Magical Realism in Latino/a Literature

             Although the origins of magical realism are still debated by scholars and authors alike, it has become clear in recent years that the genre is firmly established in Latin America and its conventions are continually used in fiction originating from this part of the world. While magical realism defies narrow definition in addition to narrow origin, its broader conventions are generally agreed upon. According to scholars Lois Zamora and Wendy Faris, magical realist works are typified by the use of supernatural elements that are “admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism,” a technique that renders the magical elements both “normative and normalizing” (Zamora and Faris 3). Perhaps no region of the world seems to delight in this integration between the magic and reality as does Latin America, so it is no surprise that Latino authors in the United States would also readily adopt the genre for their own works. This does not mean that Latinos are merely copying the styles of other Latin American writers, however; on the contrary, Latinos have adapted the genre to suit their own unique purposes. In the Latino works Bless Me, Ultima, Dreaming in Cuban, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Magical Realist elements are used to emphasize the way that individual Latinos/as are inextricably connected to more than just themselves.

Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima tells the story of one such individual, the Mexican-American boy Antonio Marez (Tony). The novel itself fits into Zamora and Faris’s definition of magical realism in that ancient myth, traditional healing, and witchcraft are all accepted parts of life and are seen as plausible components of life in New Mexico. As a child informally apprenticed to the curandera (faith healer) Ultima, Tony is in a prime position to see how magic is used in the everyday and thus how magic connects him as an individual to other people. This is particularly evident when he helps Ultima to heal his uncle Lucas, whom she agrees to help after issuing a warning that “when anybody … tampers with the fate of a man that sometimes a chain of events is set into motion over which no one will have ultimate control” (Anaya 85). This warning demonstrates Ultima’s understanding of the interconnectedness of people, a knowledge that is put to use when she mystically transfers Tony’s strength to Lucas in order to break the curse on him (Anaya 99-102). Professor Vernon Lattin notes in his article on Bless Me, Ultima that Tony comes believe in “a sense of mythic wholeness” whereby he is spiritually connected to all life (638). Theresa Kanoza takes this notion a step further when she notes that by recognizing the interconnectedness of life Tony is coming to understand that his own struggle between ancient beliefs and Catholicism are, in fact, reconcilable and that he does not have to abide by dichotomies (165). Ultimately, then, Tony’s magical connection to his uncle shows him that he is connected to all living things and that he is not alone.

Christina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban, which chronicles the lives of several generations of the Cuban del Pino family, takes a more subtle approach to the magical realist genre than Bless Me, Ultima, but it has clearly magical realist elements nonetheless. One such element is the reoccurring presence of the ghost of Jorge del Pino throughout the novel. Lois Zamora argues that ghosts in much of magical realist fiction are by their very in-between nature, representative of the rejection of dichotomies of all kinds – including the perceived dichotomies between “past and present, [and] individual and community” (498). The ghost of the character of Jorge del Pino, then, serves to remind other characters that they are connected to each other. This is especially true in the characters of Celia and her daughter Lourdes, who find it difficult to move past their own long-harbored antipathy (rooted in mental illness and political disagreements) to accept their connection to each other. At one point Jorge appears to his daughter Lourdes and encourages her to return to Cuba and make amends with Celia for her own sake and on his behalf, effectively working to help Lourdes overcome her isolation and enabling her to renew her connection to her family, however tenuously (Garcia 196-7). The fact that a ghost exists serves to illustrate the transience of all boundaries, and the ghost’s actions result in the renewed relationship between Lourdes and her mother Celia, showing each that they are connected to others beyond themselves.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a 2007 book by Junot Diaz, is comprised of several genres of which magical realism is only one. Although magical realist elements are accompanied by references to science fiction, fantasy, comics, and Dominican history, they nevertheless convey important meanings about interconnectedness. In her article on the historical and “nerdy” components of Oscar Wao, Monica Hanna proposes that the book’s self-conscious use of magical realism enables the work to present “an amplification of Dominican and United States historical reality,” which she suggests is cyclical (516). The effect of this attention given to the cyclical nature of history, then, is that the story being told – that of the overweight outcast Oscar de Leon and his ultimate death in the pursuit of love – is linked to the larger movements of history. One of the clearest ways in which Diaz is able to draw the connection between Oscar and Dominicans in general is through fukú, a word that refers to a curse affecting a family or a people. Fukú, the book’s narrator Yunior explains, “came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved … was the death bane of the Tainos [and] was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door of that was the Antilles” (Diaz 1). By linking Oscar’s murder to fukú, Yunior is placing Oscar’s life in the context of a larger story about slavery, genocide, and colonization. This sense that Oscar is connected to many others who suffered similar fates due to fukú is evident more concretely in his own cyclical family history. Yunior traces the de Leon family curse back to Oscar’s grandfather Abelard and “the Bad Thing he said about Trujillo” that resulted in Abelard’s imprisonment and torture, the disappearance of his eldest daughters, and the near-fatal beating of Oscar’s mother Hypatia (Diaz 211). Oscar is affected by the family fukú in much the same way as his mother is – by being drug to a cane field in the Dominican Republic and beaten. Both mother and son survive and are witness to another magical realist event: the appearance of the mystical Golden Mongoose, a guardian angel-like spirit that guides them back to life (Diaz 149, 301). Yunior suggests that, like the fukú, the Mongoose appears throughout history, so Oscar’s visions of the spirit serve to connect him to a larger context (Diaz 151 n18). Both the Mongoose and fukú link the lonely, seemingly isolated Oscar to a much larger sweep of history.

The many connections that Anaya, García, and Díaz draw between individual characters and the rest of humanity are made through their adept use of magical realist elements. Alejo Carpentier, an early theorist on magical realism, notes that “[Latin] America is far from using up its wealth of mythologies,” and the creativity of these three authors demonstrates that this is the case even in the context of the United States during the twentieth century (88).  Yet another literary theorist, Luis Leal, proposes that magic realists work to “intuit the imperceptible subtleties of the external world, the multifarious world in which we live” (123). This belief that diversity plays a key role in determining when magical realism is employed suggests that one reason that Latino writers would chose to use the genre is that they aim to illuminate such diversity with the Latino culture and within America. Bless Me, Ultima, utilizes magic realism to show how one boy is able to forge connections to other people and to nature itself. Dreaming in Cuban employs the genre to illustrate the importance of family relationships and their maintenance in the face of distance and disagreement.  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao incorporates magical realist elements in an effort to explain the horrors of the Trujillo regime and the lasting effects of European colonization in the Americas by drawing parallels to the life of one person. Ultimately, then, these works of Latino literature utilize magical realism in order to better describe Latino life, but also to demonstrate the place of individual Latinos – and by extension, all Latinos – in an American and in a global context.

Bibliography

Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima. New York: Warner Books, 1994. Print.

Carpentier, Alejo. “On the Marvelous Real in America.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, and Community. Zamora and Faris, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 75-88. Print.

Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008. Print.

García, Christina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992. Print.

Hanna, Monica. “‘Reassembling the Fragments’: Battling Historiographies, Caribbean Discourse, and Nerd Genres in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Callaloo 33.2 (2010): 498-520. Academic Search Premier. Web. 12 Apr. 2012.  

Kanoza, Theresa M. “The Golden Carp and Moby Dick: Rudolfo Anaya’s Multi-Culturalism.” MELUS 24.2 (1999): 159-171. Academic Search Premier. Web. 12 Apr. 2012.

Lattin, Vernon E. “The Quest for Mythic Vision in Contemporary Native American and Chicano Fiction.” American Literature 50.4 (1979): 625-640. Academic Search Premier. Web. 12 Apr. 2012.

Leal, Luis. “Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, and Community. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 119-124. Print.

Zamora, Lois Parkinson and Wendy B. Faris. Introduction. Magical Realism: Theory, History, and Community. Zamora and Faris, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 1-11. Print.

Zamora, Lois Parkinson. “Magical Romance/Magic Realism: Ghosts in U.S. and Latin American Fiction.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, and Community. Zamora and Faris, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.497-550. Print. 

Either We're Nobodies, or We're Nations

         I liked The Brief Wondrous Life of OscarWao the first time I read it, but I must admit that I formed a much deeper connection to it the second time around. Perhaps that’s because I know more about the Dominican Republic and Haiti, or because I understand more of the cultural references that pepper the book in the form of footnotes. Ultimately, though, I think my love of this book is tied to my appreciation for the way Junot Díaz is able to effectively tie a whole universe to the life of one overweight “GhettoNerd.” Díaz hints at this aspect of his book through its two epigraphs, one from the comic book The Fantastic Four, and one from Caribbean poet Derek Walcott’s poem “The Schooner Flight.” Although the sources of the quotes are very different, Díaz uses the questions they raise in much the same way. Walcott’s poem reflects on the speaker’s mixed heritage and ends with the statement “either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” In true comic book form, the other epigraph recounts the question of a supervillian who destroys entire worlds and defends his destruction by asking the rhetorical question “Of what import are brief, nameless lives … to Galactus??”  The answer in Galactus’s mind is obviously “they are brief, nameless lives and I am a destroyer of worlds, so of course they are of no importance” but the answer that The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao gives is “brief, nameless lives are everything.”  Coupled with Walcott’s suggestion that individuals contain entire nations, the novel works to demonstrate just how important individuals are.

       

        Díaz’s book tells the story of Oscar de Leon, an overweight, unlucky-in-love Dominican-American who is largely neglected by everyone but his sister Lola. Although Oscar is a social outcast, his connection to other people and places is illustrated throughout the book. The major way that Díaz explores the connection between Oscar and the rest of the world is through Fukú, a term for a sort of inescapable curse that moves through both families and nations. Oscar is a victim of Fukú, but his mother, grandparents, and the entire nation of the Dominican Republic are affected by it too, which demonstrates the way that one person can be connected to history in a broader sense than might appear. There are other ways in which Oscar is connected to movements larger then himself – in his love of reading that links him to writers, in his many unrequited loves that link him to other people in all walks of life, and so on. Ultimately the title of the book says it all – Oscar’s life, while his brief and unrecognized, is wondrous. He is part of something more, and it seems to me that Díaz is suggesting that all of us are.