The ubiquitous ocean: naval conquest, forms of citizenship, and attempted emancipation in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Abstract When Beli loses her virginity to Jack Pujols in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, her idealistic “sense of a journey starting” is subverted through the language of violent naval seafaring, as when, for instance, she is both emotionally and physically enamoured with Pujols “hook, line, and sinker.” This contamination of the intimate sphere with the linguistic framework of maritime circumnavigation is frequently deployed throughout the novel to adulterate the Cabrals’ private lives with allusions to the historical commodification of oceanic conquest and the violent oppressions that these conquests entailed. While the intergenerational trauma of colonial history within Oscar Wao has been widely discussed amongst critics, little has been said about how and why it is frequently rendered through naval language, much of which has roots in weaponry, strategy, commodity, and enslavement tactics traceable to the Middle Passage. This essay builds on Melissa M. Gonzalez’s distinctions between decoloniality and full emancipation, and Donette Francis’s conceptualisation of “sexual citizenship” amongst Caribbean women, to argue that, in reading the Cabrals’ private lives and lineage through the lens of a naval colonial tradition, complete liberation from original New World conquests remains inaccessible, even as Afro-Caribbean descendants seek belonging, citizenship, and safety amidst postcolonial diasporas. Through these new considerations of the novel’s naval and oceanic semantics, this work also illuminates the perennial role of Paul Gilroy’s theoretical Black Atlantic in contemporary literature, as Díaz applies ideas of Black cultures which transcend national boundaries but remain interconnected through a violent, transoceanic historical experience to his fictional rendering of the transatlantic Cabral family lineage.