Throughout
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,
by Junot Diaz, a recurring theme of fear is used in order to show the nature by
which order is kept in their culture.
These instances of using fear are present in situations that place two
characters against one another. Even
going as small as brother-sister, friend-friend arguments, violence/fear of
aggression is clearly the method of convincing others to do what they desire. A
simple example of a much smaller-scale confrontation can be seen at time such
as the moment in the dormitory hall when other students were asking him what it
was like to live with a crazy roommate, to which Yunior asks, “how their ass
would like dorming with my foot” (Diaz 188). However, it seems that this
instinctive use of aggression/fear as a weapon comes natural to the people of
the Dominican Republic—largely due to their horrific dictator, Trujillo.
Within the footnotes, Diaz gives an
analogy comparing Santo Domingo to a Twilight
Zone episode’s city of Peaksville that was ruled by a godlike being who
held them all in fear of him and in isolation (224). According to Diaz, “…he acted like he owned
everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill” (225). Thus, it seems that the people of the
Dominican Republic were being raised in an environment publicly endorsing the
use of violence to rule over others.
Though some of these people were in the position of the people being
held under this horrible rule, some were not.
These people who were not led lives filled with riches and spoils,
simply for buying into the thought that violence and fear were the answer to
any problem life could present to you.
Of course, the Third World society
of the Dominican Republic still held women as subordinates to men, thus their
unsatisfied feeling of discontent with themselves for allowing themselves to be
robbed of their once elusive beauty. In
addition, the Dominican Republic had naturally come from these roots centering
on masculinity and violence/fear in raising their young male children. Each Dominican man present in both stories
that we have read that has been good with women has treated them quite
poorly.
Therefore, it does not seem so
far-fetched, when looking into this angle, that people would allow for their
country to be taken over by a hypermasculine, violent man. However, this masculinity carried over to his
taste in women as well. Diaz comments on
this, stating, “Ask any of your elders and they will tell you…he was the
Number-One Bellaco in the Country.
Believed that all the toto in the DR was, literally, his” (217).
As a result, due to growing up in a
setting whose morals already favored hypermasculinity and violence as a means
for the MEN of their population to achieve cultural success, Trujillo was able
to not only control a nation through fear, but to also spread this use of
violence to his people. The fear he
introduced to people was so great that, “It wasn’t just Mr. Friday the
Thirteenth you had to worry about, either, it was the whole Chivato Nation he
helped spawn, for like every Dark Lord worth his Shadow he had the devotion of
his people” (Diaz 225).
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