Oscar Wao Junot Diaz- Muhammad Hamza Javed

After reading the Junot Diaz excerpt from Oscar Wao, I understand that he is trying to explain the brutality his people had to go through during the regime of Trujillo. He came up with a name “Fuku” which I found very unique but hard to understand at first. According to him, Fuku is some form of curse or disaster that anyone has to go through if they don’t follow the one who is in power. Author explained the violence in the second paragraph by stating “No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since.” This quote indicates the fact that the historical brutality which was brought up to his country by Europeans through the plantation still has its elements. He further emphasizes on the word “Fuku” that, “You live as long as I did in the heart of Fuku country, you hear these kinds of tales all the time. Everybody in Santo Domingo has a fuku story knocking around in their family.” This quote tells us the level of the violence that existed during the power of Trujillo. Violence was in each and every corner that nobody could have escaped from it and at some point fuku has gotten to each and every person almost. There was a passage that was difficult for me to understand. That is, “which is why it’s important to remember fuku doesn’t always strike like lightning. Sometimes it works patiently, drowning a nigger by degrees, like with the Admiral or the US in paddies outside of Saigon. Sometimes it’s slow and sometimes it’s fast. It’s doomish in that way, makes it harder to put a finger on, to brace yourself against.” I had to read this particular passage multiple times and I still couldn’t figure out what the author is really trying to say here. But, from my perception he is comparing Fuku and the Vietnam war because he mentioned Saigon which is a city in south Vietnam. Since the Vietnam war was guerilla warfare, it had a pace of being slow some days and fast some days. Author portrayed fuku in this way so people can realize that fuku is unpredictable.