It's late and I should be sleeping, but I just started re-reading Junot Diaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in preparation for this project, and it's provoked a post. The first lines of this book helped me more clearly pinpoint the energy I feel in this work. I wanted to share:
"They say it came first from America, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú--generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse or the Doom of the New World. Also called fukú of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite "discovering" the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphillitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best (what Oscar, at the end, would call the Ground Zero of the New World), the Admiral's very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fukú, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours. No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of the Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we've been in the shit ever since. Santo Domigo might be fukú's Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not."
~ Junot Diaz, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao I offer this up for thought and discussion. Do you consider yourself a child of Santo Domingo? What do you know about this idea of fukú? Is there any credence to such a thought?
