An Evil So Monstrous...

One has to be careful about taking Junot Diaz too literally. For instance, when he talks about Fuku, does he mean a curse in a literal or metaphorical sense? Certainly, the legacy of the Trujillo regime impacted generations of people adversely. Wouldn’t that justifiably make Oscar feel cursed? Perhaps, too, we cannot know the author’s intentions with certainty. The purpose of ambiguity in the text may be to entice us out of our cultural comfort zone, thereby leaving interpretation to the individual. Could there be duplicitous meaning in Diaz’s words? 

For instance, I would argue that Abelard did not literally believe that Trujillo was a supernatural being, despite Diaz’s written narrative: 

His shit, if we are to believe the whispers, was an expose of the supernatural roots of the Trujillo regime! A book about the Dark Powers of the President, a book in which Abelard argued that the tales the common people told about the President—that he was supernatural, that he was not human, may in some ways have been true. That it was possible that Trujillo was, if not in fact, then in principle, a creature from another world. (245)

It is not explicitly stated that Abelard, a man of reason with a scientific curiosity about the world, truly believed that Trujillo was a supernatural being. “The whispers” were not those of Abelard; they belonged to someone else. It was the evil that the Trujillo regime committed that was beyond belief, not the fact of his existence. Indeed, the assertions about a supernatural being are not stated as a declarative fact.  The narrator’s words indicate that Diaz is speaking metaphorically, not literally, when he says “if not in fact, then in principle” (245). In other words, to a good man like Abelard, and to the people of the Dominican Republic, the evil committed by Trujillo’s regime was so grotesque that the “common people” could not believe that any human being was capable of committing them. Those “whispers” were not substantiated facts; they are the rumors of a people who cannot wrap their brains around such monstrous evil.