Book Review: Ghetto (Nerd) Fabulous
Posted on February 28, 2008

In a short but incisive essay, “Nueva York, Diaspora City,” Juan Flores notes that the African roots of Latino culture are too often obscured by the emphasis that American popular culture places on Latinos from the lighter end of the color spectrum. Yet, as Flores observes, for generations Latinos of African descent have expressed their Afro-Latin consciousness.

Junot Diaz’s first novel advances a distinguished, century-long tradition of Afro-Latin literary heritage. “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (Riverhead Books, $24.95) has given sharp-witted eloquence to the complexities of being Afro-Latino and immigrant in the United States.

The novel is a great accomplishment for several reasons. Among these, the most significant may be that Diaz, rather than succumb to market demands to make the complexities of being Afro-Latino palatable for outsiders, rejects the clichéd images and language of immigrant sagas and of novels that obsess over questions of race. Instead, he writes in a prose that, while infused with a deep social and historical consciousness, is exhilarating, street smart, erudite and wickedly funny, all at once. Diaz is a novelist who is firmly rooted in the specificities of Dominican history. Yet, far from focusing myopically on the topic, he expertly shows the ways in which the African Diaspora, U.S. imperialism and the exodus of Dominicans to the U.S., have shaped that history.

The novel’s title includes a play on the name Oscar Wilde since Oscar Wao is actually the nickname of the main protagonist. He’s a sweet but overweight nerd, a Dominican growing up in a New Jersey ghetto, who on one fateful Halloween dons a costume that reminds everyone of Oscar Wilde. The name invokes the Dominican play on Wilde, its transformation through Spanish into Wao, that makes one imagine Diaz laughing to himself knowing that many outsiders would not expect Latinos to know about Oscar Wilde, never mind joke with his name.

Told from the perspective of Yunior (his name also puns on the typical “j” and “y” confusion of Spanish/English speakers), Oscar’s sister’s one-time boyfriend, the novel ranges across an impressive number of genres, styles and referent points.

The many footnotes that accompany the text serve as the main medium into Dominican history but, and one can see this typographically, these also allow Diaz to let history serve as the base for his fiction and not subsume his craft. The footnotes, like the rest of the novel, include, as A.O. Scott puts it in his favorable review in The New York Times, a “multigenerational immigrant family chronicle that dabbles in tropical magic realism, punk-rock feminism, hip-hop machismo, post-postmodern pyrotechnics and enough polymorphous multiculturalism to fill up an Introduction to Cultural Studies syllabus.”

Connecting these various strands is Oscar’s story, his dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, of finding love. But Oscar is a misfit among misfits.

A Dominican who, unlike most of his peers, isn’t concerned with pretending he is not Black, sports an Afro and wears his love for fantasy genres like a badger: “Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he wanted to.” The fact that he is a ghetto nerd makes things much more complicated. As Yunior writes in one of his footnotes, “You really want to know what being an X-man feels? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto…[it’s] like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.”

Oscar’s nerdiness is not the only problem: Oscar does not fit in either Black or White America. When Oscar arrives at Rutgers for college, for instance, he has high hopes of achieving escape velocity. But alas, it doesn’t happen. Yunior describes: “The White kids looked at his Black skin and his afro and treated him with inhuman cheeriness. The kids of color, upon hearing him speak and seeing him move his body shook their head. You’re not Dominican. And he said, over and over again. But I am. Soy Dominicano. Dominicano soy.”

Oscar’s nerdiness excludes him from the ultra machismo of his Dominican peers and the coolness of his African-American brothers. In imagining a character so outside the common stereotypes of Brownness and Blackness, Diaz opens the ground for writing about themes that are often too over shadowed by ghetto fiction and immigrant narratives aimed at largely white audiences—tourist-like investigation of “how the other half lives,” to invoke the title of a famous book of photojournalism by Jacob Riis about the squalid conditions of immigrants in downtown Manhattan at the end of the 19th century.

It isn’t that Diaz is trying to humanize the immigrant story or to make art out of the ambivalences of being Black and Latino in America—something already explored by the Nuyorican poets and writers like Piri Thomas. It is that for Diaz, Oscar Wao’s life is brief and wondrous despite and because he is an Afro-Dominican immigrant living in the United States.

The novel is, as Walter Mosley noted, first and foremost, a “rousing hymn about the struggle to defy bone-crackling history with ordinary, and extraordinary love.”

Glenda Carpio is an associate professor in the departments of African and African American Studies and English at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

Glenda can be reached at carpio@fas.harvard.edu.