Fuku Takes on a Monstrous Form in the First Half of 'The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao'

The concept of “fuku” as a monster takes the knowledge of monsters that we’ve consumed through Cohen and Halberstam’s writings and makes “the monster” even more theoretical and specific to the individual it is haunting. One of Cohen’s theses is that the monster is a constantly changing entity which shifts to reflect the particular anxieties of its cultural space and time. Fuku’s origin stays constant—the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas—which reflects a communal trauma of the Latinx community. However, the harbingers of fuku change—whether it be Columbus or Trujillo—and the particular form that fuku takes changes depending on the person it is haunting.

Something that struck me as interesting about fuku is that its consequences prey specifically on the insecurities and misfortunes of each individual. Oscar’s version of fuku, as it is presented early on in the novel, may be his lack of success with girls and women. In fact, Díaz even describes Oscar’s unreceived desire as a ‘ghost’, saying of Oscar, “His affection—that gravitational mass of love, fear, longing, desire, and lust that he directed at any and every girl in the vicinity without regard to looks, age, or availability—broke his heart each and every day. Despite the fact that he considered it this huge sputtering force, it was actually more like a ghost because no girl ever seemed to notice it,” (Díaz, 23.) Fuku takes on a unique quality, as it can sometimes simply be an omen of general unluckiness, like in Oscar’s case, as opposed to actual life-threatening danger, like most monsters are. Another example of this is in the prologue, when the narrator mentions his “twelve-daughter uncle in Cibao who believed that he’d been cursed by an old lover to never have male children,” (Díaz, 5.) Only having daughters isn’t a horrific fate, yet it is specific to the person whom the uncle believes to have brought the fuku upon him. Despite the sometimes trivial effects of fuku, it clearly can also be the life-altering, terrifying monster that readers are used to seeing, as it is inherently tied to colonialism and dictatorship through Columbus and Trujillo. All of this is to say that fuku takes on nearly all of the qualities we’ve discussed that are attributed to monsters, yet also evades category at all costs.