Welcome to the Philippines! How has your visit been so far?
I’ve kinda been waiting most of
my life to get to the Philippines.
I grew up in Jersey. Right south of Pinoyland. You
grow up with folks from the Filipino diaspora. You want to see where they’re
from.
Tell us about the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. From the title, we
know he is doomed. Why did you choose to write the book this way?
I was interested in writing about
someone’s life from beginning to end.
It’s not a bad idea to see how someone develops and progresses. It’s a different kind of challenge from
writing about a love story or war. We still need a couple of thousand more
books to fill the shelves of immigrant literature . I wanted to write about a
kind of kid who never shows up in the books. Very nerdy, a kid who was obsessed about comic books and science fiction, not at all a
womanizer. This kid never shows up
in the Dominican books.
Countries who were colonized by
groups like Spain and United States have a certain relationship to
masculinity. I wanted to write
about Dominican-American masculinity from its absolute obverse and opposite to
best understand it. This big dork who never goes on a date will say more about
Dominican masculinity than a baseball player or a boxer.
Is Oscar a hero?
There is a lot of pseudo-Catholic
mythology where there are lots of saints, but in reality saints are some kind
of perverts. I was interested in flawed imperfect people. I wasn’t really interested in people
wanting to go on a date with him. I grew up in a beauty culture world. Everybody
wants to be the hero, king or queen. I wanted Oscar to remind people of their
own humanness. That’s more
complicated than liking or disliking a person. People who remind us that we are frail and human, are people
with whom we have complicated relationships. In the end, myths of being a hero
and perfect will torment you every time you are weak, or make a mistake. Those
myths are good to survive with but they are not good to see yourself with. Oscar is the protagonist. He is only a hero in the sense that he
keeps trying no matter how much he fails. Can you ask anything more from a
human being?
Why did Oscar go back to Sto. Domingo to meet his fate?
He is kind of a dumb ass. I was born in Sto Domingo. If I got my ass beaten by a military man
and left for dead, I would not come back.
Oscar had an American naivete which was charming but I had to kill him
for it. My little brother was born
in America. He is very optimistic. When a man shows up at the door with a
knife, my little brother thinks he is looking for butter.
Can you explain fuku and
zafa? Our local version is called malas. Is it possible to escape your family’s fate or are you doomed to follow
it?
Even if it seems to be a
Dominican idea, it’s really American.
No one in the world is more superstitious than Americans. People there believe in UFO’s more than
Darwin, and in angels more than evolution. The idea that a nation might be cursed or blessed is a
foundational American obsession.
The American believe that the United States is the chosen nation, the
Jerusalem on the hill. The problem
with the concept of that is, when there is slavery, illegal wars or
colonization, it opens up the probability that you may not be a blessing. You may be a curse. Melville, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Morrison
obsessively wrote about it.
Oscar gets beaten up and
survives. He gets to return
home. The reason that Oscar gets a
second chance is to show that I don’t believe that there’s fate. I believe we have to make some choices.
He chooses to go back. The mother is also given a deep warning about messing
around with this dictatorship. The mother is given a chance to
go, but she chooses to back into danger.
If you make enough mistakes, you might actually learn something. I love
this family because they never learn.
Is the diaspora the only solution to oppression?
The dictatorship was
exceptionally pervasive. People
made different choices to survive this.
A lot of intellectuals ended up being agents of the regime. Some people disappeared into weird and
strange activities. People partied through it. Some people go into religion or
act like nothing happened. Some
people who can leave leave. But
very few actually was able to leave.
Why did you tell the history in footnotes? Is the line above the
footnotes fiction, and the footnotes facts?
This is your book. You can read
it anyway you want to read it. What
is your relationship to authority? There is a reason that dictatorships
last. We kind of like authority
and we empower toxic authority figures.
The footnotes are one story you like to empower. If somebody shows up in a nice suit,
not sounding like a camposino, we tend to empower what he says to us.
Footnotes are instruments for
authorization. Footnotes are part of the game. Are you going to give authority to a bunch of stories that
seem very official? I would be
very cautious in giving authority to the history in this book because most of
the history is wrong, and the narrator came out and said it. But we love official stuff, man!
Why is Yunior the narrator when he was not part of the family or even
very close to them?
That is the key question of the
book. Yunior as the narrator, does not invite you to ask that question because
depending on how you answer that question, the book takes a different
shape. If you begin to wonder that
it’s very strange that the person who most hurt Lola and Oscar is telling their
life story. How strange it is that an enemy of yours writes your story and what
might that imply, then you have another kind of book. In the end, the last chapter, is to be written by the
reader. There is an empty page
that the reader must write in. The
book is constantly about missing chapters and stories. The final character in
the book, Lola’s daughter, is called Isis. When Isis grows up, she can try to piece back the story from
interviews, maps kept inside the refrigerator. Isis in mythology is responsible
for reassembling the chopped up pieces of her dead brother-lover Osiris.
What do the references to the Fantastic Four mean?
Readers who love comic books
figure out that the book is organized like the Fantastic Four. Oscar is the Thing, the big, fat
hideous monster that no one wants to date. Lola is hot and on fire. She’s the
Human Torch. The mom, Belicia has
force fields and is the Invisible Woman. The grandfather, Abelard, is described
as the smartest man in the Dominican Republic and is made of rubber and can
bend this way and that way and he is Mr. Fantastic. If the family are Fantastic Four who is Yunior?
What books are you reading?
I’ve never read spy novels
before. I finally read “Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy”. Shit, that book is brilliant. I can’t believe I’m 42 years
old and I only read it now. John
Le Carre is it for me right now.
I’m reading Benedict Anderson’s book on the Philippines “Under Three
Flags” about Filipino anarchism, and how Jose Rizal and the Filipino liberation
movement was connected to Cuban liberation movement.
