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BOMB 108/Summer 2009
ON NEWSTANDS NOW
ON NEWSTANDS NOW
Junot Díaz. Photo by Lily Oei.
If Marvel Comics had gotten around to it, Oscar Wao would have been a hero. As it is, Junot Díaz stepped in and made him one first. Oscar is a Dominican nerd (an oxymoron) who “could write in Elvish, could speak Chakobsa, could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman in acute detail.” A young aspiring writer with wet dreams, Oscar steps out of the Dominican diaspora in New Jersey with such a singular vision of romance, such a nonstop hankering for a world where the underdog actually wins, that we fall in love with him. Oscar, spawned by a writer with a profound understanding of the mythical implications of science fiction as well as the history of the Dominican Republic under what Díaz would call a bad-ass dictator named Trujillo (true story), is heir to a fakú. That’s a curse. So too are his people, in the immediate and more general sense of the word. It started with Columbus, read the book. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is epic, not only in its historical rendering of heartbreaking violence, of a cross-generational, exiled family, but in its language: a courageous patois from the streets of New Jersey, via the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, flying right up and into the face—and the canon—of great literature.
The inimitable Edwidge Danticat has a new book out, this one a poignant memoir of her family’s own diaspora between Haiti and the United States. At the core of Brother, I’m Dying is the tragic tale of Danticat’s uncle—her “second father”—Reverend Joseph Dantica, a beloved Baptist minister whose power of speech is stolen by cancer and whose life ends under deplorable care in a detention center in Miami, after he has fled the murderous gangs terrorizing Port-au-Prince in the wake of Aristide’s departure. The book is at once an account of one family’s generations and a reflection on leaving loved ones behind—a reckoning of the price that is paid by staying, and by leaving.
—THE EDITORS
(Interview)