns over the baby’s health, it is clear that the reception of Beli’s weight does not come from a place of concern. Her weight is taken as a bad omen and aggressively undesirable trait. The significance attached to her weight indicates a commodification of baby Beli, recalling the importance of an animal’s weight when that animal is to be slaughtered and eaten. Separately, when the Gangster’s wife first attempts to force Beli to get an abortion, Yunior writes: “Beli might have felt as if the crone had thrown boiling oil on her” (141). While this quote is not to be taken literally, it certainly is in line with the wife’s attitude, and the throwing of boiling oil is a very provocative action to reference. Of course, readers will remember that Beli was burned with oil earlier in her life, but in this context the action offers itself under a new meaning (one in line with the motif of consumption), as the wording almost suggests that the wife would, if given the chance, fry Beli in oil and eat her. And, in fact, the Gangster’s wife’s desire to rid Beli of her baby is not too remote from the thought of frying and eating her. In addition to its language of consumption, Brief Wondrous Life also invokes the instrumentalization of colonial capitalism through its depictions of the role and lifecycle of producers (here, mothers). The kind of subliminal messaging achieved by these depictions is most notably evinced in disparities between the situations of Socorro and Beli, whose early descriptions foreshadow the outcomes of their respective encounters with speeding buses. For instance, prior to when Beli is nearly hit by a bus of musicians, she is characterized as having an important product to offer: children. There is mention of her “yet-to-be-born daughter” (77), and after the horrific beating she endures in the cane fields at the hands of the Elvises, the mongoose prompts her to get back up, saying: “You have to rise now or you’ll never

have the son or the daughter. / What son? she wailed. What daughter? / The ones who await” (149).

Thus Beli’s fate seems to be predetermined: “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.”13 In a terrible corollary, after Beli’s birth, Socorro too steps onto a street into the oncoming traffic of a bus. Unlike Beli, however, Socorro does not survive the incident. The meaning behind this disparity becomes apparent when one sees how often the phrase “Third and Final Daughter” (242) appears before Socorro’s death. Clearly, there is a sense conveyed that Socorro has fulfilled her role as producer and is now being cast off, no longer fecund. Socorro’s fate sends a strong message about the ethos of the novel’s present. To bear children (who are to become workers or bear their own children) is to be productive, and the message is clear: those who are not productive will quickly become refuse. The value system under which these women ‘produce’ is a clear continuation of colonial capitalism’s “radical simplification of human being: the reduction of […] human being to ‘hand.’”14 Under the system depicted in the novel, women are no longer people: “[W]hat is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero: she is a womb.’”15 This reduction is even present in Beli’s name—an obvious homophone of “belly.” Pregnancy scenes in Brief Wondrous Life force a confrontation with the complicity of the colonizers in the problems facing the Dominican Republic in the novel’s present. In each scene of heart-breaking consumption, the reader is reminded of the colonial root of the evil. While this emphasis does not serve the end of exculpating of the Trujillato nor characters associated with it, but it does perform an important framing role. As the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote of the Bosnian Genocide: We here in the safe, rich democracies feel about Serbian torturers and rapists as they feel about their Muslim victims: they are more like animals than like us. But we are not doing anything to help the Muslim women who are being gang-raped or the Muslim men who are being castrated [...] Here in the safe countries we find ourselves saying things like ‘That’s just how things have always been in the Balkans.’16

The most important thing to takeaway from the novel’s use of consumption motifs is an appreciation for how clear the colonial origin of those attitudes is. To read the novel purely as an indictment of the 13 Gen. 3:16 KJV as quoted in The Second Sex and how TSS cites the Bible passage it’s from. Simone de Beauvoir and Constance Borde, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 2011). 14 Ibid, 8. 15 Simone de Beauvoir and Constance Borde, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 3. 16 Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, Sentimentality” in Truth and Progress, Philosophical Papers 3, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 168. 10

cruelty of Trujillo and his regime would be to miss the point at a monumental level. At its core, Brief

Wondrous Life puts a finger on the source of the problems that immobilize characters within cycles of consumption, and in doing so, the novel turns its eye to the future, offering a glimmer of hope for a way out of the loop. Though the consumption-based value systems that sets up the bulk of the hardship endured by Brief Wondrous Life’s characters are deeply entrenched, the novel does contain a case of successful escape from those punishing structures—Lola’s abortion: “After a year in Brooklyn she [Lola] was now in Washington Heights, was letting her hair grow, had been pregnant once, a real moment of excitement, but she aborted it because I [Yunior] was cheating on her with some girl” (269). Lola’s abortion represents a triumph of individual will asserting itself. Lola refuses to accept Yunior’s philandering and takes it as immediate cause for terminating her pregnancy with his child—a decision sharply contrasting Beli’s wishes for her baby with the Gangster. Lola will not be bound to carry a baby she does not wish to. Her productivity remains her choice.17

“A Ship under sail and a big-bellied Woman, / Are the handsomest two things that can be seen common.”18 For the characters that populate Brief Wondrous Life, both of these sights are dark portents, as when the doctor “confirmed La Inca’s worst fear” (136) that Beli is pregnant.19 By contrast, for Franklin—as for most all colonizers—both a sailing ship (conquest, trade, etc.) and a pregnant woman powerfully symbolize prosperity. The cost born by others to achieve that prosperity is not even conceived.

17 And, n.b., she posits this autonomy in Washington Heights no less—a neighborhood named for one of the United States’ key founding fathers. 18 Q.v., footnote 1. (For the reader’s ease: Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard as quoted in Klepp.) 19 “A ship under sail” of course would invoke the genocidal colonization of Latin America. 11

Works Cited

Robert Johnson, and Adam Cureton. “Kant’s Moral Philosophy.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2019. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/. Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. Bidart, Frank. Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. Beauvoir, Simone de, and Constance Borde. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books, 2011. Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008. Ciocia, Stefania. “Psychopathologies of the Island: Curses, Love and Trauma in Julia Alvarez’s how the García Girls Lost their Accents and Junot Díaz’s this is how You Lose Her.” Journal of Modern Literature 41, no. 2 (Winter, 2018): 129-146. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezp-prod1. hul.harvard.edu/10.2979/jmodelite.41.2.08. Gonzalez, Melissa M. “‘The Only Way Out Is In’: Power, Race, and Sexuality Under Capitalism in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 57, no. 3 (2016): 279-293. doi:10.1080/00111619.2015.1046590. Klepp, Susan E. “Beauty and the Bestial: IMAGES OF WOMEN.” In Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820, 128-78. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Accessed July 28, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9780807838716_klepp.10. Kunsa, Ashley. “History, Hair, and Reimagining Racial Categories in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 54, no. 2 (2013): 211-224. doi:10.1080/00111619.2011.574747. Rorty, Richard. “Human Rights, Rationality, Sentimentality.” In Truth and Progress. Philosophical Papers 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Takolander, Maria Kaaren. “Theorizing Irony and Trauma in Magical Realism: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book.” ariel: A Review of International English Literature 47, no. 3 (2016): 95-122. doi:10.1353/ari.2016.0026.