Fukú-Sewayne Thompson

The excerpt by Junot Diaz took a few rereads in the first paragraph to comprehend. Diaz writes with mostly imagery. Something for me that is difficult to grasp if I’m missing context. For example, he mentions a demon I now understand as Fukú, who cracked open the Antilles. This caused me to reread a few times to understand what that means. Fukú was a new term for me, which gets used throughout the text a lot. Diaz does define it as “… a curse or a doom of some kind… ” But a doom specific to the world. I didn’t understand when he stated, “Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims.” The admiral, I would presume, is supposed to be those first colonizers. Midwives are caretakers of pregnant women; therefore, colonizers are responsible for the birth and delivery in the world. Another part that wasn’t as clear to me is page 4, nearing the end when he mentions a repayment for war being an item placed in rucks, suitcases, pockets—reading that, I understood that it was drugs, realistically cocaine. But Diaz insinuates that America had the war on drugs because of the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. He also states the drugs are Fukú. I wonder whether the Dominican Republic popularized cocaine and the incursion spread it throughout America after cocaine was found in DR, or if the war on drugs happened because of the Fukú America earned for messing with the Dominican Republic. Overall, Diaz was trying to explain a popular belief from his culture and do it authentic an authentic way. Diaz uses jargon throughout the text, something not popular in written pieces, but it worked for me. It feels as though he’s telling a story to a friend by not attempting to hide his vocabulary to be politically correct. Doing so makes this piece stick out to me and captivates the story he’s trying to tell.