"Reassembling the Fragments": Battling Historiographies, Caribbean Discourse, and Nerd Genres in Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. . . . Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent. —Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” In “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” Derek Walcott suggests that Caribbean art “reassembles the fragments” and “restores the shattered histories” of the islands. These images of fragmentation, reassembly, and restoration are particularly useful in describing the literary and historical reconstructions of Dominican history offered by Junot Diaz’s 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The novel’s title suggests the narrative goal of chronicling the life of Oscar “Wao” (the narrator’s nickname for the novel’s hero, Oscar de Leon), an overweight Dominican “ghetto nerd” from New Jersey. Yet the task of telling his story soon grows to implicate recounting the experiences of Oscar’s family (including his sister, Lola, his mother, Belicia, and his grandfather, Abelard) as well as the history of the Dominican Republic as it relates to their lives, from the United States-backed occupation to Trujillo’s dictatorship to the massive diaspora following Trujillo’s ascension. The wide historical scope of the novel is evident from the outset. The preface begins with references to the first encounters between Europeans, Tainos, and Africans in the “New World.” The chapters that follow explore the lives of three generations of the Cabral-de Leon family, non-linearly covering the 1940s through the 1990s. This story is filtered by Yunior, Oscar’s sometime friend and our mysterious narrator, whose identity and involvement in the story are only slowly revealed and whose name is not even mentioned until almost two hundred pages into the book. Throughout the narration, Yunior self-consciously struggles and experiments with how best to accomplish his task because in the process of his research, as he attempts to uncover both the story of the family and the history of the nation, he is continually confronted with silences, gaps, and “paginas en blanco” left by the Trujillo regime. Yunior often explicitly rejects the possibility of recovering an original, whole story because so much of the history he wishes to recover has been violently suppressed and shrouded in silence. The sources to which he has recourse are fragmentary at best, and he asserts the need of his art and creativity to cohere those shards and give a new shape to the vase of Dominican diasporic art and history. The novel adopts a hybrid