Dictators: Ethnic American Narrative and the Strongman Genre By

Dictators: Ethnic American Narrative and the Strongman Genre
By
David C. Liao
B.A., State University of New York, Binghamton 2006
M.A., Brown University
Thesis
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in the Program of English at Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island
May 2015
© 2015 by David C. Liao
This dissertation is accepted in its present form
by the Department of English as satisfying the
dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Date _________
__________________________________________
Deak Nabers, Advisor
Recommended to the Graduate Council
Date _________
__________________________________________
Tamar Katz, Reader
Date _________
__________________________________________
Olakunle George, Reader
Approved by the Graduate Council
Date _________
__________________________________________
Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School
iii
VITA
David Chang Yi Liao was born on July 20, 1984 in Taipei, Taiwan. The child of a
diplomat, he has also lived in Houston, Texas and Long Island, New York, as well as
spending numerous holidays with his brothers in California. He graduated magna cum
laude from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 2006, earning a B.A. in
English, with a concentration in Creative Writing. He began pursuing a Master’s Degree
in English at Brown University in September of 2006, and began his doctoral studies with
the English Department at Brown in the fall of 2008. In the course of completing his
Ph.D., he has taught courses in literature and composition at both Brown and Bryant
University in Smithfield, R.I.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Firstly, I would like to thank the English Department at Brown University, who
accepted me into their ranks on two separate occasions. From the very first day, Ellen
Viola and Lorraine Mazza have been an invaluable source of logistical support, sage
advice, humor, warmth and year-round good spirits. In particular, I would like to thank
my adviser Deak Nabers, who not only took me on during a moment of transition, but
gave my project a sense of clarity, cohesion and achievability. Through his tireless efforts
to reach out and work with graduate students in the form of workshops and colloquiums,
Deak had actually been advising and guiding me on my dissertation long before it
became official. To Tamar Katz, I owe much of my formation and refinement as a
scholar; having worked with me through seminars, independent studies and field exams,
she never failed to ask the rigorous, important questions, and knew when a firm hand was
required. I also had the pleasure of working with Olakunle George, whose helpful
inquiries and insightful feedback helped me to apprehend anew the relevance and
potential of my work. At Brown, I have also benefitted from the insights, talent and rigor
of Ralph Rodriguez, Daniel Kim, Timothy Bewes and Ravit Reichman. Although I only
worked with them briefly, the encouragement of Nancy Armstrong and Rey Chow was
instrumental in my transition from a master’s-level scholar to a Ph.D.-worthy one. I also
owe much to my advisers at SUNY Binghamton, Joseph Keith and Ingeborg MajerO’Sickey. Their mentorship not only laid the most basic foundations for my even
beginning to comprehend this undertaking, but also gave me the confidence and critical
tools to embark on it in the first place. I hope I have made you both proud.
More than anything, the Good Company is what has made this whole thing so
rewarding. The friendships I have forged in the English Department have been simply
matchless: Katherine Miller, Swetha Regunathan, Andrew Naughton, Sean Keck, Sara
Pfaff, Debby “Tiger Mom” Katz, John Mulligan, Derek Ettensohn, David Hollingshead,
Peter Kim, Nathan Conroy and Sarah Osment. Outside the English Department, I have
been fortunate to enjoy the company of Dae-il Kim, Niki Clements, Kevin Creedon,
Meredith Dunn, Hamzah Ansari, Daniel Picus, Heidi Wendt, Aaron Glaim, Bruno
Penteado, and Lisbeth Trille Loft. From day one Angela Allan and Sachelle Ford have
been my co-conspirators, my trench (computer lab) mates, great sources of support and
v
laughter, and ultimately, my role models. I don’t know how they put up with me at times,
but I do know that I could not have gotten through this without them.
I also want to acknowledge Jennifer Schnepf and Khristina Gonzalez (Margaret
and Helen), whom I met on my first day of graduate school, and who became the big
sisters I never had, and never realized I so needed. The extraordinary wit, irreverence,
musical genius and all-around brilliance of Austin Gorman have inspired me since the
very beginning, and it is to him I dedicate my Al Pacino Chapter. Paul Robertson, whose
scholarship was a world away from my own, but whose vitality, honesty, fearlessness and
humanity have been its own indelible part of my grad school education. My appreciation
also goes out to Stephanie Tilden and Tim Syme, for their unexpected yet indispensable
companionship and encouragement as I rounded out the last lap.
My deepest affection goes to the Dupuis family, who took me in as one of their
own, and has provided such a loving and supportive structure: Paul, Suzanne, Emily,
Phillip and Alex have all been truly a second family. A universe of appreciation goes to
my first family, the Liaos, from where everything I am begins and ends: Vincent, who I
still look up to after all these years; Ting-Ting, who first blazed the trail for me to follow;
Leslie, my teammate and ally in all things, from whom I can never feel distant, and who
keeps me sane and insane in all the good ways. No words can fully express my awe and
gratitude for my parents, Ching Hung and May Lin Liao, without whom none of this
would have been possible. Their endless reservoirs of love, understanding,
encouragement and emotional and financial support have been nothing short of
tremendous, and I have been blessed to be their son.
Finally, I want to thank Nicole Dupuis, my best friend, partner, and the brilliant
sun and star of my life. Her unconditional love and unwavering faith in me has both
recharged my sense of purpose and helped me through the difficult moments. Most of all,
she has made me feel truly alive, and To Her I Dedicate Everything.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Literary Dictators
1
Chapter One
The Authoritarian Education of Richard Wright
18
Chapter Two
Good Korean/Bad Korean:
Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and the Ghost of Syngman Rhee
64
Chapter Three
Literary Caudillos:
Junot Diaz and the Latino/a American Dictator Novel
113
Chapter Four
Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone…Generalissimo Corleone?
The Godfather: Part II and the Form of Dynastic Succession
170
Coda
Tyrant and the Limits of the Strongman Genre
208
Works Cited
215
vii
INTRODUCTION
Literary Dictators
When Lee Kuan Yew passed away on March 23, 2015, the international
response—from heads of state past and present, policymakers, captains of industry,
scholars, pundits, and the general commentariat—revealed the extent to which the former
Prime Minister of Singapore had been, as William J. Dobson notes in Foreign Policy,
“one of the most universally celebrated statesmen of the last 50 years.” Dobson appends
this assessment, however, to another, more crucial one: that Lee was also “the most
successful dictator of the 20th century.” Lee’s autocratic tendencies, commonly
characterized as a “soft” or “pragmatic” authoritarianism or a “benevolent dictatorship,”
has long been an acknowledged aspect of his rule, which saw the remote, impoverished
city-state flourish into an international economic powerhouse. Nonetheless, Dobson’s
charge brings into relief a subset of public opinion that takes a much darker view of the
late Singaporean leader. This is a view that has been, if not exactly less popular or less
vocal, then definitely less heard, due to Lee’s notorious fondness for libel suits—a
testament in itself, perhaps, to his aforementioned “success” as a dictator.
Writing for Salon in the wake of Lee’s death and the glowing eulogies that
followed, Patrick L. Smith reminds us that “For ruling cliques in Washington and across
the Western world, Lee was an exquisite example of the developing-nation leader who
gets the dirty work of political repression done with the minimum of embarrassing mess.”
In his editorial, which calls out Lee for being a “tyrant” and a “psychological monster”
right in its title, Smith argues that Lee’s only distinction from his more infamous
1
counterparts—“Pinochet and the shah…Videla and the other colonels in Argentina…alSisi in Egypt…the Marcoses and Suhartos and Somozas”—is solely a matter of method
and degree. In the end, it might only be a matter of dramatic flair: “No machine-gun
murders in the public squares for Lee. No stadiums full of dissidents awaiting their turn
to be tortured, no political prisoners thrown into the ocean from helicopters. All of Lee’s
opponents kept their fingernails.”1 More pointedly, even as Smith underscores Lee’s
essential sameness with the American-backed dictators listed above, he also clarifies
what made Lee such an “exquisite example”: his commitment to the “dirigiste errand”
involving the “installation and maintenance of one form or another of neoliberal
corporatism and the corresponding subversion of democratic process.” For Smith,
Singapore’s undeniable material progress—the keystone for Lee’s defenders—attests not
to any fundamental incompatibility between democracy and economic advances, but
rather to the mutual cancellation of democracy and neoliberal capitalism.
What Smith’s remarks highlight about Lee’s “brand of leadership,” I would
propose, is almost something like a “model minority” quality on a global scale, pertaining
to “a man and a nation the cliques in Washington wish the whole of the developing world
would emulate.” And just as the model minority myth as applied to Asian Americans
entails favorable comparisons to other minority groups such as African Americans and
Latinos, the East Asian “Tiger Economies” are frequently touted as aspirational models
for African and Latin American nations, as evidenced most recently by the speculations
that pop up regarding Rwanda as a potential “Singapore of Africa” or Panama as the
1
Patrick L. Smith, “Lee Kuan Yew is Finally Dead—and America’s Elites Are Eulogizing a Tyrant and
Psychological Monster” at Salon.com.
2
“Singapore of Latin America.”2 In this vein, Smith also foregrounds the violence,
epistemic and otherwise, inherent in upholding a figure like Lee as an international ideal
to be emulated. This is a man, after all, who has described his own “brand” of leadership
by boasting “Nobody doubts that if you take me on I will put on knuckle-dusters and
catch you in the cul-de-sac […] If you think you can hurt me more than I can hurt you,
try,” and even reflects in his memoir that “If nobody is afraid of me, I’m meaningless.”3
Finally, what emerges most saliently in this account of Lee is a certain
comparative, as well as intermediary dimension. That is, Smith’s essay seems less
interested in Lee Kuan Yew as a dictator in and of himself, than in the ways he resembles
more recognizably brutal types like Pinochet, the shah, and others, or functions as a
future template for the likes of Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. Even more important, I would
point out, is what Lee’s dictatorship illuminates about those variously named “American
policy people,” “ruling cliques in Washington,” “policy cliques” and “Washington’s
neoliberals.” Smith does disclose, notably, that he had himself been Lee’s victim twice
before—the first time through expulsion for his political coverage, and the second time as
the accused in a costly libel suit—and that his vitriol for the former Prime Minister is
borne partially of personal experience. In the end, however, his analysis couches the
larger historical significance of Lee’s legacy in these relative (to other dictators) and
relational (to the power centers of the West) aspects. The question becomes, from this
angle: what might our recognition of Lee as among “the worst of the autocrats” in turn
make us acknowledge about the entity called “Washington”?
2
See, for instance, Christian Caryl’s “Africa’s Singapore Dream” in Foreign Policy and “A Singapore for
Central America?” in The Economist.
3
Quoted in Patrick L. Smith, “Lee Kuan Yew is Finally Dead.”
3
Although not a primary (or even, really, a secondary) figure in this study, the case
of Lee Kuan Yew nevertheless provides a useful point of departure for what follows. To
begin with, if Lee’s brand of dictatorship represents the kind that Washington and
Western elites love—economically efficient, mainstream-friendly and under the radar—I
would suggest that these same qualities, after a fashion, also broadly characterize
treatments of dictators and dictatorship in the realm of United States literatures. That is to
say, if the works examined here are any indication, the engagement with dictator figures
in American narratives tend not to be a matter of direct representation or overt thematics
(like those seen, for instance, in the popular and prolific “dictator novels” of the Latin
American literary tradition, which I discuss in my third chapter). Rather, stories about
dictators in the U.S. context tend to be bracketed by other overarching themes and
preoccupations.
At the risk of triteness, we might think of the “old verities” William Faulkner
names as essential to the literary endeavor: “love and honor and pity and pride and
compassion and sacrifice.” And yet, we should also remember, that this giant of
American letters was the creator of such characters as Thomas Sutpen, Percy Grimm, and
Jason Compson (IV)—literary tyrants of the most sensational and garish order if there
ever were any, even if this facet tended to be sublated under the standard Faulknerian
concerns with race, the South, the past, etc. To put the matter more straightforwardly, if
the dictators that American “ruling cliques” love are those—like Lee Kuan Yew—who
aren’t immediately recognizable as such, due to their effective embodiment of some other
valued quality (such as economic prosperity and modernization), then the narratives
about dictators that American readers respond to are also generally those that seem not to
4
be one at first glance, in which the dictator figures at their center remain secondary to
more pressing and familiar stories about diasporic return, Third World liberation,
immigration, assimilation, crime, family, love, and so on.
This dissertation explores the trope of the ethnic dictator, or what I term more
generally the “ethnic strongman,” as it emerges in narratives by writers like Richard
Wright, Chang-rae Lee and Junot Diaz, as well as in Francis Ford Coppola’s The
Godfather films. More specifically, I examine how these works imagine the dictator
figure as a vital organizing trope for holding together and working through questions of
ethnic identity, transnationalism, diasporic consciousness, historical memory, and
political subject-formation. On the most basic level, this project conceives of the ethnic
American writer as engaged in a dialogue with the international ethnic dictator. Indeed,
my analysis in each of these chapters has its condition of possibility in the legacy and
discourse around a specific political figure, such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana,
Syngman Rhee of South Korea, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and the Cold
War dyad of Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro in Cuba. At the same time, I also use the
more flexible term “ethnic strongman” to talk about those narrative instances that address
themes of authoritarianism and dictatorship through figures who may not be literal
dictators, such as the city councilman in Lee’s Native Speaker, the mafia don in the
Godfather films, or the hyper-macho bodybuilder-narrator of Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao. Ultimately, this study aims to reveal the mutual imbrication between
two different kinds of “literary dictators”: first, the literary representations of actual
tyrants, both as historical personages and narrative inventions; and second, the figure of
5
the writer as precisely one who dictates a literary narrative, and in doing so exercises his
own form of authoritarian power.
Much like in Smith’s account of Lee Kuan Yew, an important element of the
ethnic dictator trope lies in its comparative and intermediary function—that is, in how the
dictator figure in these texts mediate the horizontal relationship between different
national histories and contexts of dictatorship, as well as vertical relationships to
hegemonic structures of power and knowledge, namely “Washington” and those “ruling
cliques” in the West. Thus the multi-ethnic nature of this project allows me to situate this
literary trope within a thoroughly global milieu of U.S. imperial power deployed across a
variety of regions (Africa, East Asia, Latin America), though without occluding their
contextual and historical specificities. Moreover, as an account of works by ethnic
American writers, this project argues for the centrality of international dictators like
Rhee, Trujillo, Castro and all the rest to the formation of modern day ethnic populations
in the U.S. It is to recognize, for instance, the correlation between the influx of Central
American migrants in the 1980s and the Reagan Administration’s support for brutal
dictatorships in that region, or the close partnerships between Washington and the
military strongmen in Seoul that enabled the vast immigration from South Korea
beginning in the 1970s.
Thus, while this project partakes in the ongoing transnational turn in American
literary studies and ethnic studies, it also invokes a version of transnationalism that has
received somewhat less scholarly attention, one interested not so much to thinking
beyond nations, but rather in exploring the relationship among and between them. In
other words, while the fashionable recent work in transnational studies generally
6
concerns the multiplicity of social, cultural or economic flows that decenter the nation
state, my dissertation embraces a definition of the transnational that focuses on political
exchanges between centered nation states, and the strongmen who play a key role in
brokering and mediating them. In some ways, this dimension had always been there, even
in the earliest formulations on the topic. In his milestone essay “Trans-National America”
(1916), Randolph Bourne characterizes the United States as a “cosmopolitan federation
of national colonies” and argues that “America is coming to be, not a nationality but a
trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all
sizes and colors.” More recently, in her address to the American Studies Association,
Shelley Fisher Fishkin argues that “The complexity of our field of study…requires that
we see the inside and outside, domestic and foreign, national and international, as
interpenetrating” (21). Finally, speaking from an ethnic literatures perspective, Paula
M.L. Moya and Ramon Saldívar similarly assert that “‘American’ fiction…must be seen
anew as a heterogeneous grouping of overlapping but distinct discourses that refer to the
U.S. in relation to a variety of national entities” (1).4
Furthermore, I would argue, the notion of what Lisa Lowe calls the “international
within the national” has also been a prevalent feature of certain U.S. ethnic literatures,
especially in their incipient manifestations.5 Due to their legal and social marginalization
from Anglo-American national culture, early Asian American and Latino/a writers
exhibited a high degree of awareness of their transnational status, largely because they
could look back to homelands that were also discrete and coherent “national entities.”
4
The constitutive tension between political entities also frames José David Saldívar's theorization of “the
borderlands" in Border Matters (1997), where he observes that “[as] a near inter-cultural world unto itself,
the U.S.-Mexico border is dominated by two foreign powers, in Washington D.C., and Mexico City” (8).
5
See Lisa Lowe’s essay “The International within the National” (1998).
7
Even in narratives that endorsed assimilation into the American mainstream, authors
tended to depict older cultural affiliations not only in the generalized terms of tradition,
family and culture, but also as tied to specific political allegiances. This can be seen in
the Chinatown community's support for China’s anti-communist Kuomintang regime in
Jade Snow Wong's memoir Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), as well as in the patriarch
Juan Rubio's romantic nostalgia for his past life as a revolutionary ally of Pancho Villa in
Jose Antonio Villarreal's novel Pocho (1959). In both cases, the quest for an American
national identity plays out against other distinct nationalist loyalties—i.e. to Nationalist
China or Revolutionary Mexico—and raises the question of how national and
transnational (or rather, national and other national) subjectivities might be mutually
imbricated rather than mutually exclusive. In both these examples, I would add, the
alternative national attachment is actually less so to a ruling government, party or
movement, but to a specific political strongman that stands as a synecdoche for the
homeland “national entity,” such as the allusions to Chiang-kai Shek in Fifth Chinese
Daughter, or the explicitly-named Pancho Villa (and Emiliano Zapata) in Pocho.
It is within this specific conception of transnationalism—as “a heterogeneous
grouping of overlapping but distinct discourses that refer to the U.S. in relation to a
variety of national entities”—that this study highlights the figural and symbolic
importance of the ethnic strongman. To this end, I also see my project as following in the
steps of recent scholarship that have focused on literary fantasies of charismatic and
authoritarian leadership in the works of ethnic American writers. Most of these studies
have centered on the African American tradition, and include Mark Christian
Thompson’s Black Fascisms (2007) and Erica Edwards’ Charisma and the Fictions of
8
Black Leadership (2012). Two other critical works have taken a similar approach, while
also bringing to our attention to the way specific political figures become useful tropes
for articulating literary fantasies of political cohesion and action. In A Pinnacle of Feeling
(2008), Sean McCann examines twentieth century American literature’s deep fascination
with the modern American president, and how writers participate in discourses of the
chief executive as a national redeemer, as well as agent of state power and sovereign will.
Focusing on an entirely different sort of figure, Rychetta Watkins’ Black Power, Yellow
Power (2012) traces the emergence of the “guerilla” as a key literary and cultural trope
invoked by the militant, ethnic nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. For
Watkins, the figure of the guerilla exemplifies a “resistant” persona and a revolutionary
subjectivity, while also serving as “an allegory for the development of a liberated
consciousness and, eventually, a liberated society” (15).
In taking the trope of the dictator as its point of departure, my dissertation shares a
similar founding principle and analytical approach with McCann and Watkins, even as I
consider a different political creature altogether. On the most immediate level, I argue,
the ethnic dictator trope can be read as a way for immigrant or second generation writers
(or, as in Richard Wright’s case, those of a much deeper diasporic descent) to partake in a
dialogue with homeland “national entities.” In each of the works I look at, the diasporic
subject imagines the dictator figure as a past-looking embodiment of an “authentic”
homeland culture, history or memory. Thus while Wright sees in the laugh of the
Ghanaian Prime Minister a secretive “African laughter,” Lee and Diaz’s novels also posit
their respective dictators as epitomizing some conception of a “fundamental” Koreanness
or Dominicanness. And although I do not address this aspect of the film directly, we
9
might recall that even The Godfather: Part II posits a nostalgic ideal of Sicilian paternal
authority, through its flashback sequences detailing the immigration and ascendance of
the father, Vito Corleone. In these instances, the allure of the dictator figure rests in his
putative connection to an “essence” associated with the diasporic homeland—even if, as
a matter of historical reality, it is also his distinction from his nation’s general population
that facilitates his preference and support by Western ruling cliques.
More pertinently, in addition to marking the contact points between the U.S. and a
“variety of national entities,” the ability to preside over and impose coherence upon “a
heterogeneous grouping of overlapping but distinct discourses” comprises another key
feature of the ethnic dictator trope. This feature has its geopolitical correlative in the
figure of someone like, once again, Lee Kuan Yew, or Josip Tito of Yugoslavia—
political strongmen who, through sheer authoritarian force of will, are able to hold
together and organize diverse nationalities, ethnicities, religions, institutions, factions and
other elements that would otherwise not cohere or coexist. Likewise, all of the writers in
this study conceive of the ethnic dictator as a focal point and container for a host of
heterogeneous assemblages, including social collectivities, discourses, identity
formations, hermeneutic frames, languages or linguistic dialects, and intertexts.
Whatever his misgivings about Kwame Nkrumah in Black Power, for example,
Richard Wright nonetheless admires the “bewildering unity” he is able to forge, out of
elements that at times read like a bewildering list indeed: “Christianity, tribalism,
paganism, sex, nationalism, housing, health, and industrial schemes” (BP 88).6 By this
standard, in fact, the staunchly anticommunist Wright can even begrudgingly respect
someone like Mao Zedong, for having “organized what was at hand, that is, millions of
6
Richard Wright, Black Power (1954), in Three Books from Exile; hereafter abbreviated as BP.
10
starving peasants, plus Moslems, Buddhists, Protestants, and Catholics” (CC 559).7 In
Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, the charismatic councilman John Kwang uses his
campaign apparatus to fashion a multiracial and multicultural “family” out of his political
constituency, one in which American democratic rhetoric coexists alongside Confucian
patriarchal authority. And as the text most self-reflexively interested in how disparate
parts might be narratively united into a functional (if messy) whole, Junot Diaz’s The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao finds a germane metaphor for the Caribbean dictator
in the person of the storyteller-narrator, whose capacious linguistic and discursive
repertoire operates as the instrument of his domination.
This last idea—that a dictator’s power includes to the power to determine how a
story is told (consider again, for example, Lee Kuan Yew’s fondness for the libel suit)—
leads me to another key component of this dissertation, which revolves around the matter
of genre. On the surface, each of the works explored in this study can be broadly
classified within a recognizable generic frame, such as travel narrative (Wright), spy
narrative (Lee), immigrant family saga (Diaz) and crime drama (The Godfather). These
frames, in turn, become central to the visibility and hermeneutic significance of the
dictator figure within the narrative—for example, as the patriarch of the family saga; the
target/mark of the espionage plot; or the emblem of homeland violence, or homeland
liberation, in the memoir of diasporic return. Reading these texts alongside one another, I
would argue, also enables us to recognize a certain generic instability that inheres in each
of them. Diaz’s novel, most pertinently, places this quality front and center, in its
intertextually rapacious metacommentary on storytelling and marginalized genre forms.
On the lower frequencies, Richard Wright’s travel narrative in Black Power comes to
7
Richard Wright, The Color Curtain (1956), in Three Books from Exil; hereafter abbreviated as CC.
11
resemble, at certain moments, a spy novel of sorts. In the case of Chang-rae Lee’s fusion
of the immigrant narrative with the spy novel in Native Speaker, the fascinating (if
ultimately inconclusive) question becomes: what kinds of spy novels does it resonate
with? And how do its varying proximities to the works of Ian Fleming, Richard Condon,
or John le Carré inflect its meanings and insights as an ethnic novel?
Notably, in each of these works this generic indeterminacy is signaled by the
trope of the ethnic dictator, who functions as the epistemological fulcrum around which
multiple interpretative frames turn. In this sense, the figure of the dictator also becomes a
metaphor for the very notion of genre. In his monograph on the topic, John Frow argues
that genres “actively generate and shape knowledge of the world,” and more appositely,
that “generically shaped knowledges are bound up with the exercise of power, where
power is understood as being exercised in discourse” (2). Throughout his discussion,
Frow expands upon this view of genre as tied to the “exercise of power,” describing
generic modes as, variously, “a set of conventional and highly organized constraints on
the production and interpretation of meaning,” a “regime of reading,” and a system that
“amounts to a kind of policing” (10, 139, 125, emphasis mine). Picking up on this thread
of genre as a form of “unabashed political allegory,” Bruce Robbins notes that “When
genre is discussed, the metaphor of the police is everywhere” (1646). Connecting issues
of genre to discourses surrounding national literatures, he likens the oft-invoked figure of
the “genre police” to also a sort of “border police, which is to say officials of the nationstate, bringing into relief the genre debate’s geopolitical dimensions” (1646). Crucially,
as Robbins insists, “If genre is an agent of social domination, the sort of domination that
most concerns us now is that of some nations over others” (1646).
12
This project positions the trope of the dictator within this theoretical intersection
between genre, geopolitics and literary representation. Here the matter of genre is also
useful because it reminds us that the category of the “dictator” is itself something of a
generic form, encompassing various sub-classifications such as sultanistic regimes,
personalist regimes, military dictatorships, single-party dictatorships, presidential
monarchism, straightforward monarchies, and various others. More importantly, this
project also contemplates how writers articulate a transnational ethnic identity through
the dictator figure, in foregrounding different forms of authoritarian leadership as genres
of political and social sciences. Either explicitly or implicitly, each of the works in this
study engages a historically and culturally specific version of the ethnic strongman: the
African “Big Man” in Wright, the Confucian patriarch in Lee, the Latin American
caudillo in Diaz, and the Italian padrone (as well as an extension of the meditation on the
caudillo) in The Godfather: Part II. In the end, these texts do not purport to “explain” or
contextualize these types, as per the longstanding ethnographic imperative behind ethnic
literatures. Rather, what they bring to light is the ultimate emptiness of the “dictator” as a
form, which the texts then fill with a certain ethnic content. As I demonstrate in my
chapters, the deployment of generic modes becomes a chief means of filling in this ethnic
content, which takes the forms of diasporic attachments, transnational political
sympathies (i.e. with nationalist independence movements), historical memory (i.e. of
war and dictatorship), and modes of writing and storytelling, among others.
The disparate analytical approaches of my readings speak to the multiethnic
character of this study, as well as to the protean nature and multiple valences of the
dictator trope. Taken as a whole, the chapters of this dissertation lays out a narrative
13
trajectory that begins with one of the elder statesmen of twentieth century ethnic
American letters, as well as the most historically visible U.S. ethnic group. My first
chapter, “The Authoritarian Education of Richard Wright,” considers Richard Wright’s
Third World travel narratives—particularly Black Power (1954)—and how they bring his
earlier thinking on authoritarian politics into conversation with a global context of
decolonization and national liberation movements. Read through the generic frame of a
diasporic memoir, Black Power, an account of his 1953 visit to Ghana on the eve of
independence, captures Wright’s paradoxical stance toward the ancestral homeland—in
particular, his feelings of ambivalence toward Africans while still being politically for
Africa.8 Finding himself in a situation where notions of “freedom” have become more
tangible and immediate than they ever were during his Communist party days in Chicago,
Wright attempts to imagines new roles and “uses” for the politically-engaged writer
fighting for the cause of decolonization. For Wright, the personage of Prime Minister
Nkrumah embodies a partial fulfilment of earlier fantasies of Pan-African mobilization
and liberation, as well as a figure of competition against whom the author struggles to be
a source of knowledge and authority. In the end, while Wright conceives of his
authoritarian power as tied to a certain epistemological supremacy as an “artist,” the
dictator Nkrumah—framed in some ways as the “antagonist” of Wright’s narrative—
comes to represent the limits of this supremacy.
In looking at works by a Korean American and a Dominican American author,
respectively, my second and third chapters focuses on two groups that not only represent
more recent immigrants to the United States, but also from countries that have had long
8
I borrow this notion from Manthia Diawara, who insists that “Black Power may unsettle many readers,
but one thing is certain: Wright was for Africa” (75). See Manthia Diawara’s In Search of Africa (1998).
14
histories of U.S.-backed dictatorship. In this way, these texts become ideal sites for
exploring how ethnic subject-formation takes place in the shadows of the power relations
between nations.9 Chapter Two, “Good Korean/Bad Korean: Chang-rae Lee’s Native
Speaker and the Ghost of Syngman Rhee,” examines how Native Speaker (1995), which
has by now become the canonical Asian American novel, remains invested in a Korean
national history and memory centered around the Korean War. Key to this transnational
memory is Lee’s deployment of the spy genre, which links his novel to a Cold War
frame, while also articulating a vision of Korean identity that transcends that frame.
Crucially, I read the character of the Korean American city councilman John Kwang as
an allegory for Syngman Rhee, the dictatorial president of the Republic of Korea (South
Korea) during the Korean War, an allegory made visible by the novel’s intelligence and
espionage plot. In addition, I also consider Lee’s novel alongside Bruce Cumings’
historiography on the Korean War, and reveal how both Cumings’ account of Rhee and
Lee’s depiction of Kwang imagine an “essential” Koreanness that gets rendered through a
certain spy genre iconography. For Lee, the figure of the ethnic dictator exemplifies how
literary genres produce and order historical and cultural knowledges, as well as enact
literary fantasies about the diasporic homeland.
My third chapter turns to Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
(2007), one of the most prominent and acclaimed American novels in recent years to
directly address the topic of dictatorship. In Diaz’s novel, the outsized and outlandish
legacy of Rafael Trujillo’s brutal reign over the Dominican Republic serves as the
9
More broadly, Asian Americans and Latino/as both share the distinction of occupying what has been
called the “racial middle,” in the black and white divide over race in the United States, as well as having
much younger literary histories. For more on comparative studies between these two groups, see Nicholas
De Genova’s Racial Transformations (2005) and Eileen O’Brien’s The Racial Middle (2008). The work of
Claire Jean Kim is also useful in this regard.
15
impetus for a number of thematic and discursive meditations. These include, for instance,
the inheritance of this legacy by subsequent generations of Dominicans and members of
the Dominican diaspora, as well as its larger significance within a global pattern of
dictatorship and neocolonial domination. Most importantly, Diaz’s novel is notable for
dramatizing the intertwined relationship between the ethnic writer and the ethnic dictator.
Through the character of Yunior, who is also the novel’s narrator, Diaz illustrates how
the storyteller emulates the figure of Trujillo—and thus asserting his connection to the
homeland—through a virtuosic, aggressive and “virile” narrative voice, one that
forcefully holds together a heterogeneous assemblage of linguistic codes, discourses,
intertextual references and generic modes. Furthermore, while numerous commentators
have noted the discursive and generic promiscuity of Diaz’s text, I single out the primacy
of two literary genres, the Latin American dictator novel and U.S. Latina fiction, and
argue for their centrality to Diaz’s conception of a distinctly Pan-Latino/a, identity.
Doubling as something of a tentative conclusion, my last chapter looks at one of
the most visible and popular American narratives about dictator figures, while also
thinking through how the broader themes of this project relates to an earlier generation of
ethnic immigrants. Specifically, I offer a transnationals reading of Francis Ford
Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II (1974), and illustrate how the film—through the
extended middle sequence set in Cuba—variously depicts the protagonist Michael
Corleone as a symbolic correlative for Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro. From this
perspective, this chapter is unique in that it considers the transnational encounter and
exchange between two distinct iterations of the ethnic dictator, the Sicilian mafia don and
the Latin American caudillo, reminding us that this trope is an inherently comparative
16
one. In considering the film’s multiple generic frames, moreover, I underscore the import
of The Godfather: Part II as a sequel—that is, as a sort of “successor” text to the first
film. As I point out, the film’s Part II-ness rests not simply in its continuation of the first
film’s narrative, but rather in an inherited “DNA” that manifests in Coppola’s noted use
of visual and structural parallels across the different installments. Considering the
Godfather film trilogy as a whole, I locate its unique contribution to the ethnic dictator
trope in this formal exploration of the theme of dynastic succession.
17
CHAPTER ONE
The Authoritarian Education of Richard Wright
I.
Richard Wright’s suite of travel writings and related essays from the 1950s
provide a useful point of departure for a number of reasons, not least for the
straightforward and literal way they stage the encounter between writers and dictators, as
well as the way that these encounters prompt us to rethink the generic framework of these
texts. Along with charting his transition from an astute analyst of U.S. race relations to a
globally-oriented intellectual, works such as Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain
(1956), Pagan Spain (1957) and White Man, Listen! (1957) also represent discursive
spaces through which Wright parses out the intertwined relationship between the function
of authorship and forms of authoritarian politics, as well as ways that the former might
serve as a version of the latter.1 To this end, it bears pointing out that authoritarian leaders
figure centrally in each of these works, and to varying degrees of immediacy: while
Wright never comes in contact with Francisco Franco in Pagan Spain, for instance, the
Generalísimo nonetheless function as the absent-yet-ever-present symbolic patron of
Wright’s travels through Falangist Spain; his report on the 1955 Bandung Conference in
1
Scholars have long regarded these texts as marking a crucial expansion in Wright’s political
consciousness, in which his earlier preoccupation with black American subjectivity merged with an
investment in global anticolonial and nationalist liberation movements. As Armitjit Singh reminds us in his
afterword to The Color Curtain: “Wright’s interest in matters racial and American was still intense […] He
saw the struggle for Civil Rights in the U.S. as inextricably linked to the full freedom of peoples of color
throughout the world. So, while others participated in the boycotts and marches at home, he was convinced
that he was fighting the same battles in global contexts by participating in debates on Negritude and PanAfricanism and supporting movements for freedom in Africa and Asia” (CC 613). For further general
perspectives on Wright’s transition from domestic preoccupations to more global concerns, see Virgin
Whatley Smith’s edited collection, Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections (2001).
18
The Color Curtain allowed Wright to observe many nationalist strongmen up close,
though not directly interacting with them; finally, Wright’s account of Ghana’s
independence movement in Black Power brings him into the inner circle and personal
company of Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. These experiences, as I argue, profoundly
shape Wright’s conception of his unique role as an author among authoritarians, set
against an international context of decolonization and emergent nationalisms in which
both figures would have an urgent, crucial role to play.
This opening chapter examines Wright’s Third World travel writings—with a
particular focus on Black Power—and how they expand upon his earlier accounts of the
relation between writing and authoritarian politics, translating them from the domestic
scene to an international one. While recent studies such as Mark Christian Thompson’s
Black Fascisms and Sean McCann’s A Pinnacle of Feeling have attempted to foreground
Wright’s literary engagement with non-democratic forms of politics, their readings focus
primarily on his earlier, U.S.-centered novels such as Native Son (1940) and The Outsider
(1953). While these works of fiction generally enjoy a higher degree of critical regard
than Wright’s later non-fiction writings, their emphasis on the U.S. national context tends
to confine discussions of Wright’s treatment of authoritarian politics largely to the
theoretical, allegorical or speculative realms.
One of my key aims, then, is to consider how Wright’s Third World-centered
texts—and the shift to a transnational consciousness that they chronicle—further
illuminate our understanding of what McCann broadly refers to as Wright’s “notorious
lifelong attraction to tyrannical power” (25). Here Wright’s modal shift from fiction to
non-fiction proves particularly salient for our considerations of genre, and the discursive
19
frames through which to apprehend these texts. While frequently classified as a travel
narrative, Black Power can also be read as a kind of memoir, and particularly a “diasporic
memoir,” in which a diasporic subject “returns” to a putative ancestral homeland. This
aspect of the book emerges in several prominent features. First, I would suggest, is the
notable way Wright’s perceptions of Africa are frequently inflected by visions of his
American South origins—for example, he describes the Prime Minister’s residence as “a
red, two-story brick dwelling that looked remarkably like a colonial mansion in Georgia
or Mississippi” (BP 73). Elsewhere, the sight of a spirited African dance reminds him of
dancing he’d seen “in storefront churches, in Holly Roller Tabernacles, in God’s
Temples, in unpainted prayer-meeting houses on the plantations of the Deep South” (BP
78). Secondly, as I show in this chapter, his reflections on the nationalist movement in
Ghana take up and elaborate upon many of the same themes first broached in his memoir
Black Boy (1945), as well as his other earlier non-fiction writings.
At the same time, Wright’s narrative of diasporic return has also been notable—
and notorious—for its emphasis on the author’s profound sense of alienation from what
he finds in the ancestral homeland.2 As Wright muses after observing a ritualized funeral
dance, “I had understood nothing. I was black and they were black, my blackness did not
help me (161). As numerous commentators have noted, Wright’s reaction to the culture
and peoples he encounters range from this vexed non-comprehension at best, and
exasperation, revulsion and condescension at worst.3 Where Wright’s admiration and
2
As Kevin Gaines notes of Wright’s text, “Viewed as a diaspora narrative of return to one’s presumed
ancestral homeland, Black Power raises expectations of romantic solidarity that Wright fails to satisfy”
(77).
3
For some prominent examples, see Anthony Appiah, “A Long Way from Home: Richard Wright in the
Gold Coast” (1987) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Third World of Theory: Enlightenment’s Esau” (2008).
20
positive feelings stand out in his account, it is typically toward the charismatic figure of
Kwame Nkrumah, upon whom he pins his hopes for the future success and prosperity of
the fledging Ghanaian nation. This, in turn, adumbrates a broader feature of Wright’s
Third World writings: that his dissociation from what he saw as the primitive and
backward populations of the Third World is complemented by his affinity with this
world’s Westernized—and thus “rational”—governing elites. As a self-styled “Twentieth
Century Western Man of Color,” Wright professed a spiritual kinship with this rising
wave of Third World nationalist leaders, and in particular those whose Western education
and acculturation under colonialism have rendered them, as Wright also saw himself,
“tragic and lonely and all too often misunderstood” (WML 722).4 Notably, Wright
stresses that these leaders should “necessarily” use “quasi-dictatorial methods to hasten
the process of social evolution and to establish order in their lands” (WML 725).
Wright’s imagined identification with these leaders anchors this chapter’s inquiry.
Namely, I explore how the nascent authoritarian leanings exhibited in works like Native
Son, Black Boy Outsider and Black Boy engage with a real-world context of antiimperialist struggle, Cold War political maneuvering, and nation-building. This
engagement is all the more salient given that Wright’s observation of Third World
nationalist movements brought him into contact with the lived and practical realities of
authoritarian leadership as it pertains to states, political parties, and institutions of
political power. Furthermore, his admiration for these leaders often dovetailed into a
broad sympathy for their ideologies and agendas, with Wright proclaiming in various
forms that “Nkrumah, Nasser, Sukarno, and Nehru, and the Western-educated heads of
Nina Kressner Cobb also characterizes Wright’s attitude toward Africa in Black Power as a combination of
“hostility, sympathy, repugnance and condescension” (230).
4
Richard Wright, White Man, Listen! (1957), in Three Books from Exile; hereafter abbreviated as WML.
21
these newly created national states, must be given carte blanche to modernize their lands
without overlordship of the West, and we must understand the methods that they will feel
compelled to use” (WML 725).
As his comments suggest, Wright regarded the project of Third World liberation
as properly the domain of talented individuals, in whose hands the “overlordship” of their
newly created national states should rightfully belong. In this regard, one especially
germane approach to Wright’s “attraction to tyrannical power” is through the framework
of charisma, and the mechanisms of charismatic authority. The recent work of Erica
Edwards proffers an especially relevant framework, in her theorization of how African
American cultural production has both bolstered and belied “one of the central fictions of
black American politics: that freedom is best achieved under the direction of a single
charismatic leader” (xv). In Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (2012),
Edwards forwards a conception of charisma not as a static social structure (pace Max
Weber and his interlocutors), but rather as a “narrative and performative regime” and a
“portable scenario” involving a dynamic interplay between text, performance and
political desire. For Edwards, this expression of charisma is closely bound with literary
production: “If charisma functions as an official story and a portable scenario of black
political engagement, literary texts reread and rewrite the ritualized narrative in new
grammars. Cultural production thus shapes political desire even as it creates the potential
to undo the influence of ‘official’ stories through the production of restagings” (33).
While Edwards’s study mentions Wright only tangentially, her formulations nonetheless
invite us to view his work as also partaking in the broader African American cultural
project of staging and re-staging what she calls the “charismatic scenario.” Not only do
22
Wright’s Third World writings export, after a fashion, the narrative and performative
regime of charisma onto an international stage, they also foreground the scene of writing
as a key element in the cultural dialogue with charismatic leadership. This can be seen in
Black Power—as I illustrate shortly—in a figurative exchange of letters through which
Wright posits himself as symbolically trading places with the Prime Minister of Ghana.
As I hope to show in the following, the “political desire” being articulated in
Wright’s non-fiction writings on the Third World goes beyond his surface wish for
charismatic leaders to deliver their lands and peoples from Western domination, but
rather entails the writer’s desire to appropriate the charisma of the nationalist leader and
re-channel it through the medium of his art. In this sense, Wright’s reflections in Black
Power, The Color Curtain and White Man, Listen! express the confluence of his political
desires with an aesthetic one, and proffer a latent theory of the author-as-authoritarian.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that Wright wishes to rule in Nkrumah’s place—though
maybe a fantasy of doing so subtends his intellectual project—but rather that he
conceives the tasks of the writer and dictator as sharing a set of strategic protocols.
Although this notion in and of itself is not exactly a novel development in Wright’s
thinking, within the context of Third World liberation struggles it comes to take on a
whole new set of political, material, and extra-literary stakes.
II.
Black Power chronicles Wright’s travels through Africa’s Gold Coast, where he
observed, among other things, the independence movement led by Kwame Nkrumah that
would eventually end British colonial rule and establish the present-day nation state of
23
Ghana. As previously mentioned, Wright’s text is bookended by two epistolary moments.
The first of these, presented immediately following the title page, is a reproduction of a
letter from Nkrumah himself. Addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” the letter certifies
Nkrumah’s acquaintance with Wright, explaining that “Mr. Wright would like to come to
the Gold Coast to do some research into the social and historical aspects of the country,
and would be my guest during the time he is engaged in this work.” Invoking the gravity
of his newly-appointed role as Prime Minster, Nkrumah affirms that “To be best of my
knowledge and belief, I consider Mr. Wright a fit and proper person to be allowed to visit
the Gold Coast for the reasons stated above,” effectively endowing Wright’s visit with an
aura of official sanction. The second of Black Power’s epistolary interjections is the open
letter to Nkrumah with which Wright concludes his travel narrative. In it, Wright
provides nothing less than a full summary of his political, social and psychological
diagnoses of the region, as well as outlining a set of prescriptions for how Nkrumah
should go about leading his nation. Infamously, Wright decrees in his letter that “There is
but one honorable course that assumes and answers the ideological, traditional,
organizational, emotional, political, and productive needs of Africa at this time:
AFRICAN LIFE MUST BE MILITARIZED!” (BP 415).
Between the two epistles that comprise the beginning and ending of Black Power,
a marked shift occurs in Wright’s epistemological self-positioning. He begins his
narrative as a neophyte outsider who admits, from the comfort of his Paris apartment, that
“I’m of African descent…yet I’d never seen Africa; I’d never really known any Africans;
I’d hardly ever thought of Africa” (BP 18). Thus the first-page insertion of Nkrumah’s
letter frames Wright’s entry into Africa, as well as the reader’s entry into his text, through
24
a tacit deference to the patronage of the Prime Minister, under whose auspices he travels
as a designated “guest” in an unfamiliar land. Wright’s open letter to Nkrumah, however,
stages something like a reversal of this political prerogative. By the journey’s—and
text’s—end, the same narrator presents himself not only as having a firm grasp of “the
African’s mentality,” but also being in a position to advise the Prime Minister on how
best to address the “ideological, traditional, organizational, emotional, political and
productive needs” of his fledgling nation.
In contrast to the formal trappings of political office exhibited in the facsimile
letter from Nkrumah—complete with government letterhead, royal coat of arms, and
signed “Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister”—a decidedly informal air suffuses Wright’s
concluding remarks. Beginning with a straightforward “Dear Kwame Nkrumah,”
Wright’s open letter eschews all pretenses pertaining to rank and protocol in favor of a
blunt, conversational tone, often referring to Ghana’s head of government as simply
“Kwame.” The use of the first-name address augurs Wright’s familiar and didactic tone
throughout the letter, as seen in the recurrence of such interjections as “Kwame, let me
put it bluntly,” “But Kwame, the truth is…” and “Make no mistake, Kwame” (BP 410,
411, 413). In doing so, Wright rhetorically establishes himself as Nkrumah’s social equal
(if not superior) and abolishes the institutional and hierarchal divides insinuated by the
form(alities) of Nkrumah’s letter of introduction. Whereas that official document
legitimates Wright’s fitness to travel and observe as a matter of Nkrumah’s expressed
best “knowledge and belief,” Wright’s coda to Black Power places, front and center, his
own best knowledge and beliefs on the “social and historical aspects of the country.” In
25
doing so, Wright narratively upgrades his status from the Prime Minister’s guest to
something resembling an advisor, or even mentor, to the Prime Minister.
“Your safety, your security lie in plunging full speed ahead!” Wright declaims at
one point, and follows up by asking “But, how? What methods? Means? What
instrumentalities? Ay, there’s the rub…” (BP 413). These musings, I would propose,
represent no less than Wright’s own latent political desires: to play a role in the safety,
security and progress of Nkrumah’s Ghana (and by extension, the rest of Africa), to
ponder and advance methods, means and instrumentalities—in short, to govern, albeit in
an abstract, distant form. What does it mean, it bears asking, for a writer and intellectual
with no experience holding political office, like Wright, to participate in the stewardship
of a nation? Or, to approach this question from another perspective, one suggested by
Black Power’s framing of political authority through two instances of letter writing: how
might the endeavor to govern and lead national bodies take shape as a distinctly literary
problem? In other words, how might controlling a narrative, or textual body, come to
seem akin to controlling a national body, or a body politic?
Here is a brief caveat is in order: while writing letters might not count as
“literary” in and of itself, I would contend that Wright’s closing missive to Nkrumah does
much to signal its own operation within a literary register. Most straightforwardly,
perhaps, are those instances where Wright bundles the deliberation of political objectives
with the invocation of an iconic poet. The above-quoted citation of Shakespeare, for
instance—“What methods? Means? What instrumentalities? Ay, there’s the rub…”—
frames the challenge before Nkrumah as a Hamlet-like grappling with “something rotten”
26
in the State of Ghana.5 In addition, Wright concludes his letter (and thus the entire text of
Black Power) by quoting the opening lines from Walt Whitman’s poem “Europe, the 72nd
and 73rd Years of These States.” In framing his quotation, Wright utilizes Whitman to
rhetorically assert his self-conscription into Nkrumah’s ‘militarized’ cause, and imagines
the alliance between the American and the Ghanaian across a long historical view:
With words as our weapons, there are some few of us who will stand on
the ramparts to fend off the evildoers, the slanderers, the greedy, the selfrighteous! You are not alone…Your fight has been fought before. I am an
American and my country too was once a colony of England…It was old
Walt Whitman who felt what you and your brother fighters are now
feeling when he said: […] (BP 420)6
In its figuration of the writer-soldier standing vigilant upon a rampart, armed with his
weapon of choice, such passages also foreground a certain novelistic quality that subtends
Wright’s political exhortations. They subtly remind us that we are reading, at bottom, the
work of a master storyteller, one who has made a long career out of fighting political
battles with weaponized words (and against “evildoers, the slanderers, the greedy, the
self-righteous,” categories that resonate for their evocativeness more than their
specificity). What’s more, the idea of these framing letters as a literary device operates at
both ends. Specifically, Nkrumah’s letter of introduction, which begins “This is to certify
that I have known Mr. Richard Wright for many years, having met him in the United
States,” turns out to be a sort of fiction itself. As Hazel Rowley informs us in her recent
5
From Hamlet: “To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub” (3.1.66). The invocation of that other
recognizable line from Hamlet, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (1.4.95), while purely my
own stylistic flourish, nonetheless does gesture toward a compelling resonance with Wright’s rhetoric,
specifically in his descriptions of indigenous cultures and traditions. In “Tradition and Industrialization,”
for example, Wright imagines “a knowing black, brown, or yellow man” who can say “Thank you, Mr.
White Man, for freeing me from the rot of my irrational traditions and customs[…]!” (WML 719).
6
In a 1953 interview with William Gardner Smith in Ebony, Wright expresses a similar idea of words as
weapons, and in a similar context of transnational political projects and affiliations, stating: “I fight with
words. They know no national boundaries.”
27
biography of Wright, Wright and Nkrumah had met once in the U.S. in 1940, but not
since, revealing the Prime Minister’s legitimating claim as leaning upon a fabrication, or
at least a stretch of the imagination.7 Thus Nkrumah’s own epistle inaugurates the text of
Black Power via a moment of “fiction,” allowing us to view the book as framed not only
by an exchange of letters, but also an exchange of stories.
The literariness of these passages can also be discerned in their figural
complexity, in which the content of the message appears articulated to its formal
construction. Wright’s Shakespearean deliberations on means and instrumentalities above
lead directly to his call to “militarize” African society, a remark that has led several
commentators to note the patently authoritarian stance that runs through his vision for
African development.8 As Wright elaborates:
One simple conviction stands straight up in me: Our people must be made
to walk, forced draft, into the twentieth century! The direction of their
lives, the duties that they must perform to overcome the stagnancy of
tribalism, the sacrifices that must yet be made – all of this must be placed
under firm social discipline! […] Be merciful by being stern! If I lived
under your regime, I’d ask for this hardness, this coldness…” (BP 414).
7
See Hazel Rowley’s Richard Wright: The Life and Times (2001). As Rowley also recounts, Nkrumah’s
letter of introduction was crucial in expediting Wright’s visa, although its further practical uses during his
travels remain unclear.
8
Kevin Gaines remarks that “with the continent plagued by coups d’état and kleptocratic military regimes,
hindsight would permit some to accuse Wright of cryptofascism and hostility to the cause of African
freedom” (81). See Kevin Gaines, “Revisiting Richard Wright in Ghana.” In his analysis of Wright’s essay
“Tradition and Industrialization,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. also characterizes Wright’s endorsement of
militarization as tantamount to a “blueprint for a neocolonialist police state,” while adding that “still, we
can at least credit him with a fair degree of historical prescience” (S193). See Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
“Third World of Theory: Enlightenment’s Esau.” Although Nkrumah’s regime in Ghana did eventually
drift toward widespread corruption, mismanagement and an increasingly erratic and personalist rule
(culminating in his ouster by a military coup in 1966), the majority of these events occurred well after
Wright’s visit in 1953, and his death in 1960. Importantly, Gaines’ essay also offers a thoroughly positive
interpretation of Wright’s call for “militarization,” citing the vital role of military service for black
modernity. Gaines elaborates on Manthia Diawara’s own positive evaluation of Wright’s endorsement of a
militarized African society, which can be found in In Search of Africa.
28
In passages such as this, Wright presses the stylistic techniques of the writer into the
service of his political clarion call. Here the martial undertones of his rhetoric—the
“conviction” standing “straight up,” soldier-like, in him; the syntactical march of his
imperative exclamations that resemble a barking of orders—coincide with the martial
overtones of his appeal: for the “firm social discipline” that he prescribes for African
society. His reference to this populace as our people is striking, given that Wright spends
large portions of Black Power expressing his distance (and distaste) from the “stagnant”
and “tribal” masses of the Gold Coast. The formulation, nonetheless, allows Wright to
invoke his diasporic status as a man of African descent, while staking this affiliation—as
I had earlier shown—to Africa’s Westernized and intellectual and political elite rather
than the urban and rural multitudes. Similarly, the possessive, Mosaic connotations of
“our people” serve to figuratively project Wright into a position of dominion alongside
Nkrumah, the messianic leader to whom he attributes the authority over the direction of
lives, the duties to be performed and the sacrifices to be made.
Crucially, Wright letter also gestures to the ways that the political purview of the
writer potentially exceed that of the politician, as seen when he assumes the hypothetical
guise of a Ghanaian citizen. Further stressing the need for an authoritarian “hardness” or
“coldness” in the building of modern nation states, Wright imaginatively presents himself
as speaking not merely on behalf of, but as part of, the body politic Nkrumah must lead,
via the counterfactual “If I lived under your regime.” Such a stance, of course, is meant
more as a narrative performance than a policy position. If anything, Wright’s hypothetical
willingness to ask to be governed in this hard and cold manner only brings his dissonance
from the desires of the Ghanaian people (whatever these may be) into sharper relief.
29
Simultaneously, we are made all the more aware of his determination to speak for this
populace, and delineate to the Prime Minister the contours of their own best needs and
interests. In this way, Wright’s text frames the challenge of political action as a question
of inhabiting knowledges and subject positions extrinsic to oneself, as well as
approaching matters through the sheer force of a “simple conviction” (as opposed to, say,
a nuanced and detailed grasp of technical, sociological, economic and cultural factors).
In subordinating the heterogeneous perspectives and viewpoints that he
encounters in his travels to the supremacy of his own “rational” evaluations and opinions,
Wright’s own rhetorical performance can also be said to epitomize certain dictatorial
“hardness” and “coldness.” My use of the term “hardness” here draws upon the insights
of Abdul JanMohamed, who elaborates on the concept of hardness as a “multivalent trope
in Wright’s work generally, as well as in Black Power” (242).9 Couching this idea in the
mechanisms of subject-formation on an individual, psychic level, JanMohamed casts
Wright’s fixation on hardness as a function of “symbolic identification.” In such a
process, a subject identifies with the structural conditions of its own constitution, or “the
position of agency through which we are observed and through which we observe and
judge ourselves” (236). This is in contrast to the process of “imaginary identification,”
the identification with someone or something outside oneself, but still within the
structure/position of agency—which in Wright’s work gets associated with softness,
9
See JanMohamed’s essay “Richard Wright as a Specular Border Intellectual” (2002). JanMohamed’s
method is similar to my own in this chapter, in his examination of the ways this trope translates from
Wright’s earlier domestic works to his later analyses on the Third World; for JanMohamed, understanding
how this trope works in the former does much to illuminate its functioning in the latter. It is my hope here
to show how the dimensions of this “hardness” relate to Wright’s engagement with authoritarian politics.
30
emotion and sentimentality.10 Most importantly, in JanMohamed’s formulation,
“symbolic identification permits an identification with the Law and, via the subsequent
access to the process of (political) signification, the capacity to occupy an active place in
an intersubjective symbolic/political network” (248). As JonMohamed argues, this trope
of hardness “not only defines the entire political field in which Wright operates but also
defines the core of this subjectivity”; within this “political field,” ultimately, the
attachment to hardness also represents a yearning to mimetically appropriate the “hard”
structure—the “Law”—of racial and colonial domination (249). By borrowing this
hardness, Wright’s writings would suggest, one can begin to fashion equally hard, and
thus effective, structures of antiracist and anticolonial resistance.
To return to the “hardness” of Wright’s rhetorical performance, his account of
Africa in Black Power displays precisely a sort of privileged access to the process of
political signification. This can be applied even to the basic level of Wright’s “access” to
the center of political power in Ghana, signaled in his text by his symbolic exchange of
letters with Nkrumah. These letters, in turn, reveal Wright’s desire to influence the future
direction of the nation, specifically through his signification of the necessary political
methods, means and instrumentalities. Wright also demonstrates his “active place in an
intersubjective symbolic/political network,” as we had seen earlier, by subsuming all
other perspectives, interpretations and subject positions to the primacy of his own. This
assertion of his epistemological superiority, I would suggest, can be read as an
intersubjective assertion of a politicized hardness over and above the softness of others.
10
JanMohamed borrows his operative terms from Jacques Lacan, although he also offers an explanation of
symbolic identification in Freudian terms. Stated simply, “in Freudian terms it is identification with the
superego, and in Lacanian terms with the (negating) Law of the Father” (236).
31
Not surprisingly, Wright regards this softness as something endemic to the
African milieu he scrutinizes. As he informs Nkrumah in his letter (once again, in the
voice of someone in a position to know better): “African culture has not developed the
personalities of the people to a degree that their egos are stout, hard, sharply defined;
there is too much cloudiness in the African’s mentality, a kind of sodden vagueness that
makes for lack of confidence, an absence of focus that renders that mentality incapable of
grasping the workaday world” (BP 410, emphasis mine). Shortly after, Wright restates
this condition more succinctly as “an Africa beset with a gummy tribalism,” a phrase he
would recycle in The Color Curtain, when he describes the Asians and Africans of the
Third World as a “gummy mass” (BP 412, CC 599). Wright’s choice of adjective is
highly suggestive; more than mere softness, “gummy” implies a certain pliability, and
susceptibility to being molded by external forces. Wright repeats it in The Color Curtain,
in fact, to express his wariness toward Chou En-Lai, the envoy from Communist China,
whom he suspects “would be content to snuggle as close as possible to this gummy mass
and watch and wait…” (CC 599). For Wright, the perils of this “gumminess” exhibited
by the newly-independent African and Asian masses rest in its malleability before the
firm hands of a cunning, charismatic manipulator like Chou. Despite his gentle-seeming
“snuggling,” what Chou represents, as Wright is wont to remind us, is the hardness and
“Law” of a different oppressive structure: that of Communism.
One the one hand, Wright insinuates that the best way to forestall this danger is
with the equally firm hands of more ideologically palatable statesmen, like a Nkrumah, or
a Nehru. On the other, his texts also suggest another possibility, the unexpressed fantasy
at the heart of his writings on the Third World: that what would benefit the gummy
32
masses most is the molding influence of a figure like Wright himself, in the role of an
author-cum-authoritarian. Here the “multivalent trope” of hardness that pervades his
work becomes, from a certain angle, a trope of dictatorship. In Black Power, for example,
we can see how Wright marshals the expansive and often unwieldy details of his fourhundred page travel narrative into a politicized “forced draft”—in both the martial and
authorial senses of the term—in the form of his concluding letter. Though he subtitles his
book “A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos,” by the end Wright has diverged from
this mission statement, presenting less a “record of reactions” than something resembling
a government white paper. This document, notably, is also quite devoid of pathos,
preferring instead to perform the very “hardness” and “coldness” it prescribes, in which
alternative viewpoints from actual African subjects remained effectively silenced and
neutralized. In this fashion, Black Power symbolically allies the writer’s perspective with
the political leader’s sovereignty, while deploying the rhetorical arsenal of the former to
serve, supplement, and occasionally supersede the prerogatives of the latter.
III.
Before delving further into Wright’s travel writings, it would be useful to revisit
some passages from his earlier works that address the relationship between the practice of
literature and the practice of politics, to better frame his view of authoritarian politics as a
literary practice. As one of the more politically active and outspoken among twentieth
century American writers—and, famously, a one-time member of the Communist Party—
Wright meditated frequently upon the conflicts and confluences of his respective duties
as a writer and party operative. As he muses in Black Boy:
33
The artist and the politician stand at opposite poles. The artist enhances
life by his prolonged concentration upon it, while the politician
emphasizes the impersonal aspect of life by his attempts to fit men into
groups. The artist’s enhancement of life may emphasize, at certain times,
those aspects that a politician can use. But the politician, at other times,
eager to do good for man, may sneer at the artist because the art product
cannot be used by him. Hence, the two groups of men, driving in the same
direction, committed to the same vision, often find themselves locked in a
struggle more desperate than either of them wanted, while their mutual
enemies gape at the spectacle in amazement. (BB 345).
Arising from a period of increasing contention between Wright’s artistic impulses as a
writer and the restrictive ideological demands of the Communist Party, these comments
reflect his growing sense that the two were not only separated by a wide gulf, but that
they in fact stood at “opposite poles.”
Here we might examine the nature of these “opposite poles,” and the key terms at
play between them. While the work of the artist is characterized by a “prolonged
concentration” on life, as befitting an intellectual orientation, the politician is largely an
organizer, one who “fit[s] men into groups.” Looking closer, an even more salient and
fundamental distinction arises, between the artist/intellectual who “enhances” and the
politician/organizer who “emphasizes.” Granted, a degree of vagueness hangs over
Wright’s use of these words, though what interests me here is not so much their technical
definitions as what joins the two together. The answer, I would point out, might be found
in the sentence in which both terms appear, and appear to operate in tandem: “The artist’s
enhancement of life may emphasize, at certain times, those aspects that a politician can
use.” For Wright, what aligns the processes of artistic “enhancement” and political
“emphasis” (at least “at certain times”) is the concept of utility, or the question of whether
or not something can be “used” for concrete, practical aims. As Wright laments, the
failure of this utility—when an “art product cannot be used—is what leads to discord
34
between the two groups, the “spectacle” of their struggle, and their vulnerability to the
predations of “mutual enemies.” Most crucially, for the purposes of my argument, Wright
associates this trope of utility with the allures of dictatorial power; elsewhere in Black
Boy, he professes that “I would have consented to live under the most rigid type of
dictatorship, for I felt that dictatorships, too, defined the use of men, however degrading
that use might be,” and that such a social arrangement “made use of a limited part of a
man, defined him, his rank, his function in society” (BB 265).
In migrating from Black Boy to Black Power, these concepts take on a renewed
sense of consequence and urgency. As we see in the latter work, Wright mobilizes all his
artistic powers of “prolonged concentration,” to not only “enhance” the details and larger
meaning of the African situation as he saw it. More pointedly, he aims to produce a text
that might prove useful to Nkrumah, whom he characterizes as a “full-blown politician
whose consciousness was anchored in concrete, practical concerns pointing toward a
fondly sought goal” (BP 74). Indeed, Wright’s emphatic appeals for “a militarization of
the daily, social lives of the people” in Africa invoke the very same organizing and
utilitarian functions that once made dictatorship so attractive to him: “I am speaking of
giving form organization, direction, meaning, and a sense of justification to those lives”
(BP 415). Thus, if as a Communist Party operative in Chicago Wright had viewed the
artist and politician as locked in a “desperate,” embarrassing struggle, then in the global
context of decolonization and Third World nationalism he felt more than ever the burning
imperative to bridge that divide, and restore the two to a state of “driving in the same
direction” and being “committed to the same vision.”
35
In some ways, this imperative was always there, even before Wright turned his
critical eye beyond U.S. borders. In staunchly committing to his role as an artist, he never
fully repudiates the “opposite pole” of the politician; even as the politician “sneers” at the
artist, Wright still recognizes him as being “eager to do good for man.” In the end, Black
Boy lays out Wright’s career-long effort to negotiate the intertwined work of the artist
and politician, their respective “enhancing” and “emphasizing” of various qualities of
“life,” and the ever-pressing matter of how best to make his own “art products” useful.
Describing his project to write a biographical sketch of one of his black Communist
colleagues during his days in the party, Wright explains: “I felt that if I could get his story
I would make known some of the difficulties inherent in the adjustment of a folk people
to an urban environment; I would make his life more intelligible to others than it was to
himself. I would reclaim his disordered days and cast them into a form that people could
grasp, see, understand, and accept” (BB 332). More than a simple “profound
concentration” upon life, this description reveals Wright as also partaking in his own
version of the politician’s organizing impulse. In particular, he envisions his work as
reclaiming the “disordered” and unwieldy details of a life, and converting it, through
“story,” into a coherent and understandable form. Foreshadowing his later
representational strategies toward African subjects, Wright equates his “power” (or
hardness) as an artist with his superior apprehension of an individual’s existence, beyond
even the capability of that individual himself. In fact, it is in making this individual’s life
“more intelligible to others” and casting it “into a form that people could grasp” that
Wright’s artistry resembles the work of the politician, turning a person’s life into
36
impersonal material to be “grasped” and “accepted” by others. The political usefulness of
Wright’s art, in this instance, resides in its rendering legible of life itself.
Even in the service of concrete political aims, however, Wright’s highest
allegiance remains to his artistic and subjective autonomy. As he goes on to attest, “My
writing was my way of seeing, my way of living, my way of feeling; and who could
change his sight, his notion of direction, his senses?” (BB 346). Such an understanding of
his art serves, I would argue, as the crux between Wright’s self-conception as a writer
and his broader interest in forms of authoritarian power. In a 1944 letter, Wright restates
these principles through a striking political metaphor: “In the last analysis, the artist must
bow to the monitor of his own imagination; must be led by the sovereignty of his own
impressions and perceptions; must be guided by the tyranny of what troubles and
concerns him personally. There is no other true path” (67).11 Here Wright suggests that
authoritarian politics, like artistic integrity, necessarily requires the triumph of individual
will and agency over external and collective considerations. For the same reasons Wright
remained devoted to the imperatives of his singular ways of seeing, living and feeling
over the agendas of the Communist Party, he also admired those leaders who, like the
artist, were able to impose their singular vision upon others. In both cases, Wright valued
the ability of a committed, talented and charismatic individual to assert influence over his
audience and achieve a unity of purpose and action.
In this vein, Wright also recognized the undervalued importance of aesthetic
displays to the expression of political power and the articulation of political desires.
11
Wright to Antonio Fransconi (November 1944), qtd. in Michel Fabre’s “Beyond Naturalism?” (1985).
Fabre’s citation of this letter focuses on Wright’s relationship to the aesthetic practices of American literary
naturalism, and how Wright, while hewing to a “point of objectivity” in the handling of his subject matter,
never defines that objectivity solely through extrinsic criteria.
37
Recounting his early interactions with the followers of Marcus Garvey, Wright describes
them as “the one group I met during those exploring days whose lives enthralled me”:
The Garveyites had embraced a totally racialistic outlook which
endows them with a dignity that I had never seen before in Negroes. On
the walls of their dingy flats were maps of Africa and India and Japan,
pictures of Japanese generals and admirals, portraits of Marcus Garvey in
gaudy regalia, the faces of colored men and women from all parts of the
world. I gave no credence to the ideology of Garveyism; it was, rather, the
emotional dynamics of its adherents that evoked my admiration […] It
was when the Garveyites spoke fervently of building their own country, of
someday living within the boundaries of a culture of their own making,
that I sensed the passionate hunger of their lives, that I caught a glimpse of
the potential strength of the American Negro.” (BB 287)
In the end, Wright regards the ideology of Garvey’s United Negro Improvement
Association as too impractical and short-sighted, lamenting that “Those Garveyites I
knew could never understand why I liked them but would never follow them, and I pitied
them too much to tell them that they could never achieve their goal, that Africa was
owned by the imperial powers of Europe” (BB 287). What captures Wright’s
enthrallment is thus not the Garveyites’ ideology or practical aims, but rather its visual
accoutrements: maps of Africa and Asia, pictures of the generals and admirals of the
Empire of Japan, “portraits of Marcus Garvey in gaudy regalia” (which likely resembled
the attire of those same Japanese commanders)—in short, the regime of imagery and
iconography that reinforces the organization’s “totally racialistic outlook,” while offering
the prospect of “dignity” and redemption from the “dingy flats” they often adorned.12
Closely tied to this aesthetic component is what Wright refers to as the
movement’s “emotional dynamics,” those glimpses of “passionate hunger” and “potential
12
Wright’s observations resonates with Paul Gilroy’s assessment that Garvey’s movement posits racial
purity as a project, not a condition: “Neither biology nor racist oppression is sufficient to generate purity of
race: martial technologies of racial becoming—drills, uniforms, medals, titles, rallies—are necessary to
standardize a racial outlook that cannot arise spontaneously” (73). In Paul Gilroy, “Black Fascism” (2000).
38
strength” that stimulates his sense of political possibility, even as they serve a cause he
deems unlikely to succeed. Wright associates this emotional dynamism—and the maps,
pictures and icons that fuel it—with a palpable nationalist longing, in the Garveyites’s
hopes of “building their own country” and “someday living within the boundaries of a
culture of their own making.” Tellingly, Wright would later draw upon a similar language
in The Color Curtain to describe the “emotional nationalism”—wrought of “racial
consciousness”—that he observed animating the newly-independent nations of the Third
World (a context that resembles, in some distant way, the attainment of those Garveyites’
hopes noted above). Though he dismissed the Black Nationalist goals of Garvey’s
organization, Wright nevertheless respected its achievement of a mass mobilization under
the aegis of one man’s singular vision—in effect, “his sight, his notion of direction, his
senses”—as well as the martial aesthetic that gave visual form to the “sovereignty” of
Garvey’s “own impressions and perceptions.”
In recent years, several critics have acknowledged the convergence between
Wright’s valorization of individual agency and his nationalist imaginings of community,
and how this complicates traditional leftist interpretations of his political and aesthetic
project. In Black Fascisms, Mark Thompson locates Wright within a matrix of African
American writers whose work articulates a “black literary fascism.” Not only does the
figure of Marcus Garvey—as the most prominent embodiment of an ultranationalist, antiMarxist black radicalism—feature centrally in Thompson’s conception of black fascist
ideology, but, similar to Wright’s remarks on Garvey’s movement, Thompson’s remarks
also casts this fascism as a distinctly aesthetic (and more specifically, distinctly literary)
phenomenon. As Thompson stresses, while black literary fascism drew upon forms of
39
“generic fascism,” it remained unique in that it emerged in the absence of any black
fascist political party, any black public consensus regarding fascism, nor even any unified
vision of Black Nationalism that might provide a basis for the first two elements. Rather,
this black fascist ideology was articulated “almost exclusively on the individual level as a
political and aesthetic fantasy of collective action” (24).13
Here should make clear that I am not reading Wright’s Third World narratives
through the rubric of Thompson’s black literary fascism, which remains firmly grounded
in an interwar, post-Harlem Renaissance black radical tradition. More precisely, I do not
regard Wright’s writings on Third World nationalist movements as engaging with what
Thompson calls “fascist ideological imperatives” (44).14 For all of Wright’s fascination
with and investment in dynamic political strongmen like Nkrumah, Nehru, Sukarno,
Nasser and others, as well as his calls for African life to be militarized, texts such as
Black Power and The Color Curtain do not exhibit any fascist characteristics, just as the
valorization of charismatic leadership and “firm social discipline” alone does not
constitute fascism. Rather, what I find most useful in Thompson’s analysis is the broader
notion constructing an authoritarian political fantasy “centered on both the charismatic
leader and an aesthetic imperative” (44).
To begin with, I simply wish to note that the “political and aesthetic fantasy” of
black literary fascism likewise emphasizes the supremacy of the individual imagination
in envisioning forms of collective action. That is, Thompson’s model of black fascism
13
As Thompson states elsewhere in his introductory remarks, “This is not a work of pure historiography or
pure political science: it is a literary study that searches novels for political fantasy and the aesthetic form
that conveys that fantasy” (2).
14
As outlined by Thompson, these include: a theory of the volk, race chauvinism, an extreme masculinist
politico-cultural praxis and aesthetic, racial militarization and violence, and the subordination of reason to
vitalism in the quest to recapture the mythic, originary essence of a racially coded people (44).
40
underscores the imperative of an individual’s artistic vision, or the “tyranny of what
troubles and concerns him personally,” over and above any actual collective dynamic.
Moreover, the locus of this individual agency rests less so in the figure of the political
leader, but rather with the writer who is able to give form to this fantasy via the literary
text. In fact, for Thompson, it is precisely a sense of ambivalence toward an extant
political leader—Marcus Garvey, in this case—that occasions the black fascist literary
text. Because Garvey’s mixed historical legacy rendered him both “the strongest model
for the presentation of the charismatic black fascist leader” as well as “the greatest
obstacle to this presentation,” one of the tasks of black literary fascism was to “revere
Garvey while reviling him, to glorify certain aspects of his movement while disavowing
others” (44). In this light, Thompson conceives the work of the writer as not merely
supplementing the efforts of the politician, but in fact refining, clarifying and enhancing
it. As seen in Wright’s own reflections on Garvey, while the figure of the (extant)
charismatic leader offers a certain political promise (in the “emotional dynamics” or
“passionate hunger” he inspires), he also represents a serious deficiency or lack (“they
could never achieve their goal”), for which the insight of the writer then becomes a
source of recompense. Thompson’s reading of Wright’s novel The Outsider, for instance,
explores how the actions of its murderer protagonist Cross Damon strips black fascism
down to its “ideological kernels” of sovereignty, violence and fear (170). Through this
characterization, Thompson argues, Wright forwards a vision of black fascism that
substitutes the flawed Garvey with the more attractive Damon, who represents a pure
fascist “essence” or “ontology” as embodied in a singular individual.
41
In a similar vein, Sean McCann’s A Pinnacle of Feeling also explores Wright’s
literary engagement with institutions of political authority, though focusing on a
distinctly American discourse on the “relations among democracy, nationality, and
executive power” (23). More pertinently, McCann casts Wright’s literary output as part
of a broader dialogue between twentieth-century American writers and a “rising theory of
presidential government,” in which a perpetually frustrated popular sovereignty “might
come to redemptive expression through the power of charismatic leadership” (32).
Tracing Wright’s intellectual debts to Walt Whitman (also on display at the end of Black
Power), McCann highlights a “rarely noted, yet central feature of [Wright’s] work—the
frequency with which he, too, viewed national solidarity as the sine qua non of
meaningful democracy and the degree to which he imagined that national identity being
evoked by the exercise of executive power” (23).15 Much like Thompson’s theory of
black literary fascism, McCann foregrounds this literary articulation of presidential
executive power (to recycle Thompson’s wording) “on the individual level as a political
and aesthetic fantasy of collective action.”
While Thompson and McCann approach Wright’s fiction from seemingly
disparate coordinates of the political spectrum, their investigations share several key
thematic preoccupations, which aid in illuminating Wright’s subsequent non-fiction
writings on the Third World. Firstly, both Thompson and McCann bring renewed
15
McCann draws heavily upon Walt Whitman’s numerous writings extolling Lincoln as a “national
redeemer,” and which imagines Lincoln’s presidency as turning upon two symbolic ideals of leadership:
the commander and the martyr (x). While the first of these refers to the firm-handed commander-in-chief
who exercised vast political and martial powers to win the Civil War, the second draws attention to the man
who suffered greatly and in solitude – and who was eventually assassinated – for that very cause. As
McCann stresses, these two disparate narratives of Lincoln should not be seen as functioning in opposition,
or as a progressive trajectory wherein the second supplants the first. Rather, they are “aspects of a single
dynamic pattern, each of which emphasizes the capacity of executive power to create, through both
coercion and sympathy, an otherwise unrealized national community” (xii).
42
attention to the thoroughly nationalist orientation in Wright’s work, whether in the
radical form of black fascist ideologies inspired by European fascisms, or more moderate,
American-originated notions of “national solidarity” and “meaningful democracy.” In
addition, both studies articulate these nationalist imaginings of community as centered
upon the symbolic import of a charismatic leader, from which group unity, ideological
coherence and political agency all ostensibly emanate. While the equivalence of this
charismatic leadership with dictatorship constitutes a self-evident part of Thompson’s
premise, the “coercive power of government” also plays a critical role in the theory of
presidential government McCann elaborates (29). Most suggestively, McCann’s analysis
of the porous boundaries between state tyranny and legitimate executive leadership
hinges upon the political theories of Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt. As McCann
explicates, Wright’s novel Native Son anticipates Agamben’s theories of the modern
state, by envisioning—via the protagonist Bigger Thomas—an “executive power
characterized by conquest and command” who is then “displaced, through an act of
martyrdom, by a mystically bound people” (29).16
Underpinning these theoretical matrices of nationalism, authoritarianism and
charismatic leadership, ultimately, is the “aesthetic imperative” that gives literary from to
16
More specifically, Agamben’s insight (from Homo Sacer [1998])—that any state that imagines its people
as a spiritual source of political authority may also legitimately demand the lives of those same people—
undergirds McCann’s nationalist reading of the famous final exchange between Bigger and Max in Native
Son (“What I killed for I am!”). In McCann’s analysis, Max’s Communist party affiliations render him
unable to appreciate the “transcendent national sovereignty” signaled by Bigger’s willingness to die, which
represents an “effective desire to refound the nation” through an act of symbolic executive martyrdom (31).
Even though McCann refers to “a radically authoritarian philosopher like Carl Schmitt” in
conjunction with Agamben, he offers no elaboration on Schmitt’s philosophies – i.e. what they are, how
they might inform the project at hand, or even why Schmitt is relevant at all, aside from being a noteworthy
influence upon Agamben. This oblique invocation, then quick dismissal, of Schmitt, I would note, also
appears in both Thompson’s Black Fascisms and Edwards’s Charisma and the Fictions of Black
Leadership. This peculiar commonality not only intimates the authoritarian underpinnings shared across
theories of presidential government, fascism and charismatic leadership, but also gestures toward a broader
connection between Schmitt’s philosophies and black literary politics that is worth further exploration.
43
Wright’s political fantasy, and enthrones the author, in his view, as an equally powerful
sort of dictator in his own right. As we have seen, Wright’s novelistic meditations on
nationalist politics eschew depictions of any actual or fictional fascist dictator or
democratic president. Rather, these political fantasies find their allegorical fulfillment in
the figure of a fictional protagonist, such as Native Son’s Bigger Thomas or The
Outsider’s Cross Damon, who functions not only as a symbolic stand-in for the
“charismatic leader,” but also as a vehicle for the author’s own views—that is, “his sight,
his notion of direction, his senses.” In elaborating upon Wright’s “lifelong attraction to
tyrannical power,” it bears noting, McCann cites not only his expressions of affinity
toward political authoritarianism, but also his stated aesthetic principles (such as his letter
to Fransconi), which suggest that “the literary imagination was a close relative of
tyrannical power” (25). In one compelling example, McCann quotes from a lecture in
which “Wright described himself as a leader of his people who alone might inspire them
put aside the caution of ordinary life and told his audience that he wished not merely to
argue with or persuade them, but to literally enter their persons and through the sheer
force of his rhetoric chemically transform their bodies” (24). 17 Thus even as Wright
posits the artist and politician as standing at “opposite poles,” I would propose that his
strident commitment to the “sovereignty” and “tyranny” of his art bespeaks a more
complex view: that the artist in fact amounted to a superior form of politician, one whose
rhetorical powers represented a “sheer force” more powerful than argumentation or
persuasion. Where Communist directives reduced Wright to a mere party propagandist,
writing on his own terms allowed him to play a sort of Weberian charismatic leader, who
17
These remarks are from Wright’s acceptance speech for the Springarn medal, given in September 1941.
Because the Wright estate declines to grant permission to quote from certain of Wright’s unpublished
critical writings, I rely here on McCann’s own paraphrasing in A Pinnacle of Feeling.
44
through is able to command his readers’ ways of seeing, ways of living and ways of
feeling through means that are largely extra-rational.
Finally, as Thompson and McCann both emphasize, the authoritarian political and
aesthetic fantasies that subtends Wright’s work emerges from a specific African
American social context of oppression, racial discrimination and political
disenfranchisement. If the “aesthetics of political power” I have been outlining—ranging
from the visual iconography and “gaudy regalia” of Marcus Garvey to literary
invocations of fascist or presidential authority—can inspire “emotional dynamics” of an
incipient nationalism, they also serve to highlight the emotional despair to be found in
political reality. As Wright reflects in his essay “How Bigger Was Born”:
When the Nazis spoke of the necessity of a highly ritualized and
symbolized life, I could hear Bigger Thomas on Chicago’s South Side
saying: “Man, what we need is a leader like Marcus Garvey. We need a
nation, a flag, an army of our own. We colored folks ought to organize
into groups and have generals, captains, lieutenants, and so forth. We
ought to take Africa and have a national home.” […] Those words told me
that the civilization which had given birth to Bigger contained no spiritual
sustenance, had created no culture which could hold and claim his
allegiance and faith, had sensitized him and had left him stranded, a free
agent to roam the streets of our cities, a hot and whirling vortex of
undisciplined and unchannelized impulses. The results of these
observations made me feel more than ever estranged from the civilization
in which I lived, and more than ever resolved toward the task of creating
with words a scheme of images and symbols whose direction could enlist
sympathies, loyalties, and yearnings of the millions of Bigger Thomases in
every land and race… (“How Bigger Was Born” 445)
In recounting the genesis of his novel, Wright elaborates a point that would become a
recurrent theme throughout his writings: that the experience of racism amounted to a
profound alienation from the fullness of communal life, and that racism itself can best be
understood as a failure of national sovereignty. With this passage, Wright illustrates an
intellectual trajectory that links the allure of European fascisms, the desire for charismatic
45
leadership and Black Nationalist political longings, the social and spiritual alienation of
African Americans, and ending, crucially, with the import of these elements to his own
aesthetic project. Not only does he present his literary aspirations in terms that resemble
the role of a charismatic, and even vaguely fascist, leader—namely, “the task of creating
with words a scheme of images and symbols whose direction could enlist sympathies,
loyalties, and yearnings”—he also imbues these aspirations with a distinctly international
scope, addressing the “millions of Bigger Thomases in every land and race.”
This internationalism, while a relatively minor aspect of Wright’s work from the
30s and 40s, takes on a renewed significance in the 1950s, with the onset of
decolonization, and the rapid rise of independent nations throughout the colored world.
The next section of my chapter considers the encounter between Wright’s authoritarian
political and aesthetic fantasies, and their at least partial realization within the emergent
context of Third World nation-building. As Thompson reminds us in regards to Bigger
Thomas’s latent fascism, “world events and the machinations of foreign leaders and
powers have the ability to frame otherwise unbounded and ambiguous desires. They put
into focus ill-conceived longings and confused domestic upheavals” (147). What
happens, then, when the “native son” and “black boy” meets his counterparts from other
lands and races—and, more crucially, discerns in these foreign lands a potential
realization of those dreams that had seemed so outlandish from the streets Chicago’s
South Side? How might he react to an Africa finally freed and ready to be a proper
“national home,” complete with flags and armies, as well as the means for “spiritual
sustenance” and “allegiance and faith,” and most importantly, leaders who might succeed
where Garvey had failed? Above all, what role might that other charismatic leader, the
46
writer, serve for the imperatives of this unprecedented nationalist moment, and how
might the artist’s task of “creating with words a scheme of images and symbols” continue
to prove useful, for this brave new world and the politicians at its helm?
IV.
Throughout his numerous observations and reflection on the figure of Kwame
Nkrumah in Black Power, Wright exhibits a wide spectrum of reactions, ranging from
awe to uncertainty, affection to estrangement, admiration to condescension. What
remains consistent, and their core, is an appreciation of the singular and unprecedented
nature of Nkrumah’s achievement, in leading the first African nation to independence
from European colonial rule. While Wright avows that “only a native African could do
what Nkrumah had done” he also stresses the vital influence of black American political
activism upon African independence struggles, noting how the “Gold Coast boys” had
“soaked up […] a sense of racial and class solidarity derived from the American Negro’s
proud and defensive nationalism” (BP 88). Thus the legacy of Marcus Garvey casts its
subtle shadow over Wright’s apprehension of Nkrumah’s political movement. In White
Man, Listen!, Wright directly contrasts Garvey’s “premature” proposals to create “allblack nationalism based on color, racial pride” alongside Nkrumah’s subsequent efforts
to “forge tribes into a unity based on modern political concepts [such as nationalism,
instead of race]” (WML 685). While he never states so explicitly, throughout his texts
Wright gestures toward the view that Nkrumah’s political triumph represents a
fulfillment, at least in part, of Garvey’s dreams of reclaiming Africa as a “national
home.” As Erica Edwards reminds us, at the height of his popularity Garvey was
47
considered “an international icon of black activism,” whose vision of “Africa for the
Africans” inspired not only black Americans, but Pan-Africanist advocates the world
over (27, emphasis mine). While Nkrumah himself has openly acknowledged his
intellectual debt to Garvey, my interest here is not in charting the evolution of PanAfricanist politics from Garvey to the emergence of postcolonial Africa, but rather to
place Wright’s literary treatments of Garvey and Nkrumah within the same politicalaesthetic fantasy of nationalism, authoritarianism and charismatic leadership.18
As Edwards argues, within the black American context “the wish for charismatic
leadership was echoed in the literary text throughout the twentieth century as much as it
was constructed by events like the World’s Fair, the [UNIA] parades, and the civil rights
marches” (27). From this perspective, Wright’s textual accounts of Nkrumah’s leadership
in Ghana, as well as the rallies of the Convention People’s Party that buttressed it, can be
said to re-stage Edwards’s “charismatic scenario” within a framework of global black
freedom struggles. For Edwards, to call attention to charisma as a “scenario” is to
“understand black political history as a dynamic complex of power”:
The charismatic scenario, accessed continually in the American political
repertoire – from the dais to the page – normalizes a charismatic aesthetic,
a specific organization of symbolic elements as banal as the podium; the
positioning of the leader in front of, in the center of, and/or above the
collective; the deployment of music to create a collective ethos of
resistance and change; calling upon or silencing women to authorize
masculine power; the habits of black sermonizing; and the call-andresponse format of black improvisatory speech. (Edwards 19, emphasis in
original)
18
Not only has Garvey’s influence upon Nkrumah’s political views been well documented, they also find
expression through a number of Nkrumah’s policies, such as his encouragement for African Americans and
other members of the African diaspora to settle in Ghana, as well as his insistent pursuit of pan-Africanist
foreign policies. See, for instance Kwame Nkrumah’s autobiography Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame
Nkrumah (1957), Manning Marable’s African and Caribbean Politics from Kwame Nkrumah to the
Grenada Revolution (1987), and Marika Sherwood’s Kwame Nkrumah: The Years Abroad (1996).
48
Even though Edwards attributes her theory of charisma to a distinctly American “political
repertoire,” the broad outlines of this “charismatic aesthetic” nevertheless appear
throughout Wright’s narrative in Black Power, most prominently in several set pieces
featuring Nkrumah positioned “in front of, in the center of, and/or above the collective.”
Meeting Nkrumah for the first time, Wright recounts how, following a single order from
the Prime Minister, “His personal bodyguard stood at attention; it was composed of handpicked militants and faithfuls of the Convention People’s Party. He led the way and I
followed down into the street where his motorcycle escort, dressed in scarlet, stood lined
up near their machines” (BP 74). Riding in a motorcade with Nkrumah through the
streets of Accra, Wright describes the crowds that immediately “rushed pellmell out of
shacks, their faces breaking into wide, glad smiles and, lifting their hands upward with
their elbows at the level of their hips, palms fronting forward—a kind of half-Nazi
salute—they shouted a greeting to the Prime Minister in a tone of voice compounded of
passion, exhortation, and contained joy: ‘Free–doom! Free–doom!’” (BP 75).
Although thousands of miles and a good number of years removed, this African
iteration of the charismatic scenario speaks, in its subtle ways, directly to those black
American political yearnings that Wright sketched in “How Bigger Was Born.” Foremost
among these is the longed-for leader, replete with personal bodyguard and motorized
escort, riding at the vanguard of his African flag, nation and army. Within the narrative
arrangement of this motorcade scene—its charismatic aesthetic—the person of the Prime
Minster serves as the focal point of the collective’s exaltation, as well as a response to the
earlier text’s call: specifically, in the verbal refrain and “half-Nazi salute” (BP) that
bespeaks a “highly ritualized and symbolized life” (“Bigger”) and the “passion,
49
exhortation, and contained joy” (BP) that affirms the “spiritual sustenance” and
“allegiance and faith” (“Bigger”) of Nkrumah’s followers. As this juxtaposition of these
texts suggests, it is in the streets of Accra that Wright encounters the political reality that
Bigger Thomas could only vaguely dream of in the streets of Chicago.
As Wright goes on to emphasize, this gathered multitude not only elevates
Nkrumah to the role of a messianic charismatic leader, but also imbues his authority with
the trappings of popular sovereignty: “The passionate loyalty of this shouting crowd had
put this man in power, had given him the right to speak for them, to execute the mandate
of national liberation that they had placed in his hands” (BP 76). Here Wright depicts
Nkrumah as wielding a “mandate of national liberation” that secures both his political
power and the “passionate loyalty” of his followers, rendering him akin to a legitimate
democratic executive. Wright’s further musings on this topic in White Man Listen!,
however, reveals the other side of this sovereign popular will:
Naturally, he was qualified for this role by his superb organizing and
speaking abilities; but, by his colleagues fastening their hopes on him, he
was lifted to the position of a deity. Listen carefully to what I’m
explaining and perhaps you’ll get some insight into the tendencies toward,
and origins of, authoritarian or dictatorship governments […] We can say
that Nkrumah and his talent for leadership was captured by his followers.
He could not say yes or no. These masses needed someone upon whom
they could project their hopes, and Nkrumah was chosen. There came
moments when, had he refused to act, they would have killed him. Do you
recall the story of the Dying God? Gods must serve men, or they are
killed.” (WML 796).
This twinned dynamic, between firm command over a people, in the manner of a “deity,”
and being at the mercy of that same populace, as a “Dying God,” recalls the presidential
“martyr chief” that McCann identifies, by way of Agamben, as an animating trope in
Wright’s Native Son. Thus, along with engaging black literary and political tradition of
50
charisma, Wright’s analyses of Nkrumah also expounds on many of the “political and
aesthetic fantasies” in his earlier works: not only in the literary black fascist who heralds,
in aesthetic form, a fulfillment and revision of Marcus Garvey’s legacy, but also the
tyrant/martyr figure that underpins a sovereign democratic will.19
Most importantly, Wright’s assertion of his authorial voice—and its attendant
intellectual authority (“Listen carefully to what I’m explaining and perhaps you’ll get
some insight…”), reminds us that the true driving agency behind such literary
engagements with charisma rests not with the political leader being represented. Rather,
as an “interplay of text and performance” that transverses the “dais” and the “page,” the
charismatic scenario remains impelled by the “aesthetic imperatives” of the writer who
orchestrates the representation. Compounding this notion is the unique dual role that
Wright occupies within the travel-narrative frame of Black Power: not only is he the
author of the text at hand, he also functions as a direct participant in the events being
narrated. Here we might take up the approach suggested by Jack B. Moore, who invites
readers to apprehend Wright’s narrative “as a novel focusing on a character named
Richard Wright playing a familiar role, the outsider, the baffled native son foreign to the
land of his ancestor’s birth” (185, emphasis mine). By underscoring “Richard Wright” as
both “native son” and “outsider,” Moore’s framing allows us to regard the narrator of
Black Power as a literary creation along the same continuum as Bigger Thomas and
19
The changing form of this “democratic executive” is also relevant to note here. At the time of Wright’s
visit, Nkrumah’s title was that of a Westminster-style Prime Minister, a title he would hold until 1960,
when he declared Ghana a republic and himself the first President of Ghana. Interestingly, it is after his
transformation from Prime Minister to President that Nkrumah’s rule became increasingly dictatorial,
lending a certain transnational valence to McCann’s theory of a tyrannical Presidential authority. Through
this lens, the military coup that eventually removed Nkrumah from power and exiled him from Ghana can
be seen as a sort of political martyrdom.
51
Cross Damon—and, in this capacity, as a more straightforward version of the charismatic
author-authoritarian anchoring the text’s aesthetic and political fantasies.
Perhaps the most palpable manifestation of this fantasy in Black Power, on the
level of narrative, occurs when Wright himself is asked to briefly address a large outdoor
political rally, as a lead-in to Nkrumah’s own speech. In this rare instance, the writerobserver-protagonist finds himself at the center of the charismatic scenario, literally on
both the dais and the page. Indeed, in its surrounding events, the scene functions like a
checklist for the key elements of Edward’s charismatic aesthetic: “the spectacular
oratory, the masculine (or masculinized) body, the position of the leader in front of or
above his followers, the ecstatic call and response of political speech making and riposte”
(Edwards 27). Upon his arrival, Wright describes the ecstatic call and response between a
party speaker and the crowd, in which “the dialogue between the speaker and the
audience became so intimate, so prolonged, so dramatic that all sense of distance between
leaders and followers ceased to exist, and a spirit of fellowship, of common identity
prevailed among faces young and old, smooth and bearded, wise and simple” (BP 101).
In contrast to the intimacy and sense of nationalistic unity that the party speaker—
and later, Nkrumah himself—is able to summon from the crowd, Wright’s own turn upon
the dais falls short of spectacular. Wright’s speech, which he transcribes in full, offers
broad words of praise for Ghana’s independence and political development, while
foregrounding his unique perspective as an American observer. Although Wright declares
“I am an American and therefore cannot participate in your politician affairs,” he
nonetheless identifies himself as “one of the lost sons of Africa who has come back to
look upon the land of his forefathers. In a superficial sense it may be said that I’m a
52
stranger to most of you, but, in terms of a common heritage of suffering and hunger for
freedom, your heart and my heart beat as one” (BP 103, 102). As S. Shankar has noted,
these remarks stake Wright’s allegiance to his African audience not on any racial or
cultural grounds, but upon a shared political desire. 20 That is, it is through “a common
heritage of suffering and hunger for freedom” that Wright imagines his and his
audience’s hearts to “beat as one,” in his attempt to capture the earlier “spirit of
fellowship” and “common identity” invoked between the party speaker and the crowd.
Despite these earnest overtures of solidarity, Wright remains too much the
“outsider” and “native son” from America. His oratory is met with a lukewarm reception
that only intensifies his sense of estrangement and incomprehension among his African
hosts: “The handclapping was weak and scattered. Perhaps they were not used to hearing
speakers who did not raise their voices, or maybe they had not understood…?” (BP 103).
Hence, the author’s literal ascension before a political collective—in the physical posture
of a charismatic leader—ends on something of an anticlimax, particularly when
compared to the “applause, singing, chanting” in response to the speech Nkrumah gives
immediately after (BP 105). Significantly, Wright’s puzzled reaction focuses not on the
content of his address, but rather on the specifically aural distance between himself and
his listeners, either due to insufficient volume or barriers of language. What seems
deficient to Wright here is not his choice of words but rather his aptitude as an orator. If
Wright had previously maintained a romantic image of himself as a “leader of people
who might inspire them to put aside the caution of ordinary life” and “through the sheer
force of his rhetoric chemically transform their bodies,” what his underwhelming turn
20
See S. Shankar’s “Richard Wright’s Black Power: Colonial Politics and the Travel Narrative,” in
Richard Wright’s Travel Writings.
53
upon the dais in Ghana underscores is that the page remains—at least in his
imagination—the most effective medium for his rhetoric. As his Third World narratives
suggest, it is through the written word that represents his preferred mode of authoritarian
“sheer force.” Moreover, it is also in the realm of writing that this force distinguishes
itself from the predominantly oratorical talents of a politician like Nkrumah.21
The notion of the written word as a site of divergence between Wright and
Nkrumah gains added resonance from an exchange that transpires directly after the two
men make their speeches. After the rally, a journalist approaches Wright with a request to
print the text of his speech in the next day’s paper. When Wright asks for the Prime
Minister’s clearance to share his written remarks, Nkrumah requests to first see those
notes himself. Wright’s narration of this incident unfolds in slow, minimalist suspense:
I gave him my notes. He took them, looked off solemnly, then folded them
slowly. The reporter waited. I waited. Then the Prime Minister came close
to me and pushed the notes into the top breast pocket of my suit; he said
no word and I said no word. I looked at the reporter and he looked at me.
Then the Prime Minister moved silently away…The reporter took a few
steps backward, looking around with embarrassment. I did not understand
what was happening and I did not want to ask for any explanation in
public. Had I said something wrong in my speech? No one had asked to
read what I had proposed to say. If they had, I’d have gladly submitted my
ideas to be censored. But then why had the Prime Minister taken my notes
and given them back to me with such a meaningful gesture? (BP 105)
In this instance, a literal piece of written text occasions a moment of interpersonal
disquiet and interpretative opacity between Wright and Nkrumah. The first thing we
might note about this passage is way Wright refers to Nkrumah strictly as “the Prime
Minister,” positing this encounter as a clash between an artist and a politician—and over
21
It bears noting that by all measures, Nkrumah qualifies as a prolific author in his own right, having
written some sixteen books throughout his life. Here I mean to emphasize Wright’s specific self-conception
as a writer-by-vocation, in contrast to the “superb organizing and speaking abilities” that renders Nkrumah,
in his eyes, a more “traditional” politician.
54
the “use” of an artist’s work, no less. Recalling the earlier aural disconnect between
Wright and the crowd, the dissonance between Wright and Nkrumah is also rendered
through the tropes of wordlessness and silence, where “he said no word and I said no
word,” and ending with the Prime Minister moving “silently” away. Finally, the specific
materiality of writing stands out here, in light of Wright’s own tepidly-received effort at
oratorical persuasion, and more generally, amidst Black Power’s numerous scenes
depicting oration as the driving engine behind political mobilization. Offered the
opportunity to disseminate his rhetoric via the printed page, as is his familiar method,
Wright instead finds his notes folded up and returned to his breast pocket, as if having his
written words—the source of his rhetorical power—literally checked and pressed back
into his person by the Prime Minister.
This tense, wordless exchange between the two men over a piece of text closely
parallels an earlier moment in Black Power, one occurring under similar circumstances.
The scene follows meeting of the Women’s Division of the Convention People’s Party,
during which the audience is asked to raise their right hands and repeat an oath pledging
their allegiance to Nkrumah and the party. While Wright is initially “thunderstruck” at
this sight, he finds himself privately approving, reflecting upon the oaths’ appropriateness
in rendering Nkrumah into a “living symbol” of his followers’ political cohesion. When
Wright asks Nkrumah to see the slip of paper on which the oath is written, however, he is
met with a similarly abstruse reaction:
He glanced off without answering, still holding the slip of paper in
his hand. I knew that he knew what I had asked and he seemed to be
debating. Would my rash request make him distrust me? Would he think
that I’d use the oath against him and his party, his people, his cause? I
gritted my teeth, scolding myself for being too forward in my zeal to
account for what I saw…He was looking off into space; he had not
55
answered me […] Nkrumah had been educated in the United States and he
must have known instinctively how such an oath had struck me. And I
knew that he couldn’t imagine my being shocked and, at the same time,
being in complete agreement! But, if he was reticent about this, what
about the other things I’d see in the Gold Coast? Another song was sung
and, as we all stood up, the Prime Minister, looking off, slowly and
seemingly absent-mindedly, folded the slip of paper containing the oath
and put it into his pocket. I knew then that I’d never get a chance to copy
it. […] Obviously the Prime Minister did not want me to attach too much
importance, politically or psychologically, to that oath. How could I make
him understand that I understood, and that in general I agreed to it as
being an inevitable part of the twentieth century? (BP 84)
Once again, following a boisterous political gathering, a moment of unease irrupts upon
Wright’s interaction with Nkrumah in regard to a “slip of paper.” In both cases, the paper
contains a transcription of an otherwise oral piece of political rhetoric, which Nkrumah
deliberately—and, to Wright, quite suspiciously—withholds from public circulation.
Wright’s palpable consternation in these passages results, I would suggest, from
coming up against the limits of his authorial comprehension. As he asserts in Black
Power, “I wanted to be given the ‘green light’ to look, to know, to be shown everything. I
wanted the opportunity to try to weigh a movement like this, to examine its worth as a
political instrument; it was the first time in my life that I’d come in contact with a mass
movement conducted by Negro leadership and I felt that I could, if given a chance,
understand it” (BP 85). In the above-mentioned scenes with Nkrumah, however, the
writer’s ravenous desire “to know, to look, to be shown everything,” is thwarted by a
glaring red light, in the inscrutability of the politician’s motives. Here the silent enigma
of the Prime Minister’s “meaningful gestures” (“He glanced off without answering”;
“looking off, slowly and seemingly absent-mindedly”) obstructs Wright’s “zeal” to
account for all he saw, and instead reduces his usual certainty and “conviction” about
56
matters to a series of anxious conjectures: “Had I said something wrong in my speech?”;
“Would he think that I’d use the oath against him and his party, his people, his cause?”).
At the heart of Wright’s exasperation, I would add, is a frustrated desire to
communicate to Nkrumah his general understanding, agreement, and solidarity with the
Prime Minister’s political tactics, which he considers “an inevitable part of the twentieth
century.” Thus Wright frames these moments of interpersonal rift not in terms of any
political or ideological qualms, but rather as a matter of medium. In staging this discord
as centered around pieces of text, Wright foregrounds the materiality of the written
word—that is, as opposed to the content of whatever is written—as a site of contestation
between the writer and the dictator. As we have seen, the artist’s unique form of
dictatorial power rests in his sight, notion of direction, and senses, as well as his ability to
render “disordered” materials legible and “intelligible to others.” From this perspective,
these exchanges between Wright and Nkrumah mark the failure of the artist’s power: in
one scenario, he is prevented from literally seeing, and thus understanding, the writing on
a slip of paper; and in the other, he is prevented from distributing his written words
(through the material circulation of newspapers, notably) and thus reaching those
“others” that he might influence.
In this way, even as Wright imagines the artist-writer as possessing his own form
of authoritarian political power, Black Power also dramatizes the limits of this power.
Here the text highlights the limits of the authoritarian’s “enhanced” and superior
perception, as well as his continued struggles with the “full-blown politician” over the
use, or non-use, of his work—even as the two are ostensibly “driving in the same
direction” and “committed to the same vision.” On a surface level, this struggle is
57
presented as a straightforward matter of mutual suspicion. As Rowley’s biography
informs us, throughout his trip Wright in fact felt frequently rebuffed by Nkrumah and
his party leadership, from whom he had expected much more cooperation and personal
attention. Scratching beneath the delicacies of Wright’s text, Rowley reveals that “More
than he dared say in Black Power, Wright distrusted Nkrumah. His methods of
organization seemed blatantly Communist. Wright was convinced that Nkrumah had
slighted him because he feared that Wright, as a former Communist, might understand
more than Nkrumah wanted him to know” (436). As this contextual detail reveals,
undergirding the distrust between the two men is not merely the issue of politics, but also
a crucial problem of knowledge, which itself is tied directly to Wright’s narrative focus
on the written text. Throughout Wright’s account of their confrontation over a slip of
paper, he presents himself as being able to intuit many of Nkrumah’s thoughts and
feelings in the face of the Prime Minister’s reticence (“he must have known instinctively
how such an oath had struck me…”; “Obviously the Prime Minister did not want me to
attach too much importance…”). Conversely, in Wright’s view, it is Nkrumah whose
knowledge is deficient, remaining unware of the scope of Wright’s apprehension of the
larger meanings and implications behind his actions (“And I knew that he couldn’t
imagine my being shocked…”; “How could I make him understand that I understood...”).
For Wright, the written text enables the writer to assert the supremacy of his
knowledge and comprehension over those of the politician. To this end, we might read
Wright’s concluding letter to Nkrumah as a site of recompense, through writing, for his
earlier lackluster rhetorical performance upon the dais, as well as his reluctant
submissions to the Prime Minister’s ad hoc censorship. In contrast to the facile praises of
58
a foreign observer conveyed in his speech, Wright’s letter presents his comprehensive
vision for Ghana’s future development, including his notorious injunction to “militarize”
African society. In place of sharing his thoughts with the “disordered” masses of Ghana’s
citizens, Wright now addresses himself directly to the only one who matters politically:
the charismatic leader. By recasting Nkrumah’s executive prestige as “the Prime
Minister” into the more modest “Kwame,” Wright’s letter rhetorically usurps his role as
the “singular voice of authority, knowledge and political promise” (Edwards xiii). In this
way, Black Power revises Edwards’s observation that “the sonorous man with a text in
his hand stands at the center of the charismatic scenario,” a condition that she argues
“holds true […] throughout a diasporic repertoire of modern black freedom dreams” (29,
emphasis mine). Here Wright’s narrative restaging of the charismatic scenario not only
emphasizes its “diasporic” character, by dramatizing it as a power-struggle between a
native African and his African American counterpart, it also emphasizes the primacy of
the text in the man’s hand, over the sonority of his voice, as the superior foundation of
authority, knowledge and political promise.
V.
By way of a brief coda to this chapter, and as a transition to the next one, I would
now like to revisit the issue of genre. In taking up Moore’s suggestion to read Black
Power as a novel, one fascinating yet largely overlooked question remains: what kind of
novel? Perhaps the answer to this question would allow us to consider afresh some of the
tonal and analytical infelicities that critics often find so distasteful about Wright’s text.
Returning once more to the tense exchanges between the protagonist “Richard Wright”
59
and the character of “the Prime Minister,” I would propose that the narrative dramas
unfolding over “a slip of paper” resonate with the conventions of a specific generic mode:
that of the espionage narrative, and the novel of international political intrigue. Seen
through this optic, Wright’s desire “to look, to know, to be shown everything” can be
read as a mission of intelligence gathering, where the writer-observer resembles
something of a secret agent. The broad features of Wright’s narrative certainly support
this reading, with a protagonist working his way through the cities and interior of an
exotic, unfamiliar country, armed with his typewriter and ammunition of words, and
encountering an assortment of outlandish characters and vexing scenarios.
Even more pertinent, I would suggest, is the way this intelligence narrative
coalesces around a single individual: the political leader who is both charismatic and
enigmatic, and who comes to function as a sort of hermeneutic cipher for a broader
collective. As with the other works considered in this study, Black Power features a
version of the iconic scene in which the writer-observer-narrator-spy sketches a “profile”
of the dictator-subject he is shadowing. Meeting Nkrumah for the first time, Wright notes
before anything else his representative qualities: “The Prime Minister threw back his
head and laughed. I got used, in time, to that African laughter. It was not caused by mirth;
it was a way of indicating that, though they were not going to take you into their
confidence, their attitude was not based upon anything hostile” (73). In keeping with
writer’s mandate to make his subject “more intelligible to others,” Wright presents the
Prime Minister’s body, via his emphatic laughter, as a site where given interpretative
codes are destabilized (where laughter signals secrecy rather than mirth), as well as for
understanding a general “African” quality. As Wright reports some pages later:
60
On this journey I had an opportunity to observe the Prime Minister
in action at close range. Among his own people he was a democrat, selfforgetfully identifying himself with the common masses in deed and word
each passing hour. He slept, played, and ate with them, sharing his life in a
manner that no Englishman or missionary ever could…It was his lapsing
into a sudden silence that drew a line between himself and them. […] I’d
not witnessed any evidence of the fury of which I’d been told that he was
capable, but there was a hidden core of hardness in him which I was sure
that no one could bring to the surface quicker than an Englishman… (112)
Here Wright’s “close range” observations of the Prime Minister read almost like a spy’s
intelligence profile or dossier: “attitude was not based on anything hostile”; “Among his
own people he was a democrat.” What makes the dictator figure truly exceptional,
however, is his ability to seem an organic part of the collective, while also standing apart
from this collective: “he ate, slept, played, and ate” with the “common masses,” yet was
able to “draw a line between himself and them” at will. In Wright’s conception, and
personal experience, this “sudden silence” represents less so a passive “lapse” than a key
aspect of the Prime Minister’s active power: the power to “draw a line” between himself
and others, to exclude from his confidence, to bar the artist’s imperative to see, know and
understand. Enhancing these subtle shades of dictatorial malevolence that he perceives,
Wright images a “fury” and “core of hardness” concealed beneath the “surface” of
Nkrumah’s silence, even as this quality, like the “slip of paper” evades his sight.
Reading Black Power through the framework of an espionage narrative, what
becomes visible is an element of intrigue that pervades the interactions between Wright
and Nkrumah, what Gaines touches upon as a “sinister undercurrent,” in his analysis of
the oath scene (89). This undercurrent reminds us that Wright is above all a novelist, one
with a penchant for thrilling pulp stories that revolve around figures of “hard,” masculine
menace. It is possible, then, to regard Wright’s narrative of diasporic return as also
61
overlaid by a sort of international political thriller, in which the diasporic “outsider”
returns to embroil himself in the political intrigues of the postcolonial homeland—only to
be obstructed, ominously, by the country’s shifty dictator. Whether or not Wright actively
conceived of himself as writing such a text, certain extra-diegetic details suggests that he
saw himself as partaking in a kind of genre narrative. While Wright’s biographers
generally agree that he felt snubbed by Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party,
Rowley’s account contains one illuminating piece of information. Shortly before
departing Ghana, Wright visited the American consulate, where he spoke to the consul
and volunteered a four-page memorandum. In this document, Wright offers his
assessments of the CPP’s relationship to Communist organizations, noting that “leading
members of the Party openly admit that they have conscientiously modeled their
organization upon the Russian Communist Party,” and that Nkrumah slept with a large
portrait of Lenin above his bed (437). In perhaps the most “spy novel” touch of all, he
also furnishes details (gleaned from one of Nkrumah’s enemies) regarding sub rosa
communications that Nkrumah’s “Secret Circle” maintained with George Padmore and
other contacts in London—he even includes the names of key intermediaries, and
tradecraft particulars like letters sealed “within envelope within envelope and
addressed…in a barely legible scrawl to mislead governmental censorship.”22
Though omitted from Wright’s published accounts of the journey, all the same
this episode casts a new light on the “usefulness” of a writer’s work, this time as practical
instruments of intelligence—and also its counterpart, subterfuge—within a distinctly Cold
War context. As Rowley clarifies, “Wright’s statement could not have contained much
that was new to the State Department, and Wright knew that. Nevertheless, it was an act
22
Quoted in Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times, 437.
62
of betrayal, and he knew that too” (437). That is, while Wright’s contributions as an
intelligence operative may not have yielded much in the way of strategic, Communistfighting value, its valences as a purely symbolic gesture are still relevant. After twice
ceding to Nkrumah’s will over a “slip of paper,” Wright’s own four-page “slip of paper”
represents, in a sense, the writer’s final coup over the politician who had rebuffed and
thwarted him.
63
CHAPTER TWO
Good Korean/Bad Korean:
Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and the Ghost of Syngman Rhee
I.
In Ian Fleming’s 1955 novel Moonraker, British secret agent James Bond is
assigned to investigate Sir Hugo Drax, a self-made millionaire industrialist and rising
darling of London society. During his initial briefing, Bond remarks thus of Drax’s
burgeoning national stature: “The public have taken to him…They’ve got a real feeling
for him. They consider he’s one of them, but a glorified version. A sort of
superman…And when you think of what he’s doing for the country…it’s really
extraordinary that they don’t insist on making him Prime Minister” (334). As 007’s
sleuthing eventually uncover, the very British Sir Hugo Drax is actually the very German
Graf Hugo von der Drache, a former Wehrmacht officer who was able to pass himself off
as a wounded and amnesiac British soldier during the closing days of World War II.
Secretly an unrepentant Nazi, Drax’s self-reinvention as a “glorified” Briton in fact
masks his unrelenting hatred of Britain, and his ‘patriotic’ plan to build a missile defense
system for the United Kingdom is only an elaborate cover for his true intentions: to
avenge Germany by launching a nuclear warhead at London.
In imagining a megalomaniac German Nazi who masquerades as an English
gentleman, Fleming’s novel stokes prevalent Cold War fears of the “enemy within”
(among the eccentricities of Moonraker’s plot is that, despite being a Nazi, Drax/Drache
also happens to be backed by the Soviet Union). Across the Atlantic, this trope would
find its most famous iteration in Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate (1959),
64
which centers upon Raymond Shaw, a war hero and political scion who is brainwashed
into becoming a Communist assassin. In both these popular Cold War fictions, the
infiltrators assume the guise of celebrated public figures, whose proximity to institutions
of political power testifies to their civic exemplarity—in Sir Drax as an imagined Prime
Minister, or Shaw’s distinction as a Medal of Honor recipient, and also stepson to a US
senator and potential Vice President.
Playing upon these spy genre conventions in its exploration of Asian American
political and psychic subject formation, Chang-rae Lee’s debut novel Native Speaker
likewise foregrounds the intrigue surrounding a prominent, seemingly “model” citizen.
Its protagonist and narrator, Henry Park, is an intelligence operative who has been
assigned to gather information on a rising New York City councilman. Early in the novel,
Henry profiles his subject in terms that resemble Bond’s comments on Drax:
John Kwang was Korean, slightly younger than my father would have
been, though he spoke a beautiful, almost formal English. He had a JDMBA from Fordham. He was a self-made millionaire. The pundits spoke
of his integrity, his intelligence. His party was pressuring him for the
mayoral race. He looked impressive on television. Handsome,
irreproachable. Silver around the edges. A little unbeatable. (23)
While this passage augurs many of the novel’s wider themes—immigrant identity,
language, and the politics of race—what stands out here is the way Henry regards Kwang
as a “glorified version” of Koreans like himself and his father. A potential candidate for
mayor, Kwang exceeds Henry’s notions of what a Korean American can be, and indeed
seems a sort of “superman” in his grandeur. Meeting Kwang in person, Henry describes a
“kind of light that emanated from him,” and how “from any distance at all he appeared to
me as though he were ascending an invisible ramp that magically preceded him” (134).
65
In true spy thriller fashion, of course, Henry’s investigations lead him to uncover
a dark underside to this charismatic surface. An office firebombing that kills one of
Kwang’s trusted lieutenants turns out to have been orchestrated by Kwang himself, as
retribution for the subordinate’s betrayal. “You see, there is horror in your face,” Kwang
exclaims when he admits his guilt, his exposition redolent of a pulp villain’s dramatic
confession. “Think of mine when I found him out. I loved him, Henry, I grieve for him,
but he was disloyal, the most terrible thing, a traitor. I left it to Han and his gang” (311).
The fallout from this incident accelerates the collapse of Kwang’s immaculate public
image, and by the novel’s closing chapters the once-esteemed city councilman has
revealed not only his complicity in murder, but also a disturbing penchant for excessive
drinking, adultery, fits of violent rage, and aggression towards women. Throughout the
denouement, what Henry registers most poignantly about Kwang’s downfall is his
regression from someone who was “such a natural American, first thing and last” to one
indelibly marked by foreignness, “his Korean accent getting thicker and heavier”; the last
Henry sees of Kwang, notably, is his “wide immigrant face” as it disappears beneath an
angry throng of nativist protestors (326, 297, 343).
Most critical discussions of Native Speaker have tended to gloss over its literary
lineage as a spy narrative, even as they widely praise Lee’s use of spying as an innovative
metaphor for the immigrant experience. By now among the most canonical of Asian
American texts, Lee’s novel has been overwhelmingly read through the lens of 1990s
U.S. multiculturalism, in keeping with its depiction of the period’s demographic shifts
and racial politics.1 One early review, part of a New York Magazine cover story about
1
Various critics have noted the ways Lee’s novel comments on contemporaneous news events pertaining to
issues of racial politics and immigration. While Liam Corley highlights Native Speaker’s reference to the
66
Korean immigrants in New York City, describes the novel as “an artful meditation on
ethnic identity, fractured loyalties, and cultural confusion that is bundled inside a notentirely-plausible political spy thriller” (Goldberg 46). Such remarks reveal a wider
proclivity to view the spy genre elements of Lee’s novel as something of a curiosity, an
artistic misstep, or a distraction from the customary ethnic literature themes of “fractured
loyalties” and “cultural confusion.”2 Even when scholars directly address questions of
genre, the inclination has been to read Native Speaker as a spy novel that is not quite one,
with the spy plot standing in for broader concerns regarding minority subjectivity. 3 In
highlighting the familial resemblances between Lee’s novel and such “not-entirelyplausible political spy thrillers” as Moonraker and The Manchurian Candidate, this
chapter considers anew the centrality of the spy genre to Lee’s “artful meditation” on
ethnic identity. Specifically, how might thinking about Native Speaker as also a distant,
lateral descendant of works by Fleming and Condon—works that speak forcefully, if
loudly and garishly, to the geopolitical anxieties of their era—illuminate its critical
engagement with an earlier historical moment? That is, even as Lee’s novel provides an
1993 grounding of the Golden Venture, a freighter carrying nearly three hundred illegal Chinese
immigrants, in New York, Min Song focuses on the novel’s allegorical meditations upon the 1992 Los
Angeles riots. For a recent overview of discourses around multiculturalism, including its critique by the left
during the 1990s, see Timothy B. Powell’s “All Colors Flow into Rainbows and Nooses: The Struggle to
Define Academic Multiculturalism” (2003).
2
Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Rand Richards Cooper comments: “Native Speaker brims
with intrigue and political high jinks, but Mr. Lee…is no spy novelist. His interest lies in culture, language,
and identity.” In The New Yorker, Verlyn Klinkenborg notes how Lee’s prose is “the right language for
insight…but it’s the wrong language for telling a spy story…Spying seems, after all, too small a vehicle for
ambitions of the kind Chang-rae Lee rightly harbors.” Similarly, Ruth Pavey asks of the novel, “But was it
necessary to add in the spy story as well, fun though it is? Henry is so much more like a writer than a spy;
perhaps he could just have been one.”
3
Tina Chen describes how Lee “is drawn to the ways it [the spy genre] illuminates the in/visibility of his
protagonist even as he writes against the genre to reflect Henry’s ontological dilemmas” (659). James
Kyung-Jin Lee, meanwhile, casts the spy as a metaphor for the model minority, and how “by constructing
an Asian American spy as the novel’s protagonist, Lee alludes to the structural role that Asian Americans
have served as the nation’s Ariel in contemporary racial debates” (247).
67
undeniably cogent portrait of 1990s multiculturalism, what critics have generally ignored
is the way it also persistently invokes a historical memory rooted in the 1950s.
On one level, this 1950s frame is necessarily a Cold War one, with the division of
the globe into a communist East and capitalist West taking on an especially stark and
violent dimension for the Korean people, in the devastating Korean War (1950-1953). At
the same time, scholars have also come to apprehend the Korean War as not merely an
expression of bipolar Cold War hostilities, but rather through its own local context as a
civil war and war of national liberation, a conflict over the future of a country in the wake
of imperial domination. More precisely, the latent fifties context in Native Speaker speaks
to a Korean War context, one heavily-inflected by the Cold War but not solely
determined by it, and equally articulated to a narrative of decolonization and nationalist
struggle. In this sense, Lee’s novel shares much with Wright’s Third World narratives,
which, as we have seen, also navigate the intricacies of decolonization and postindependence nation-building alongside the ideological shadows of the Cold War.
In my discussion of Black Power in the previous chapter, I gestured only briefly
toward the significance of literary genres—and particularly the spy genre—for
negotiating the overlapping frames of dictatorship, decolonization, and the Cold War
(roughly in that order). In what follows, I examine more fully how the spy genre
articulates these frames as part of a broader 1950s historical consciousness, one that
subtends the “present” narrative action of a novel published in the 1990s. Central to my
argument is the character of John Kwang who, like the “character” of Nkrumah in Black
Power (a.k.a. “the Prime Minister”), functions as the epistemological object of Native
Speaker’s spy plot. Starting out as the novel’s fantasy of a progressive, multicultural
68
politics, Kwang ends up, rather abruptly, as another kind of fantasy altogether: the
sinister foreigner who must be expelled from the national body. For all the prolific
commentary surrounding Lee’s novel, few have effectively addressed this final-act
dramatic shift, and the way it vexes the otherwise realist mode of the ethnic novel that
Lee writes in. Kwang’s trajectory from upstanding citizen to foreign threat—or more
pointedly, from model minority to “yellow peril”—makes a certain sense, however, when
we approach the novel from a fifties discursive frame.4 Tellingly, Lee situates the
character’s origins within one of the defining conflicts of that decade, with Kwang having
suffered the violence, privation and displacement of the Korean War as a child. For
Henry, Kwang’s lived experience of the war not only stresses the remarkability of his
ascent from Third World abjection to First World affluence, but also reinforces his
organic connection to an “authentic” Korean national history. In this sense, the Korean
War serves as a crucial background to Kwang’s role as genre villain and ethnic dictator;
his wartime past animates both his assimilationist success, as well as his exposure as an
“enemy within” who remains, in the end, too Korean to be properly American.
Moreover, as I aim to show, Kwang’s analogy to 50s literary antagonists like
Hugo Drax and Raymond Shaw adumbrates his parallels to another kind of generic figure
associated with the period: that of the US-backed anticommunist strongman. Drawing
upon the work of historian Bruce Cumings, I explore how Kwang’s portrayal also
resonates with accounts a key personage of the Korean War, one whose legacy bestrides
a wider history of U.S. military intervention and neocolonialism in Korea, as well as a
closely related Korean national history of decolonization and dictatorship. While
4
For more on the interrelatedness of the “model minority” and “yellow peril” tropes in Asian American
studies, see Gary Okihiro’s Margins and Mainstreams (1994), Roberg G. Lee’s Orientals (1999) and
Collen Lye’s America’s Asia (2005).
69
Cumings’ historical accounts provide a germane and insightful framework for my
discussion, this chapter also offers a critical reading of his work alongside Lee’s.
Namely, in drawing upon similar ethnographic tropes of a “traditional” Korean leader,
both Lee’s fiction and Cumings’ historiography end up representing this figure as a sort
of “genre villain,” whose outward affinity with U.S. state interests obscures an intractable
and malevolent nature. This antagonism manifests not only as an adversarial personality,
but as a fundamental opposition to an American “national ontology.”5 In fact, for Lee as
well as for Cumings, the narrative allure of the ethnic strongman—whether a fictional
Korean American city councilman or a historical Korean dictator—rests in his
embodiment of distinctly Korean national ontology. For if Lee’s novel does nothing else,
it also enacts a literary fantasy of Koreanness, and a Korean homeland, one that links the
imagination of ethnic American identity with a transnational historical memory, as well
as merging the identitarian meditations of the ethnic novel with the global concerns of the
spy novel. In its discursive imbrications within a Korean War context, I argue, Native
Speaker’s engagement with the spy genre might also be seen as a vital way to remember
what has widely become known as “the forgotten war.”
II.
As previously established, Native Speaker chronicles Henry Park’s mission to
infiltrate and gather information on city councilman John Kwang. At the same time, the
novel also details Henry’s struggles with a series of personal difficulties: the recent
5
I borrow this term from Lisa Lowe, who argues that “ Asian American critique asks us to interrogate the
national ontology through which the United States constructs its international ‘others’ and through which
the nation-state has either sought to transform those ‘others’ into subjects of the national, or conversely, to
subordinate them as objects of that national ontology” (30). See Lisa Lowe, “The International Within the
National.”
70
deaths of his young son and elderly father, his estrangement from his white American
wife, the ethical burdens of his profession and, most pressing of all, a lifelong feeling of
alienation from the American cultural mainstream, which he regards as the legacy his
Korean ethnicity and upbringing. With a plot set largely in the mid-nineties, Native
Speaker has understandably not been thought of as addressing the Korean War, at least
not in the direct manner seen in other recent Asian American literary works like Susan
Choi’s The Foreign Student (1998), Ha Jin’s War Trash (2004) and Lee’s own The
Surrendered (2010). Nonetheless, Lee’s preoccupation with the Korean War as a salient
historical subtext remains evident throughout his first and still most celebrated novel. In
one scene, Henry and his wife Leila discuss the war’s resonance for younger, Americanborn Koreans like himself, even as he is only able to encounter this history as a series of
elisions, silences and redactions:
“My father never talked about the war,” I say. “He tried once. I had to
write a report for social studies. I got the bright idea to do something on
the Korean War. I asked him what it was like. He almost smiled and
started to talk as if it was no big deal but then he choked up and left the
room.”
“How did you do the report?”
“I read my junior encyclopedia,” I tell her. “The entry didn’t
mention any Koreans except for Syngman Rhee and Kim Il Sung, the
Communist leader. Kim was a bad Korean. In the volume there was a
picture of him wearing a Chinese jacket. He was fat-faced and maniacal.
Bayonets were in the frame behind him. He looked like an evil robot.”
“The Mao lover’s Mao,” Leila answers.
“Exactly,” I reply. “So I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to
embarrass myself in front of the class. So my report was about the threat
of Communism, the Chinese Army, how MacArthur was a visionary, that
Truman should have listened to him. How lucky all of us Koreans were.”
“You really felt that way?”
“More or less, when I was little. Sometimes, even now. You know,
it’s being with old guys like Stew that diminishes you.” (NS 242)
71
Here Lee illustrates how a specific Korean history mediates the difficult formation of
Henry’s American identity. That the topic was his own “bright idea” hints at the war’s
lingering pull upon his childhood sense of cultural heritage, while the adult
“diminishment” he feels before Stew, his father-in-law and war veteran, affirms that
“even now” this event he never experienced fuels his perpetual sense of unbelonging. As
for actual knowledge of the war, the child Henry faces two opposite poles: his father’s
silence, rooted in the trauma of direct experience, and a junior encyclopedia entry, rooted
in a U.S. neocolonial imaginary that registers Koreans as either “bad” or “good.” Due to
the Cold War division of the Korean peninsula into a communist North and Americancontrolled South, such are the ideological terms available to Henry as he forms his
subjectivity in relation to the U.S. state.6 That his school report ends up reciting Cold War
bromides about “the threat of Communism,” “how MacArthur was a visionary” and
“How lucky all of us Koreans were” reflects Henry’s childhood desire to be identified as
a “good” Korean, which prefigures his broader, lifelong attempt to be a “good”
American.
While Native Speaker delves no further into the particulars of the Korean War,
Henry’s anecdote does underscore the importance of figures like Kim Il Sung to the Cold
War imaginary that frames commonplace accounts of the conflict. For the child Henry,
the prospect of embarrassment stems from the threat of being identified with the
morbidly caricatured “bad Korean.” Here we see how a logic of metonymic association—
or in this case, dissociation—with a symbolically-laden political leader shapes how a
Korean American subject comes to know and identify himself. Left unaddressed in this
6
Here the classroom functions as an apparatus for the student’s induction into an American national
identity, as well as a synecdoche for the hegemonic state. For more on this notion, see Louis Althusser’s
Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1971).
72
scene, and in critical discussions of Native Speaker at large, is the corresponding figure of
the “good” Korean, whom the text explicitly names as Syngman Rhee, the anticommunist
president of South Korea and Kim Il Sung’s Korean War counterpart. If the young
Henry’s attempt to be a “good” Korean (and thus a “good” Korean American) entails the
rejection of Kim Il Sung, to what extent does it entail an implicit embrace of Syngman
Rhee, as per the Manichean Cold War logics into which he is interpolated? Here one
might note the lopsidedness of this pedagogical moment, which asserts Kim Il Sung’s
“badness” while leaving Syngman Rhee’s “goodness” an unstated, ghostly asterisk.
This figuration, though a seemingly minor detail, indexes a contradiction endemic
to the dual Cold War ideologies of containment and integration. The first, long familiar
to Cold War discourse, imagined Communism as an expansionist threat that needed to be
resisted at all points. As a directive of foreign policy and domestic propaganda,
containment involved the conspicuous demonization of communist or communistfriendly leaders like Kim Il Sung, who were often regarded as little more than Soviet or
Chinese pawns—the “Mao lover’s Mao.”7 More recently, scholars like Christina Klein
have also shown how the imperative of containment was accompanied by one of
integration, which refers to efforts to incorporate Third World nations into an
interconnected global system, one led by the U.S. and united under the banners of
capitalism, free trade and liberal democracy.8 Yet while the U.S. projected itself as the
apotheosis of freedom and democracy in the pursuit of integration, in practice it installed
and supported all manners of repressive, authoritarian and brutal governments throughout
7
For an account of how central the concept of containment has been to Cold War studies, as well as to
American cultural production, see Alan Nadal’s Containment Culture (1995).
8
Complicating the customary narrative of a Manichean struggle between a democratic/capitalist West and a
totalitarian/communist East, Klein argues, the logic of integration frames the Cold War as a triangulated
struggle over the hearts and minds of the Third World. See Klein’s Cold War Orientalism (2003).
73
the globe in the name of “collective security.” Thus as a matter of Cold War rationale,
although the designation of all things communist as “bad” was a straightforward affair, it
was far more difficult to sustain an unproblematic equivalence between anticommunism
and “goodness,” especially under the rubric of liberal democratic ideals.
In Native Speaker, this asymmetrical logic appears in the hyperbolic image of
Kim Il Sung as an “evil robot” framed by bayonets. Here Lee’s imagined picture evokes a
certain 50s pulp iconography that animated not only the literary/pop-cultural imagination,
but also the bureaucratic imagination, as exemplified by the government policy paper
NSC-68. Aside from articulating the main goals of containing and reducing the Soviet
sphere, this document, among others, has been noted by scholars for its “hysterical view,”
“morbid Orientalism and dehumanization” and “diabolical imagery (Cumings 1990,
217).”9 In contrast to this excess of signification (and signification of excess) is the
decidedly undersignified Syngman Rhee, whom the text names but does not otherwise
identify or contextualize. Had Henry’s junior encyclopedia offered a picture of the South
Korean leader, it might have depicted a gray-haired septuagenarian with a wrinkled
visage and narrow gaze, with the accompanying text possibly describing his lifelong
advocacy for Korean independence, his Ivy-League education in the United States, and
his fierce opposition to communism. What this hypothetical entry would likely not have
mentioned, most likely, is that beneath Rhee’s dignified, paternal exterior was a staunch
autocrat with a volatile temperament, one who headed a repressive police state that belied
official U.S. portrayals of South Korean as a bastion of democracy.
9
See Bruce Cumings’ The Origins of the Korean War, Volume II (1990). Similarly, the first chapter of Jodi
Kim’s Ends of Empire also highlights the “Orientalism of anticommunist rhetorics” underlying NSC-68, as
well as other canonical Cold War government documents such as NSC 48/1 and George F. Kennan’s “Long
Telegram.” (2010 39).
74
On this basis, the historian Seth Jacobs counts Rhee among a clique of East Asian
national leaders who received considerable material and ideological support from the
U.S. during the Cold War, even as their countries proved, in one American ambassador’s
words, “not exactly a paragon of the democratic process” (124).10 For Americans, the
most attractive quality about these leaders—which also included Ramon Magsaysay of
the Philippines, Ngo Dihn Diem of South Vietnam, and most prominently, Chiang KaiShek of Nationalist China, later Taiwan—was their virulent anticommunism (and to an
important degree, their Christian faith). This quality alone, however, was enough to
secure for these regimes such devoted and influential advocates as U.S. Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles, author James Michener and media magnate Henry Luce. Thus while
Luce’s Time magazine likened Rhee to a Korean George Washington, an American
MASH surgeon in Korea portrays a different reality in a letter to his wife, describing the
South Korean president as “a tyrant and as fascistic as Chiang” (230).11 Within this Cold
War symbolic economy, the moral clarity surrounding the “bad Korean” is often
accompanied by the moral ambiguity of the putative “good Korean,” who for all intents
and purposes was just a “bad Korean” in a western suit instead of a Chinese jacket.12
In her study, Ends of Empire, Jodi Kim argues that Asian American cultural
productions present a vital site for critically reframing the Cold War, and probing the
10
Quoted in Seth Jacob’s America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam (2004).
11
See: “Korea: The Walnut” in the March 9, 1953 edition of Time magazine; also Dorothy G. Horowitz’s
We Will Not Be Strangers: Korean War Letters Between a M.A.S.H. Surgeon and His Wife (1997). The
prevalent image of Rhee as a “little Chiang Kai-shek” serves as a useful counterpoint to the notion of Kim
Il Sung as the “Mao’s lover’s Mao.”
12
I would argue that this symbolic economy persists into the present day (even though South Korea is no
longer a repressive dictatorship), with the American media focusing disproportionately on images of Kim Il
Sung’s successors, his son Kim Jong Il and now his grandson Kim Jong Un, as modern incarnations of the
“bad Korean.”
75
ways the Cold War “continues to enjoy a persisting recursiveness when seen as a
structure of feeling, a knowledge project, and a hermeneutics for interpreting
developments in the ‘post’-Cold War conjecture” (3). Kim urges us to view the Cold War
“not only a historical period, but also an epistemology and production of knowledge, and
as such it exceeds and outlives its historical eventness” (3).13 In a similar vein, I propose
that Native Speaker stages Henry’s reckoning with the Cold War “good Korean” as
occurring belatedly, in his adult relationship to the charismatic John Kwang. In Kwang,
Henry finds something like a positive alternative to the embarrassing picture of Kim Il
Sung that had vexed his childhood self-identification—a highly visible Korean man who
is also able to inhabit the iconography and ideals of American political culture. Contrary
to the “fat-faced and maniacal” Kim in his Chinese jacket, Henry notes that Kwang’s
“warm-hued face was square,” with an “angular jaw, which carved out two perfect
hollows on either side of his chin,” and that he “dressed like a power broker,” whose suits
“mostly stayed to the conservative, what the people expected of him, Paul Stuart and J.
Press, the American executive look” (134, 137).
As councilman for the diverse and multitudinous Flushing, Queens district of
New York City, Kwang also represents an expansion of American democracy, namely to
include the recent immigrants of color that comprise the bulk his constituency.
Describing these constituents, Henry observes that “They were all kinds, these streaming
and working and dealing, these various platoons of Koreans, Indians, Vietnamese,
Haitians, Colombians, Nigerians, these brown and yellow whatevers, whoevers, countless
13
Kim’s work has helped me more clearly articulate my own argument, particularly her analysis of Native
Speaker as a “Cold War composition” in the way it reveals “how the Cold Wars has come to haunt and
overdetermine not only racialized minority subjectivity and identity, but also the identity politics—and
politics of identification—of the American nation in the post-World War II era” (2009 123). Also see her
essay “From Mee-gook to Gook: The Cold War and Racialized Undocumented Capital in Chang-rae Lee’s
Native Speaker” (Spring 2009).
76
unheard nobodies…John Kwang’s people” (83). Kwang’s goal of granting political
visibility to these “brown and yellow whatevers, whoevers,” can be seen, in one sense, as
the protracted afterlife of Cold War integration. As Klein’s study reminds us, the
integration of decolonizing and developing nations into the capitalist “free world” was
directly related to the domestic integration of new immigrants into the American social
and political mainstream.14 In addition, the aforementioned roll-call of Third World
nationalities signals a demographic reality made possible by the Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, which abolished former
immigration quotas and restrictions based on race and national origin. This landmark
legislation, passed with Cold War considerations at the forefront, resulted in an
unprecedented influx of new immigrants from Asia, Latin America and other nonEuropean regions, enabling the very multiethnic urban masses that form “John Kwang’s
people.” For Henry, a large part of Kwang’s “goodness” resides in his passionate, nearmilitant efforts to bring these “countless unheard nobodies” into the political landscape:
“This his daily order: do the good duty, go out into the street…In ten different languages
you say Kwang is like you. You will be an American” (143, emphasis in original).
It is Kwang’s “good duty” of integrating myriad Third World bodies into an
American democratic way of life, I would suggest, that casts him as a sort of structural
analogue to the US Cold War ally, a latter-day version of the Syngman Rhee figure that
had remained a faceless lacuna during Henry’s childhood. Where the younger Henry had
recoiled from the image of Kim Il Sung, his adult gaze toward Kwang is tinged with an
14
Klein’s insights on integration also draws upon the scholarship of Penny Von Eschen, Nikhil Pal Singh
and Mary Dudziak, who all show how “After World War II…Cold War ideologues mobilized this idea of a
racially and ethnically diverse America in the service of U.S. global expansion. The United States thus
became the only Western nation that sought to legitimize its world-ordering ambitions by championing the
idea (if not always the practice) of racial equality” (11).
77
identificatory desire: “I had ready connections to him, of course. He knew I was Korean,
or Korean-American, though perhaps not exactly the same way he was…though taken
together you might say that one was an outlying version of the other” (139). More
crucially, Kwang’s structural parallel to the “Good Korean” is also an evocative one in all
the less-than-benign ways, as seen in the revelation of his ruthless and dictatorial
tendencies. Like many a US-aligned anticommunist strongman—with Rhee being an
especially egregious example—Kwang’s deftness with the trappings and rhetoric of
American liberal democracy conceals a decidedly undemocratic political practice. As the
final, spectacular decline of his campaign and public favor attests, Kwang’s volatility and
authoritarianism ultimately mark him as un-American, or at least unsuited for the
American political scene. Nevertheless, Lee’s novel does suggest, in its subtle way, that
these same qualities might be legible from a Korean cultural and historical context.
Specifically, it is Henry’s “ready connections” to the culture that illuminate this
dimension, allowing him to explain Kwang’s political style and personal foibles as the
expression of an authentically Korean mode. Key to this authentic Koreanness, the novel
insinuates, is Kwang’s connection to the cultural memory of the Korean War, which
inform both the content of his politics—in his appeals to keep alive the memories of such
collective traumas—as well as its form, as seen in his structural consonances with a
figure like Syngman Rhee. As I illustrate in the sections that follow, the Korean War
provides an important discursive backdrop for Native Speaker’s literary project—as an
undertaking, variously, of historiography and ethnography, as well as of genre.
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III.
As Lee’s novel conceives it, the authentic Korean culture that Kwang exemplifies
can also be characterized as a culture of memory. At one point, Henry calls Kwang a
“devotee of memory,” referring to his practice of memorizing lists of every voter and
constituent in his district. At first Henry wonders “if he wasn’t simply odd, nervous. An
uptight Korean man” (177). Discussing this practice with Henry later on, Kwang waxes
both world-historic, as well as nostalgic: “In past times, a person’s education was a
matter of what he could remember. It still is in Korea and Japan. I assume in China as
well…I had a teacher who made us memorize scores of classical Chinese and Korean
poems. We had to recite any one of them on command. He was hoping to give us
knowledge, but what he actually impressed upon us was a legacy” (178). Fleshing out
this idea of a “legacy,” Kwang links its urgency to the irruptive violence of the Korean
War: “Young Master Lim…He was becoming a respected writer when the war broke out.
We later heard that he was killed in the fighting. Sometime before the school was closed
he said it was our solemn duty to act as vessels for our country and civilization, that we
must give ourselves over to what had come before us, as much to literature as we did to
our parents and ancestors” (179).
This “giving over” of oneself to what had come before suffuses the very tenor of
Kwang’s coalitional politics. In one pivotal scene, the councilman gives a public speech
addressing a recent wave of black-Korean tensions throughout the city. In his pleas for
conciliation, Kwang urges the two groups to recognize their mutual history of oppression
and displacement. After acknowledging the historical and contemporary hardships faced
by black Americans, Kwang asserts that “We Koreans know something of this tragedy.
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Recall the days over fifty years ago, when Koreans were made servants and slaves in
their own country by the Imperial Japanese Army. How our mothers and sisters were
made the concubines of the very soldiers who enslaved us.” As he goes on to elaborate:
“I am speaking of histories that all of us should know. Remember,
or now know, how Koreans were cast as the dogs of Asia, remember the
way our children could not speak their own language in school, remember
how they called each other by the Japanese names forced upon them,
remember the public executions of patriots and the shadowy murders of
collaborators, remember our feelings of disgrace and penury and shame,
remember most of all the struggle to survive with one’s own identity still
strong and alive.
“I ask that you remember these things, or know them now. Know
that what we have in common, the sadness and pain and injustice, will
always be stronger than our differences.” (153)
The shared remembrance of past injuries plays a crucial role in Kwang’s efforts to forge
genuine interethnic solidarity between Koreans and African Americans. More
importantly, the syntax of the speech echoes the novel’s articulation of a culturally
specific practice of memory. In continuously repeating the command for his listeners to
“remember…remember…,” Kwang presents the tragedies of Korean history as a list to
be memorized, as he once did with scores of classical Chinese poems. Similarly, his
request “that you remember these things, or know them now” calls to mind his teacher’s
imperative that students be able to recite these poems on command. True to the lessons of
Young Master Lim, what Kwang desires to impress upon his audience is the notion of
these tragic histories as a “legacy,” something that people might practice remembering so
they can better all the better “know them now.” In overlaying his appeals for interethnic
cohesion with a specifically Korean historical narrative, and evoking a memory practice
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likewise coded as Korean (or at least East Asian), Kwang’s rhetoric can be seen as the
performance of his “solemn duty” to act as a vessel for his country and civilization.15
Here it would be useful to delve into these “histories that all of us should know.”
Strictly speaking the collective injuries that Kwang describes in his speech refer not to
the Korean War itself, but rather the period of Japanese colonial rule that preceded it.
Enfolded within the broader motifs of “the struggle to survive with one’s own identity
still strong and alive” and “sadness and pain and injustice,” however, these two events
can be seen as part of a contiguous historical consciousness. In this way, Lee’s novel
resonates with the work of the historian Bruce Cumings, who argues that no
understanding of the Korean War is possible without first grasping Korea’s colonial
history under the Empire of Japan, which lasted from 1910 until 1945.16 When American
and Soviet forces proceeded to divide and occupy the Korean peninsula upon defeating
Japan at the end of World War II, the fledging governments they respectively erected had
to account for the intense lingering resentment toward pro-Japanese elements. While the
Soviets installed many leftist anti-Japanese revolutionaries in key positions, the most
prominent of which was Kim Il Sung, the U.S. set up a conservative regime whose ranks
were filled with numerous Koreans that had collaborated with the Japanese. Needing
someone untainted by collaboration to head this new government, and thus provide an
15
It is also worth noting that for a rhetorical performance seeking to point out the shared struggles between
African Americans and Koreans, Kwang’s speech merely glosses the African American experience, and
instead foregrounds a Korean national history as a synecdoche for the broader themes of slavery and
subjugation.
16
Cumings’ landmark two-volume The Origins of the Korean War (1981, 1990) was among the first to
challenge the conventional understanding of the war as a Cold War proxy conflict. For the purposes of my
analysis, I draw primarily from Cumings’ two volume study, as well the more accessible accounts he
provides in Korea: The Unknown War (1988, co-authored with Jon Halliday) and Korea’s Place in the Sun
(1997, updated 2005).
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aura of nationalist legitimacy, the Americans turned to Rhee, an independence activist
who had spent nearly four decades in the United States.
Eschewing conventional narratives of the Korean War as a clash between
ideologically opposed rival republics, one communist and one West-aligned, Cumings’
account emphasizes above all the its postcolonial underpinnings—namely, as “a Third
World problem or a North-South problem, a conflict over how best to overcome the
debilities of colonial rule and comparative backwardness” (2005 209). Within this
framework, Cumings goes to great lengths to stress the underlying similarities between
the two Koreas, in which “charismatic leaders in the South drew upon the same sources
of strength as did leaders in the North, an appeal to complete unity at home and resistance
to penetration from abroad, and an assertion of a Korean essence against all the rest”
(2005 206). In Cumings’ view, the assertions of “complete unity” and a “Korean
essence,” fused with the engine of charismatic leadership, forms the basis for
comprehending not just North Korea’s notorious totalitarian personality cult, but also the
conservative strongman system that took hold in South Korea. For Southern leaders,
“their ideal was similar to Kim Il Sung’s, minus the revolution—a way to weld together a
nation under one’s own leadership” (1990 191).
As the first President of the U.S.-backed Republic of Korea, Rhee welded his
fledgling nation together by presiding over one of the worst police states in Asia.
According to CIA reports from the period, including the first “personality study” ever
conducted of a foreign leader, President Rhee was “indomitably strong-willed and
obstinate,” and did not hesitate to “use such totalitarian tactics as stringent
censorship…police terrorism, and…extra-governmental agencies such as youth corps and
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armed ‘patriotic’ societies to terrorize and destroy non-Communist opposition groups and
parties.”17 Cumings points out, furthermore, that while Americans knew they had a
“volatile charge” in the new president, “the harsh truth is that the United States as a
matter of high policy vastly preferred the southern police state to any sort of serious
revolutionary regime. The repression of the Rhee regime, in other words, had a joint
Korean-American authorship” (1990 227, 189).18 This “joint” nation-building project
would have far-reaching impacts for both its authors: while South Korea enjoyed
American support for its reactionary politics, sowing a decades-long legacy of
authoritarian government, the U.S. had in South Korea a template for the “positive
action” against communism that presaged much of its later foreign policy—in Greece,
Indochina, Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua—where “Americans came to defend any
group calling itself anticommunist, because the alternative was thought to be worse”
(2005 200).
Even as he acknowledges the depth of American complicity in the terror of the
Southern regime, Cumings ultimately attributes the greater share of Rhee’s autocratic rule
to a political culture that he identifies as distinctly Korean. In this “vintage Korean
politics,” Cumings explains, stable rule derives “from the model of the well-run family,”
where “the object of every Korean ruler is to inculcate proper ideas in everyone in the
realm, to push a uniform pattern of thought to the point that it becomes a state of mind,
and therefore impervious to logic and argument” (1990 190, 210). Elsewhere, Cumings
notes how Rhee’s long years in the U.S. had failed to turn him into any kind of “Christian
17
Quoted in Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: 345.
18
Although the term “Korean-American” is used here in a strictly diplomatic context, its homonymic
overlap with “Korean American” in the demographic/identitarian sense—along with the notion of
authorship—is a suggestive one, evoking a discursive confluence that also informs Lee’s novel, and which
I will address further on.
83
democrat, suffused with Wilsonian idealism”; rather, “his Confucian heritage would tell
him that a well-run polity proceeds from a correct set of ideas…and it mattered little that
the ideas often bore little resemblance to political reality” (1990 208). If the disregard for
“logic,” “argument” and an empirical “reality” signals a radical difference from a
Western Enlightenment tradition, it is a contrast that Cumings finesses throughout his
account, as seen in the juxtaposition of Rhee’s Confucian heritage against the political
heritage of Woodrow Wilson. Similarly, he goes on to describe the Korean political
ideology as “the antithesis of liberalism: an organic politics,” which—in terms that recall
the words of Kwang’s former teacher—would be repellent to “Western individualists
who cannot imagine that human beings find solace and fulfillment in giving oneself over
to a family, a group, a society, or to a shared state of mind” (1990 191, emphasis mine).
While Cumings denies making any sort of “cultural argument,” the opposition
between Korean and American political styles nonetheless generates much of the
dramatic momentum behind his narrative. To a large extent, and in keeping with his
decolonization frame, the conflict that Cumings finds more compelling is not the global
confrontation between Syngman Rhee and Kim Il Sung (whom he regards as products of
the same “Confucian heritage”), but the behind-the-scenes jostling between Rhee and his
American handlers. If Rhee represents a traditional Confucian Korean, then the role of
the “archetypal American” is epitomized by General John R. Hodge, the military
governor who oversaw U.S. occupation forces in South Korea. Along with having “a
typical American’s visceral disgust for anything that looked like communism,” Hodge is
also described as “an honest, unpretentious military officer” who was “well known for
hard work and plain living” (2005 213). By and large, it is also Hodge to whom Cumings
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refers when he speaks in broad strokes about the political biases of “the Lockean
American,” or “an archetypal American [who] can only grasp nonliberal politics as a
pathology of the Left or Right,” and “liberal Americans [to whom] the Rhee system
looked like Nazism” (1990 192). For Cumings, the uneasy alliance between a Korean
“organic politics” and American liberalism bears out in the tempestuous personal
relationship between Rhee and Hodge, which entailed no small amount of antipathy and
distrust, as well as “long, emotional sessions…where these two hard-bitten men went at
each other without restraint” (2005 213).19
Within this dramatic foil between the “honest” and “unpretentious” Hodge and
the “obstinate” and “volatile” Rhee, I would argue, it is not difficult to also discern a
metonymic clash between a straight-shooting American rationality and an intractable
Korean authoritarianism. In contrast to Hodge’s hard working, plain living career soldier,
Rhee is portrayed as a dictator of the most lurid and eccentric order, who alternated “a
calm and fatherly demeanor with shrieking hysteria” (1990 227). While some Americans
who interacted with him came away “convinced of his senility,” others would witness his
angry dissolution into a “frothing drivel,” or see him “turn up in Congress and advocate
thermonuclear war” (1990 224). In its complete flouting of reason and restraint, the
sketch of Rhee offered here shares something of the “maniacal” and bayonet-framed
quality seen in the imagined picture of Kim Il Sung Henry describes in Native Speaker—
in short, an exaggerated portrait of villainous excess.
19
This mutual antagonism underscores one of Cumings’ main theses: that the tragedy of the Korean War
resulted in large part from a failure of the American liberal imagination to grasp the nonliberal complexities
of Korean society and politics. To his credit, Cumings invokes “Lockean” and “liberal” ideologies not as a
normative stance from which to regard an archaic and “repellent” Confucianism, but rather to critique
Western ethnocentrism, and encouraging readers to understand the Korean situation on its own terms.
85
As a historian, Cumings has spent a career challenging Cold War orthodoxies that
divided Korea, and Koreans, into “bad” and “good” varieties along Communist and noncommunist lines. What his analysis of Rhee’s statecraft and personality suggests, I would
point out, is that Cumings does not so much dismantle Manichean categories of the “bad
Korean” and “good Korean,” as he claims that we have simply misrecognized which is
which, and that the truer “bad Korean” was the one sponsored by the U.S.20 That
Americans support abhorrent dictators in pursuit of myopic strategic aims is hardly a
revelation.21 Of greater interest here, rather, is the diabolical characterization that
emerges in Cumings’ profile of Rhee, which at times resemble something out of a “notentirely-plausible political spy thriller.” Cumings elaborates, for example, that Rhee was
“an inveterate gambler…who could play poker with two deuces and come away with the
pot,” and that he had a “a penchant for getting his way through wild threat, an eruptive
bottle of nitroglycerin who seemed always to require care in handling” (1990 228). Here
Cumings presents the image of a poker-playing intimidator who is likened to a literally
explosive substance, but who is also, significantly, a schemer who knows how to win by
bluffing, and prompting others to approach him with “care.” In addition to the narrative
invocation of cards games and bombs redolent of many a James Bond scenario, what
emerges in this account is an element of intrigue, involving an antagonist who is cunning
as well as unpredictable, not unlike Wright’s exchanges with Nkrumah in Black Power.
20
This is not to say that Cumings necessarily inverts the equation by suggesting that Kim Il Sung was
“good”; however, he does note that of the two Korean regimes, Kim’s did enjoy a larger measure of
popular support, whereas Rhee’s remained widely unpopular. Cumings’ positive appraisals of other
potential Korean leaders during the period, such as Yo Un-hyong and Chang Myon, suggest that there was
indeed such a thing as a “good,” or at least better, Korean.
21
This is especially true in the wake of a transnationally-oriented American Studies that has cast American
foreign policy as a fundamentally imperialistic endeavor, at least since the mid-nineteenth century. The
foundational text for this trend remains Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease’s edited collection, Cultures of
United States Imperialism (1994).
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Indeed, as Cumings is keen to emphasize, Rhee was neither crazy nor senile, and his
mercurial outbursts were signs of a “calculative ambition,” in which “his apparently
frothing drivel and senility were useful ploys to mask his purposes or bargain with
Americans” (1990 224). In Cumings’ view, Rhee personified what Daniel Ellsberg called
the “madman theory,” where the objective is to convince others that one is capable of
anything, toeing the boundaries of mutually assured destruction in order to cow
adversaries into submission (driving the point right home, Cumings alleges that Richard
Nixon actually first learned this tactic from Rhee).22
Compounding Rhee’s explosive volatility, we thus learn, was also a
“Machiavellianism that was second nature to him, coming not from his intellect but his
viscera” (1990 228). The emphasis on “viscera” here is revealing, as elsewhere Cumings
attributes this quality to a Korean national identity, in opposition to the “intellect” of a
“Western rationalist” (like Hodge, or Cumings himself).23 In this way, Cumings’
rendering of Rhee as a kind of genre villain turns upon what looks suspiciously like a
“cultural argument.” This ethnographic subtext is made clear in the following assessment:
[Rhee’s] personality however, does seem modal for elderly Korean men of
responsibility. It is quite common to witness in the same person, often on
the same day, ineffable charm and outrageous crudity; an icy Confucian
demeanor of utter self-control and dignity at one point, giving way to a
show of raging insanity or puerile inanity. This is often what it takes to
maintain a patriarchy whose legitimation is purely traditional. As for his
22
The term “madman theory” has been frequently associated with Nixon’s foreign policy as president.
Largely attributed to Ellsberg’s lecture “The Political Uses of Madness,” it has also been variously
connected to strategic thinkers such as Thomas C. Schelling and Henry Kissinger. According to Cumings,
Nixon, as Eisenhower’s vice president, “was quite taken with Rhee during a visit to Seoul in 1953” (1990
816n87). Other accounts, such as Conrad Black’s Nixon: A Life in Full (2007) and Geoffrey Perret’s
Commander in Chief (2007) also insinuate that Rhee’s brinkmanship had somehow inspired Nixon.
23
Specifically, in Korea’s Place in the Sun, Cumings refers to the “Korean mind-heart,” a “visceral
knowledge that joins thought with emotion” (22). As he continues, in his typically sweeping register: “This
is the human mind connected to the viscera and the body in touch with its natural environment…It is the
purest Korean tradition, infusing songs, dances, dreams, and emotions…It is the Korea that I, a Western
rationalist, know least about” (22).
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obstinacy and willfulness, a people that has survived for centuries under
an arbitrary rule and a perennial foreign threat will have many Syngman
Rhees, just as shrewd, just as Machiavellian, just as willful. (2005 346)
With this passage, Cumings effectively culturalizes Rhee’s behavior—his shrewdness,
his obstinacy, his erraticism, and even his dignity and charm—as “essentially” Korean
traits, rather than the expression of a unique individual personality. The passage even
ends, notably, with “Syngman Rhee” no longer signifying a singular personhood, but
becoming instead a recurrent and duplicable—that is, a generic—category. It would also
not be difficult, I might add, to imagine many of the traits listed above as fitting
descriptors for a spy novel antagonist: starting with “Machiavellian,” but also “ineffable
charm,” “outrageous crudity,” “icy demeanor,” “raging insanity,” “puerile inanity.”
Andrew Salmon states it most forcefully, perhaps, in a review of Cumings’ work for The
New Republic, noting the irony that while “Cumings loves nothing more than railing
against Orientalist renderings of Koreans,” his portraits of certain brutal South Korean
leaders “might have been ripped from the pages of Ian Fleming.”
From here we might return to Lee’s Native Speaker, and the two points I had
raised regarding its depiction of John Kwang: as, on the one hand, a literary iteration of
the “many Syngman Rhees” that Cumings posits, and on the other, a figure seemingly
“ripped from the pages of Ian Fleming.” Moreover, both these figurations converge in the
novel’s espionage plot, in which Henry gains Kwang’s trust in order to gather
information on him, and goes on to facilitate his downfall. In the next section, I examine
how Lee’s novel conceives of Korean American identity—and ethnic American identity
more generally—as not only embedded in the dramas of twentieth-century geopolitics,
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but as also a perpetual negotiation across nationalist, transnationalist, and even
institutional alignments.
IV.
Central to Native Speaker’s critical renown has been Lee’s unique variation on the
spy genre, in his imagining of a protagonist who is a professional “ethnic spy.” More
specifically, Henry works for a private intelligence firm called Glimmer & Co., which
specializes in deploying ethnic operatives to survey and collect intelligence on other
ethnic persons of interest. This task is facilitated by the supposed trust borne of a shared
racial-cultural identity, with each operative assigned to a broadly corresponding area of
“ethnic coverage” (18). As Henry explains, the core of his work involves writing detailed
reports, or “registers,” about his targets, which Glimmer & Co. then passes on to its
clients. These clients are usually “multinational corporations, bureaus of foreign
governments, individuals of resource and connection,” or any entity whose vested
interests the target might be working against. By now, critics have thoroughly mined the
symbolic richness of this premise, especially as it pertains to questions of ethnic
knowledge production. While Michelle Young-Mee Rhee analyzes the novel’s
metafictional commentary on writing ethnic literature in the age of multiculturalism,
Crysta Parikh reads the figure of the intelligence worker as an allegory for the ethnic
intellectual/scholar, and the ethics of betrayal endemic to this position. Similarly,
Yoonmee Chang addresses the ways Henry’s spy work reproduces “culturalist
epistemologies” that distill ethnic subjects to a racial-cultural essence, which then
accounts for the range of their actions, histories, personalities and possibilities. In her
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rather efficient summation, Native Speaker is “a story of an ethnic subject spooking his
own to extract reductive, ethnographic portraits for his readers’ consumption” (147).24
As spies who are also quite literal “native informants,” the agents of Glimmer &
Co. approach ethnic identity as a matter of both objective and tradecraft: Henry
investigates Kwang in order to identify his ethnic characteristics, and he does so by
utilizing his own “ready connections.” Crucially, it is largely through memories of his
late father—a gruff, taciturn man whom the novel portrays as quintessentially Korean—
that Henry is able to recognize Kwang’s own fundamental Koreanness. Early in the
narrative, Henry describes his father as “a Confucian of high order,” for whom “all of life
was a rigid matter of family” (7). “I know all about that fine and terrible ordering,” Henry
adds, “but I know, too, of the basic comfort in this familial precision, where the relation
abides no argument, no questions or quarrels” (7). Recounting an incident where Kwang
kneels dramatically before a campaign volunteer in a show of gratitude, Henry at first
wonders “if I had witnessed the gravest humility or conceit,” before reflecting that “I can
imagine my father saying no, no, it was clearly Kwang’s Confucian training at work, his
secular religion of pure hierarchy, his belief that everyone is at once a noble and a servant
and then just a man” (148). Like Cumings, Lee also stresses the import of a Confucian
“training” or “heritage” as a guide to proper action, even if such actions might appear
perplexing to an assimilated “Western individualist” or “Lockean American” like Henry.
Kwang himself professes a similar view later in the novel, telling Henry: “When
you are someone like me, you will be many people at once. You are a father, a dictator, a
24
Chang actually makes the compelling assertion—in line with my own argument—that “Native Speaker
does not fail because it is a spy story; it succeeds because it is one” (147). However, this remark serves
merely to ornament her larger concerns about ethnic entrepreneurship and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, and
receives no further elaboration.
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servant, the most agile actor this land has ever known.” (293). Despite its somewhat
abstruse tone, I would argue that this formulation neatly encapsulates the various
“ethnographic portraits” that Henry draws of Kwang over the course of the narrative. The
first, “father,” indexes what both Lee and Cumings might consider the most Korean of
virtues: namely, the “rigid matter of family” that drove Henry’s father, which also
prefigures Henry’s subsequent appraisal of Kwang: “I want to say that he was a family
man, that being Korean and old fashioned made him cherish and honor the institution,
that his family was the basic unit of wealth in his life” (146). Importantly, Henry adds
that Kwang “loved the pure idea of family as well, which in its most elemental version
must have nothing to do with blood. It was how he saw all of us, and then by extension
all those parts of Queens that he was now calling his” (146). If the devotion to family
marks Kwang, like Henry’s father, as “Korean and old fashioned,” his broadening of the
concept to encompass his staff and electoral district also render him a Confucian of high
order in the political sense. As Cumings has informed us, such a politics models itself
upon a “well-run family.” Having infiltrated Kwang’s political machine, Henry notes the
extent to which its effectiveness derives from just such a dynamic: “All day and all night
we worked without stopping, knowing we’d get to be with him at the end of the day. Oorhee-jip, he’d say then, just before the eating and drinking, asking for our hands around
the table, speaking oo-rhee-jip for Our house. Our new life” (146).
This brings us to the second part of Kwang’s pronouncement, which turns out to
be deeply intertwined with the first. At the head of this well-run political family, Henry
understands, must necessarily preside a patriarch who “abides no argument, no questions
or quarrels.” This is made explicit in a scene in which Henry watches Kwang mediate a
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dispute between a Korean storeowner, Mr. Baeh, and a disgruntled black customer (also
named Henry). Kwang takes Baeh aside to speak privately, and seemingly strong-arms
him into a compromise in the customer’s favor. Registering the storekeeper’s visible
irritation afterwards, Kwang “grimly” remarks that “He doesn’t have to like it. Right
now, he doesn’t have any choice” (174). As Henry goes on to ponder:
At the time, I didn’t know what Kwang meant by that last notion, what
kind of dominion or direct influence he had over people like Baeh. I only
considered the fact of his position and stature in the community as what
had persuaded the storekeeper to deal fairly with Henry. I assumed Baeh
was honoring the traditional Confucian structure of community, where in
each village a prominent elder man heard the townspeople’s grievances
and arbitrated and ruled. Though in that world Baeh would have shown
displeasure only in private. He would have acted as the dutiful younger
until the wise man was far down the road. (188)
Such moments further underline the resonances between Lee’s fiction and Cumings’
historiography, in their recourse to a Confucian antiquity that functions as equal parts
ethnographic alibi and diasporic fantasy, and rendered as a “world” apart from that of
their (presumably) “liberal American” readers. Henry’s invocation of a “village” model
with a “wise man” at its center foregrounds the “secular religion of pure hierarchy” that
subtends Kwang’s political authority, where loyalty and obedience are the main
guarantors of group cohesion. This is supported by the self-justifying “fact” of Kwang’s
“position and stature in the community,” as well as the relational dynamic between a
“prominent elder” and his “dutiful younger,” with the judgment of the former being
“impervious to logic and argument.”
And yet, as hinted in the storekeeper’s deviation from his prescribed role, a
“traditional Confucian structure of community” does not quite account for the full
picture. As Henry discovers, Kwang’s political family comes with an institutional
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correlative, in the unofficial “money club” he establishes. Once again, Henry’s memories
of his father serve to contextualize Kwang’s broader political practices. He recalls that his
greengrocer father “got his first infusion of capital from a ggeh, a Korean ‘money club’ in
which members contributed to a pool that was given out on a rotating basis. Each week
you gave the specified amount; and then one week in the cycle, all the money was yours”
(50). Whereas only Koreans participated in the ggeh to which small business owners like
Henry’s father belonged, Kwang implements his on a community-wide scale, and
includes all the different ethnic and immigrant groups that comprise his constituency. As
Henry explains it, the concept of the ggeh is inherently tied to a sense of familial
connection: “Small ggeh, like the one my father had, work because the members all know
each other, trust one another not to run off or drop out after their turn comes up.
Reputation is always worth more than money. In this sense we are all related” (279).
Drawing upon this ethos, Kwang’s expanded version seeks to instill these familial values
into its diverse members: “The larger ggeh depends solely on this notion, that the lessons
of the culture will be stronger than a momentary lack, can subdue any individual
weakness or want. This is the power lovely and terrible, what we try to engender in
Kwang’s giant money club, our huge ggeh for all. What John says it is about” (280).25
25
Daniel Y. Kim offers a similar analysis of the function of the ggeh and its connection to familial values,
arguing that “Through his depiction of Kwang’s political project, Lee imagines a multiracial political
coalition that is presided over by a charismatic Korean American figure and whose solidarity and coherence
derives from an ideology that is rendered as essentially Korean” (235). See Daniel Y. Kim’s “Do I, Too,
Sing America? Vernacular Representations and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker” (2003). My own reading
is indebted to Kim’s insights on the nature of this “essential” Koreanness as it emerges in Lee’s novel, and
I build upon the implications of this “essentially Korean” political ideology, especially as it plays out as a
form of dictatorship. Other critics have similarly noted, but do not fully explore, the importance of
Kwang’s Koreanness. For Caroline Rody, Kwang represents “a Korean father who embodies the tantalizing
possibility of a Korean American masculinity the hero might actually want to own” (75). Min Song reads
Kwang as offering “a narrative about diaspora that sees in the history of both Koreans and non-Koreans in
Queens shared accumulated historical traumas” (190).
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Here the “lesson of the culture” recalls the lessons of Young Master Lim, and
similar to his exhortation to “remember” historical traumas, Kwang—per Cumings’
“traditional” Korean leader—seeks to inculcate a “correct set of ideas” through his
implementation of the ggeh. More significantly, as its capacity to “subdue” obliquely
suggests, Kwang’s community-wide ggeh also functions as an instrument of his
“dominion” and “direct influence” over men like the shopkeeper Mr. Baeh. Even as
Henry credits Kwang’s sincere desire to aid his constituents by attenuating the hardships
of immigrant life, he also remarks that “the ggeh was his one enduring vanity, a system
paternal, how in the beginning people would come right to the house and ask for some
money and his blessing. He wasn’t a warlord or a don, he had no real power over any of
them save their trust in his wisdom” (334). This duality, between “wisdom” and “vanity,”
benevolence and tyranny, is what Henry refers to as a “power lovely and terrible,”
echoing his earlier comments on the “fine and terrible ordering” of his father’s Confucian
principles. On one end of the spectrum, Kwang exercises this power by imposing his will
on Mr. Baeh’s business decisions, asserting that “he doesn’t have to like it.” At the other
extreme, he orders the murder of his campaign worker Eduardo Fermin (whose death by
firebombing I mentioned at the beginning) for being “disloyal, the most terrible thing.”
Notably, Eduardo had also been managing the extensive list of participants in the large
ggeh, and it was Kwang’s discovery that he had been leaking sensitive information that
prompted the drastic action. Henry’s insistence, then, that Kwang “wasn’t a warlord or a
don” carries no small irony, in that those things are more or less what he turns out to be,
from his lethal intolerance of disloyalty to the delegation of his dirty work to a criminal
gang. If the ggeh gives material form to Kwang’s expanded political family, it is also the
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means by which he serves as this family’s Confucian father-dictator—in the end, finally,
things are simply about “what John says it is about.”
Beneath his expert grasp of the trappings of American democratic pageantry,
Kwang remains a diasporic practitioner of Cumings’ “vintage Korean politics.” In this
sense, his ability to present himself as “effortlessly Korean, effortlessly American” is also
what renders him “the most agile actor this land has ever known” (328). Not unlike Bond
exposing and thwarting the megalomaniacal Nazi under Drax’s gentlemanly façade,
Henry’s spy work entails identifying the Confucian patriarch underneath Kwang’s public
guise as a “lover of the republic” (139). In Native Speaker, the interpreting and
“unveiling” of the ethnic strongman thus provides the site of convergence between the
ethnographic imperatives of the ethnic novel and intrigue of the spy novel. Reading
Native Speaker alongside Cumings, it becomes clear that the qualities that make Kwang a
compelling spy thriller antagonist (in addition to the unsanctioned financial network and
involvement in assassination) are the same qualities that make him a “modal” Korean
elder—the same vacillation, for instance, between “ineffable charm” and “utter selfcontrol and dignity” on the one hand, and “outrageous crudity” and “raging insanity” on
the other. As a useful template, we might revisit yet another of Cumings’ assessments of
Rhee: “In small doses, Rhee came off as a handsome, warm, charming gentleman; he was
a past master of flattery and disarming, endearing use of the democratic symbolism that
stirs American hearts. It took a measure of experience with him to disabuse Americans of
their first impressions of him” (1990 226).
In many ways, Native Speaker seems to chart a fictional version of this trajectory.
Aside from being a “handsome, warm, charming gentleman,” it is the ineffability of
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Kwang’s powerful charm that Henry registers: “Somehow you felt a pin-ache of
unneeded love on top of the respect and hope and plain like of him, that little bit of extra
feeling that must separate even a good man and politician from a natural leader of
people” (132). Henry’s investigation, however, does gradually disabuse him—and the
reader—of these early idealized impressions, even as his general admiration persists.
Long before the scandalous twists of the final chapters, Henry’s studied observations of
Kwang reveal an erratic and temperamental disposition, one capable of “high, manic
moods” and “the foulest humor” (144). Even early in his assignment, Henry reports that
“I began to see the whip of his temper. One afternoon I watched him shout at his wife,
May, for what seemed ten straight minutes as they sat inside their white sedan. He was
shaking his fist so close to her face, which had gone white…Then he stepped from the car
and spoke softly to her from the open door, shutting it gently before she drove off” (145).
While such behavior would alarm “rational” American observers, Cumings might argue
that the abrupt shift from fist-shaking wrath to soft voice and gentle motion is simply
“what it takes to maintain a patriarchy whose legitimation is purely traditional.”
Furthermore, this glimpse of patriarchal aggression foreshadows a later scene in which a
drunk and sullen Kwang, whose career is on the downslopes, takes Henry and Sherrie
(his campaign manager with whom he is also having an affair) to a Korean “hostess bar,”
where waitresses are paid to flirt with male patrons. Displaying the fullness of his
“outrageous crudity,” Kwang instructs a young waitress to fawn sexually on an
uncomfortable Henry, and when Sherrie protests and tries to leave, he handles her
roughly and ends up striking her. Kwang eventually departs with the Korean waitress—
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later revealed to be an undocumented minor—only to end up in a car accident that puts
her in a coma.
With set pieces like this, it almost seems odd that more critics have not addressed
Kwang’s role as a sensationalist thriller villain. Or more precisely, this plot development
tends to get registered not in spy novel terms, but in ethnic novel ones, which focus on
Kwang’s structural exclusion from political ascendancy, his individual foibles, or a
failure of assimilation.26 In aligning Lee’s characterization of Kwang with Cumings’
accounts of Rhee, I am not suggesting that Native Speaker somehow “confirms”
Cumings’ ethnographic descriptions, or that Lee consciously drew upon Rhee in writing
his novel. Rather, by drawing parallels between the figures of the domestic ethnic
politician and the foreign ethnic dictator—that is, in positing John Kwang as a sort of
allegory for Syngman Rhee—I hope to show how Native Speaker represents ethnic
identity as a transnational discursive construction, formed at the contact points between
“Korean American” in the identitarian sense (being a Korean-descended citizen of the
United States) and “Korean-American” in the geopolitical sense (in the longstanding
neocolonial relationship between the United States and the Republic of Korea). This
approach highlights an important yet overlooked aspect of Lee’s text: its exploration of
domestic race politics through the wider prism of empire and international relations, and
26
For Betsy Huang, the trials and tribulations of Kwang’s campaign exposes the “ideological and material
imperatives of U.S. citizenship for its ethnic and immigrant subjects, and the kinds of cultural consent…it
uncompromisingly demands of them” (246). Liam Corley argues that Kwang’s personal failings of “rage,
alcoholism and philandering…is not unlike many of New York’s, and the United States’s, most successful
political leaders,” and that his fate is largely the result of “racial exclusion from full enfranchisement and
the revanchist features of New York city politics at the time” (68, 80n4); Yoonmee Chang offers, in my
opinion, the most convincing assessment: that “underneath his assimilatory sheen Kwang remains
irrepressibly Korean” and thus “he remains at the core tied to a world of racial-cultural difference” (173).
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its participation in what Susan Koshy has termed the “deterritorialization of ethnic
identity” (323).27
Fittingly, it is through the mode of the spy novel that Native Speaker’s
transnational preoccupations emerge most saliently. Along with the multinational
corporations and foreign governments that employ Glimmer & Co., Henry describes the
firm’s typical target as “a well-to-do immigrant supporting some potential insurgency in
his old land…Sometimes he was simply an agitator. Maybe a writer of conscience. An
expatriate artist” (18). As the Kwang-Rhee connection suggests, Henry’s spying out of
the domestic ethnic strongman can also be read as the spying out of the global power
arrangements that necessitated such strongmen in the first place. Henry states that the
Kwang job began with the standard objective, to “come away with some spice or flavor
under my nails…As Hoagland would half-joke, whatever grit of an ethnicity,” before
musing, in imagery reminiscent of the recent Mission: Impossible films, “it so happened
that one of his faces fell away, and then another, and another, until he revealed to me a
final level that would not strip off. The last mask” (141).
Draped in the expressive lyricism of Henry’s narration, the nature of this “last
mask,” “the man he beheld in his most private mirror,” is never made explicitly clear
(140). The obvious ethnic novel analyses might point, justifiably, to the fragility of Henry
and Kwang’s assimilatory sheen, and how their flawless American speech only tenuously
conceals the foreignness and stigma they still feel. Reading through the lens of the spy
novel, however, I propose that Lee offers an alternative, yet equally compelling possible
meaning for this “final level,” one consonant with the spy genre’s geopolitical optic.
27
Lee’s second novel, A Gesture Life (1999), takes up the transnational valences of US minority
subjectivity much more explicitly (and to further critical acclaim), lending credence to the notion that such
concerns were present, albeit in a more subdued and nascent form, in his first novel.
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Framed around a fairly archetypal spy story scene, it begins with Henry assessing the
reams of intelligence he has gathered: “And now I have Kwang. There are scores and
scores of his versions scattered about the room, myriad trunks of him, thistling branches,
specied and catalogued, a thousand stills of him from every possible angle” (210). Yet
Henry adds that “there is one more version I want to write for Hoagland, for the client,
for the entire business of our research. The greater lore that I can now see” (210):
I want to tell them that what they have here is a man named John Kwang,
born in Seoul before the last world war, a boy during the Korean one, his
family not mercifully sundered or refugeed but obliterated, the coordinates
of his home village twice removed from the maps. That he stole away to
America as the houseboy of a retiring two-star general. Where he saved
enough money to leave the general’s house in Ohio and go to New York.
Where he named himself John. Where he was beaten nearly to death and
robbed of all his savings. Where he worked in a Chinatown noodle shop
and slept outside next to the steam vent and awoke one morning to see that
his feet had turned almost black with the cold. Where he knew hunger
again, that unforgettable taste of his other country. Where, desperate as he
was, he took to stealing from others, one of them a young priest who saw
something to salvage and took him to a Catholic orphanage. Where he first
went to a real school and learned to read and write and speak his new
home language. And where he began to think of America as a part of him,
maybe even his, and this for me was the crucial leap of his character, deep
flaw or not, the leap of his identity no one in our work would find valuable
but me. (211)
In his capacity as a writer-spy who composes “remote, unauthorized biographies,” what
Henry submits here is nothing less than the “final level” of Kwang’s origin, which tethers
his American success story to the violent history of postcolonial Korea (18). Behind the
“greater lore” of Kwang’s Horatio Alger-esque triumph over privation, urban violence
and working-class toil, Lee’s novel reminds us, are the U.S. military interventions that
compelled his immigration in the first place, a fact underscored by his passage at the
hands of an American general. While Kwang’s birth in the South Korean capital of Seoul
further links him to the lived memory of Syngman Rhee, the circumstances of his
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family’s obliteration alludes to the relentless American bombing campaign against the
north during the war, aimed precisely at the wholesale removal of cities, villages, and just
about any standing structure from the maps.28
In this manner, Lee’s novel accords with Jodi Kim’s pronouncement about Asian
America’s violent conditions of possibility, that “We are here because you were there”
(2010 12). This “last mask” that Henry uncovers, I would proffer, isn’t so much an
“identity” or even a “culture,” but what he calls “the greater truths…spanning human
event and time” that is the general pattern of U.S. imperialism as it plays out through a
montage of bombings, the movements of two-star generals, refugees, ethnic ghettoes such
as Chinatowns, and the beneficence of the Catholic orphanage system (206).29 As I had
previously shown, the demographics of Kwang’s very campaign is made possible by the
history of American policies toward the Third World, driven by the ideological
imperatives of containment and integration, and immigration reforms like the Hart-Celler
Act. Put another way, where Native Speaker’s ethnic novel plot foregrounds an emergent
racial milieu comprised of “these various platoons of Koreans, Indians, Vietnamese,
Haitians, Colombians, Nigerians,” its spy novel plot draws our attention to the official
U.S. dealings with Korea, India, Vietnam, Haiti, Colombia and Nigeria that enable such
domestic formations, often involving those other, more literal “platoons.”
By this same token, the multiracial immigrant landscape that Lee’s novel
imagines is one shadowed by the myriad histories of foreign ethnic dictators who, like
Rhee, have played crucial roles in facilitating and mediating these transnational currents.
One of Henry’s previous assignments, for instance, was a Filipino psychoanalyst and
28
See Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 293-298.
29
See Klein and Jodi Kim for readings of transnational adoption in relation to Cold War ideologies.
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expatriate supporter of Ferdinand Marcos. Other examples appear more subtly, such as
Kwang’s Dominican American protégée Eduardo, whose slain body calls to mind the
exceptionally brutal U.S.-backed regime of Rafael Trujillo (which I explore in the next
chapter). In another allusive episode, Henry recounts how he managed to placate a
“rowdy assemblage” of Peruvian laborers protesting outside Kwang’s offices, and even
sending them off “carrying John-inscribed pennants and bumper stickers, oven mitts and
disposable lighters” (86). When the news cameras arrive, the gathered Peruvians wave at
them, and “the small crowd that had gathered in the street joined in, jumping in at the
lens. Encores of flags. Fingers saying number uno” (86, emphasis in original). While
mostly likely unintended by Lee, the image of a Peruvian crowd enthusiastically cheering
a politician of East Asian descent evokes the controversial and authoritarian presidency
of Peru’s Alberto Fuijmori.30 Cast against this context of international dictatorships, the
notion of “John Kwang’s people” and “all those parts of Queens that he was now calling
his” take on a starker dimension, connoting less so a multiracial democratic collective
than a “traditional” Confucian village-family welded together by a charismatic leader.
The chosen language of Kwang’s detractors reinforce this idea: a news report describes
the councilman as “steadily building an ‘empire’ from his ‘ethnic base’ in northern
Queens,” while the incumbent mayor admonishes on television that “This isn’t the Third
World…Americans make up their own minds (301, 149).
Fittingly, the association of Kwang’s political enterprise with a despotic “Third
World,” as opposed to the polity of proper Americans, reaches its logical conclusion
30
While Marcos’ rule over the Philippines (1965-1986) represents a standard Cold War anticommunist
alliance, the dates of Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic (1930-1961) and Fujimori’s presidency in
Peru (1990-2000) remind us that such power arrangements exceed the temporal framework of the Cold
War, and in fact demonstrate the degree to which Cold War ideology is just an extension of longstanding
American imperialism.
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through Native Speaker’s spy narrative. After replacing Eduardo as organizer of Kwang’s
large ggeh, Henry purloins and delivers a list of its participants to Glimmer & Co., who
then passes it on to their clients, revealed to be the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service. With the information therein, the INS is able to arrest and deport dozens of
illegal immigrants, and the ensuing public scandal serves as the final blow to Kwang’s
public image and political career. Despite the transnational orientation of Glimmer &
Co.’s operations, Henry’s spy mission turns out to be fairly conventional, insofar as it
involves shoring up the efficacy of the U.S. state and preventing the foreign subversion of
domestic power structures. In its depiction of Kwang as a volatile Syngman Rhee-like
figure holding American office—an allegorical arrival of the comprador dictator upon the
imperial center, building an “empire” from an “ethnic base”—Lee’s novel imagines this
subversion as a contamination of “liberal” or “Lockean” American democratic processes
by “Confucian” or “Third World” political forms (for Cumings, such a contamination
already carries the tinge of a real-world narrative possibility, in the influence of Rhee’s
“visceral” Oriental Machiavellianism upon American politicians like Richard Nixon).
Throughout this chapter, I have attempted to show how the structures,
conventions and characterizations of the spy narrative operate as a kind of discursive
fulcrum, accentuating the ethnographic dimensions of Cumings’ historiographical project
and the historiographical dimensions of Lee’s ethnographic project. In this respect, I
concur with Wai Chee Dimock’s conception of genres as strategically constructed “fields
of knowledge,” which are “best seen not flatly, as the enactment of one set of legislative
norms, but as an alternation between dimensions, mediated vectors of up and down, front
and back, in and out” (1380). It is precisely by highlighting Lee’s engagement with genre
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fiction, I argue, that we might more fully apprehend the multiplicity of its
epistemological vectors—as a lauded “artful meditation on ethnic identity,” undeniably,
but as also, variously: a memorialization of “histories that all of us should know,” a
transnational chronicle of Korea and Korean America within the wider dramas of
international politics, a critique of the global and domestic orders of U.S. hegemony, an
allegorical “dictator novel,” and most straightforwardly, a “not-entirely-plausible political
spy thriller.”
V.
Given its ending, and the attendant expressions of guilt and melancholy, it is no
surprise that a degree of pessimism tends to pervade critical assessments of Lee’s novel.
In betraying Kwang, Henry also brings to ruin a man he had grown to admire and respect,
and whose political dream he had genuinely come to believe in. The novel ends with
Henry managing an uneasy reconciliation with his wife, quitting Glimmer & Co. to work
as her assistant in teaching English to immigrant children. As critics have pointed out, the
novel leaves little room for imagining alternative possibilities to the structural and
cultural inequities that prove such a psychic burden to Henry, and that give no quarter to
a political vision like Kwang’s. By the final pages, the mood seems to remain largely one
of resignation, and political and subjective impasse.31 Rather, this is especially true if one
reads Native Speaker exclusively through the prism of ethnic immigrant literatures. I
would now like to conclude with some further remarks on Lee’s engagement with genre,
and how a maximal approach to the novel as a spy novel can prove expansive for its
31
For examples of this pessimistic outlook, see the analyses by Betsy Huang, Yoonmee Chang and Min
Song.
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meditations on ethnic identity. While the novel’s self-reflexivity and formal innovation
have drawn the greater share of critical attention, its narrative is also certainly not without
an appreciable degree of intrigue, high stakes and mortal danger.32 Aside from the fatal
office firebombing, other such “thrilling” scenes include a public speech disrupted by
smoke bombs, Henry being chloroformed and abducted by his own colleagues after
compromising an earlier assignment, and the episode at the hostess bar, which erupts into
fisticuffs when Henry intervenes by tackling and restraining Kwang. As Chang-rae Lee
himself has averred in an interview: “I wanted to widen the stage in which my character
was going to act…I wanted to put him in harm’s way, or at some kind of risk, so that he
would have to put himself on the line…” (6).33
Here I would propose that the widened stage Lee erects includes not only physical
or geographical spaces, but also, in the spirit of Dimock, a widened literary terrain, or
interpretative “field” that genre fiction offers. At the most basic level, Henry’s mission—
however much anguish and ambivalence and crisis of identity he bears in its execution—
involves the successful exposure and thwarting of clandestine activities operating outside
state sanction, activities which are the brainchild of a charismatic and megalomaniacal
strongman . In more ways than one, Kwang’s ggeh can be read as analogous to Drax’s
Moonraker rocket in Fleming’s novel. It is the “secret plot” that, when discovered,
clarifies all the other turns of intrigue: Eduardo’s murder, Kwang’s memorization of
extensive voter lists, furtive whispers about “the disposition of certain funds” (200,
emphasis in original). Equally significant is the idea of the ggeh as a reparative for past
32
In this sense, I read against the assessment of Crystal Parikh and Tina Chen, who regard Native Speaker
as lacking the adventure elements that characterize a spy narrative.
33
Interview with Sarah Anne Johnson in The Writer’s Chronicle (2005).
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injury or aggrievement; from this vantage, it might be seen as the vehicle of Kwang’s
highly personal retribution, forging a “family of thousands” to replace the one obliterated
by American bombs (326).34 Finally, Kwang’s ggeh also resembles Drax’s weapon as a
potent cultural signifier, asserting Kwang’s connection to an “authentic” Korean history
and folk practice, just as the Moonraker rocket calls to mind the infamous V-2 rocket
program associated with Nazi Germany and the ingenuities of “German engineering.”
Yet even with these similarities, Lee also takes deliberate pains to situate his
literary project against Fleming’s outsized legacy. When Henry first reveals his
profession to the reader, he begins, “In a phrase, we were spies. But the sound of that is
all wrong…We pledged allegiance to no government. We weren’t ourselves political
creatures. We weren’t patriots. Even less, heroes” (17). Expanding upon these provisos,
he draws from a familiar repertoire of Fleming-esque elements, only to repudiate them:
“Guns spooked us…We knew nothing of weaponry, torture, psychological warfare,
extortion, electronics, supercomputers, explosives. Never anything like that” (17). These
remarks presage a later moment in which Henry and Leila watch a movie on television,
“a new technothriller stocked with laser-guided weapons, gunboats, all flavors of
machismo. Muscular agents. Give us The Third Man, we decide, give us The Manchurian
Candidate and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” (244). Through this self-reflexive
commentary on the production and consumption of spy thrillers, Lee distances his work
from the genre’s latter-day excesses while evincing a nostalgic affinity for certain
canonical Cold War texts (even though Henry speaks of their film adaptations). This
34
Lee’s novel does make a strong case for this idea, as seen in Henry’s private remarks to a hypothetical
supplicant during his stewardship of Kwang’s ggeh: “I want to see the fleshed shape of the need, I want to
know the blood you’ve lost, or that someone has stolen, or tricked from you, the blood you desperately
want back from the world” (281).
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moment is also instructive for the way it hints at the specific kind of spy narrative that
Lee’s own novel seeks to “give us,” with the key reference being, I would contend, John
le Carré’s influential The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). If Henry is, by his own
admission, a far cry from James Bond, he shares far more in common with the
protagonist of a le Carré novel: cynical, disillusioned, morally exhausted and
professionally out of his depth. The reader learns that Henry’s assignment to Kwang
comes on the heels of a disastrous operation where, dogged by the recent torments of his
personal life, he had “nearly blown cover” (21). In a particularly le Carré-like twist,
Henry learns that Eduardo was also an agent planted by Glimmer & Co., and that the
“something damning” he uncovered in the ggeh had been the true objective all along,
with his reports and daily registers being merely “trivial prose” (225, 334).
Although I have made the case that select elements of Lee’s novel indeed seem
“ripped from the pages of Ian Fleming,” in the end it is perhaps the work of le Carré—
with its psychological and moral complexities and understated depiction of espionage—
that more accurately conveys the novel’s conception of its own literary, or at least
generic, aspirations. From this angle, the echoes of le Carré’s 1979 novel Smiley’s People
in the phrase “John Kwang’s people,” whether intended by Lee or not, becomes highly
suggestive for the novel’s vision of multiethnic collectivity. The pertinent resonance,
however, is not with Kwang’s campaign, but the novel’s other multiethnic coalition, the
spy agency. Michelle Rhee captures the agonism between the two multicultural
formations, observing that “Glimmer and Company represents one vicious form of
multiculturalism outdoing and undoing another kind of multiculturalism” (164). To be
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sure, Lee foregrounds his imagined intelligence firm as an alternative multicultural space,
though equally connected to an emergent globalism:
Each of us engaged our own kind, more or less. Foreign workers,
immigrants, first-generationals, neo-Americans. I worked with Koreans,
Pete with Japanese. We split up the rest, the Chinese, Laotians,
Singaporans, Filipinos, the whole transplanted Pacific Rim. Grace handled
Eastern Europe; Jack, the Mediterranean and Middle East; the two
Jimmys, Baptiste and Perez, Central America and Africa…Dennis
Hoagland had established the firm in the mid seventies, when another
influx of newcomers was arriving. He said he knew a growth industry
when he saw one; and there were no other firms with any ethnic coverage
to speak of. The same reason the CIA had such shoddy intelligence in
nonwhite countries (18).
Even more explicitly than the urban masses of Kwang’s following, Glimmer & Co.’s
genesis is rooted in the post-1965 “influx” of immigrants, with its unique brand of
“ethnic coverage” metonymically linked to CIA activities in “nonwhite countries.” Its
multicultural personnel also resembles the diversity—after a fashion—that characterizes
le Carré’s tight-knit “Circus” (his euphemism for Britain’s MI6), where the generically
English Smiley works alongside the lowland Scottish Alleline, the Hungarian émigré
Esterhase, the vaguely cockney Bland, and the half-French Guillam. In this way, Lee’s
novel inhabits the spy novel trope of the “firm” as an alternative site of multicultural
belonging, where one’s loyalty to the syndicate transcends ethnic group, government or
political affiliations. In a related vein, the agency also functions as an important node of
individual subject-formation, with Henry admitting at one point that “I had become more
like Hoagland than I would have liked to admit. My years with him and the rest of them,
even good Jack, had somehow colored me funny, marked me” (21).
The extent to which the novel imagines Glimmer & Co. as a foil to Kwang’s
political vision is accentuated in a conversation with “good Jack”—Jack Kalantzakos,
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Henry’s only close friend at the agency—in which Jack suggests “We are brothers, yes,
Greek and Korean? Like it or not, Parky, ours is a family. Pete, Grace, the Jimmys. Me
and you. I know it is a sad excuse for one, but what else do we have?” (292, emphasis
mine) Much like Kwang’s multiethnic family, Hoagland’s “sad excuse” for one is forged
in the furnace of geopolitics: the notion of Greeks and Koreans being “brothers,” for
instance, can be read as an allusion to the Truman Doctrine, under which U.S. aid to
contain communism in Greece and Turkey became the basis for its subsequent “positive
action” policies in Korea.35 Elsewhere, Henry links his Japanese American colleague Pete
Ichibata to the memory of Korea’s colonial past, musing how “My mother, in her hurt,
invaded Korean way, would have counseled me to distrust him, this clever Japanese”
(15).36 Although Henry retorts “It’s an orphanage, Jack…And there’s a Fagin,” the two
positions are not mutually exclusive, and Henry’s nod to Dickens actually heightens their
commonalities (292). As seen in my earlier analysis, Kwang’s political family is also one
comprised of the transnational orphans of empire, with Kwang no less a “Fagin”—in fact,
Henry’s invocation of an “orphanage” reminds us that Kwang himself emerged, a familyless refugee, from the Catholic orphanage system before building his political family.
Even though the pressures of Henry’s conscience eventually compel him to resign
from Glimmer & Co., this does not necessarily exhaust the agency’s viability as a source
35
See Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun (2005): 210. This is also supported in Native Speaker by Jack’s
backstory, in which he spent much of his younger years in Greece doing piecemeal jobs for the CIA.
36
The character of Pete Ichibata is a fascinating one, and prefigures, I would argue, a distinct “type” that
recurs in Lee’s subsequent works. Henry describes him as a relentless and demonically efficient spy, who
was “a kind of anti-therapist, a professional who steadily ruined you session by session...a one-man crisis
of faith,” and whose preferred method with a subject was to “actively seek out his weaknesses, expose and
use them to take him apart, limb from limb, cell by cell” (173). If the words of Henry’s mother posits Pete
as a sort of national allegory of Imperial Japan from a “hurt, invaded” Korean perspective, this is reinforced
by the historical narratives in Lee’s later novels A Gesture Life (1999) and The Surrendered (2010), both of
which feature a cruel Imperial Japanese officer who proves brutally adept at psychologically dismantling
others, as well as literally dismembering their bodies.
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of communal and identificatory possibility. In considerable ways, I would suggest, the
intelligence firm remains the novel’s most sustainable vision of “family,” at least
compared to the alternatives. Henry likens his eventual reunion with Leila to a
provisional arrangement: “We play this game in which I am her long-term guest.
Permanently visiting. That she likes me okay and bears my presence, but who can know
for how long?” (347) This proves a striking contrast with the novel’s other depiction of a
romantic pairing between an Asian American man and a white woman: the affair between
Henry’s fellow agents Pete and Grace, which had developed, almost Ian Fleming-like,
during an undercover assignment in the Bahamas. Observing their rapport over a dinner
meeting, Henry notes how “Pete makes fun of her, tells her she eats like a white woman.
Grace says she is a white woman…Pete shovels back the noodles as fast as he can bear
their heat. All the while Grace nudges him to slow down. They bicker and flirt and handle
each other. They even kiss” (317). As a vignette of easy interracial affection—with due
emphasis on Grace’s status as a “white woman”—the Pete-Grace romance suggests a
certain “effortless” affiliation that the world of the spy agency offers, transcending not
only ethnic divides, but also personal-professional ones. It also bears noting that Henry is
there to hand over the list of Kwnag’s ggeh, framing this scene around that most standard
of spy narrative rituals: “We are serious in the spook play, playing as we are…Pete stares
at me and says in the most even voice: ‘You brought what you were supposed to?’ I nod.
Grace quietly finishes her soup. We are friends again, after a fashion” (319).
Such scenes direct our attention to the other identity conflict that beguiles Henry
throughout Native Speaker: between his respective identifications with “John Kwang’s
people” and “Hoagland’s people.” Couched within a series of authorship metaphors, this
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division also parallels Lee’s negotiation between being a writer of ethnic fiction and a
writer of spy fiction. While working on the member list of Kwang’s ggeh, Henry
imagines that “I am writing a new book of the land…And the more I see and remember
the more their story is the same. The story is mine. How I come by plane, come by boat.
Come climbing over a fence…Now, too, I have lost the old mother tongue. And I forget
the ancestral graves I have left on a hillside of a faraway land, the loneliest stones that
each year go unblessed” (279). Contrary to these notes of unbelonging and loss, it is as a
spy that Henry’s ethnic identity becomes a source of exuberance rather than
encumbrance, “the perfect vocation for the person I was, someone who could reside in his
one place and take half-steps out whenever he wished…I found a sanction from our
work, for I thought I had finally found my truest place in the culture” (127). He recalls
the excitement of an early training assignment with Pete, working a Chinese dissident
named Wen: “I was enjoying myself. I was thrilled with what we were doing, as with a
discovery, like finding a new place you like, or a good book. I felt explicitly that secret
living I’d known throughout my life, but now for the first time it took the form of a
bizarre sanction being with Pete and Wen. We laughed heartily together. We three
thieves American” (175, emphasis mine). Beneath this stolen glimmer of pan-ethnic
harmony, we are reminded, remains an undercurrent of intrigue and danger—for Wen,
ultimately, if not Henry and Pete—providing the requisite “thrill” that is every spy story’s
objective.
In these moments of figurative book-writing, Lee foregrounds the productive
coexistence between the imperatives of the ethnic novel (memorializing the travails of the
immigrant masses and their lost mother tongues, unblessed gravestones and faraway
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lands) and the spy novel’s “sanction” (delivering “enjoyment” and “thrills,” via “secret
living,” bombs, clandestine plots, maniacal villains, and even—in Pete and Grace’s
case—exotic locales and co-spy romances). In this way, Lee conceives of his novel as
much more than a “vessel” for “histories that all of us should know”; more pertinently, it
is a hybrid “new book of the land” with which to think through configurations of ethnic
identity, family, transnational memory and the simple “enjoyment” of genre forms. In
this light, it should come as no surprise that Lee’s latest novel, On Such a Full Sea
(2014), is a dystopian science fiction narrative that explores contemporary anxieties
regarding class stratification and mass transnational migration. In his review of the novel
for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Min Song begins with a highly apposite reflection
on Lee’s career-inaugurating engagement with genre narratives, and namely the novelty
of Native Speaker’s take on the spy thriller. As Song surmises, “No one, I suspect, has
ever shelved this novel in the same bookstore section as Casino Royale or Tinker, Tailor,
Soldier, Spy.”37 For all his praise of Lee’s experiment, Song’s remark serves the
(familiar) critical posture of noting the dissonance between Lee’s novel and the highly
conventionalized genre with which it improvises. Nonetheless, one of my implicit aims in
this chapter—and at the end of the last one—has been to wonder how doing just such a
thing might open up new contours, perspectives and formulations for ethnic American
literary production. In both Native Speaker and Black Power, furthermore, a certain
generically protean quality is signaled by the figure of the ethnic dictator, who also
represents the forceful welding of disparate epistemologies, discourses and hermeneutic
frames (Africa and the “West,” the Cold War and decolonization, diasporic memoir and
spy narratives, spy narratives and ethnic writing, Korean and American “national
37
See Min Song’s “Between Genres: On Chang-rae Lee’s Realism” (2014).
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ontologies,” historiography and ethnography, just to name a few). My next chapter
illustrates how this logic is stretched to a stylistic extreme in Junot Diaz’s The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Of all the works in this study, Diaz’s novel is the one that
addresses theme of dictatorship most directly and prominently; to this end, it is also the
most self-reflexively preoccupied with the relationships between dictators, writers, and
genres as multivalent “fields of knowledge.”
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CHAPTER THREE
Literary Caudillos: Junot Diaz and the Latino/a American Dictator Novel
“You must remember…that there is a little of Trujillo in every
Dominican.” –quoted in Howard J. Wiarda and Michael J. Kryzanek,
“Dominican Dictatorship Revisited: The Caudillo Tradition and the
Regimes of Trujillo and Balaguer”
“Dictatorships are pantheistic. The dictator manages to plant a little piece
of himself in every one of us.” –Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the
Butterflies
“Ten million Trujillos is all we are.” –Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao
I.
The quotations above express an insight that, for the most part, might be
considered neither novel nor provocative: that, along with the modern Dominican
Republic, modern Dominican identity has been profoundly shaped by the long
dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930-1961), widely recognized to be one of the
most brutal and notorious regimes in Latin American history. The first epigraph,
attributed to an unnamed “prominent Dominican historian and politician,” appears in a
1977 scholarly article linking Trujillo’s rule to a broader “Caudillo Tradition” in Latin
American politics.1 The second comes from Julia Alvarez’s celebrated historical novel In
1
The Spanish term caudillo translates to English roughly as leader or chief, but also more commonly—and
pejoratively—as dictator, warlord or strongman. The word has roots in the Latin capitellum, the diminutive
of caput or head, and generally describes an authoritarian political-military leader (the Merriam Webster
Dictionary defines it as simply “a Spanish or Latin American military dictator”). While the term has a
broad historical resonance in the Hispanic tradition, stretching back to the conquest of the New World, the
Reconquista and even to military figures of classical antiquity, its modern usage, and the attendant concept
of caudillismo, has been most commonly associated with the military strongmen who arose during the
Latin American wars of independence in the early nineteenth century. By and large, these men were
charismatic militia leaders who were able to seize and maintain political power by mustering a degree of
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the Time of the Butterflies (1994), a fictionalized account of the Mirabal sisters, political
dissidents who were assassinated for their vocal opposition to the Trujillo regime. For a
time, Alvarez’s was perhaps the best-known work by an American novelist to address
this period of Dominican history, at least until the stratospheric acclaim that greeted the
2007 publication Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Chronicling the
fates and (mis)fortunes of a fictional Dominican American family from New Jersey, as
well as the family's intertwined history with the violence of the Trujillo dictatorship in
the Dominican Republic, Diaz’s novel offers its own spin on this widely-acknowledged
trope of Dominican identity, as seen in the third epigraph above. Unlike the other
comments that frame Trujillo’s legacy in terms of “little” pieces parceled out to and
borne individually, by “every Dominican” and “every one of us,” Diaz’s iteration
dramatically expands the sense of scale, to the amassed and undiluted “ten million
Trujillos” that characterize the Dominican people tout court. At the same time, his
formulation also effects a diminuitizing and even reductive gesture, in its illustration of
the Dominican people as a population of Trujillos-in-miniature—Trujillitos, as the
implicit term might be—and the insinuation that this represents something primary about
Dominican identity, and that over and above everything else it is “all” they are.
Even more crucial, for the purposes of my discussion, is that in Diaz's novel these
words are spoken not by a native Dominican who has experienced the lived reality of the
Trujillo regime, but rather a Dominican American born in the United States some years
after the regime had ended. For Diaz, the reverberations of the Trujillo dictatorship reach
beyond the geographic bounds of the Dominican nation-state to envelop the members of
populist support. For a thorough introduction to the topic, see Caudillos: Dictators in Spanish America
(1992).
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its diaspora, as well as beyond the temporal bounds of its historical eventness and unto
subsequent generations. Finally, as we can see in the epigraphic trajectory—from Wiarda
and Kryzanek's anonymous native informant to the works of Alvarez and Diaz—the idea
of Trujillo as a cipher for Dominicanness is one that straddles the discursive realms
between history and political science, on the one hand, and literature, on the other.2 This
chapter takes the notion that “ten million Trujillos is all we are" as its starting point, and
asks what follows from this relation, and how it prefigures the complex set of questions
regarding the relationship between dictatorship, identity and collective subject-formation.
More specifically, I investigate how the symbolic resonance of the dictator figure
animates not only the explorations of Dominican and Dominican American identity in
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but the novel's efforts to imagine a panethnic
Latino/a identity as well. Central to Diaz's approach to the often vexing and elusive
concept of a Pan-Latino/a label I will further show, is his engagement with the idea of a
panethnic literary history, which his novel likewise connects to the discourses and
rhetorics of dictatorship. Just as dictators like Trujillo are seen to hold sway over and give
coherence to a nation, polity, or peoples, Diaz's text illustrates how a similar authoritarian
impulse drives the creation of a "canonical" Latino/a literary tradition out of its disparate
constituent parts. By the end of the chapter, I will have touched upon two aspects that has
been largely ignored by the prolific critical commentary on Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao: namely, how the figure of the dictator plays a central role in the
novel’s conception of Dominicanness as a literary identity, and how this literary identity
serves as an intervention into debates about Latino/a panethnicity.
2
See Ignacio López-Calvo’s God and Trujillo: Literary and Cultural Representations of the Dominican
Dictator (2005).
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II.
At the center of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, of course, is the titular
Oscar, a Dominican American young man whose real name is Oscar de León. Growing in
up in New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s, Oscar is a stereotypical "nerd"—bookish and
lovesick, his two driving obsessions in life are “the Genres,” which include science
fiction, fantasy, comic books and role-playing games, and an aching desire to find true
love (20). Oscar’s romantic longings are perpetually thwarted by his homely appearance
(particularly his obesity) and general social awkwardness, which in turn contribute to his
pervasive sense of alienation from an “authentic” Dominican identity. In addition, readers
are also introduced to Oscar’s assertive and independent older sister, Lola, their
domineering and forceful mother Belicia, and Yunior, Oscar’s onetime college roommate
and Lola’s sometime boyfriend, who is also revealed to be the novel's narrator. The
reader also learns how, as a teenager, Oscar’s mother had been savagely beaten and left
for dead by agents of Trujillo’s regime, prompting her to flee the Dominican Republic for
New York to become “the Empress of Diaspora” (106). The novel also devotes several
chapters to the story of Oscar’s grandfather Abelard Cabral, an affluent and respectable
doctor who was wrongfully imprisoned by Trujillo, and as a result lost his sanity and
languished into an anonymous death.
Even before we meet this principal cast, however, Diaz insists that the “wonder”
of Oscar’s life cannot be understood without first grasping the historical forces that have
produced him. With the novel’s opening lines, Diaz invokes the long history of
domination in the Western Hemisphere that begins with first contact, and colonialism:
They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved;
that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished
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and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the
nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or
more colloquially, fukú —generally a curse or a doom of some kind;
specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World”…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. Santo Domingo might be
fukú’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children,
whether we know it or not. (1-2)
It is against the backdrop of this deeper context, as the manifestation of a primordial
curse, that the dictator Rafael Trujillo emerges as a pivotal figure in the novel’s dramatis
personae. Drawing a direct line from the bloody history of enslaved Africans and
decimated Tainos at the hands of Columbus, “the Admiral,” to the twentieth century
horrors of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, Diaz introduces the dictator as a
“hypeman of sorts” or “high priest” to the fukú: “No one knows whether Trujillo was the
Curse’s servant or its master, its agent or its principal, but it was clear he and it had an
understanding, that them two was tight” (2-3). Framed as a folk metaphor for the
historical and contemporary relations of oppression in the Americas, the concept of fukú
becomes a key hermeneutic through which Diaz invites us to read the story of Oscar and
his family, who are imagined as the bearers of a hereditary curse that has afflicted the
entirety of the Dominican Republic.
Moreover, the framing device of fukú allows Diaz to couch his exploration of
Dominican and Dominican diasporic identity within a larger, ongoing hemispheric
pattern of conquest, domination and hegemony—within what certain decolonial theorists
have termed the “coloniality of power.” For scholars such as Anibal Quijano and Walter
Mignolo, the coloniality of power describes the world-system that came into being
following the European colonization of the Americas during in 16th century. During this
period, the colonizers created and imposed hierarchal orders of race, class, labor and
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gender relations that prescribed value to certain peoples and societies while subordinating
others. In particular, while Europe was imagined as the standard-bearer for civilization,
progress and reason, non-European peoples were placed at the bottom of racial
hierarchies and deemed intrinsically inferior and primitive. These hierarchical
arrangements would outlive formal colonialism and become integrated into succeeding
social orders, and are directly connected to the myriad forms of discrimination and
disenfranchisement experienced in contemporary societies. Mignolo argues, in fact, that
coloniality must be seen as constitutive of modernity itself, the dark underside that is also
its condition of possibility, from which springs such features of modernity as capitalist
modes of production, Enlightenment rationality, scientific discourses and the nation-state.
Importantly, as Mignolo goes on to contend, both Latin Americans and Latino/as in the
United States have been mutually, though differently, relegated to subordinate and
inferior positions in relation to Europe and Anglo-America.3
From this perspective, the trope of fukú— as “the Curse and the Doom of the
New World”—signals the multiple axes of its characters’ "New World" experiences, as
Dominicans, U.S. Latino/as, and general members of the Wretched of the Earth. To be
sure, Diaz’s novel does associate fukú with a uniquely Dominican heritage—as seen in its
unique “understanding” and “tightness” with Trujillo, as well as Santo Domingo’s status
as “fukú’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry.” Yet at other points, the concept of fukú also
comes to register a wider hemispheric experience shared by a multiplicity of nations and
peoples, who are all its “children." Combing through internet discussion threads on the
3
For more on the coloniality of power, see Anibal Quijano and Michael Ennis’ “Coloniality of Power,
Eurocentrism, and Latin America” (2000); Walter Mignolo’s The Idea of Latin America (2005) and
Coloniality: The Darker Side of Modernity (2009). For detailed readings of Diaz's novel through the this
lens, see José David Saldívar’s “Conjectures on “Americanity” and Junot Díaz's “Fukú Americanus” in The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (2012), and also Anne Garland Mahler’s “The Writer as Superhero:
Fighting the Colonial Curse in Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (2010).
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topic, the narrator reports that fukú stories came “not just from Domos,” but that “the
Puertorocks want to talk about fufus, and the Hatians have some shit just like it,”
reminding us of the curse’s trans-American provenance (6).
The transnational dimensions of fukú become even more salient, furthermore, in
its function as shorthand for dictatorial figures like Trujillo. In the first of the novel’s
many footnotes, the narrator provides a lengthy explanatory primer on the Dominican
dictator, “for those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican
history” (2). Describing Trujillo’s regime as “one of the longest, most damaging U.S.backed dictatorships in the Western Hemisphere,” the narrator takes care to add that “if
we Latin types are skillful at anything it’s tolerating U.S.-backed dictators, so you know
this was a hard-earned victory, the chilenos and argentinos are still appealing” (3). With
this pointed aside that names-without-naming, Diaz casts the travails of the Dominican
Republic under Trujillo as akin to—though ultimately surpassing—other close-contest
cases such as Chile under Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and Argentina under Jorge
Rafael Videla and the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (1976-1983), envisioning a
hemispheric and pan-ethnic affiliation shaped primarily by the sufferance of military
strongmen and U.S. geopolitical meddling. At various points, Diaz’s text even broadens
this identificatory gesture beyond “we Latin types” to encompass a larger global view. In
the same footnote, the narrator underscores Trujillo’s creation of “the first modern
kleptocracy” by musing that “Trujillo was Mobutu before Mobutu was Mobutu,”
referring to Mobutu Sese Seko, the notorious President of Zaire (now the Democratic
Republic of the Congo) from 1965 to 1997. As U.S.-backed and destructive a dictator as
any, Mobutu was similarly “tolerated” by the Congolese, while being one of many such
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despots to plague postcolonial Africa. Elsewhere the novel adopts a more region-specific
orientation in its acknowledgement of “that other Caribbean nightmare, the Haitian
dictator François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier," whom the narrator posits as a sort of parallel to
Trujillo by nicknaming him "P. Daddy," in a similar vein to “T-zillo,” "T-illo," and the
numerous other glib monikers he reserves for the Dominican dictator (111, 110, 225).
While both Mobutu and Duvalier certainly enjoy reputations for terror and
malevolence that are arguably on par with Trujillo's, it is not my intention here to draw
hasty equivalences, and elide the vast differences between peoples, nations, historical
backgrounds and political contexts that produced such figures. More simply, I want to
suggest that these comparative moments illuminate the transnational vision behind the
novel's contextualization of the Trujillo dictatorship, as one node among many within the
world-system erected by the coloniality of power. Here the constellation of Trujillo
alongside Duvalier—though a minute, passing detail in the text—proves especially
meaningful, reminding readers of the intertwined histories of the two nations that share
the island of Hispaniola. Rather than focusing on the well-documented antagonism
between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, the novel emphasizes their mutual
experiences of oppression, often at the hands of their own nefarious leaders—and by
implication, their geopolitical commonalities as thralls to U.S. imperial power.4 To
borrow the language of the fukú mythos, we might regard the two Caribbean nightmares,
“T-zillo” and “P. Daddy,” as having emerged through the same “nightmare door that was
4
Nonetheless, Diaz's novel does draw plenty of attention to the longstanding antagonism between the
peoples of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Several references are made to Trujillo's own virulent antiHaitian views, culminating in the Parsley Massacre in October 1937, in which tens of thousands of Haitians
and Haitian-Dominicans were murdered along the border regions (an event dramatized in Edwidge
Danticat's 1998 novel The Farming of Bones). Diaz's novel also makes explicit the widespread prejudice
against Haitians prevalent in both the Dominican Republic and the Dominican diaspora. For an in-depth
analysis of this contentious history, see Michele Wucker’s Why the Cocks Fight (2000).
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cracked open in the Antilles” when Europeans arrived on their shared island. Indeed,
even as Diaz's novel proclaims Santo Domingo as “fukú's Kilometer Zero,” it might be
argued that the Haitians, with their “shit just like it,” can assert an equal, if not greater
legitimacy as fukú's immediate heirs, given their direct descent from those very enslaved
whose screams first carried forth the Curse from Africa.5
Read in this light, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao dramatically
reinterprets Julia Alvarez's claim that “dictatorships are pantheistic,” in its location of
Trujillo among a veritable “pantheon” of dictators who personifies some of the more
conventionally political, visible and nakedly brutal forms that the coloniality of power
has assumed in the modern era. Interestingly, even the novel's vision of liberatory
opposition draws upon the symbolic import of charismatic strongmen, the most familiar
examples being the scattered references to “Fidel and Revolutionary Crew,” and the
prominent “book-loving argentine” (Che Guevara) among their ranks (97). Later in the
novel, a footnote relates the history of the Taino chieftain Hatüey, whose ferocious battle
against European conquest in the Caribbean—“When the Spaniards were committing
First Genocide in the Dominican Republic”—prompts the narrator to liken him to a
“Taino Ho Chi Minh,” as well as a precursor to the nineteenth century Dominican-Cuban
independence leader Máximo Gómez (212). Linking these disparate individuals and their
campaigns across a centuries- and continents- spanning continuum, Diaz's novel situates
Dominican identity within a global dialectic of (neo)colonial oppression and anticolonial
5
To this day, Haiti carries the distinction of being the world's first and only nation-state established as the
result of a successful slave revolt. In this way, the concept of fukú also partakes of the ship-based
chronotope Paul Gilroy elucidates in his study of the Black Atlantic.
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struggle, anchored at both ends by figures who, if not outright authoritarians, at least bear
authoritarian connotations.6
The correlation between Hatüey and Ho Chi Minh as icons of resistance also
foregrounds the specific geopolitical backdrop against which Diaz writes this identity, in
which the United States has succeeded the European powers as the primary agent of the
coloniality of power, and its myriad forms and apparatuses of domination. On a more
subtle register, the comparison also recalls the novel's introductory remarks on fukú,
which posits nothing less than a Dominican origin for the U.S. defeat in Vietnam:
How about Vietnam? Why do you think the greatest power in the world
lost its first war to a Third World country like Vietnam? I mean, Negro,
please. It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its
involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the
Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before
Iraq was Iraq.) A smashing military success for the U.S., and many of the
same units and intelligence teams that took part in the "democratization"
of Santo Domingo were immediately shipped off to Saigon. What do you
think these soldiers, technicians, and spooks carried with them, in their
rucks, in their suitcases, in their shirt pockets, on the hair inside their
nostrils, caked up around their shoes? Just a little gift from my people to
America, a small repayment for an unjust war. That's right, folks. Fukú.
(4)
Although the narrator imagines the U.S. loss to a “Third World country like Vietnam” as
a sort of karmic retribution for its “unjust” occupation of the Dominican Republic (19651966), the invocation of fukú enfolds these twentieth century events within a longue
6
Scholars have often cited the culture of powerful local chiefs, or caciques, among pre-Columbian tribes as
an important predecessor to the tradition of caudillismo in Latin America. The term cacique originates from
the Taino word kassiquan, meaning “to keep house,” though in modern Spanish the term has come to
connote a local political boss who exercises significant power and influence. As just such a Taino cacique,
Hatüey might be said to share something of a symbolic lineage with Trujillo, the preeminent Dominican
caudillo. Similarly, although both Ho Chi Minh and Máximo Gómez are known more for leading liberation
movements than being tyrants, Ho's image remains widely associated with the repressive single-party
regime of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, while Gómez was a known authoritarian who demanded iron
discipline and obedience above all else, with one biographer detecting in him an instinctive “inclination to
dictatorship.” See Hugh M. Hamill’s introduction to Caudillos: Dictators in Spanish America”; for more on
Maximo Gómez, see John Lawrence Tone’s War and Genocide in Cuba (2006).
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durée stretching back to the Spanish conquest of the Americas and forward to the recent
Iraq War, the latter of which has likewise featured a similar rhetoric of "democratization"
and “a smashing military success” (“Mission Accomplished”). In this manner, the novel
effects something akin to a Dominicanization of Ho Chi Minh (as well as the Iraq War)
by casting his successful resistance against U.S. military might as a continuation of
Hatüey’s originary struggle against the Spanish Empire, “the greatest power in the world”
of his own time” (244).
Conversely, it is also by reframing certain traditional signifiers of the Dominican
experience (Taino indigenous roots, Spanish colonial heritage, the Trujillo dictatorship)
through a U.S.-centered transnational optic that Oscar Wao comes to articulate a uniquely
Dominican American perspective. Weaving a narrative landscape of mobile imperial
forces (“soldiers, technicians and spooks” deployed from Santo Domingo to Saigon to
Iraq) and authoritarian figureheads arrayed within a global neocolonial matrix (Mobutu,
Duvalier, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, the unnamed Pinochet, etc.), Diaz's novel suggests
that there is nothing more profoundly Dominican than American empire, and nothing
more emblematic of this relationship between “my people” and “America” than the
Trujillo dictatorship. Diaz himself insinuates as much in an interview with Slate, even as
he seems unsure about where to split the difference:
Trujillo was one of the U.S.’s favorite sons, one of its children. He was
created and sustained by the U.S.’s political-military machine. I wanted to
write about the demon child of the U.S., the one who was inflicted upon
the Dominican Republic. It didn’t hurt that as a person Trujillo was so odd
and terrifying, unlike anybody I’d ever read or heard about. He was so
fundamentally Dominican, and for a Dominican writer writing about
masculinity, about dictatorship, power, he’s indispensable.7
7
Interview with Meghan O’Rourke in Slate (Nov 2007).
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Here Diaz's remarks reveal a telling bit of ambivalence, or at least indecision, about how
exactly he wants to characterize Trujillo. While casting him as “the demon child of the
U.S.” implies a degree of exceptionality to Trujillo’s embodiment of U.S.-sponsored state
terror, this view is offset by the pluralizing assertion that he was “one of the U.S.’s
favorite sons,” one of its many demon children—an idea reinforced throughout Oscar
Wao, as I have been demonstrating. What’s more, Diaz describes Trujillo as both
“fundamentally Dominican” and “indispensable” for a Dominican writer, while at the
same time rendering him as somehow external to the Dominican Republic, something
“created and sustained” by a foreign political-military machine and “inflicted upon” the
country from without.
Conceived thus, the figure of Trujillo emerges as a symbolic nexus where the
national and the transnational, the singular and the structural, the fundamentally
Dominican and the inexorably American converge. As such, he is "indispensable" not
just for a Dominican writer, but, speaking more accurately to Diaz's case, for a
Dominican American writer writing from a U.S. Latino/a standpoint. In The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the U.S.-based diasporic perspective bears out through the
modern-day story centered on Oscar and his family, though its early designation as a
“fukú story” assures us that Trujillo never lingers very far in the background. In the same
Slate interview cited above, when asked “How—or why—in your mind do the stories of
Trujillo and Oscar fit together?” Diaz gives the following response:
I guess the question for me is, how are they not related? It's like the
history of the Dominican Republic. You can't tell the history of the U.S.
without the history of the Dominican Republic, and yet people do so all
the time. Oscar, like Lola, like Yunior, is one of Trujillo's children. His
shadow, his legacy, is upon them all in ways that none of them understand.
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Trujillo is a local version of the legacy of the New World, which all of us
who live in this hemisphere carry upon our heads.
These pronouncements are notable, I would point out, for the way they shade across the
two meanings of the word “related”—both in the sense of a general association or
connection, and in the sense pertaining to kinship and familial ties, as signaled by the
repeated emphasis on progeny. Diaz’s description of his characters as "Trujillo's
children" echoes his previous statement about Trujillo being “one of the U.S.’s favorite
sons, one of its children,” all of which resonate with the novel’s originary thesis on fukú:
that "we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not." While themes of family,
parentage and descent have long been a hallmark of U.S. ethnic literatures, Diaz
repurposes this language to accentuate his novel's focus on the relationships between
individuals, on the one hand, and the nations, collectives and historical forces that are
their capital-P Parents, on the other.
Taking up the genealogy sketched out in Diaz's comments, with Oscar, Lola and
Yunior as Trujillo's children and Trujillo himself the child of the U.S., what might it
mean for us to regard Oscar and company as, in some sense, grandchildren to the U.S.—
that is, in a more expansive way than the mere naming of a neocolonial relationship? For
starters, such a lineage suggests that for Oscar, Lola and Yunior, the claim to American
nationality lies not in any status of citizenship, immigration, native birth or residence, but
rather constitutes an embedded part of their cultural inheritance as Dominicans. Such a
perspective accords with Diaz's view that the history of the U.S. and the history of the
Dominican Republic should be seen as essentially coterminous, with former remaining
somehow incomplete and less-than-truthful without the latter. The other critical element
here, I would add, is mediated nature of the grandparental relation. Specifically, Oscar,
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Lola and Yunior are posited as "children" in relation to the United States only through the
intercessory parental agency of Trujillo, the "favorite son" and "demon child" who is also
the phantom father, in a narrative devoted to exploring his “shadow” and “legacy.” It is
through the personage of the dictator, a sort of hybrid figure who encompasses both a
Dominican and U.S. historical consciousness (as both symbolic parent and child), as well
as a global historical consciousness tied to the coloniality of power, that Diaz's novel
delineates the multiple identitarian negotiations of its protagonists. 8
Ultimately, to assert that “ten million Trujillos is all we are”—as Lola does at the
end of the novel—is to recognize the Dominican American subject as a similarly hybrid
entity, itself a “local version of the legacy of the New World.” This is a subject rooted not
merely to the geographic coordinates of Santo Domingo or Paterson, New Jersey, but
also to a global imaginary that includes “all of us who live in this hemisphere,” and even
beyond (“They say it came from Africa”; “How about Vietnam?” etc.). This is not,
however, to locate the significance of the dictator figure solely in its metonymy for a
vague transnationalism or globalism. Any collectivity articulated through the notion of
“ten million Trujillos,” it goes without saying, must also necessarily engage with the
national and historic specificity of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo’s rule, and
those unique particulars of the “local version” in all its “odd and terrifying” and
comparison-defying aspects. In the following sections, I examine the nature of Trujillo's
patrimony in relation to his "children": which includes not only the novel's Dominican
8
Maja Horn has argued against the tendency to equate Trujillo’s discourse of masculinity simply with that
of a stereotypical Latin American caudillo, and stresses the importance of transnational and imperialist
forces, including “international political discourses of sovereignty and Euro-American racism,” to its
articulation (2). As she usefully reminds us, “‘Trujillo’ should not be conflated too easily with Dominican
political and cultural ‘tradition.’ Indeed the Trujillato broke with many preceding Dominican formations or
‘traditions’ in ways that were greatly enabled by the impact of U.S. imperialism on the country and on the
personal trajectory of the dictator” (16). In this way, “Trujillo” and his “children” are truly the progeny of
the United States. See Maja Horn’s Masculinity After Trujillo (2014).
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American protagonists, but also Diaz himself. While the “fundamentally Dominican”
preoccupations of masculinity, dictatorship and power that Diaz associates with Trujillo's
legacy remains “indispensable” to an identity wrought in the dictator’s image, they also
comprise the basis for the novel's attempt to imagine a distinctly masculine and
dictatorial form of Dominican American writing. In this conception, the author functions
as a mirror-image of the hypermasculine dictator, positing himself and his work as a
symbolic site around which the multiple nodes of Dominican American cohere, and as a
mediating force between Dominicans in the U.S. and a dominant U.S. society (“Just a
little gift from my people to America”), as well as between Dominicans and other
Latino/a ethnic groups (“we Latin types”).
III.
While I have thus far been highlighting an emergent global view that subtends
Diaz’s identitarian explorations in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, it should also
be noted that the novel does assign a certain exceptionality to the experience of the
Dominican Republic and its peoples (1). For the most part, this sense of Dominican
exceptionalism coalesces around the figure of Trujillo, who gets figured as a sort of
primus inter pares among history's tyrants, the “Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated"
(80). As the narrator remarks, “At first glance he was just your prototypical Latin
American caudillo, but his power was terminal in ways that few historians or writers have
ever truly captured or, I would argue, imagined. He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our
Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so
dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up” (2). The contrast that
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the narrator sets up here is quite suggestive: between the readymade, “prototypical”
category of the Latin American caudillo, and the uncategorizable, ineffable nature that
distinguishes Trujillo’s “terminal” power; and also, between the historians and writers
that have traditionally written about the Latin American caudillo and another kind of
writer potentially better suited to the task. Despite claiming that “not even a sci-fi writer
could have made his ass up,” the recourse to iconic fantasy, science fiction and comic
book villains as explanatory analogies nonetheless suggests that it is precisely writers of
sci-fi and other genre fiction that possess the necessary insight to “capture” the extent of
Trujillo’s outlandishness, perversity and dreadfulness.
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the character most readily associated
with the figure of the “sci-fi writer” is of course Oscar, who is depicted as both an avid
consumer of what he terms “the more speculative genres,” as well as an equally avid
writer who dreams of being, variously, the “Dominican Stephen King” and “the
Dominican Tolkien” (43, 27, 192). The qualifier “Dominican” takes on a crucial
importance here, indexing Oscar’s racial and ethnic otherness in relation to a white
cultural dominant, in which he cannot simply be a “next,” or “another,” or otherwise
unmarked version of Stephen King or J.R.R. Tolkien.9 Yet it’s also unclear that an escape
from ethnic markers is something Oscar desires, for the label also gestures toward
another of his preoccupations: his personal connection to the history and legacy of his
ancestral homeland, and to the very category of Dominicanness. Compounded with his
devotion to genre fiction, one might understandably imagine Oscar as originating the
insight that Trujillo was “our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future
9
For a recent discussion by Diaz on the circumscribed possibilities for writers of color in the modern
publishing industry and creative writing programs, see his essay “MFA VS. POC” (2014) in The New
Yorker.
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Dictator.” But this turns out not to be the case, as the reader eventually discovers that the
novel is actually narrated by character Yunior, who recounts the story of Oscar’s life and
death after the fact, and writes the book in the reader's hands. In his sly way, Yunior
admits that the invocation of Sauron and Darkseid to talk about Dominican history
probably make more sense coming out of Oscar’s mouth than his own: “I’m not entirely
sure Oscar would have liked this designation. Fukú story. He was a hardcore sci-fi and
fantasy man, believed that that was the kind of story we were all living in. He’d ask:
What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles? […] But
now that I know how it all turns out, I have to ask, in turn: What more fukú?” (6).
Exercising his epistemic dominance as the sole storyteller, and the one who
knows “how it all turns out,” Yunior acknowledges Oscar’s likely preference for a sci-fi
and fantasy-oriented hermeneutic, only to discard it in favor of his own predilection for
the “fukú story.” Read thus, his comments represent nothing less than a struggle over the
very interpretative framework through which the reader is to understand the narrative that
follows—that is, over who gets to determine “the kind of story we were all living in.”
Although a decidedly one-sided affair, the moment still remains noteworthy for the way it
adumbrates several prominent, interrelated elements of Diaz’s text: a competitive
agonism between Yunior and Oscar, particularly over the contours of an “authentic”
Dominican identity; the way Yunior's performance of narrative control comes to
resemble a form of dictatorship; and finally, the way this authorial dictatorship
reverberates specifically with the figure of Trujillo.
To begin with, we might note that Yunior asserts his interpretative primacy over
Oscar not simply by rejecting Oscar's preferred mode of discourse, but by demonstrating
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the greater capaciousness of his own discursive repertoire. As gradually becomes clear,
Oscar is not the only one fluent in “the more speculative genres”; rather, this is a fluency
that Yunior also shares, as seen in the prolific use of science fiction, fantasy, comic book
and popular culture references throughout his narrative, and also in the various hints that
Yunior himself is secretly an aficionado of these genres. Describing Oscar's “outsized
love of genre,” Yunior states “Perhaps if like me he'd been able to hide his otakuness
maybe shit would have been easier for him, but he couldn't. Dude wore his nerdiness like
a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens” (21).10 Later, Yunior recalls sharing a
room with Oscar in college: “Do you know what sign fool put up on our dorm door?
Speak, friend, and enter. In fucking Elvish! (Please don't ask me how I knew this.
Please.)” (172, emphasis in original.) In these moments Yunior confesses to his
"nerdiness" and distances himself from it in the same breath, whether through his
admitted “hiding” or sheepish, parenthetical evasion. In any case, what becomes evident
is his own literacy in the “nerd” languages of Lensmen and Jedi Knights—with the
stereotypical apotheosis of this being an actual literacy in the fictional Elvish language
featured in the works of Tolkien. From this angle, the comparisons between Trujillo and
Sauron read less like Yunior ventriloquizing Oscar, and instead represent examples of
Yunior speaking from his own legitimate “nerd” authority.
Ultimately, the display of his personal mastery over Oscar's preferred discourse
becomes a way for Yunior to establish the supremacy of his perspective in regards to who
can better tell the Dominican story. While Yunior doesn't exactly disagree with Oscar's
view, that “What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the
10
“Otaku” refers to a Japanese term for someone with obsessive interests, or an avid collector or enthusiast,
particularly in regards to anime, comic books, and video games, and often to the detriment of their social
skills. Its' rough equivalent in English might be “geek” or “nerd.”
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Antilles?”, he nevertheless presents himself as being able to transcend it, by imagining
Trujillo and the “legacy of the New World” through a more expansive array of idioms
(though Yunior does exercise his prerogative to shut down Oscar's view when necessary,
as when he exclaims “Negro please—this ain't a fucking comic book!”) (138). The
vastness of Yunior's discursive arsenal, I would propose, figures as one of the primary
ways he is presented as yet another kind of dictator figure—namely, the writer/storyteller
whose control over the narrative constitutes its own form of authoritarian power. In a
passage that has become one of its most popularly-cited, the novel draws a direct
correlation between the political dictator and the narrative dictator:
What is it with Dictators and Writers anyway? Since before the infamous
Caesar-Ovid war they’ve had beef. Like the Fantastic Four and Galactus,
like the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, like the Teen Titans
and Deathstroke, Foreman and Ali, Morrison and Crouch, Sammy and
Sergio, they seemed destined to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle.
Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I
think that’s too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my
opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like,
after all, recognizes like” (97, emphasis in original).11
Rendered as part of Yunior's distinctive narration, these reflections on the porous
boundaries between dictators and writers also exhibit his unique form of dictatorial
power: an ability to inhabit, and eventually surpass, the narrative frames favored by his
rivals, such as Oscar. Along with his displaying aptitude for the well-wrought comic
book simile, Yunior's exposition also invoke examples that begin with classical antiquity
(Caesar and Ovid), and ranges from the literary-academic highbrow (Toni Morrison and
11
It is important to note that this aside on the relationship between dictators and writers remains an integral
part of the novel's broader explorations of the Trujillo dictatorship and the history of the Dominican
Republic. Specifically, the passage appears as part of an account of Jesús de Galíndez, a Basque nationalist
writer who had lived in the Dominican Republic, and who was writing a doctoral thesis at Columbia
University detailing the horrors and excesses of Trujillo's regime. In an infamous unsolved case, Galíndez
disappeared from the streets of New York City on March 12, 1956 and was never seen again, with evidence
strongly suggesting he was kidnapped and murdered by Trujillo's agents.
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Stanley Crouch, Salman Rushdie) to sports history (Foreman and Ali) and all the way to
the more obscure ends of popular culture esoterica (Sammy and Sergio, most likely a
reference to Mad Magazine artists Sam Viviano and Sergio Aragones). In flaunting the
breadth of his erudition, as well as his idiomatic registers, Yunior distinguishes himself
from what he sees as the narrow focus of Oscar's own: “In these pursuits alone Oscar
showed the genius his grandmother insisted was part of the family patrimony. Could
write in Elvish, could speak Chakobsa, could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a
Lensman in acute detail, knew more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a
role-playing fanatic” (21). The assertion of his own more capacious perspective—in
which the comic book frame, while valid, is but one fabric among a larger tapestry—
enables Yunior to champion his designation of “fukú story” as the more informed and
judicious option for apprehending dictators and writers, Caribbean history, the “legacy of
the New World,” and all the crucial themes for understanding Dominican identity.
Yunior’s ambivalence toward Oscar’s interpretation frames, I would add, also
reflects the novel’s ambivalence toward the moral binaries traditionally built into the
science fiction, fantasy and comic book genres. The italicized emphasis on “like, after all,
recognizes like” cannot be under-stressed, as it ultimately subverts any Manichean
assignation of value that comparisons to comic book superheroes and supervillains might
invite. Eschewing Rushdie's idea of a “natural” antagonism between dictators and writers,
and refusing to let the latter off easily, Diaz, it seems, would prefer to consider the
hostility between the two as a sort of narcissism of small differences, with writers every
bit as susceptible to oppressive and dictatorial tendencies as their more conventionally
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political counterparts.12 As it plays out in Oscar Wao, the more salient analogy between
writers and dictators might be less so the heroic Fantastic Four versus the villainous
Galactus, and more the like-recognizing-like clash between George Foreman and
Muhammad Ali, a rivalry in which narrative distinctions between heroism and villainy
seem tenuous at best.13 As a matter of fact, the image of two prizefighters with outsized
egos competing for—on a most basic and reductive level—prestige, influence, the
adoration of an audience, wealth and women, presents an exceedingly fitting illustration
of the idea that both dictators and writers “just know competition when they see it.” As a
counterpart to the political strongman, it bears noting, the writer Yunior is also something
of a literal strongman, as seen in his fondness for bodybuilding: “Me, a guy who could
bench 340 pounds...who never met a little white artist freak he didn't want to smack
around” and “I mean, shit, I was a weight lifter, picked up bigger piles than him [Oscar]
every damn day” (170, 171). Conveying the importance of his muscular physique to his
12
On this point, I am in accordance with the insights of critics like Anne Garland Mahler and Andrew
Hoberek, who both read Diaz's novel as revealing “the blurred line between the hero-writer and the forces
of tyrannical power” (Mahler 133). See Mahler, “The Writer as Superhero.” I find Hoberek's analysis of
Diaz's dictator-writer passage particularly spot-on: “The list of similes at the heart of this passage opens
with several that seem to cast the writer in the role of the superhero (the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the
Teen Titans) versus the dictator as supervillain (Galactus, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, Deathstroke)—
or so we presume, although this actually reverses the order of the opening question and the invocation of
Caesar and Ovid, and as the sequence progresses, at least some of the pairings become less clear-cut: why
Foreman and Ali, and why is Ali in the second (villanous) position? By the time we get to Rushdie's
assertion, the passage has already deeply confused the issue, and we are prepared for Diaz's revision...that
writers and dictators are in fact difficult to distinguish” (176). See Hoberek’s Considering Watchmen
(2014).
13
The clash in question—the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match between Foreman and Ali
that took place on October 30, 1974—seems particularly germane to the discussion at hand, and might even
be regarded as something of a minor “fukú story.” To start with, the fight took place in Zaire at the
invitation of Mobutu Sese Seko himself. Similar to Trujillo, Mobutu had come to power on the heels of a
(U.S.-sponsored) coup that ousted a democratically elected government, and was eager for the positive
publicity such a high-profile sporting event would bring to his regime. In many ways, the event can be seen
as a rhetorical and material expression of Mobutu’s dictatorial power, with the match held at a venue
named after the date of his political ascendance (20 th of May Stadium, now Father Raphael Stadium in
Kinshasa), and which was a known detention and torture center. Furthermore, the then unheard-of $10
million fight purse was largely footed by the impoverished Zairian population, as befitting a Trujillo-style
kleptocrat. It was also on this trip that Ali, controversially, met and socialized with not only Mobutu, but
also other prominent African dictators such as Libya's Mummar Gaddafi and Uganda's Idi Amin.
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self-image, Yunior’s statements also underlines the connection between this physique and
a physically aggressive and pugnacious orientation toward other male bodies, which he
seems to be constantly sizing up—whether it’s the “little” white artist freaks he wants to
smack around, or the obese Oscar, likened to a big “pile” that he can pick up with ease.
This pugnacity, moreover, also extends to the narrative's treatment of Trujillo,
which includes numerous physical assessments that seek to mark the dictator’s body as
debased and insufficiently masculine. At the start, Yunior describes Trujillo as a “portly,
sadistic, pig-eyed mulato who bleached his skin, wore platform shoes, and had a fondness
for Napoleon-era haberdashery” (2). Later on, while narrating the two brief scenes in the
novel in which Trujillo appears in person, Yunior makes note of his “shrill voice,”
“heavily powdered face,” “porcine eyes,” and the way he “sniffed the air like a cat”
(233). The implications of such language and imagery are clear enough; in their
underscoring of Trujillo’s diminutive stature (platform shoes, the image of Napoleon
Bonaparte, “portly”), his pig-like appearance (“pig-eyed,” “porcine-eyed,” “portly”) and
feminine mannerisms (shrill voice, powdered face, cat-like behavior), they serve the
purpose of denigrating the dictator’s body and manhood in comparison to Yunior.
Coupled with the mocking nicknames that Yunior lobs at Trujillo throughout the
narrative, like “the Failed Cattle Thief” and “Fuckface,” the stance of the writer toward
the dictator in Diaz’s text comes off as not merely pugnacious, but downright pugilistic,
in the spirit of a boxer taunting and trash-talking his opponent, as exhibited most
famously by Muhammad Ali against such adversaries as Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and
George Foreman, among others.
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In this fashion, the agonistic struggle between the writer and dictator that Yunior
engages in plays out as a form of aggressive masculine “beef.” More precisely, it is a
struggle waged in the arena of what both Diaz's novel and scholarly studies have
identified as a distinctly Dominican form of hegemonic masculinity, a regime of gender
relations in which “men derive prestige from displays of superior virility” (Simonson
133).14 In her study of gender norms among public sector workers in the Dominican
Republic, Jenny K. Rodriguez reports how interactions between men were “based on
expert knowledge and competitiveness: with practices that include challenging each other
and references that link attainment to manhood or virility” (54). More than anything else,
“displays of superior virility” serve as the chief paradigm through which Yunior
conceives of an authentic Dominican manhood. His account of Oscar’s life, in particular,
delineates this identity through its negative image: “Our hero was not one of those
Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about—he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a
fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock”; on the contrary, “dude never
had much luck with the females (how very un-Dominican of him)” (11). The judgment of
Oscar as “un-Dominican” reappears in countless iterations, each time stressing
heterosexual male promiscuity as the unequivocal norm. Oscar “had none of the Higher
Powers of your typical Dominican male, couldn’t have pulled a girl if his life depended
on it,” and “Anywhere else his triple-zero batting average with the ladies might have
14
See P.G. Simonson’s dissertation “Masculinity and Femininity in the Dominican Republic (1994). E.
Antonio de Moya also explores the “totalitarian image of dominant masculinity” that “produces intricate
strategies (power games) for men to oppress other men” (73, 98). See his “Power Games and Totalitarian
Masculinity in the Dominican Republic” (2004). For more on traditional ideologies of masculinity within
Latino/a communities, see Pedro A Saez, Adonaid Casado and Jay C. Wade, “Factors Influencing
Masculinity Ideology Among Latino Men” (2009). For more on the general concept of "hegemonic
masculinities," defined broadly as practices that promote the dominant social position of men and the
subordinate social position of women, see R.W. Connell’s Masculinities (2005).
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passed without comment, but this is a Dominican kid we’re talking about, in a Dominican
family: dude was supposed to have Atomic Level G, was supposed to be pulling in the
bitches with both hands.” (20, 24).
With terms like “Higher Powers” and “Atomic Level G,” Yunior again traffics in
the fantasy and science fiction argot that is generally Oscar’s area of “expert knowledge,”
only to wield them, boxer-like, to discredit Oscar’s manhood—and by extension, his
ability to properly represent the narrative of Dominican identity at hand. More subtly,
expressions like “a million hots on his jock” and “pulling in the bitches with both hands”
suggest an even more specific dimension to this Dominican hypersexuality, emphasizing
not just the quantity of sexual partners, but also the simultaneous enjoyment of them.
Under this rubric, only two men in the narrative can be said to truly possess such “Higher
Powers” and “Atomic Level G,” and to the hyperbolic degree these terms would imply:
Yunior himself, and Trujillo. As the polar opposite of Oscar’s “un-Dominican” ways,
Yunior is a self-described “ill sucio” and “the biggest player of them all” (180, 186).
More importantly, his sexual habits are in vigorous keeping with the “typical Dominican
male” who pulled in the bitches “with both hands.” As he relates in flamboyant, nearparodic fashion: “Me, who was fucking with not one, not two, but three fine-ass bitches
at the same time and that wasn’t even counting the side-sluts I scooped at the parties and
the clubs; me, who had pussy coming out my ears” (185, emphasis in original).
As Yunior goes on to assert, “Some niggers couldn’t have gotten ass on Judgment
Day; me, I couldn’t not get ass, even when I tried” (196). Clad in the language of Oscar’s
beloved apocalypse narratives, this statement also quietly hints at the burden of Yunior's
promiscuity, as a compulsion he seems to have little control or agency over. Combined
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with the image of “pussy coming out my ears,” with its vague connotations of drowning,
we see how the rhetoric of Yunior's boasting also bears the traces of an attendant
ambivalence and self-loathing. At other moments, Yunior's capacity to turn a critical eye
toward his “superior virility" flashes up more clearly: after being publicly humiliated for
cheating, Yunior reflects that “what I should have done was check myself into BootieRehab. But if you thought I was going to do that, then you don’t know Dominican men”
(175). The concept of “Bootie-Rehab” seems especially loaded, in its framing of Yunior’s
sexual appetite as akin to an addiction. Just as atomic power carries with it the dangers of
unchecked destruction, nuclear fallout and radioactivity, the notion of “Atomic Level G,”
it would seem, turns out to be a mixed blessing.
The depiction of Dominican hegemonic masculinity as a noxious and destructive
force surfaces most emphatically in the novel's account of Trujllo's own notorious and
near-outlandish hypersexuality. “If you think your average Dominican guy’s bad,”
Yunior informs us, “Trujillo was five thousand times worse” (217). Once again, a focus
on sheer accumulated quantity seems key, with Yunior’s “not one, not two, but three
fine-ass bitches” and “side-sluts” seeming utterly petty when compared to Trujillo's fame
for “fucking every hot girl in sight, even the wives of his subordinates, thousands upon
thousands upon thousands of women” (2). The bedding of subordinates’ wives attests to
the equivalence between prestige and superior virility in the Dominican national and
cultural context, insofar as “prestige” refers to the pinnacle of political power. This point
is further bolstered by the way discussions of Trujillo's sexual proclivities are frequently
couched in the language of states and institutions: “Trujillo might have been a Dictator,
but he was a Dominican Dictator, which is another way of saying he was the Number-
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One Bellaco in the Country. Believed that all the toto in the DR was, literally, his,” and
that “if the procurement of ass had been any more central to the Trujillato the regime
would have been the world’s first culocracy (and maybe, in fact, it was)” (217). If “like,
after all, recognizes like,” then one way we might read Yunior's chronicle is as a narrative
of recognition between a self-professed “biggest player of them all” and “the NumberOne Bellaco in the Country.” Whereas Lola comes to a collectivized understanding that
“ten million Trujillos is all we are,” for Yunior this apperception assumes a much more
personal focus, as a reckoning with a fellow “bellaco,” dictator—and ultimately, a
surrogate father figure.
By now, numerous commentators have noted the myriad ways that Yunior
functions as a parallel to Trujillo—and perhaps none more vigorously and exhaustively as
Diaz himself. As he opines at length in an interview with Katherine Miranda:
For me, this book is literally arguing that the person who is using this
language, who is talking about women in this way, who is talking about
men in this way, is the son of Trujillo. He is the perfect child of the
Trujillato. In this book, you could draw a direct line in Dominican society
from Trujillo to Yunior. Yunior takes the present role of the dictator—in
the past Trujillo was the dictator, he was the only one who spoke. In this
novel, in the present, Yunior's the only one who speaks. He's literally the
dictator...All the stuff that Trujillo believed in, Yunior practices in one
form or the other. No matter how critical or left-wing he is, his sexual
politics are fucking nightmarish. (36) 15
For the most part, scholarly treatments have tended to fall in line with Diaz’s efforts to
control the way his novel is read, focusing on either Yunior as the “only one who
speaks,” or on his “nightmarish” sexual politics, or some combination of both. Certainly,
Diaz’s remarks presents the two realms as closely inter-articulated, with both coalescing
around the figure of the dictator-storyteller-womanizer: the “son of Trujillo” who is also,
15
Interview with Katherine Miranda in Sargasso II (2008-9).
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in the same breath, “the person who is using this language, who is talking about women
in this way, who is talking about men in this way.”16 In his analysis of Yunior’s
storytelling, Richard Patteson forwards the useful concepts of "textual territory and
narrative power,” which he defines broadly as “the writer's ability to exercise power over
the space he commands through his narration,” and more specifically as “the numerous
ways that the [narrative] voice is above all an instrument of Yunior's power” (6, 7).17
Meditating on the “slippery similarities between dictators and writers” as depicted in
Diaz’s novel, Jennifer Harford Vargas reflects that “they are narrative makers and
narrative controllers. Both the dictator and the novelist create metanarratives and produce
meaning. They are fabulous inventors who can make the unbelievable believable. They
both also control subjects and exercise their authority through words to dictate their
subjects’ or characters’ actions and thoughts” (8). Elena Machado Saez deftly combines
the notion of narrative power—the “similarities between fictional dictation and political
dictatorship”—with the gender and sexuality angle, in her analysis of how the
hypermasculine and heteronormative Yunior, through his narration, suppresses and
silences “Oscar's points of queer Otherness—his virginity and sentimentality” (534, 528,
524).18 In a related vein, Katherine Weese takes up a narrative theory and gender studies
16
Diaz's frequent invocation of the parental trope, I would add, reminds us that Trujillo, for all intents and
purposes, seems to be the novel's most present and functional father figure. While Oscar, Lola and Yunior's
respective fathers all remain completely absent from the narrative, the novel also reveals how Oscar's
grandfather, Abelard, fails to protect his family from Trujillo's persecution, largely due to his ineffectual,
passive and indecisive nature.
17
Patteson begins his discussion by pointing out Diaz’s attempts, through interviews and public discussions
of his work, to interpretations of his novel, exemplifying the truism that “an author’s compulsion to control
does not necessary end with publication” (5). See Patteson’s “Textual Territory and Narrative Power in
Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (2012).
18
As Saez also helpfully explains, “In Diaz's view...the writer and dictator compete over who gets to shape
the public imagining of a national and diasporic identity" (528). See Saez’s “Dictating Desire, Dictating
Diaspora” (2011).
139
approach in her exploration of how the “unnatural” features of Yunior’s narration relates
to “the novel’s relationship to traditional Dominican masculinity” (90).
More recently, Jason Cortés synthesizes the interrelated themes of dictatorship,
narration and gender roles in his study Macho Ethics (2015), which argues that “the
macho maintains proximity with the dictator, while the authorial figure concomitantly
exhibits a perturbing similarity with both figures.” (4) As Cortés elaborates, “machismo,
cast as a cultural discourse and inherently oppressive in its deployment of power politics,
claims as its counterpart the discursive as well as the physical repression of the
dictatorship. The threatening, and somewhat portentous, nature of the macho stems from
a process of de-humanization that parallels the obscene excess of dictatorial violence,
which in turn folds itself unto the figure of the author” (4).19 In Oscar Wao, as we have
seen, the character Yunior not only encapsulates all three of these figures—the
hypersexual macho, the dictator and the author—he does so in a way that the novel
renders as essentially Dominican, as the terminus of that “direct line” that runs through
“Dominican society” and Trujillo. While the text also draws fairly direct lines between
this ethnonationalist dimension and certain political institutions and sexual practices
associated with the Dominican Republic, the way that these might shade into the literary
sphere seem less straightforward. In fact, this identitarian element of Diaz’s text is one
that critics have largely failed to address: if to be a “Dominican Dictator” equals being
the “Number-One Bellaco,” how might these two conceptions of Dominicanness inform
19
Naturally, Cortés’ study includes a reading of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, although his
analyses largely rehash earlier arguments made by the likes of Mahler and Machado Saez. Cortés examines
the “conceptual entanglement” at the heart of Diaz’s critique of heteronormative power structures: “one the
one hand, the narrator, who is also Diaz’s avatar, is enmeshed amid an indictment of Trujillo-style
totalitarianism and its cultural consequences in the Dominican psyche, while, on the other, he is also
trapped by his own macho behavior, which emblematically reproduces the virile discourse of the Trujillo
Era” (98). See Cortés’ Macho Ethics (2015).
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what it means to be a Dominican, or Dominican American, author? That is, how might
we apprehend Diaz's novel as imagining a distinctly Dominican form of writing—a
writing, in other words, inflected by a similarly dictatorialness and “virility?”20
Here it might be useful to turn to the work of Daniel Y. Kim, whose book Writing
Manhood in Black and Yellow (2005) wrestles precisely with the question of “how the
sexual politics of racial identity become enmeshed in and articulated as a literary
politics” (xxiii, emphasis in original). Although the focus of Kim’s book, as signaled by
its title, is on African American and Asian American literary production, the applicability
of his insights to the discussion at hand—that is, to sexual politics, racial identities and
literary politics as it pertains to writing a Brown manhood—are difficult to miss.
Centered around the works of Ralph Ellison and Frank Chin, Kim’s study explores how
certain male writers of color formulate an anti-racist cultural politics that “comes to
articulate itself with instead of against homophobia,” in their depiction of the psychic
injuries inflicted by white racism (xxii, emphasis in original). For these authors, the
figure of the homosexual functions as a symbol for an emasculated and feminized racial
subject; in the literary sphere, this “homosexual” posture take takes the form of a
“feminizing and passive assimilationist impulse” that produce insufficiently masculine
and racially inauthentic works (40). As Kim argues, both Ellison and Chin champion “an
idea of literary identity that allegedly takes its cues from the vibrant, muscular, and
agonistic forms of cultural expression characteristic of working-class communities of
color—that gives literary form to a vernacular” (xxiii, emphasis in original).
20
It is important to reiterate here that I am not reading Diaz’s novel as an essentialist expression of any
actual “Dominican” national or cultural traits; rather, I am interested in the category of “Dominicaness” as
it emerges as part of Oscar Wao’s internal logic, and as part the novel’s conception of its own literary
aspirations (much like the way the category of “Korean” functions in Lee’s Native Speaker).
141
Already, we can see how Kim’s study constellates a number of highly fruitful
critical avenues for reading Diaz—many of which, unfortunately, remain outside the
scope of the current analysis.21 What I wish to focus on, at present, is how Kim views
African American and Asian American authors as fashioning “wholly virile and racially
distinct forms of manhood within the domain of literature,” and how Diaz’s novel might
be seen as engaged in a similar fashioning of a Dominican and Latino/a literary manhood
(36). Key to this racially authentic and masculine writing, Kim asserts, is a “virile and
active kind of mimetic hunger” (40):
What these writers valorize...is a masculine figure who speaks back from
the racial margins, whose linguistic prowess lies in his deft capacity to
repeat parodically and subversively the languages that constitute the
center, none of which he should be able to claim as properly his own. He
is defined by a violent and aggressive capacity to incorporate, appropriate,
and mangle whatever linguistic materials enter into his verbal domain. (38,
emphasis in original)
Taking a counterintuitive approach to concepts of racial “distinctiveness” and
“authenticity,” Kim conceives of these categories not as tied to any biological or cultural
“essence,” but rather as the expression of a mimetic ability par excellence, a tireless and
combative appetite for consumption and appropriation. Thus the “African American or
Asian American distinctiveness” of Ellison and Chin's “ethnonationalist aesthetics” has
21
To briefly touch upon some of these: 1) The idea of a homophobic logic in which homosexuality
functions as a symbolic shorthand for a failed and racially inauthentic manhood easily applies to Yunior’s
view of Oscar, and is in fact signaled in the novel’s very title. The name “Oscar Wao,” we are told, comes
about when Oscar dresses up as Doctor Who for Halloween, which Yunior remarks as making him look
like that “fat homo” Oscar Wilde. When one of Yunior’s friends replies “Oscar Wao, quién es Oscar
Wao,” the mispronunciation sticks and becomes Oscar’s permanent nickname (180); 2) In a related vein,
Oscar’s love of the science fiction and fantasy genres stereotypically associated with white males (and
sexual ineptitude) connects him to the ‘feminizing and assimilationist impulse” attributed to homosexuals
of color, as seen in the way Yunior regards Oscar's fanboy tendencies as “un-Dominican”; 3) While the
lives of “working-class communities of color” are more central to Diaz’s first short story collection Drown
(which also feature Yunior as a character) than to Oscar Wao, the concept of a “vernacular masculinity”
associated with these communities nonetheless remains a relevant frame for addressing the colloquial,
Dominican Spanish- and urban-slang- inflected language that characterizes Yunior’s narration. In short,
Kim’s insights, when applied to Diaz, raise further questions regarding the role of Spanglish in theories of
the vernacular.
142
less to do with something that inheres in their respective blackness or Asianness, but is to
be found instead in “the muscularity with which other cultural forms are absorbed,
reworked, and remade” (39). For Kim, in the end, it is this “highly aggressive and
appropriative” posture toward other texts and cultural forms that emerges as “manifestly
virile.” (39) Most pressing of all, this manifest virility presents itself as a distinctly
authorial agency: “As one voice striving to achieve a singular literary identity by
struggling against literary antecedents and brethren of all races, the male writer of color
perceives himself achieving not only a measure of manhood, but a particular form of
homosocial intimacy, one that is expressed through the complex agonistic interplay of
authorial voices” (39).
Returning to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, we can see how Diaz’s
novel resonates with the image of a “muscular,” aggressive, and most of all virile racial
subject, as well as the articulation of this masculine subject as an author. Here I would
argue that Diaz’s novel draws upon a similar conception of authorial “virility,” in which
Yunior’s rapacious sexual appetite in the bedroom has its literary analogue in a “violent
and aggressive capacity to incorporate, appropriate, and mangle whatever linguistic
materials enter into his verbal domain.” We have already seen a version of this agonistic
and appropriative relationship to other writers, for instance, in Yunior’s suppression of
Oscar’s sci-fi and fantasy hermeneutic, which he then absorbs into his own robust
narrative repertoire. This spirit of aggressive appropriation also operates on a broader
level, with both Yunior the narrator—and by extension, Diaz himself—emerging as
Latino versions of the “masculine figure who speaks back from the racial margins, whose
143
linguistic prowess lies in his deft capacity to repeat parodically and subversively the
languages that constitute the center.”
This “speaking back” from the racial margins to the languages and literatures of
the center begins in fact bookends Diaz’s novel, and begins at the very level of its title,
which refers to both Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Short Happy
Life of Francis Macomber”; similarly, Oscar’s closing-line exclamations of “The beauty!
The beauty!” inverts the anguished refrain of “The horror! The horror!” from Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Other examples are less overt but nonetheless palpable; the
narrative structure in which the story of Oscar’s life and death is refracted through
Yunior’s nostalgic recollections more than faintly echoes the Jay Gatsby-Nick Carraway
relationship in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, complete with a similar
celebratory nickname: “Years and years now and I still think about him. The incredible
Oscar Wao” (324). Thus while much critical attention has been heaped upon the novel’s
resuscitation of “marginalized” genres like science fiction, fantasy and comic books,
Oscar Wao also does much to write itself alongside literary works of a more traditionally
“canonical” stature, laying out an expansive literary terrain that includes not just the
obscurest of margins, but the most hallowed of mainstreams as well. In this way, Diaz’s
novel can be said to express a similar racialized literary manhood in the form of “one
voice striving to achieve a singular literary identity by struggling against literary
antecedents and brethren of all races.”
That this struggle involves antecedents and brethren of all races is also an
especially pertinent facet of Diaz’s literary project, which assumes this “virile and active
mimetic hunger” not only in relation to canonical white writers like Conrad, Hemingway
144
and Fitzgerald, but also to works spanning a wide range of national and ethnic traditions.
A substantial segment of the scholarship on Diaz's novel, importantly, has argued for the
centrality of certain literary traditions associated with Latin America, particularly that
most enduringly popular one of all: magical realism. In Oscar Wao, readers usually point
to a magical realist strain in such narrative details as the faceless man whose appearance
portends tragedy or violence, as well as his counterpart, the mystical mongoose, “an
Aslan-like figure with golden eyes” that occasionally intervenes to deliver the
protagonists from peril (302). Notably, the remarks on fukú in the novel’s prologue
mentions that it “used to be more popular in the old days, bigger, so to speak, in Macondo
than in McOndo,” in a nod to both the magical realist tradition popularized by Gabriel
Garcia Marquez and the literary movement that rose against it in the 1990s, both of which
have been cited as among the novel’s dense thicket of intertextual allusions (7).22
While critics have been split on the topic, and Diaz himself remains cagey about
the his novel’s connections to Garcia Marquez or the magical realist tradition, the
inspirations that Diaz does acknowledge—and the language he does it in—are likewise
telling. Pressed by an interviewer to address the influences “reflected” in his work, Diaz
proffers a decidedly multiracial and transnational “literary genealogy,” while stressing
that any such construct will be “more a fantasy than anything”; in his account, “the
22
“Macondo” refers to the fictional town featured in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magical realist classic One
Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), while “McOndo” is the name of a literary movement, named after a
1996 anthology edited by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gomez, which was essentially an urban realist
backlash against magical realism’s fetishistic emphasis on underdevelopment and exoticism. Critical
treatments that explore the relationship between Diaz’s novel and magical realism are legion, some of
which include: Daniel Bautista, “Comic Book Realism” (2010); Monica Hanna, “‘Reassembling the
Fragments’” (2010); Tim Lanzendörfer, “The Marvelous History of the Dominican Republic in Junot
Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (2013); Ignacio López-Calvo, “A Postmodern Plátano’s
Trujillo” (2009); T.S. Miller, “Preternatural Narration and the Lens of Genre Fiction in Junot Diaz’s The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (2011); Ramon Saldivar, “Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism,
and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction” (2011): 574-599. Notably, both Hanna’s and
Jason Cortés’ readings mention the ways that Diaz’s novel bridges the gap between Macondo and McOndo.
145
African diaspora had an enormous impact, whether it was U.S. African American letters,
whether it was writing from sub-Saharan Africa, whether it was Caribbean writing…but
also immigrant writing across the board. I’ve read a ton of Asian-American writers”
(Sargasso 28). In keeping with this heritage, Diaz has frequently stressed the influence of
Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco (1992) on his own work,
especially in regards to his use of footnotes as a literary device.23 His consumption of
Asian American literature is also indexed in the subchapter in Oscar Wao titled “The
Gangster We Are All Looking For,” which is almost certainly a reference to the 2003
book of the same name by Vietnamese American author Thi Diem Thuy Le.24 In an
interview elsewhere, Diaz further lists “comic book chingones” Los Brothers Hernandez
as “the secret fathers of this book,” adding that “What I wanted to do was honor these
Chicano brothers who had a large role in teaching me how to write” (La Bloga).25 Along
23
In discussing his novel’s use of footnotes, Diaz’s recognition of Chamoiseau is occasionally paired with
his disavowal of any influence from “the postmodern white-boy gang” that includes and David Foster
Wallace, Mark Z. Danielewski, and William Vollman (See his interview with Danticat, Edwidge in BOMB
magazine [2007]). This stance seems in keeping, I would argue, with the competitive agon that undergirds
the writer of color’s masculine mimetic hunger, especially in relation to white male writers. Interestingly,
Diaz would later claim Vollman as an influence alongside Chamoiseau, while disavowing Foster Wallace,
in a series of personal annotations of Oscar Wao that he provides for the website Genius
(http://www.genius.com/Junot-diaz-the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-excerpt-annotated).
24
A relationship to certain type of Asian American literary narrative is also visible, I would argue, in the
novel’s depiction of the Brothers Then, Juan and José, owners of a Chinese restaurant in the Dominican
Republic where Belicia worked as a youth, and where “she would always say she came of age” (105).
Namely, Diaz’s depictions of the Then brothers seem to invoke a lyrical, maudlin quality that sways
between Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston: “Juan, the melancholic gambler, who waxed about
Shanghai as though it were a love poem sung by a beautiful woman you love but cannot have” and “José,
the bravo, the guapo, his wife and children dead by warlord in the thirties…whose grief had extracted from
his body all softness, idle chatter, and hope” (105, 106). The brothers spun stories “about their youth in
China and the Philippines,” and in their old age would end up in Skokie, Illinois and Atlanta, Georgia
respectively, a narrative touch that seems directly addressed to the recent trend in Asian American studies
that focuses on the multiply-destined, trans-American migrations of the Chinese diaspora (129). See, for
example, the recent work of Evelyn Hu-Dehart.
25
See Diaz’s interview with Greg Barrios in La Bloga (2007). The Hernandez Brothers—Gilbert, Jamie
and Mario—are most famous for their Love and Rockets series, from which Diaz draws the phrase “Breasts
of Luba,” after a similarly well-endowed character in the comics, to describe Oscar and Lola's mother
Belicia (92). He revisits this reference later in the novel in the description of a prostitute whose breasts
146
with the notion of a “literary genealogy,” Diaz's desire to “honor” the “secret fathers” of
his book draws upon a familiar rhetoric of fatherhood, progeny and inheritance—and
more specifically, the recognition of a previously invisible patrimony—that we observed
earlier in his remarks on Trujillo’s “shadow” and “legacy.”
All of this, perhaps, is simply yet another take on what has been exhaustively
lauded and analyzed by scholars and casual readers alike as the wonder of Oscar Wao’s
language, a distinctive narrative mélange that weaves together multiple linguistic, literary
and cultural registers. In addition to the intertextual allusions noted above, these include
black urban slang, Spanglish, references to popular culture, “nerd” genres, world history,
and even academic jargon. Depending on the commentator, this discursive heterogeneity
has been variously characterized as a “polyvocality,” “syncreticism,” “hybridity,” or a
“fragmented” quality. A common critical tendency, furthermore, has been to attribute a
cultural explanation for this feature, often through a “Caribbean” lens that draws upon
theories of the Caribbean as a syncretic and hybrid space. Prominent among such
theories, for example, are Edouard Glissant’s conception of the Caribbean as “the estuary
of the Americas,” as well as well as Antonio Benitez-Rijo's suggestion that “The
literature of the Caribbean seeks to differentiate itself from the European not by
excluding cultural components that influenced its formation, but rather, by moving
toward the creation of an ethnologically promiscuous text” (Glissant 139; Benitez-Rijo
189).26 As evidenced by his own remarks, Diaz himself would endorse such readings of
were “bigger almost than Luba from Love and Rockets (but not as big as Beli)” (285). That Diaz
acknowledges the influence of the Hernandez Brothers in his characterization of Beli, while maintaining his
own character's superior endowment, might be seen as one way Diaz both honors his novel's “secret
fathers” while seeking to surpass them—by drawing bigger breasts, as it were.
26
See Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (1989) and Antonio Benitez-Rijo’s The Repeating
Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (1992).
147
his novel: “I'm a product of a fragmented world…In my mind the book was supposed to
take the shape of an archipelago; it was supposed to be a textual Caribbean. Shattered and
yet somehow holding together, somehow incredibly vibrant and compelling” (Slate).
As I have been suggesting, my own reading of Oscar Wao connects this aspect of
its language to a specific cultural context, namely to the vision of “Dominicanness” as
conceived by Yunior—which, like Diaz's “literary genealogy,” is best understood as
“more a fantasy than anything.” By reading the novel's discursive heterogeneity as an
expression of the narrator's “violent and aggressive capacity to incorporate, appropriate
and whatever linguistic materials enter into his verbal domain,” I propose a structural link
between the textual “promiscuity” of the narrative and the sexual promiscuity of its
narrator, and argue that both exemplify a certain “superior virility” associated with
hegemonic Dominican masculinity. As “one voice striving to achieve a singular literary
identity,” this “virile” writing also takes on an added significance in the Dominican
context, as a mark of the appearance of the dictator. As Diaz asserts in highly resonant
terms, his book is “all about the dangers of dictatorship, the dangers of the single voice”
(Slate). What we see in Oscar Wao, then, is the emergence of a dictatorial “single voice”
that achieves its “measure of manhood” through an aggressive appropriation and
supersession of “literary antecedents.” As Diaz confesses, “in some ways I couldn't have
written this book if it hadn't been for my love of other books. This book is all about a
reader's love…it is a love letter to the reading I did my entire life” (La Bloga). In a
subsequent interview, the gentleness of this “love,” epitomized by the image of penning
love letters, is replaced by slightly more aggressive and ominous overtones, starting with
the swapping of the language of love for one of obsession: “What can I tell you? I’m
148
book-obsessed and I wrote about a book-obsessed protagonist. The narrator too: bookobsessed. You better believe that I was fucking with other books written about the
Dominican Republic” (BOMB). What begins as Diaz's response to the allusions in his
novel's title transitions, somewhat abruptly and without prompting, to his intent to “fuck
with” other books. From here, the conversation veers down a more openly antagonistic
path (which I re-cite in part, for emphasis):
You better believe that I was fucking with other books written about the
Dominican Republic. I mean, have you read The Feast of the Goat?
Pardon me while I hate, but people jumped on that novel like it was the
greatest thing on earth! And you should have seen the Dominican elites
fawning over Vargas Llosa. The Great Vargas Llosa has deigned to visit
the Dominican Republic! Call me a nationalist slash hater, but Vargas
Llosa’s take on the Trujillo regime was identical to Crassweller’s and
Crassweller wrote his biography 40 years ago! (Danticat)
The rapidness with which paeans to a “reader's love” and being “book-obsessed” turns
into an invective against another author's work attests to the agonistic substratum beneath
this obsessive love, a notion deftly captured by the multiple valences of the term “fucking
with.” Diaz's self-posture as a “nationalist slash hater” in relation to the Peruvian Mario
Vargas Llosa also reveals a certain ethnonationalist impulse behind this inter-author
hostility. In decrying Vargas Llosa’s well-received 2000 novel about the Trujillo regime
for being overrated and unoriginal, Diaz also folds into this “agonistic interplay of
authorial voices” the work of American author Robert D. Crassweller, whose frequently
cited Trujillo: The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator (1960) has significantly
shaped understandings of the dictator both inside and outside the Dominican Republic
(and which Oscar Wao also directly mentions).27 For Diaz, the failure of Vargas Llosa's
27
Maja Horn stresses the way Crassweller's biography “has helped give rise to certain longstanding views
of the Trujillato” (16). Key among these, Horn argues, is: “(1) that the dictatorship was an exceptional
interim in the country's history driven by the exceptional (and often deemed as pathological) personality of
149
“take” on the Trujillo regime is precisely that it does not deviate from the overdetermined
and longstanding script already laid out by Crassweller.
In Oscar Wao, the narrator similarly finds space to “hate” on Vargas Llosa for his
lack of imagination: “Let's be honest, though. The rap about The Girl Trujillo Wanted is a
pretty common one on the Island. As common as krill...So common that Mario Vargas
Llosa didn't have to do much except open his mouth to sift it out of the air. There's one of
these bellaco tales in almost everybody's hometown. It's one of those easy stories because
in essence it explains it all” (244, emphasis in original). In this and other instances, the
narrator openly acknowledges and responds to previous texts about the Trujillo regime,
usually for the purpose of pointing out their narrative or epistemological shortcomings.
Another prominent example appears in the account of Belicia's school days in the
Dominican Republic, where the narrator comments “It wasn't like In the Time of the
Butterflies, where a kindly Mirabal Sister steps up and befriends the poor scholarship
student. No Miranda here: everybody shunned her” (83).28 In a similar spirit to “Negro,
please—this ain't a fucking comic book!” the dismissive tone in these citations are hard
to miss, either in the allegation that a particular plot is “common as krill” and “one of
those easy stories,” or in the pronouncement that there was “No Miranda here” to offer
any sentimental narratives of redemption or consolation.29
the dictator; and 2) that it was the logical continuation of a long history of caudillismo and of a "traditional"
political culture with authoritarian inclinations” (17, emphasis in original). See Horn, Masculinity After
Trujillo.
28
The character from In the Time of the Butterflies to which this description corresponds is actually named
Minerva, not Miranda; it is unclear whether this discrepancy was a mistake on Diaz's part, or if it was
meant to highlight Yunior's own narrative fallibility.
29
For more on how Diaz's interpretation of the Era of Trujillo has been mediated by his reading of novels
and historical texts about the period (including Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat and Alvarez's In the
Time of the Butterflies), and how his novel exhibits a Bloomian “anxiety of influence” toward these texts,
see Ignacio López-Calvo's essay “A Postmodern Plátano’s Trujillo.” For a more specific analysis of how
150
This struggle against literary antecedents, as I have been suggesting, can also be
read as a promiscuous “fucking with other books written about the Dominican Republic,”
a task abetted by an author’s rapacious consumption of prior texts. Among the extensive
corpus of textual precursors that Oscar Wao aggressively confronts, appropriates and
supersedes, I would stress the primacy of two literary traditions that critics have largely
glossed over in their analyses, and yet which are, ironically, exactly ones we have just
observed as being singled out in the narrative. The first of these, as represented by Vargas
Llosa's The Feast of the Goat, is the dictator novel, perhaps the genre that is most
commonly associated with Latin America after magical realism. The second, signaled in
the nod to Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies, I link to a tradition of recent U.S.
Latina writing, a category whose theoretical contours are still taking shape, but which
generally includes in its “canon” the works of Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo and
Cristina Garcia. In the next and final section, I examine how these two literary traditions
inform Diaz's construction of a Dominican American literary identity, as well as the
ways they also enable the articulation of broader, panethnic forms of affiliation.
IV.
As two antecedents aggressively consumed in Oscar Wao’s display of literary
virility, the Latin American dictator novel and the U.S. Latina literary tradition also
speaks directly to those two figures that the novel conceives as “fundamental” to
Dominican manhood: the dictator and the bellaco. In Diaz's novel, both these figures
manifest through Yunior's authorial “single voice.” As the literary dictator who literally
Oscar Wao might be responding to Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat, see Victor Figueroa,
“Disseminating 'El Chivo': Junot Diaz's response to Vargas Llosa in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao” (2013).
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dictates what gets represented and how it should be interpreted, Yunior's narration is
highlighted throughout the novel as very much an apparatus of power, and more
crucially, a power intimately connected to the written word. More than simply recounting
events, Yunior's transmission of the story at hand is emphasized as an act of writing, with
frequent references to “this book,” “our narrative,” “the manuscript” and “my first draft,”
all of which indicate a meticulous process of composing and editing the physical text
before the readers' eyes (6, 12, 114, 132). Thematically, the preoccupation with the clash
and confluence between dictators and writers is precisely what aligns Oscar Wao with the
genre of the Latin American dictator novel, as well as what sets it apart.30 In his
influential account of this tradition in The Voice of the Masters (1985), Roberto Gonzalez
Echevarria argues that such texts inquire “not only into the nature and ways of
contemporary political power, but also into the power, the energy that constitutes a
literary text, particularly a novel, and the function within it of the figure of the author”
(65). His analysis of Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo el supremo (1974), considered one of the
masterpieces of the genre, focuses on the image of a dictator and his amanuensis locked
in an agonistic, symbiotic struggle:
Dr. Francia's fear of the pasquinade, his abuse of Policarpo Patino (to
whom he dictates his own—Patino's—death sentence), his constant worry
about writing, all stem from the fact that he has found and used the power
implicit in language itself. The Supremo defines power as being able to do
30
By way of a quick overview: pretty much all scholarship on this tradition traces its inception to Facundo:
Civilización y barbarie, a deeply influential 1845 text by the Argentinian Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.
Most critics agree that while the deeper roots of this literature stretch back to the colonization of the New
World, its modern trajectory began with Sarmiento, and include such works as José Mármol’s Amalia
(1851), Ramón de Valle-Inclán’s El tyrano banderas(1926), Miguel Angel Asturias’s El señor presidente
(1946), and Enrique Lafourca de’s La fiesta del rey acab (1959). These days, the term “dictator novel” is
overwhelmingly associated with three seminal works from the 1970s that appeared as part of the “Latin
American Boom”: Augusto Roa Bastos’s Yo el supremo [I, the Supreme] (1974), Alejo Carpentier’s El
recurso del método [Reasons of State] (1974), and Gabriel García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca [The
Autumn of the Patriarch] (1975)
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through others what we are unable to do ourselves: language, being
separate from what it designates, is the very embodiment of power, for
things act and mean through it without ceasing to be themselves. Dr.
Francia has also realized that he cannot control language, particularly
written language, that it has a life of its own that threatens him. (79)31
For Echevarria, the dictator's recognition of language's power signals the fallibility and
deconstruction of his own authority, hinted in his fear of the “pasquinade” that would
make him an object of satire and or ridicule. In his own study of the genre, Robert
Spencer similarly highlights the novel's “capacity to mimic and occupy the authority of
the dictator,” which ultimately serves to “advertise its unreliability, eccentricity, and
susceptibility to the interruptions and rejoinders of other voices, to debunk it and deprive
it of its power to compel us” (146).32 Both Echevarria and Spencer view the figure of the
writer, and literary forms in general, as powerful sources of opposition against the forces
of dictatorship, primarily through their strategic wielding of the shifty an ambiguous
medium of language. In its exploration of the Trujillo dictatorship, Diaz's novel certainly
illustrates language's power to subvert the dictator's purported omnipotence, namely
through the “eccentricity,” “interruptions” and “rejoinders of other voices.” We have
observed, for instance, Yunior's rendering of Trujillo precisely in parodic and pasquinade
terms, and his ability to lay on the “hate” in the vibrant manner of a Muhammad Ali,
deploying epithets like the “Failed Cattle Thief,” “Fuckface,” the “culocrat,” “T-illo,”
and the “Dark Lord,” or more vividly as the “portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulato” (225).
31
Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, The Voice of the Masters (1985). For further critical perspectives on the
Latin American dictator novel, see Gerald Martin, Journeys Through the Labyrinth (1989); Michael Valdez
Moses, “Big Daddy: The Dictator Novel and the Liberation of Latin America” (2002); Moira Fradinger,
Binding Violence (2010).
32
Robert Spencer, “Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and the African Dictator Novel” (2012). As indicated in his title,
Spencer's essay reads Kenyan intellectual Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's 2006 novel Wizard of the Crow through the
frame of this predominantly Latin American literary tradition, and shows how this tradition proves
illuminating to an African context.
153
Apart from the person of the dictator, the apparatuses of his fearsome rule—his
lieutenants and sycophants, the ubiquitous secret police, the thugs who carry out the
actual acts of violence—also become targets of the narrative’s mockery, referred to as
“ringwraiths,” “homunculi,” “lambesacos,” “SIMians” and “the Elvises” (90, 110, 222,
142).
In this regard, Oscar Wao would seem to accord with Echevarria’s and Spencer’s
take on the dictator novel, with the supremacy of Trujillo’s power and the gravity of his
legacy deflated by the counter-power of Yunior’s verbally dexterous and irreverent
narration. At the same time, Diaz also inverts this script, by showing how this same
dexterous linguistic facility also becomes the instrument of Yunior’s own dictatorial
power, and one of the ways he comes into his inheritance as the “son of Trujillo.” Thus
while Echevarria emphasizes “it is not the voice, but writing, it is not the dictator-author,
but the secretary-writer, who reigns,” Diaz produces a dictator novel in which these two
sides—the “voice” and “writing,” or the “dictator-author” and the “secretary-writer”—
emerges as one and the same, and in fact reign together (76).
To this end, Diaz's novel foregrounds the ways the activities of this secretarywriter-editor assume pernicious forms, in fulfilling his mandate as sole storyteller. In one
of the novel’s striking plot devices, what initially presents itself as a third person
omniscient narrative turns out to be the first person narration of a specific character, with
the reader realizing that Yunior's singular consciousness has been structuring and filtering
the stories of all the other protagonists. Events outside his immediate knowledge, such as
Belicia’s personal history, are presented as the fruits of his research: “Due partially to
Beli's silence on the matter and other folks' lingering unease when it comes to talking
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about the regime, info...is fragmented; I’ll give you what I’ve managed to unearth,” with
these materials often punctuated by his distinctive macho commentary: “Even your
humble Watcher, reviewing her old pictures, is struck by what a fucking babe she was”
(119, 92). At times the details of the narrative are presented as having been modified for
aesthetic purposes, with one footnote revealing that “In my first draft, Samaná was
actually Jarabacoa, but then my girl Leonie, resident expert in all things Domo, pointed
out that there are no beaches in Jarabacoa. Beautiful rivers but no beaches” (132). In a
further bit of textual self-referentiality, it was also this native informant Leonie “who
informed me that the perrito (see first paragraphs of chapter one, “GhettoNerd at the End
of the World”) wasn’t popularized until the late eighties, early nineties, but that was one
detail I couldn’t change, just liked the image too much. Forgive me, historians of popular
dance, forgive me!” (132) On other occasions, facts are either obtained underhandedly
(“Was I really reading my roommate’s journal behind his back? Of course I was”), or flat
out withheld from the reader at Yunior’s discretion, as with the account of a character’s
suffering in prison: “A thousand tales I could tell you…to wring the salt from your
motherfucking eyes—but I’m going to spare you the anguish, the torture…spare you in
fact the events and leave you with only the consequences” (185, 250).
It is precisely because his storytelling is laced with these gestures of power and
control (i.e. alteration, incursion, censorship) that Yunior comes to function as what
Machado Saez rightly recognizes as the “dictator of the novel (or co-dictator, if you wish
to count Trujillo as a character)” (534). In Diaz’s iteration of the dictator novel, the
narrator Yunior performs the role of both Rao Bastos’ Supremo and his overworked
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secretary-scribe Patino.33 The notion of the dictator as not just an authorial voice who
dictates, but also a supreme editor and annotator, is further reinforced in Oscar Wao’s
much-discussed use of footnotes. As we have seen, the footnotes in Diaz’s novel serve
both the traditional function of providing relevant historical and cultural background, as
well as a literary function, as an extended vehicle for Yunior’s “single voice,” and its
attendant aggressions. A footnote on Trujillo’s successor, Dominican President Joaquin
Balaguer, begins: “Although not essential to our tale, per se, Balaguer is essential to the
Dominican one, so therefore we must mention him, even though I’d rather piss in his
face” (90). As such, the footnotes not only supplement and sustain the novel’s thematic
exploration of dictatorship, but also function as a sort of formal correlative, literally
underwriting Diaz’s assertion that “the real dictatorship is in the book itself, in its
telling.” Elaborating on this point, Diaz remarks: “We all dream dreams of unity, of
purity; well all dream that there’s an authoritative voice out there that will explain things,
including ourselves. If it wasn’t for our longing for these things, I doubt the novel or the
short story would exist in its current form. I’m not going to say much more on the topic.
Just remember: In dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak” (Slate).
As precisely a function of literary form, the footnotes in Oscar Wao do more than
mimic an “authoritative voice” typically associated with academic discourse; while they
33
In this light, Yunior and Oscar’s respective surnames prove telling. As revealed in his appearance in
Diaz’s short story collections Drown and This is How You Lose Her (2012), Yunior’s last name is de las
Casas, linking him to the 16th century Spanish historian, social reformer and Dominican friar Bartolomé de
las Casas, a highly prolific writer who not only chronicled the first decades of colonization in the West
Indies, but also argued vehemently against slavery and other atrocities committed upon indigenous peoples.
Oscar’s surname, de León, on the other hand, invokes the conquistador Juan Ponce de León, notable for
being the first colonial Governor of Puerto Rico and an early explorer of Florida. De León’s involvement in
the brutal Higüey massacre on Hispaniola led Bartolomé de las Casas, who accompanied him to the New
World, to notify the Spanish authorities in protest. In pointing out the significance of these intertwined
surnames, I hope to gesture toward possible readings in which Oscar function as the unknowable, absent
dictator at the center of the text, while Yunior is the interpreter-scribe.
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certainly “explain things,” they do so mainly as instruments of Yunior’s dictatorial
narrative voice. The gradual revelation of Yunior as “the only one speaking,” I would
add, does much to complicate what has become a dominant critical stance toward Diaz’s
text: the valorization of its polyvocality and discursive heterogeneity. In her essay
“Reassembling the Fragments,” for example, Monica Hanna argues that Oscar Wao
“strives for a ‘resistance history’ which acts as an alternative to traditional histories of the
Dominican Republic by invoking a multiplicity of narrative modes and genres…allowing
for a representation of national history that is cognizant of its various, sometimes
dissonant, elements” (500).34 Reading against these celebratory accounts, I would note
here that the “multiplicity of narrative modes and genres” on display in Diaz’s novel are
all ultimately disciplined by and subservient to the dominion of Yunior’s narration, which
unfolds, essentially, as one long controlled monologue. As Machado Saez astutely
suggests, Yunior’s monologue can be read as not only complicit with the “institutional
violence and ideology of dictatorship,” but that it merely adopts “an appealing guise of
polyvocality,” through which it “charms and entices the reader, especially the academic
reader, into becoming complicit with the heteronormative rationale used to police male
diasporic identity” (523, 526).35
If the act of “policing” identity is in large part what makes Yunior a dictator, then
this “appealing guise of polyvocality” is what makes him also a charismatic one.
34
Monica Hanna, “‘Reassembling the Fragments.’”
35
For all intents and purposes, I am in agreement with Machado Saez’s general skepticism toward
“dominant readings of Oscar Wao as a transgressive text that challenges the oppressive structures of the
nation state.” Specifically, Machado Saez reads Diaz’s novel, in the vein of Doris Summer, as a
“foundational romance” of the Dominican diaspora, but one that “emphasizes the Dominican Republic’s
history of dictatorship as the decisive element shaping belonging” (523). While I am indebted to her
complex readings of Yunior-as-literary dictator, my own argument looks beyond the scope of Machado
Saez’s focus on topics of gender and sexuality, and diaspora.
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Seducing critics and readers alike with his deftness of language and breadth of allusion,
Yunior’s narration is littered with virtuosic bilingual formulations like “Respectability so
dense in la grande that you’d need a blowtorch to cut it, and a guardedness so Minas
Tirith in la pequeña that you’d need the whole of Mordor to overcome it” (78). Yet what
many commentators largely gloss over is that the novel's multiple discourses nonetheless
require an authoritarian “single voice” to hold it all together, lest the work risk slipping
into so many fragmented and “dissonant” parts. In his review of the novel for The New
York Times, A.O. Scott’s description of Yunior’s narrative performance subtly touches
upon this precariousness: “Holding all this together—just barely, but in the end
effectively—is a voice that is profane, lyrical, learned and tireless, a riot of accents and
idioms coexisting within a single personality.” Even as he lauds Yunior’s “profane,
lyrical, learned and tireless” narrative voice, Scott's observation that it holds together
“just barely” underscores the urgent necessity that of second element, a certain brutal
“effectiveness,” without which the whole enterprise threatens to devolve into anarchy.
For critics like Scott, it would seem, the “riot” of accents and idioms in Diaz’s novel
“works” because of the “single personality”—the dictator—holding the text together.
Such an image also calls to mind the novel’s very first footnote about the Trujillo, the
text’s ur-dictator: that, along with the familiar mixture of “violence, intimidation,
massacre, rape, co-optation, and terror,” his achievements also include “last, but not least,
the forging of the Dominican peoples into a modern nation state” (3). The term “forge”
here can be interpreted in two different ways: as an act of building or creation, but also
indicating a sense of illegitimacy, as a forgery or counterfeit, especially as pertains to acts
of writing. If the “modern state” that is the Dominican Republic is “forged” through
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Trujillo’s oppressive violence, then Diaz’s novelistic explorations of an identity
appended to that state partakes of a similar logic, as a “textual Caribbean” forged into
literary coherence by its author.
Finally, that Scott titles his review “Dreaming in Spanglish” is also highly
evocative in its naked reference to Dreaming in Cuban, the acclaimed 1992 debut novel
by Cuban American author Cristina Garcia. The positioning of Diaz’s novel alongside
Garcia’s reflects more than a superficial commonality based on a shared Caribbean
heritage; rather, I would suggest, it speaks to the profound and intimate ways that
Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban—and to a lesser extent, other fiction by U.S. Latinas—
might be considered among the most eminent of Ocar Wao’s literary bedfellows. Here I
wish to return to Diaz’s characterization of the allures of both dictatorship and literature,
and their shared connection to “dreams of unity, of purity.” On the literature side,
particularly in the realm of American literature, nowhere is this longing for purity, unity
and cohesion a more pressing prerogative than the in case of ethnic literatures, as seen in
the numerous debates surrounding authenticity, canonicity and political value that cohere
around works by African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latino/as and
other minority writers. Of these, the latter category presents its own set of vexed
relationships to these issues, given the relatively recent ascendance of “Latino/a” as a
pan-ethnic label of affective identification, a phenomenon generally dated to around the
1980s. Before then, the dominant tendency had been the separation of political, literary
and intellectual traditions by its constituent subgroups based on national origin, such as
Chicano/a, Puerto Rican, Cuban Americans and Dominican Americans, with each group
occupying a unique position within relations of power and privilege in U.S. society,
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which were in turn informed by the specific geopolitical relationship between their
country of origin and the United States. These distinctions, alongside larger economic
and cultural differences—for instance, within regional variations of the Spanish
language—thus loom large over any attempt by writers and academics to conceive of an
umbrella “Latino/a” identity, or a corresponding category of “Latino/a” literature. 36
While anthologies gesturing toward a “canon” of pan-Latino/a literature began to
appear the 1990s, since then two events can be regarded as monumental to signaling a
panethnic consolidation of the field: the inaugural issue of the journal Latino Studies in
2003, and the publication of the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature in 2010.37 In her
review of the Norton Anthology, Kirsten Silva Gruesz notes how, unlike its predecessor
and professed model, the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996), the
Latino volume “occupies the unusual position of presenting an authoritative canon for a
body of literature that doesn’t yet have a literary history”; that is, Gruesz observes, the
anthology seems to have appeared “before its compilers had coherent narratives about the
tradition to offer” (335, 341). Framed against this context, my goal here is to think about
Junot Diaz not only as a Dominican American writer, but also as a Latino one, with all of
the requisite conflicts and contradictions that this approach implies. Namely, I read Oscar
36
For an extended discussion of how U.S. Latino/a writers have—or more often, have not—addressed the
concept of a “Latino” identity that encompasses various national-origin groups, see Marta CamineroSantangelo, On Latinidad (2007).
37
In their recent critical study of this emergent tradition, Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado Saez’s The
Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of the Post-Sixties Literature provides a list of the above-mentioned
anthologies, which include: Masterpieces of Latino Literature (1994), Latina: Women’s Voices from the
Borderlands (1995), The Latino Reader: An American Literary Tradition from 1542 to the Present (1997),
The Prentice Hall Anthology of Latino Literature (2001), Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature
of the United States (2001) and Latino Boom: An Anthology of U.S. Latino Literature (2005). Alongside
these collections of Latino/a creative writing are also a number of anthologies of Latino/a literary criticism,
including A Companion to Latino/a Studies (2007), edited by Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo, as well as
Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism (2007) edited by Richard Perez and Lyn Di Iorio Sandin.
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Wao as offering its own attempt to work through the question of a “Latino/a” literary
tradition, and forward an “authoritative” response; more specifically, Diaz’s literary
performance of dictatorship in the novel becomes the apparatus through which the novel
seeks to “forge” something of its own “coherent narrative” of Latino/a literary history—
even if the ultimate coherence of the resultant narrative remains up for debate.
Central to my argument is the novel’s sense of its own “virile” mimetic writing, a
posture consonant with the hypersexual Dominican manhood embodied in its narratordictator. In Oscar Wao, the imagination of a “Latino/a” category that transcends nationspecific groups is frequently couched in the realm of heterosexual desire. Following a
depressive funk over his perpetual singleness, Oscar “tried to polish up what remained of
his Dominicanness, tried to be more like his cursing swaggering cousins, if only because
he had started to suspect that in their Latin hypermaleness there might be an answer”
(30). Lola’s girlfriends, targets of Oscar’s adolescent crushes, are described as “the sort
of hot-as-balls Latinas who only dated weight-lifting morenos or Latino cats with guns in
their cribs” (26). While images of “Latin hypermaleness” and “weight-lifting morenos”
resonate more with Yunior, it is Oscar, interestingly, whose heterosexual desire is
foregrounded as generating affective attachments across different Latino/a groups.
During an aberrant childhood period when he was “something of a Casanova,” who his
mother describes as “our little Porfirio Rubirosa,” Oscar briefly had “two little girlfriends
at the same time”: the Peruvian Maritza Chacón and the Puerto Rican Olga Polanco (12,
13). The novel’s account of this prepubescent fling—innocent and inconsequential
though it was—nonetheless provides a compelling sketch of Oscar’s childhood social
field, and its attendant ethnographic boundaries. Olga, we are told, “lived in the house at
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the end of the block that his mother complained about because it was filled with
puertoricans who were always hanging out on their porch drinking beer. (What, they
couldn’t have done that in Cuamo? Oscar’s mom asked crossly.)” (13). Growing up,
Maritza transforms into “the flyest guapa in Paterson, one of the Queens of New
Peru…probably the only Peruvian girl on the planet with pelo curlier than his sister’s (he
hadnt’ heard of Afro-Peruvians yet, or of a town called Chincha)” (18). These vignettes
illustrate an urban space that sees the commingling of Dominicans with other Latino/a
groups, and also functions as a vector for various transnational, translocal connections—
linking Paterson, New Jersey, for instance, to places like Cuamo and Chincha.
Later on, Yunior recounts one of Oscar’s unrequited loves in college: the
formidable Jenni Muñoz, a “boricua chick from East Brick City” and “Puerto Rican
goth,” and for whom “Oscar’s adoration [was] like the light of a new sun” (182, 185).
What I wish to point out here is the way the novel figures Oscar’s own rapacious and
intense desires as also a desire for panethic affective bonds. This, in turn, adumbrates
other moments in the text when a “Latin hypermaleness” is associated with the forging,
through sex, of a conception of “we Latin types.” Although Yunior is less vocal about the
ethnicities of his countless sexual conquests, at one point Oscar chastises him for
cheating on Lola by saying “You should never have had carnal relations with that
Paraguayan girl” (313). The sexual tastes of Belicia’s former lover, a Pimp for the
Trujillo regime known only as “the Gangster,” are also characterized in distinctly
hemispheric terms: “the Gangster might have harbored love for Venezuela and its many
long-legged mulatas, and burned for the icy beauties of Argentina, and swooned over
Mexico’s incomparable brunettes, but it was Cuba that clove his heart, that felt to him
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like home” (122). While the women of Venezuela, Argentina and Mexico are described
in physical terms, it is “Cuba”—the country itself, rather than any female type found
there—that cleaves the “heart” and feels like “home.” The emphasis on the affective
primacy of Cuba is no mere narrative flourish, but turns out to be central to the novel’s
rendering of this panethnic desire. In the story’s one example of a functional interLatino/a coupling, Lola eventually marries a man Yunior refers to as “Cuban Reuben,”
with whom she has a daughter named Isis. At the end of the novel, after Oscar’s murder
following a doomed sexual affair in the Dominican Republic, it is the Dominican-Cuban
Isis who comes to embody all of Yunior’s maudlin hopes for dispelling the fukú: “And
maybe, just maybe, if she’s as smart and as brave as I’m expecting she’ll be, she’ll take
all we’ve done and all we’ve learned and add her own insights and she’ll put an end to it.
That is what, on my best days, I hope. What I dream.” (331).
The focus on Cuba, and the possibility of a joint Cuban-Dominican (American)
“insight,” brings me back to the centrality of Cristina Garcia to Diaz’s literary project,
and its own invocation of a panethnic “hope” and “dream.” As previously mentioned,
Garcia’s work is often grouped among a vibrant and popular tradition of writing by U.S.
Latina authors that include Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984), Ana
Castillo’s So Far From God (1993) and Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their
Accents (1991) and In the Time of the Butterflies (1994). These works have long been
considered canonical among U.S. multicultural literatures, not least for their exploration
of race and identity alongside themes of domesticity, patriarchy, gendered spaces, as well
as transnationalism and migration.38 While Alvarez’s work might seem on the surface to
38
For a critical account of the above authors as part of a “canonical” Latina literary tradition, see Ellen
McCracken, Latina Narrative (1999).
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have the most in common with Diaz’s (both authors explore Dominican American
identity and the history of the Trujillo dictatorship), I argue here that it is in fact Garcia’s
Dreaming in Cuban that resonates most powerfully in Oscar Wao, particularly in the
chapters focused on Lola.
Much like the transnational shifts between the United States and the Dominican
Republic in Diaz’s novel, Dreaming in Cuban moves between the United States and
Cuba, focusing on three generations of women in the Cuban Del Pino family. The
youngest of these, Pilar, is an American-born teenager whose narrative of self-discovery
and political awakening is driven in large part by her conflicts with her overbearing
mother, Lourdes, a relationship that often veers into the dictatorial and violent (with also
a tinge of the privacy-invasion we see in Yunior’s treatment of Oscar). As Pilar tells us,
“My mother reads my diary, tracks it down under the mattress, or to the lining of my
winter coat. She says it’s her responsibility to know my private thoughts” (26). When,
through such surveillance, Lourdes learns that Pilar masturbates in the tub, “she beat me
in the face and pulled my hair out in big clumps. She called me a desgraciada and ground
her knuckles into my temples. Then she forced me to work in her bakery every day after
school for twenty-five cents an hour. She leaves me nasty notes on the kitchen table
reminding me to show up, or else” (27). Eventually Pilar decides to run away, hoping to
end up in Cuba, but only makes it as far as Miami before she is caught by an aunt, who
calls her mother to retrieve her; during her long bus journey, Pilar recalls how “back in
Cuba the nannies used to think I was possessed…They called me brujita, little witch”
(28, emphasis in original).
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In Oscar Wao, the sections that detail the relationship between Lola and Belicia
also emphasize the volcanic nature of a similar daughter-mother dyad. Notably, the
chapters about Lola are the only ones in the novel to be narrated in the first person by
someone other than Yunior—although they are punctuated by Yunior’s narrative
inflections, strongly hinting that they are transcribed by or otherwise channeled through
him. This formal technique bears a striking resemblance to the way Dreaming in Cuban
also shifts between myriad first and third person points of view, with the sections
pertaining to Pilar remaining strictly in the first person. “For as long as you could
remember you had bruja ways; even your mother will begrudge you that much,” muses
an enigmatic, italicized second person narration that frames the start of Lola’s narrative,
most likely a transitional voice that belongs to Yunior (53).39 Later, Lola speaks of “that
crazy feeling that started the whole mess, the bruja feeling that comes singing out of my
bones” (72). Like the “brujita” Pilar, the teenaged Lola’s interactions with her mother are
marked by an antagonism and violence that the novel portrays as downright tyrannical:
“She would hit us anywhere, in front of anyone, always free with the chanclas and the
correa…She was my Old World Dominican mother and I was her only daughter…which
meant it was her duty to keep me crushed under her heel” (55). Indeed, Diaz’s novel
seems to seize upon the ethnic literature trope of the “Old World” mother only to ratchet
it up tenfold, depicting Lola’s life with Beli as akin to the arbitrary terror and
unpredictable menace of living under a dictatorship:
39
The most compelling piece of evidence that this second-person voice is Yunior addressing Lola, rather
than Lola addressing the reader, is that it contains several turns of phrase that recur throughout Yunior’s
subsequent narration, and are in keeping with Yunior’s hypersexual nature. For instance, the description of
Belicia’s “extraordinary train-wrecking secondary sex characteristics” in the Lola section appears later in
the account of Belicia’s youth, when she is said to have experienced a “Summer of Her Secondary Sex
Characteristics” (51, 52, 91).
165
Most of the time she just looked at me with the stinkeye, but sometimes
without warning she would grab me by my throat and hang on until I pried
her fingers from me. She didn’t bother talking to me unless it was to make
death threats. When you grow up you’ll meet me in a dark alley when you
least expect it and then I’ll kill you and nobody will know I did it!
Literally gloating as she said this. (61)40
Here the foreboding “or else” that punctuates Lourdes’ note to Pilar finds its magnified,
Dominican apotheosis in Belicia’s “death threat” against her own daughter. Lola also
reaches her breaking point and runs away, and like Pilar, she is eventually caught and
turned in by a relative—this time her own brother Oscar. Finally, the first Lola chapter
ends with her being sent to the Dominican Republic to stay with her grandmother, a
moment that the novel presents as a weighty emotional crossroads, which Lola compares
to the physical thrill of a track competition: “And that’s when it hit with the force of a
hurricane. The feeling...I felt like I always did at the last seconds of a race, when I was
sure that I was going to explode. She [my abuela] was about to say something and I was
waiting for whatever she was going to tell me. I was waiting to begin” (75). Likewise,
one of Pilar’s sections in Dreaming in Cuban concludes at a similar precipice, which also
gets enfolded in the sensation of an engrossing physical activity (in this case, playing a
musical instrument): “The thick strings vibrate through my fingers, up my arms, down
my chest. I don’t know what I’m doing but I start thumping that old spruce dresser of an
instrument for all it’s worth, thumping and thumping, until I feel my life begin” (181).
It is in these female-centric chapters of Oscar Wao that Diaz’s novel starts to
resemble a certain kind of Latina writing, one featuring a certain kind of Latina
40
The remarkable similarities between Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban and Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao are numerous, and could comprise an entirely separate study. Some of these include: closely
paralleled scenes of travel to the island homeland; the benign and wise grandmother figure who resides
there (Celia del Pino and La Inca); the pervasive, sudden threat of sexual violence; a mother physically
scarred by past trauma (Lourdes’ scars on her stomach from her rape, and Belicia’s scars on her back from
her childhood scalding); Pilar and Lola’s shared love for the punk music scene of the early 80s; Belicia’s
and Lourdes’ shared disdain for Puerto Ricans, and so on.
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protagonist and centered on specific tropes such as daughter-mother-grandmother
dynamics, running away from home, a romantic gaze toward the diasporic homeland,
survival in a heteropatriarchal world, sexual awakening, and the “beginning” of selfdiscovery, among others. In doing so, I would argue, Diaz writes himself into what
Raphael Dalleo has termed an “intertextual poetics of relation” that “establishes and
interrogates connections to other [Latino/a] groups and traditions” (4).41 Specifically,
Dalleo argues that Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban “begins to codify a Latina literary
tradition” in its intertextual links to other works by Latina authors, particularly Sandra
Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (9). For Diaz, however, this “intertextual poetics
of relation” assumes a more aggressive cast, as a “complex agonistic interplay of
authorial voices” that also expresses his text’s manifest “virility.” Crudely stated, I
propose that Diaz’s text approaches the Latina literary tradition in a way that parallels his
male characters’ approach to the community of Latina women: that is, as a forceful erotic
desire that takes the form of appropriation, possession, and a “fucking with other books.”
In other words, given Diaz’s admission of Garcia’s influence, how might we read Oscar
Wao as not merely a “love letter” to Dreaming in Cuban, but something like an
aggressive and virile intertextual seduction of the Cuban American author?
In this way, Diaz’s text aggressively incorporates a tradition of Latina literature
into the “coherent narrative” of Latino/a literary history it wishes to tell, while also
foregrounding set of thematic and aesthetic concerns that the novel conceives as
specifically Dominican: the forms of dictatorship, as well as a related “Latin
41
See Raphael Dalleo’s “How Cristina Garcia Lost Her Accent, and Other Latina Conversations” (2005).
In delineating this notion of intertextuality, Dalleo draws upon both Henry Louis Gates’ notion of
signifyin(g) as a (re)writing with a difference, as well as Edouard Glissant’s concept of relation and
“creolization” as a way of “imagining identity as booth rooted and in process” (9). In both cases, Dalleo
singles out ways of reading the relationship between texts and identities that are also tied to a specific
cultural lens: namely, a black diasporic and a Caribbean lens, respectively.
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hypermaleness” that directs its promiscuous desire across national-group lines. Like all
the other “polyvocal” and “dissonant” elements reassembled by Diaz’s text, this
incorporation occurs under the dictatorial imperative of Yunior’s narration, a point that
Diaz also stresses in relation to the specific issue of writing across gender lines. In an
interview with LAist, when asked how hard it was for him to “get into the female
subjectivity, to view things from the perspective of Lola, Belicia,” Diaz responds:
Ones of the good things is that I wasn't trying to direct it, it was all being
filtered through Yunior’s voice. What I was happiest with, even though
these women are being filtered through this aberrant, weirdly masculine,
polymathic voice, what I wanted to get across was that the sense that you
were encountering the female subjectivity despite all this white noise from
Yunior. That a voice like Yunior could, without losing itself, render what
it's like to be around these kinds of women.42
To conclude by way of restating one of the driving questions behind this chapter: how
can we read Diaz’s literary performance of dictatorship as forging—in both senses of the
term—some notion of a pan-ethnic Latino/a affiliation? Here I call our attention to two
recent and influential attempts at the tricky theorization of Latinidad. Embracing the side
of specificity, Juan Flores asserts that “while there is a certain inevitability in the
formation of pan-ethnic concepts like ‘Latino’ or ‘Asian-American,’” the sociological
validity of these constructs depends overridingly on the contextual specifics of each
group. Thus, for Flores, “Latino” only holds up when it is qualified by the national-group
angle or optic from which it is uttered: there is a “Chicano/Latino” or “Cuban/Latino”
perspective, but no meaningful one that is simply “Latino” (8). From within this premise,
however, Flores does propose several useful frameworks for conceiving of “Pan-Latino”
formations—for instance, as a series of “Trans-Latino” crossings, or as a “Latino
42
From “LAist Interview: Junot Diaz, Author and Pulitzer Prize Winner” (2008).
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imaginary” in the spirit of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities.” From a broader
scope, Juan Gonzalez begins his magisterial study of the Latino/a population in the
United States by asserting that “U.S. economic and political domination over Latin
America has always been – and continues to be – the underlying reason for the massive
Latino presence here. Quite simply, our vast Latino population is the unintended harvest
of the U.S. empire” (xvii).
In a sense, Diaz’s novel straddles both of these positions, which are certainly not
mutually exclusive. From his specifically Dominican/Latino optic, the Latin AmericanCaribbean experience of dictatorship can certainly be taken as a defining quality from
which to relate separate members to a larger whole, an imagined community of “we Latin
types,” even if the unity and coherence of this trans-Latino community has to be imposed
from above, dictatorially—as is also the case with any conception of literary history. As
Juan Gonzalez would also remind us, it is specifically U.S.-backed dictatorships that
“Latin types” are excellent at tolerating. It is as the focal point of these twin lenses of
dictatorship and American empire, perhaps, that the Dominican American experience
finds itself at the vanguard a Latino imaginary. The chilenos and argentinos, of course—
and, as I begin my next chapter by showing, the cubanos—are still appealing.
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CHAPTER FOUR
Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone…Generalíssimo Corleone?
The Godfather: Part II and the Form of Dynastic Succession
I.
December 2014 brought about a rather momentous sea change in United States
foreign policy, when U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro
jointly announced the beginning of a process to normalize relations between the United
States and Cuba. This comes after five decades of economic sanctions and a devastating
embargo against the Caribbean nation following Fidel Castro’s rise to power in 1959.
Certainly, the renewed focus and discourse on Cuba coincides fortuitously with many of
the topics and contexts touched upon in this study. Like the continued division of the
Korean peninsula, for instance, the Cuban embargo represents one of the more egregious
relics of Cold War geopolitics to have lingered this far into the twenty-first century;
meanwhile, Fidel Castro’s authoritarian rule—now passed on to his brother—has long
prompted many observers to characterize him as the last of the old school caudillos.1 As
the world eagerly awaits ramifications of this unfolding development, and with an even
longer incubation period before it registers in the literary-aesthetic realm, I would now
like to turn our attention to another landmark cultural artifact from the last century, one
that has also received a degree of renewed attention thanks to the recent U.S.-Cuba thaw.
1
See, for instance, Maurice Halperin’s “Fidel’s Power to Disrupt,” in Caudillos: Dictators in Spanish
America. Interestingly, several commentators have made this connection by comparing Castro to Spanish
dictator Francisco Franco, who referred to himself as “El Caudillo.” See Anne Louise Bardach, “Fidel’s
fade-out” in Los Angeles Times, and Irving Louis Horowitz, “Castro and the Caudillo” (2007). More
recently, Cristina Garcia’s latest novel King of Cuba (2013) depicts the modern day life of the aging “El
Commandante,” paralleled with the aging cohort of Florida Cuban exiles who are his sworn enemies, as a
comical, Grumpy Old Men-esque farce.
170
December 2014 also marks the 40th anniversary of Paramount Pictures’ release of
The Godfather: Part II (1974) director Francis Ford Coppola’s sequel to his wildly
popular and critically beloved The Godfather (1972), which was based on Mario Puzo’s
bestselling novel of the same name. In the weeks following the announcements from
Washington and Havana, numerous news reports and opinion pieces have invoked The
Godfather: Part II, which features, memorably, an extended sequence set in Havana that
culminates with the victory of Castro’s Cuban Revolution on New Year’s Day, 1959.2 As
the headlines of some of these pieces would suggest—“‘Godfather II’ Explains Why
Dominicans Worry Over U.S.-Cuba” and “The ‘Hyman Roth’ Play: Cuba-related Stocks
Rally”—the film remains relevant not only as a history lesson, but also as a handy
analytical tool for “explaining” current events, whether in its implications for Caribbean
regional economies or U.S. financial markets. The very idea of a “Hyman Roth” play
(named after the character played by Lee Strasberg) for Cuba stocks—the short version:
start investing, but be cautious—attest to the extent to which Coppola’s Godfather films
have become a prominent part of the American cultural lexicon, and often converted into
an easy hermeneutic shorthand.3
In many ways, Coppola’s films and Puzo’s novel likewise offer a productive site
for tying together some of the driving threads behind this study, and for further exploring
the connections between ethnic identity, dictator figures and narrative genres. Leaving
2
See Ezra Fieser, “‘Godfather II’ Explains Why Dominicans Worry Over U.S.-Cuba,” Bloomberg Business
John Melloy, “The ‘Hyman Roth’ Play: Cuba-related Stocks Rally,” CNBC; John Sununu, “Opinion: Faith
in Cuba Misplaced,” The Boston Globe, Karl Vick, “Fidel Loses the Race to the Grave,” Time.
3
In 2009, Princeton University Press even published a volume titled The Godfather Doctrine, which
repurposes Coppola’s film as a parable for the decline of post-Cold War American power, emblematized by
the aging Don Vito Corleone, while his heirs represents the three leading approaches to U.S. Foreign
policy: liberal institutionalism (Tom Hagen), Bush-era neoconservatism (Sonny) and the realist school
(Michael). See: John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell, The Godfather Doctrine: A Foreign Policy
Parable (2009).
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aside for now the obvious, broad-stroke resonances between the “ethnic strongman” trope
and the mafia dons of American gangster narratives, I want to begin with a consideration
of the aforementioned Cuba scenes from The Godfather: Part II. Just as each of my
previous chapters focused on the constellation of an ethnic American subject alongside an
foreign ethnic dictator—Richard Wright’s wary interactions with Kwame Nkrumah, John
Kwang’s historical analogy to Syngman Rhee (and Henry Park’s “ready connections” to
both), Yunior’s narrative inheritance from his diasporic “father” Rafael Trujillo—so too
does my reading of Coppola’s film begin with a moment of reckoning between a
domestic ethnic strongman and a transnational political counterpart: specifically, the
encounter between the Italian American mafia don and the Cuban caudillo, which
becomes an expressive “primal scene” for the film’s construction of its protagonist,
Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino). As I hope to argue, far from serving as a mere
exotic backdrop for the gangster plot, the Cuban Revolution in fact plays a critical role in
the film’s articulation of the mafia don-as-ethnic strongman, by further framing this
figure within the transnational symbolic economy of the military dictator.
II.
Here it helps to recall what brings Michael Corleone to Cuba in time to witness
the revolution in the first place: his business dealings with Castro’s predecessor and
ideological nemesis, the corrupt, pro-capitalist and U.S.-backed President of Cuba,
Fulgencio Batista.4 Having succeeded his father Vito (played by Marlon Brando) as head
4
The historical Fulgencio Batista twice served as the head of state of Cuba: the first time as an elected
President (1940-1944) and the second time as a military dictator (1952-1959), before being overthrown as a
result of the Cuban Revolution. It was during the second period of his rule that Cuba became notorious for
being a venal and repressive police state, a lucrative mafia haven, and an eager supplicant to U.S. corporate
172
of the Corleone crime family at the end of the first film, and subsequently ascending to
the heights of the American underworld, Michael’s trip to Cuba represents the logical
next step of his aggressive capitalist expansion, as well as his assimilation into the
American mainstream. This is a process that begins with his moving of the family
business out the ethnic enclave of New York’s Little Italy to the WASP environs of
Nevada, abandoning the olive oil business that had been his father’s base of operations in
exchange for the life of a casino magnate. In light of this trajectory, Michael’s plan to
invest in casinos in Cuba, along with veteran Jewish gangster Hyman Roth, signifies the
completion of his entrance into the U.S. power establishment—a Man in the Gray Silk
Suit who is also now a full-fledged imperialist.
In one pivotal scene, Michael and Roth arrive in Havana to attend a meeting with
Batista, as part of a delegation of executives representing various American business
interests. The scene, though brief, is thematically straightforward in its indictment of U.S.
economic predation in Latin America, and the mobsters and friendly dictators who abet
it—it can be read, in a word, as Coppola’s take on the “fukú story.” Closely linked to the
telling of this story, furthermore, is the importance of naming in this scene. After some
welcoming remarks, in which the Cuban President thanks “this distinguished group of
American industrialists,” the camera pans slowly across the large conference table, first
down one side, then the other, passing over the face of each attendee as the president lists
their names and respective organizations: “Mr. William Shaw, representing the General
Fruit Company; Messrs. Corngold and Dant, of the United Telephone and Telegraph
interests. A staunch anticommunist, Batista, for all intents and purposes, can be likened to a Cuban
Syngman Rhee.
173
Company, Mr. Petty, Regional Vice President of the Pan American Mining Corporation;
Mr. Robert Allan of South American Sugar.”
Though it unfolds as an extended roll call, narratively speaking the scene is not at
all interested in introducing the viewer to any characters that might advance or
complicate the plot, but rather to a set of forces. For these nondescript organization men
who play no further role in the film, it is the names of their respective firms that
distinguish them, some of which deliberately invoke real-life companies with long
histories of exploitation in Latin America (most obviously, the United Fruit Company
and International Telephone & Telegraph). In his analysis of the film, Fredric Jameson
reads in such scenes the unveiling of “American capitalism in its most systematized and
computerized, dehumanized, ‘multinational’ and corporate form” (145).5 Within this
context, Michael’s own introduction is notable for its relative obliqueness: “Mr. Michael
Corleone of Nevada, representing our associates in tourism and leisure activities.” Unlike
the others, Michael remains untethered from any clear institutional or even national
affiliation; he represents vague “associates” rather than a corporate entity, and his origin
is tied to the sub-national Nevada rather than the United States.
But ultimately, the person whose lack of proper designation stands out most
prominently in this scene is not Michael, but the figure who presides at its center: the
5
Jameson, Fredric, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979). In Jameson’s reading, Coppola’s
Godfather films posit the mafia as an ideological critique of capitalist excess—a critique that emerges most
fully in Part II, which strips away the sentimental trappings of a “utopian” family sphere that occluded the
full power of the critique in the first film. Instead, the second film reveals the romantic fantasy of mafia for
what it truly is, a nightmare of big business gone wrong: “When indeed we reflect on an organized
conspiracy against the public, one which reaches into every corner of our daily lives and our political
structures to exercise a wanton ecocidal and genocidal violence at the behest of distant decision-makers and
in the name of an abstract conception of profit—surely it is not about the Mafia, but rather about American
business itself” (145). For Jameson, naturally, the Havana scenes represent the “climatic end moment of
this historical development…when American business, and with it American imperialism, meet that
supreme ultimate obstacle to their internal dynamism and structurally necessary expansion which is the
Cuban Revolution” (147).
174
unnamed President of Cuba. Although universally accepted by audiences to be the
dictator Batista, and commonly identified as such, it is important to note that film never
actually refers to this character by name. Played by Panamanian actor Tito Alba, the
character is listed in the credits as “Cuban President,” and in the scene he is addressed
only as “Mr. President.” To be clear, I am not arguing that Coppola intended for the
character to not be Batista; in fact, based on the depiction of certain historical details—
the gift of a golden telephone from “United Telephone and Telegraph,” the New Year’s
Eve resignation and exile—the film makes every indication that this president absolutely
is meant to be Batista, with arguments to the contrary seeming highly unlikely. Rather, I
merely wish to suggest that the unnamed status of this character remains a relevant detail,
especially in light of the film’s open references to U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower
and, more crucially, Fidel Castro.
The first mention of Castro, notably, takes place in a scene immediately following
the meeting with Batista, in which the crime genre briefly segues into an international
political thriller in the Graham Greene mold. While driving through a crowded Havana
street, Michael’s car is stopped at a military roadblock, while up ahead government
troops line up a group of captured rebels against a wall. Here Coppola doubles down on
conveying the war-zone like qualities of Havana, from the uniformed soldiers and
protruding rifles lining both embankments above the inclined street, to the conspicuous
troop carriers, jeep—and even a tank—visible further in the background [Figure 1].
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Figure 1. The gangster film as war film/political thriller.
As Michael observes from his car, one of the detainees breaks away from his captors and
tackles a nearby commanding officer, shouting “Viva Fidel!” before detonating a
concealed grenade and killing them both. Shortly after, Michael recounts this incident to
a gathering of his criminal associates who, like him, are also in Cuba to invest in casinos
under the auspices of Batista’s government.6 “It occurred to me,” Michael remarks, “the
soldiers are paid to fight. The rebels aren’t.” When Roth, looking skeptical, asks what he
thinks this means, Michael replies “they [Castro’s rebels] can win.” Here it would seem
that the distinction famously raised in the first film, and in Puzo’s novel—between what’s
“business” and what’s “personal”—proves relevant even in the world of geopolitics.
While this display of prescient political savvy feels somewhat dampened by the
6
For a history of the close and profitable association between the Cuban dictator Batista and the American
mafia, a relationship in which prominent organized crime figures like Meyer Lansky (whom the character
of Hyman Roth is based on) played a key role, see Jack Calhoun, Gangsterismo: The United States, Cuba,
and the Mafia, 1933 to 1966 (2013) and T.J. English, Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and
Then Lost It to the Revolution (2008). In an interview following the publication of his book, English asserts
“Most Americans, everything they know about this era is from the movie Godfather II.”
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easy hindsight from 1974, Michael’s intuition is contrasted against the arrogant myopia
of his allies, Roth and Batista. In response to Michael’s concerns, Roth retorts that “This
country has had rebels for the last fifty years. It’s in their blood. Believe me, I know. I’ve
been coming here since the twenties. We were running molasses out of Havana when you
were a baby.” More pointedly, Michael’s strategic acumen provides a stark counterpoint
to the Cuban President. When pressed about the status of rebel activity and its
implications for American businesses in the earlier meeting, the president replies “my
staff indicates, with assurance, that we’ll drive them out of the city of Santa Clara before
the New Year,” and follows by quipping: “I want to put you all at ease. We will tolerate
no guerillas in the casinos or the swimming pools.” The irony of this statement, of course,
is underscored by the famous final moments of Cuba scenes, which depict the president’s
resignation and Havana’s descent into a frenzy of rioting and looting. As victorious mobs
shouting Castro’s name storm the gaming houses and smash slot machines onto the
ground, it seems that contrary to assurances, the guerillas would come to occupy the
casinos and swimming pools after all.
What I wish to point out about these scenes from The Godfather: Part II, most
importantly, is that more than simply rendering him a witness or bystander to this pivotal
historical event, the film positions Michael at the forefront of the Cuban political
situation. He is first positioned alongside Batista—connected through that symbol of elite
power, the conference table—only to grasp the state of the nation with greater clarity than
its own official president. While Batista merely passes along the secondhand assurances
of his “staff,” conveying his general detachment from the military situation, Michael
gleans his insight by witnessing firsthand the rebels’ visceral, violent determination. In
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foregrounding Michael’s perceptive advantage over both Roth and Batista, the film
partakes in a persistent fantasy that has its origins in Puzo’s novel: the notion of the mafia
don as a superior statesman. Within the span of a single page, Puzo’s text narrates how
Michael’s father and predecessor, Don Vito Corleone, “consolidated [his] power with a
far-seeing statesmanlike intelligence” and “planned for the future of his empire with all
the foresight of a great national leader”; one adversary even fatally underestimates Vito
for seeming more like “a Parliamentary debator than a true mafioso” (285). Driving the
point home even further, the novel adds that “Don Corleone kept an eye on the affairs of
the world outside his world. He noted the coming of Hitler, the fall of Spain, Germany’s
strong-arming of Britain at Munich. Unblinkered by that outside world, he saw clearly
the coming global war and he understood the implications” (294). Most tellingly,
perhaps, is Puzo’s curious inclination for casting underworld violence through the
language and imagery of Third World conflict. In response to the “guerrilla wars” that
flared up in major cities due to “ambitious hoodlums trying to carve themselves a bit of
empire,” Don Corleone “mounted what was in effect a colonial war against these
people,” in which “the pacification of the New York area took three years” (292, 293).
Given that Puzo also co-wrote the two Godfather films, Michael Corleone’s
presence in Cuba in The Godfather: Part II offers a highly evocative manifestation of this
subtext from the novel, situating the mafia don in a literal world of “guerilla wars,”
“colonial wars” and “pacification” campaigns that his father had waged only
metaphorically. For Puzo and Coppola, Michael’s shrewdness as a gangster (in which he
perceives the future of his casino enterprises more lucidly than Roth), is exactly what
renders him a potentially more effective President of Cuba (in which he perceives the
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future of the nation more lucidly than Batista). In one sense, the second film exports to
the domain of international politics what J.D. Connor highlights in the first film as the
“structuring principle of Mafia action: this has been foreseen” (85).7 If, as Connor asserts,
“the essence of leadership in The Godfather is the ability to turn recognition into
anticipation,” and that “the preternatural sense of anticipation is what Don Vito and
Michael Corleone share” (as seen in both father and son’s successful forecasting of their
enemies’ moves in the first film), then just as his father had previously noted the coming
of Hitler and the fall of Spain, Michael seems to foresee the triumph of Castro in Cuba
and, most important of all, “understood the implications” (84, 85).
In addition to bringing him face to face with Batista, The Godfather: Part II goes
even further, I would argue, by symbolically transferring to Michael the role of the
dictator of Cuba. More precisely, Michael is portrayed as the fulcrum between several
discrete yet overlapping cabals that represent the island’s true rulers. Over the course of
the Havana scenes, Michael interacts with three separate cohorts, embodying three
different spheres of power: the first, of course, is the “distinguished group of American
industrialists” who meet with Batista at the Presidential Palace; the second includes those
“associates in tourism and leisure activities” led by Hyman Roth, and comprised of
fellow gangsters, casino shareholders, and underworld associates; the third are a party of
United States senators, judges and “some government people” that fly in from
Washington, and whom Michael escorts on a tour of Havana nightlife. While the
boundaries between these cliques are shown to be porous (Roth is present at both the
industrialist and mob gatherings, while one of the industrialists turns up among the
American senators) Michael is the only common denominator among all three. In his
7
J.D. Connor, The Studios After the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970-2010).
179
civilian capacity as a businessman and mafia don, Michael becomes the key facilitator
and power broker between the various factions seeking to dominate Cuba—business,
crime and government—a function that one would expect to be fulfilled by Batista
himself (who is shown directly interacting with only one of these groups). The image of
Michael as the film’s substitute dictator is further reinforced in a conversation he has with
his brother Fredo (played by John Cazale), where he once again exhibits the
“preternatural sense of anticipation” inherited from his father: after the New Year’s Eve
party at the Presidential Palace, Michael predicts, “they’ll take me home in a military car,
alone. For my protection. Before I reach my hotel I’ll be assassinated.”
As this prophecy of his own assassination subtly hints, the institution that matters
most, in the end, is the one domain that Michael has no access to—namely the military,
which remains solely under Batista’s control. Unlike an effective mafia don, however,
Batista utterly fails in the “pacification” of his territory. By the time Michael arrives on
the island, the tides of history have already swelled beyond even his considerable
influence, leaving him to be literally engulfed by the human tides sweeping across
Havana on New Year’s Day, 1959. As depicted in the film, the decadent revelry of the
elites at the Presidential Palace is soon replaced by the revelry of Havana’s long-suffering
populace, filling the air with the sounds of car horns, curses, revolutionary slogans
blaring from loudspeakers, and shouts of “Viva la revolucion! Viva Fidel!”8
Nevertheless, for someone who arrives in Cuba firmly aligned with Batista’s ruling
establishment, Michael remains strikingly unfazed in the face this establishment’s hostile
8
In many aspects, the film’s depiction of events in Havana following Batista’s resignation remains faithful
to contemporary news reports. See, for instance, R. Hart Phillips’ account in the January 2, 1959 edition of
The New York Times, which describes how “the black and red flag of the 26 th of July Movement, headed by
Senor Castro, appeared on automobiles and buildings,” “cars raced through the streets with horns blowing,”
and “a mob destroyed the new gambling casino in the Plaza Hotel.” Other details from the film are clearly
fictionalized, such as Batista’s announcement of his resignation in the middle of a New Year’s Eve party.
180
overthrow. What seems most remarkable about the Cuban Revolution scenes, I would
note, is the seamlessness with which Michael Corleone transitions between the worlds of
Batista’s Cuba and Castro’s Cuba. Even as he hastens to leave the island, the manner of
his departure is portrayed in marked contrast to the other Americans, Cuban elites and
pro-Batista elements rushing to flee the revolution. Still dressed in their New Year’s Eve
finery, this panicked crowd overruns the marina, the airport, and the U.S. Embassy. We
even see some of the American senators that Michael earlier entertained as they
frantically announce their credentials before being allowed past the embassy gates, which
end up shut to other asylum seekers.
Juxtaposed against these scenes, Michael is shown navigating this chaotic
backdrop with his characteristic detached composure, sitting in his car as it slowly makes
its way through the throngs pouring into the street. As the film makes abundantly clear,
the hordes surrounding Michael’s car are not fellow Americans and elites racing to flee
the country, but rather the very downtrodden Cuban masses that he had come, for all
intents and purposes, to exploit. And yet, rather than recognizing Michael as a bourgeois
Yankee oppressor and tearing him from the vehicle, the crowd carries on in their
exuberant celebrations. Shots of Michael inside the car are intercut with scenes of the
raucous multitude outside, shaking their firsts in the air, occasionally pounding on the car
exterior (the extent of their encroachment upon Michael’s space), their chants of “Fidel!
Fidel! Fidel!” punctuating the soundtrack. The staging of this scene, in fact, almost makes
Michael seem like the object of the crowd’s adoration, in the fashion of a beloved head of
state or celebrity riding his limousine through a sea of supporters and fans. Whereas he
had earlier functioned as a symbolic stand-in for Batista, as the focal point for the
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different string-pulling forces in pre-revolution Cuba, here Michael becomes a symbolic
stand-in for Castro, as the focal point of the masses’ revolutionary fervor. Within this
context, the conspicuous refrains of Castro’s name also take on a heightened significance,
in its inversion of the representational logic behind the film’s depiction of Batista. That
is, while Batista appears on screen but is never explicitly named, Castro is named
explicitly in his followers’ cries but remains unseen. In this sense, the two Cuban
strongmen are presented as both half-present and half-absent—one seen and not named,
and the other named and not seen—leaving the remaining semantic space to be filled by
the outsized figure of Michael Corleone, the film’s true paragon of dictatorial power.
The figuration of Michael as symbolic dictator of Cuba is perfectly encapsulated
by a specific shot that appears after Michael, one step ahead of everyone as always,
discreetly leaves the New Year’s party even before Batista has finished his resignation
speech. As he descends the steps of the President Palace, a symmetrical arrangement of
architectural frontispiece, pillars, Cuban flags and white-uniformed guards frames his
lone figure, in a manner reminiscent of the aesthetic of Leni Riefenstahl [Figure 2].9
9
Interestingly, Riefenstahl herself recounts how she had met Francis Ford Coppola around the time he was
editing The Godfather: Part II, and that he expressed an interest in her editing technique. See her memoir
Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir (1993). For an account of Leni Riefenstahl’s influence upon various artists of
the 1970s, including Coppola, see Pages, et al., Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism
(2008)
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Figure 2. The Don as dictator.
The extraordinariness of this brief sequence rests in the confluence of the literal and
figurative in the performance of its symbolic work. Spatially, it situates Michael at the
literal center of political power in Cuba (to a close extent, anyway: in the capital city of
Havana, at the Presidential Palace, framed in the visual center of the building).
Scenically, the stillness of the shot—with the only movement being Michael’s emergence
from the left doorway and brisk descent down the steps—is a literal calm before the
storm, followed immediately by the scenes of Havana’s descent into chaos. Narratively,
Michael’s exit from the lights of the Presidential Palace and into the darkness of the
simmering night represents him literally walking out of Batista’s world and into Castro’s,
an effect heightened by the distant sounds of Batista’s speech echoing behind him.
While the film’s narrative and visual arrangement posits the mafia don as a kind
of intermediary figure between the conservative Batista and the revolutionary Castro,
Michael’s characterization as a repressive and ruthless authoritarian, I would suggest,
also gestures toward the ultimate lack of any meaningful distinction between Batista and
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Castro as dictators.10 More so than any inclinations toward the political right or left, what
Michael Corleone shares most palpably with both Batista and Castro is the absoluteness
of his rule, the assertion of his authority through violence and terror, and the harshness
with which he deals with adversaries (and even allies and family members who have
displeased him).11 Narratively, it is after his emergence from the crucible of the Cuban
Revolution that Michael truly hardens into the cold, merciless tyrant that the popular
imagination most commonly associates with The Godfather: Part II. While the earlier
half the film focused on Michael’s activities as a businessman, strategist and powerbroker, the latter half charts the completion of his transformation into a full-fledged
despot: he skillfully evades the U.S. government’s efforts to prosecute him; he
orchestrates the death of his enemies even after they no longer pose a threat; he overrules
his wife Kay (played by Diane Keaton) when she attempts to leave him—even striking
her during an altercation—and when she persists, he ostracizes her from their children;
and most memorably, he responds to his brother Fredo’s unwitting betrayal by first
banishing him from the family, and later ordering his murder. Michael’s proclamation to
his prostrate brother in this scene is chilling not only for its cruelty, but also the sneer of
cold command befitting a ruler’s edict; at bottom, it is a scene of pure dictating, laying
10
Alessandro Camon offers a compelling theory of the mafia as embodying an ideology of collective
interest, via “the family,” that is inseparable from individual interest. For Camon, “this is an ideology of the
proletariat or of the aristocracy,” but is “not as deeply ingrained in the bourgeoisie.” This is because “a
proletarian is somebody whose only richness is in his progeny; an aristocrat is somebody whose richness
lies in his name. Reproduction, not production, is in both cases the key to ‘success’: the fact of having
children, or the very fact of having been the child of the right parents.” From a socioeconomic standpoint,
Camon concludes, “the Mafia represent in fact a confluence of aristocratic and proletarian interests” (60).
Alessandro Camon, “The Godfather and the Mythology of Mafia” (2000). While Batista might not exactly
have represented “aristocratic” interests in any sense, the notion of Michael Corleone as straddling both
conservative and proletarian ideologies seems especially suggestive for the discussion at hand.
11
For an influential account of the “indivisible” political power associated with Latin American caudillo—
as well as the way that leaders like Castro, Batista and Trujillo (among others) all fit similarly under this
category—see “The Political Dilemma in Latin America” (1960) by Frank Tannenbaum.
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out precise terms regulating both territorial and familial borders: “Fredo, you’re nothing
to me now. You’re not a brother, you’re not a friend. I don’t want to know you or what
you do. I don’t want to see you at the hotels, I don’t want you near my house. When you
see our mother, I want to know a day in advance so I won’t be there. You understand?”
While such scenes underscore Michael’s role as the film’s supreme dictator, the
deeper context behind this exchange also raises critical questions regarding the source
and legitimation of his power. As Michael learns, Fredo’s betrayal stemmed from a slowgestating resentment at having been passed over when Michael was chosen to succeed
their father as head of the Corleone family: “You’re my kid brother, and you take care of
me? […] I’m your older brother, Mike, and I was stepped over!” When Michael coolly
replies that “that’s the way pop wanted it,” Fredo screams “It ain’t the way I wanted it!”
This tension, between “the way pop wanted it” and “the way I wanted it,” illuminates
several interrelated thematics that are central not only to my analysis of The Godfather
films, but also to the works considered in this study more generally. The first of these
pertains to matter of dynastic succession, and the transference of authority from one
generation to the next. As Nick Browne has observed, “the first two films bring together
and interlock two stories—the struggle over control of the changing postwar, ItalianAmerican underworld and, second, the management of the problem of generational
succession—that is passing control within one family from father to the right son” (14).
The concept of the right son is key here; as Puzo’s novel also explicitly establishes,
succession within the Corleone family does not operate on primogeniture (the brief
leadership of the eldest brother, Sonny, in the novel and first film had arose out of
practical necessity due to the Don’s incapacitation, as well as Michael’s then-refusal to be
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part of the family business; after Sonny’s death, Vito openly deems him a “bad Don”).
Thus Fredo’s bitterness at being “stepped over” arises from his own archaic conceptions
of family succession rites/rights (“the way I wanted it”), while Michael’s justification for
his rule, despite being the “kid brother,” reflects the true source from which all power,
order and meaning in the family emanates: “the way pop wanted it.”
Just as important as designating the right son, Coppola’s film seems to suggest, is
the importance of succeeding from the right father, one powerful enough enforce a
successful transition, yet wise enough to recognize when to relinquish this power. The
prime contrast here is with Hyman Roth, the film’s main antagonist, who posits himself
as a father figure to Michael, based largely on his longstanding associations with the late
Vito. Early in the Cuba scenes, Roth even names Michael as his heir, seemingly on this
basis; he tells the gathered criminal associates, “You all know Michael Corleone, and we
all remember his father. At the time of my retirement, or death, I turn over all my interest
in the Havana operation to his control.” Later on, in the same conversation where he
predicts his assassination, Michael reveals to Fredo what he knows: “It was Roth all
along. He acts like I’m his son, his successor. But he’s think he’s gonna live forever, and
he wants me out.” Later in the film, while planning his final revenge, Michael revisits this
point by remarking of Roth that “he’s been dying of the same heart attack for 20 years.”
Unlike Vito in the first film, who gracefully retires and even uses his authority to muster
support for his chosen successor (“Do you have faith in my judgment?” he asks his
lieutenants. “Do I have your loyalty? Then be a friend to Michael. Do as he says.”),
Roth’s villainy is tied to his refusal to honor his responsibility to his adopted “son” and
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“successor,” which Michael frames as a delusion of immortality.12 In this way, the
physically ailing Roth parallels the politically ailing Batista, who announces much too
late to his supporters that “my position in Cuba is untenable.” While Michael fails to
make good on his promise that “Hyman Roth will never see the new year”—once again,
his plans are thwarted by the military—his words still seem prophetic when applied to
Batista, whose rule over Cuba turns out to be the thing that doesn’t see the New Year.
The concentration of authority within the figure of the patriarch, “pop,” rather
than any external governing protocols (say, pre-exiting mafia traditions) attest to the
Corleone family as a highly personalistic regime, which further clarifies the political
fantasy subtending Puzo’s novel and Coppola’s films. Read against the narrative
investment in Vito and Michael as akin to “great national leaders,” I would propose, the
preoccupation with familial succession in The Godfather films takes on a distinctly
transnational resonance, in which the Corleones comes to resemble such global family
dictatorships as the Duvaliers in Haiti, the Somozas in Nicaragua, the Kims in North
Korea, and most recently, the Castros in Cuba (though in specifics the Castros prove the
opposite of the Corleones, with Fidel’s transfer of power to his younger brother Raul
12
The third installment of the trilogy, The Godfather: Part III (1990) finds the aging Michael Corleone on
the other side of this dynastic equation, facing the problem of grooming a proper heir, recognizing the right
moment to relinquish power, and knowing what sorts of conditions and concessions to make of his
successor (“That’s the price you pay, for the life you choose” he tells his nephew and protégé, Vincent
Mancini, before declaring him the new Don Corleone). Even though he steps down voluntarily, in many
ways Michael’s relentless, Ahab-like pursuit of some vague notion of redemption in the third film aligns
him, I would argue, more with Roth’s illusions of omnipotence than with his own father, who had
exemplified the virtue of knowing one’s limits. Taking stock of his life at the end of the first film, Vito tells
Michael that “I work my whole life, I don’t apologize, to take care of my family,” and in addressing his
unmet goals, the old don simply sighs in resignation that there “just wasn’t enough time.” Michael’s
response to his father, in light of his later character arc, hints at his tragically outsized ambitions: “We’ll get
there, pop. We’ll get there.”
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inverting Michael’s execution of his older brother Fredo).13 Though the “greatness” of
their national leadership remains a subjective matter, each of these ruling families has
likewise had to “manage” the problem of succession given the lack of institutional
strictures, relying solely on the patriarch’s personal power and charisma. Framed thus, we
might read Puzo and Coppola’s story of the “changing postwar, Italian-American
underworld” as articulated to a similar story of the changing postwar geopolitical
overworld—a point that I will return to further on.14
Secondly, the theme of succession also underlines another of the narrative
fixations that animate The Godfather: Part II: the looming shadow of the dynastic
founder and originary patriarch—a condition that applies as much to Vito Corleone as it
does to Anastasio Somoza or Kim Il Sung or even Joseph Kennedy, Sr. Throughout the
film, numerous characters invoke the specter of Don Vito, usually in wistful and
nostalgic tones. Fredo wishes that he could, “for once in my life, be more like pop.”
Connie (played by Talia Shire), their sister, explains the Italian toast “Cent’ Anne” by
13
My framing of the Corleone dynasty through this transnational lens reads against conventional
interpretations of Puzo and Coppola’s iconic mafia family, which have generally emphasized its distinctly
American qualities. This domestic framework typically blends a romantic myth of origins in a premodern,
feudal Sicily, on the one hand, with a narrative of capitalist modernity, on the other. The end result, of
course, proves to be no less romantic in its propagation of a popular myth of Ellis Island immigration,
Horatio Alger-like success, and upward mobility through the generations, with the operative archetype
being the Kennedys. In a 1975 interview, Puzo gestures toward both of these strains (the feudal and the
modern), declaring that “Godfather Part I is a romance about a king with three sons. It is a film about
power. It could have been the Kennedys. The whole idea of a family living in a compound—that was all
based on Hyannis Port.” See: Murray, William. “Playboy Interview: Francis Ford Coppola.” Playboy (July
1975): 60. Given the extensive interpretation of the Corleones along these lines, J.D Connor’s observation
is worth bearing in mind, that “The Godfather has been the subject of more good criticism than perhaps any
other film from its era, in part because Coppola was as voluble about the project as he was. He told anyone
who would listen that the film was really about capitalism, about business, about family—about the great
American themes. And writers were willing to listen to him because he was the auteur” (84).
14
As scholars have noted, personalist regimes like the ones listed above have become increasingly common
in the period following World War II, growing from 10 to 25 percent of all non-democracies. For more on
personalist dictatorships, as well as relevant period statistics, see Natasha Ezrow and Erica Franz, Dictators
and Dictatorships: Understanding Authoritarian Regimes and Their Leaders (2011); also Juan Linz and
Houchang E. Chehabi, Sultanistic Regimes (1998).
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saying: “It means we should all live happily for a hundred years. It’d be true if my father
were alive.” It is also Connie who bitterly screams at Michael, in the beginning of the
film, that “you’re not my father!” Such words certainly strike a nerve, for more than any
other character it is Michael who bears, Hamlet-like, the formidable weight of the absent
father upon his shoulders. “It’s not easy to be a son, Fredo” he says to his brother. Later
on, while struggling with this same brother’s betrayal, Michael visits his mother, asking
her “What did papa think, deep in his heart? He was being strong, strong for his family.
But by being strong for his family, could he lose it?” The operative choice here, between
“being strong” and preserving the family, clearly burdens Michael in a way it never did
for his father, as indicated by his mother’s failure to understand the question.
Crucially, this moment presages a later scene in which Connie makes up with
Michael, telling him “You were just being strong for all of us the way Papa was.” His
sister’s conciliatory words signal the option that Michael ultimately chooses: strength. 15
Yet the equating of Michael’s “being strong” to “the way Papa was” seems tragically
ironic given Michael’s murder of Fredo of a few scenes later, an act that the previous
Don Corleone—who is portrayed as treasuring the bonds between family above all else—
would have found unthinkable. Thus if Fredo’s transgression against the family begins
with his difficulty accepting his father’s will, the film also reveals the extent of Michael’s
own alienation from “the way pop wanted it.” Watching from the windows of his house
as his henchman carries out Fredo’s execution, the culmination of an elaborate, multipronged revenge against his enemies, Michael secures his family’s safety and supremacy
by destroying it. In this way, Michael Corleone, like all of the other ethnic strongmen
15
Connie’s role as arbiter of personal “strength” in relation to “Papa” persists into The Godfather: Part III,
where she tells Vincent, her nephew and Michael’s eventual successor that “you’re the only one left in this
family with my father’s strength.”
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explored in this study, figures the literary dictator as both tyrant and martyr. While, like
his father, Michael takes moral responsibility for the violent actions he takes to preserve
the family, the murder of his own brother by blood also signifies his moral death, and the
betrayal of the values upon which his father built the dynasty.
The mourning of Vito as an ever-present loss by the film’s characters is also
mirrored in the critical commentary on The Godfather: Part II. This brings us to the third
thematic framework, which involves the examination of these ethnic dictator narratives
as literary texts. Upon its release in 1974, many contemporary reviewers made a point of
lamenting the absence of Brando’s character, which had been such an integral and iconic
part of the first The Godfather. In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby
begins by drawing our attention to the glaring lack that characterizes the second film:
The only remarkable thing about Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Godfather,
Part II’ is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better his
original film was. Among other things, one remembers ‘The Godfather’s’
tremendous narrative drive and the dominating presence of Marlon Brando
in the title role, which, though not large, unified the film and transformed
a super-gangster movie into a unique family chronicle (58).
Similarly, Molly Haskell’s review in The Village Voice notes how “Brando’s absence
hangs over the new picture as his presence…hung over the previous one” (88). If one
were to replace “Brando” with “Vito” in Haskell’s sentence, it would easily turn her
critique of the movie into a shorthand plot summary. Thus both Canby and Haskell’s
fond invocations of Brando as the dominating and unifying force behind Coppola’s first
film come to echo Michael, Fredo and Connie’s fond invocations of Vito as the
dominating and unifying force behind the Corleone family. Or, to frame it in Junot Diaz’s
terms: Vito’s dictatorship embodies, perhaps, that dream of unity and purity, and the
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“coherent narrative” holding together and giving meaning to both the Corleones as a
social unit and The Godfather films as aesthetic constructs.
In a related vein, Michael’s failure to live up to his father—and the impossible
ideal of strength, authority and family he represents—also occasions much of the critical
commentary on The Godfather: Part II, in which the differences between father and son
become emblematic of the aesthetic difference between the two films. Such readings
commonly (and not inaccurately) recognize Vito as warm and paternal, while Michael is
painted as cold and patriarchal, and completely lacking in his father’s tenderness and joie
de vivre. Glenn Man, for instance, points out how:
In Part I, Vito’s paternal affection, sensitivity, and tact during business
meetings and family engagements blurred the underlying ruthlessness and
criminality of the family’s activities and contributed to the romantic
construction of the Corleones. In contrast, Michael’s cold professionalism,
bluntness, and bossy attitude bare the brutality that surfaces in his dealings
with business associates and family members alike in Part II. (119)
In his critical analysis of the second film, and its calculated “deterioration” in relation to
the first, Todd Berliner also observes that:
Even Michael himself appears less charming than in the first Godfather,
having lost his youthful idealism and acquired a sterile, icy manner, like a
stolid CEO. He certainly has none of the warmth of the old don, who
never treated his family coldly or manipulatively. We can see Michael’s
likeness to his father, but the comparison invariably makes Michael look
worse.” (114)
Berliner’s study, titled “The Pleasures of Disappointment: Sequels and The Godfather,
Part II” is unique for its scholarly treatment of the “sequel-ness” of Coppola’s film,
arguing that it “incorporates into its plot the very nostalgia, dissatisfaction, and sense of
loss that sequels traditionally generate in their viewers” (108). The consideration of The
Godfather: Part II through its specific status as a “Part II” also proves especially salient
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for my discussion of dictatorship and ethnic narratives, in its thematizing of the subject of
dynastic succession, and the transfer of a family’s (or, as the case may be here, a
franchise’s) “power” from one “installment” to the next.16
From this perspective, my generic interest in The Godfather: Part II in this study
is less so as a crime narrative or political thriller, or even a “family drama” in the
conventional sense; rather, my emphasis here is on the genre of the sequel, which we
might also regard as a “successor” text to a charismatic original. Indeed, the invocation of
the film’s successor status begins at the level of its title, with “Part II” functioning in a
similar manner to the appellations of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and “Dear
Leader” Kim Jong Il, nicknames that signal a relationship to a prior, and often superior,
antecedent (Francois “Papa Doc” and “Great Leader” Kim Il-Sung). In the remainder of
this chapter, I examine The Godfather: Part II as a “successor” to the first film, and the
way its qualities as such serve as a literary correlative to the broader themes of
dictatorships and political dynasties.17
III.
I now turn to a reading of The Godfather: Part II, and what it might mean to
conceive of its relationship to The Godfather not merely in terms of a sequel, but as a
“successor” and a “son,” with all the connotations of relation and descent that these terms
imply. To this end, this last section also takes the partial form of a “visual essay,” in
16
Another critical study of The Godfather: Part II as a sequel can be found in Barton R. Palmer’s “Before
and After, Before Before and After: Godfather I, II, and III” (2010).
17
To this day, The Godfather: Part II enjoys a reputation among critics, general audiences and film
scholars alike as one of the best sequels in film history, with some even arguing for its superiority to the
original. Like its predecessor, it won the Academy Award for Best Picture. This enduring popularity, I
would propose, can be seen as an example of a successful “succession” that is as rare for film franchises as
it is for political dynasties.
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which I analyze a series of parallel set pieces that span the first and second Godfather
films (with a brief contribution from the third), as part of a common filmic “DNA” that
they share. In doing so, I also highlight an latent visual economy traversing these films,
one that speaks to the distinctly transnational contextualization I have been
foregrounding, in which Michael Corleone comes to function as an analogue for a global,
rather than domestic, conception of the ethnic dictator.
The notion of The Godfather: Part II as a “son” to the first film begins with its
very first image, which is actually a recreation of the final moments of The Godfather,
where Michael’s gathered subordinates kiss his hand and honor him as “Don Corleone”
for the first time. Although restaged in close-up, as opposed to the long shot of the first
film, the details of this opening sequence—Michael’s identical wardrobe, the henchman
who kisses his hand, Michael’s touching of this man’s head—indicates that this is in fact
the same “inauguration” moment that concluded the first film, providing a line of
continuity in which the second film is “birthed” from the conclusion of its progenitor.
When the henchman’s torso moves aside, the camera lingers on the sight of the empty
chair behind him, above which the title card finally appears. Tellingly, the words “Mario
Puzo’s The Godfather” materializes first, lingering for a good several seconds, before the
appended “Part II” follows [Figure 3]. Suspended thus, this image could very well be an
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Figure 3. The king’s empty throne (before the appearance of “Part II”)
alternate title card for the first film, and for a brief moment the viewer occupies an
indeterminate space between the predecessor and the successor. Compounded with the
image of Vito’s throne-like chair, the filling of which represents precisely Michael’s
burden, these few seconds literalize the powerful, lingering hold of the first film—and the
first don— upon the “dynasty” they have engendered, as further indicated by the brand
marker of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.18
The idea of a consistent brand is also one that applies especially pertinently to the
films of Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, all three of which share certain parallel features
that have been well-remarked by viewers and commentators. These include, most
prominently: an extended opening scene at a religious ceremony, through which all the
major players are introduced (a wedding, a first communion, the awarding of a Papal
Order); an elaborate murder montage in the final act, in which the Don disposes of all his
18
From a different angle, we might regard Puzo’s novel as the true textual “father” of the series. In this
sense, The Godfather: Part II, like Michael Corleone himself, is not even the firstborn child (which perhaps
makes the critically much-less-beloved Part III the Fredo, or perhaps Connie, of the family).
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enemies in one strategic stroke; and a closing image that emphasizes some sort of tragic
“death” (the death of Michael’s bond with his wife in the first, Michael’s “moral” death
in the second, and finally, Michael’s literal death in the third). While these comprise
some of the more conspicuous examples of the “family resemblance” between the films,
the moments I wish to look at closely are more subtle, and less well-trod.
The first of these is mafia conference from The Godfather, in which Vito
Corleone meets with the heads of the Five Families and other gathered affiliates to
negotiate an end to the ongoing gang war. At one point during the meeting, the audience
is shown a long shot from the end of the room in which all of the attending mafia dons
are visible, seated around a long conference table bearing diagonally rightward across the
screen [Figure 4]. Both structurally and visually, this scene has its transnational restaging
in The Godfather: Part II in the meeting scene I had pointed out earlier, where Don
Michael comes face to face with his counterpart in the Cuban dictator Batista [Figure 5].
Figure 4. The meeting of the Five Families from The Godfather.
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Figure 5.
The “successor” scene from The Godfather: Part II. Batista shows off his golden telephone.
What I want to note here is not simply Coppola’s fondness for repeating particular
shots and spatial compositions—though this is certainly apparent—but the similar
arrangements of power relations that emerge across both sequences. Both, for instance,
begin with a “roll call” of those in attendance, with the camera panning slowly down the
table as each mafia don or corporate executive is named. Like Michael in the second film,
who sits directly across from his antagonist Hyman Roth, Vito is seated at the center of
the table facing his immediate adversary, Don Tattaglia. Also important, I would add, is
the detail that any movie scene involving a long conference table invites us to consider:
the person at its head. In The Godfather, the gathering is presided over by Don Barzini,
who is presented as the most powerful of the dons aside from Vito Corleone, and whom
Vito thanks “for helping me organize this meeting here today.” It is only after this
meeting, however, that Vito realizes “it was Barzini all along,” rather than Tattaglia, who
has masterminded the war against his family; subsequently, Barzini is the most prominent
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of the targets that Michael has systematically assassinated in the film’s climax, where he
is dramatically gunned down on the courthouse steps. In this context, Barzini’s
occupation of Batista’s place at the table in the second film is fitting, given that Barzini
functions in the first film as the background dictator, powerful purely in theory (note the
uniformed military officers standing behind Batista, signifiers of his empty power), and
who will soon be removed by a dramatic and unexpected coup. This connection is further
accentuated in Barzini’s quip during the meeting that “after all, we are not communists,”
a subtle prefiguration of Batista’s assurance that “we will tolerate no guerillas in the
casinos or swimming pools”—both of which elicit smug laughter from the attendees.
The second of the parallel set pieces I wish to examine involves a sequence from
the first film that has become an iconic moment in cinema history, and its “offspring”
from the second film that has never been quite recognized as such—even though the
genealogies between the two are quite striking. Here I am referring to the restaurant scene
from The Godfather, in which Michael murders two of the family’s enemies, Virgil “the
Turk” Sollozzo and the corrupt police captain McCluskey. Whereas he had earlier
refused to involve himself in the family business, this scene dramatizes Michael crossing
the moral Rubicon, and his initiation from innocence to a life of crime. Famously, the
moment before Michael draws his gun is preceded by a long creeping close-up, his
internal struggle conveyed by the pained, uncertain expressions on his face. The sound of
Sollozzo’s voice speaking to him is slowly drowned out by the screeching crescendo of a
passing subway train, signaling Michael’s irrevocable “crossing over” [Figure 6].
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Figure 6. Michael’s crossing, in The Godfather.
Figure 7. Michael’s second crossing, in The Godfather: Part II.
Much like the parallel conference room scenes, Coppola stages a version of this critical
passage in The Godfather: Part II, and once again re-articulates it within a transnational
context. The successor scene, in this case, is one we had earlier discussed, in which
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Michael sits quietly in the back of his car while the frenzy of the Cuban Revolution rages
on outside [Figure 7]. Significantly, both these moments occur at approximately
halfwaythrough the two films’ respective running times, underscoring the sense of a
pivotal transition that divides the first half of the narrative from the second. Rather than
the slow close-up of the first film that emphasizes Michael’s internal and external
contortions, the second scene frames his face in a still shot, mirroring Michael’s
impassive expression as darkened silhouettes continuously flit across the rear windshield
behind him. In place of the roaring subway train from the first film, the roaring chants of
“Fidel! Fidel! Fidel!” in Part II heralds Michael’s second “crossing over” into an even
darker spiritual territory. Earlier that same evening, we might recall, Michael had
discovered his brother’s betrayal, and grabbed him at Batista’s New Year’s party to
deliver the Kiss of Death (as well as the famous lines: “I know it was you, Fredo. You
broke my heart”). While the first version of Michael’s “crossing” launched a trajectory
that led to his assuming leadership of the Corleones and murdering the other heads of the
Five Families, this second version sets in motion a moral calculation that ends with the
execution of his own brother, in effect destroying the very family he has taken
responsibility for.
Finally, to reiterate a point I had argued earlier, another of the frontiers that
Michael dramatically “crosses over” in this scene is that between Batista’s Cuba and
Castro’s Cuba. Here I wish to return to the idea of Michael Corleone as a symbolic
analogue for figures like Batista and Castro, and explore how this latent iconography of
the Third World dictator undergirds Michael’s depiction not only in Part II, but
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throughout Coppola’s entire trilogy.19 To illustrate this point, I will now consider three
moments from the opening passages of each film, each of which marks in some way
Michael’s first appearance, and examine how this visual logic emerges as a cumulative
effect across the three films. For starters, it bears recalling that our first sight of Michael
Corleone is actually in military uniform, which he wears to his sister’s wedding in the
beginning of The Godfather, setting him apart from the traditional tuxedos of his father
and brothers [Figure 8]. By the start of The Godfather: Part II, Michael has adopted a
different kind of uniform: the gray suit of a businessman and respectable elite, which he
wears while receiving a U.S. senator who honors him with a plaque for his philanthropy,
during a lavish celebration for his son’s first communion [Figure 9]. Coming around full
circle, The Godfather: Part III also opens with Michael in military attire, though of a
much more rarefied variety; receiving a Papal Order of Knighthood in recognition for his
lifetime of charitable works, Michael attends the ceremony clad in the prescribed
uniform, replete with dress tunic, plumed hat, white gloves and sword [Figure 10].
19
In illuminating this dimension, I approach the Godfather films in a similar spirit to my analysis of
Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker in the second chapter, and specifically my reading of John Kwang as a
transnational allegory for Syngman Rhee. That is to say, while these patterns are most likely not overtly
intended by Coppola, they nevertheless comprise a “political unconscious” that animates his articulation of
the ethnic strongman, especially as a mediating figure in relation to the hegemonic U.S. state.
200
Figure 8. The Corleone Dynasty: Sonny, Vito, Michael, Fredo.
Figure 9. Michael and Senator Geary; “We’re both part of the same hypocrisy.”
201
Figure 10. Commendatore Michael Corleone.
Read sequentially, Michael’s various “uniforms” in these opening set pieces chart
the stages of his social ascendance: from decorated war veteran to politically-connected
tycoon, and finally, to the exalted heights of a Pontifical Order. What I wish to point out
in the above images, firstly, is the way they all deploy a (near) symmetrical composition
to accentuate Michael’s habitation of the spaces of power, as well as a certain liminality
inherent in his positioning (much like the shot of Michael outside the Presidential Palace
in [Figure 2]). While Michael’s Marine uniform in the wedding photograph is meant to
signal his independence and outsider status in relation to the family, his place in the
center beside his father hints at his eventual fate as Vito’s successor. Notably, Michael
and Vito are also the only ones in the photograph wearing hats (something Michael is not
shown doing again in the film until he becomes don), rendering the presence of headwear
in this context akin to a symbol of leadership, almost like a crown.
In Part II, Michael’s CEO-like suit and handshake photo op with Senator Geary is
meant to communicate the extent of his acceptance into the American establishment.
202
Posed before the photographers in the foreground, the grouping conveys the harmonious
interlacing of Michael’s underworld origins and legitimate world foothold, with the two
realms positioned in a balanced, alternating arrangement: the senator’s aide (partially out
of frame), the senator’s wife, Michael, Senator Geary, Michael’s wife Kay, and
Michael’s mafia henchman (in sunglasses). Behind the closed doors of his study,
however, Michael’s relationship with the senator is revealed to be one of distrust and
open antagonism. For his part, Geary makes it clear that he regards Michael as more or
less a foreigner, and even something like a racial other. “I don’t like your kind of
people,” he sneers. “I don’t like to see you come out to this clean country with your oily
hair, dressed up in those silk suits, passing yourself off as decent Americans.” While
Michael acknowledges to the senator that “We’re both part of the same hypocrisy,” he
also demonstrates his superior leverage in their battle when he flatly rebuffs the senator’s
attempt to extort him: “My offer is this: nothing.”
Finally, if Michael’s knighting in the beginning of Part III epitomizes the
pinnacle of his social approbation, then in the same stroke it also epitomizes the pinnacle
of his alienation. Framed against the baroque cathedral backdrop of niche statues,
candles, white-robed clergy and black-suited officials, the image in [Figure 10] most
closely resembles the earlier [Figure 2] in its arraying of Michael at the geometric center
of an iconography of dictatorial power. Nonetheless, the trappings of such empyrean
grandeur seem more like a cage than anything else around the spiritually despairing
Michael. Although his family and closest associates are shown to be attending the
ceremony, Michael’s official debut as a Commendatore (Knight Commander) sees him
ritualistically flanked by anonymous strangers. Thus while [Figure 8] presents Michael
203
alongside his beloved family (even as he remains “outside” their inner circle) and [Figure
9] positions him against those he must regularly jostle with in the halls of elite power
(itself an odd form of intimacy), [Figure 10] finds Michael for all visual intents and
purposes a king, but surrounded by no one he knows.
At this point it would be useful to qualify my reference to an “iconography of
dictatorial power” in the previous paragraph, which I have also designated elsewhere in
this chapter in terms of a “transnational symbolic economy” of the military dictator. In
place of further theoretical or technical elaborations, I instead direct our attention to a set
of gathered images, from the career of a dictator considered earlier in this study:
Figure 11. Scenes from the career of a dictator.
204
These images, of course, are of the Dominican Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, whom
we had previously encountered as the symbolic father and spiritual co-author of Diaz’s
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, where he was also nominated, fittingly, for the
title of “Dictatingest Dictator That Ever Dictated.” What I wish to highlight here, more
precisely, is the way these scenes from Trujillo’s career provides a transnational visual
template through which we might regard the arc of Michael Corleone’s role as an “ethnic
dictator.” The upper left hand picture, to start with, depicts the young Trujillo as
commander-in-chief of the Dominican Army, a reminder that he began his career as a
dedicated soldier before muscling his way into politics. The upper middle image is dated
1937, seven years into Trujilo’s presidency, with his light suit, striped tie and determined
glare suggesting, I would propose, something of the “sterile, icy manner” and corporatecold ruthlessness that commonly accrue to descriptions of Michael Corleone (particularly
in Part II). The upper right image depicts the signing of the Hull-Trujillo Treaty (1940)
between Trujillo and U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and presents a version of the
“Pat Geary” moment in its foregrounding of the frequent collusion between the U.S.
government and foreign dictators (as well as in the hint of distaste in Hull’s expression).
Lastly, the bottom picture commemorates Trujillo’s 1954 trip to Europe where, among
other activities, he received an honor from General Francisco Franco in Spain and
negotiated a Concordat with the Vatican. Here the image of an older Trujillo, clad in an
elaborate embroidered uniform and plumed hat, resonates with that of the aging Michael
Corleone, who first appears in Part III in similar ceremonial regalia, attempting to secure
his outward redemption by way of the Vatican.
205
None of this is to say that Coppola had these specific images in mind while
producing the Godfather films. However, the notion of a certain latent geopolitical
iconography seems less farfetched when we approach the trilogy’s periodization from a
transnational optic, rather than the U.S.-centered interpretations they are predominantly
read through. Traditionally, such accounts focus on the domestic milieu of the 1970s, and
the films’ response to a set of contexts that Glenn Man concisely recounts thus:
The first two films of The Godfather trilogy hit the screens in 1972 and
1974, respectively, during a period in American history darkened by the
unpopular Vietnam War and by the scandal of Watergate. Distrust of the
government during the Vietnam War turned into cynicism and
disillusionment during the Nixon years. It is no wonder that The Godfather
films would include a critique of the American system during this time of
social upheaval and dimming faith in the country’s traditional values.
(127)
Turning our gaze beyond U.S. borders, however, we might note that the release of the
two films in 1972 and 1974 was also roughly contemporaneous with another side of “the
American system”: the rise of Augusto Pinochet in Chile (1973-1989), martial law in the
Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos (1972-1981), the authoritarian Yushin Constitution
of South Korea under Park Chung Hee (1972-1981), the regime of Idi Amin in Uganda
(1971-1979), the ailing of Francisco Franco of Spain (died 1975), and numerous other
examples. From this perspective, the sight of military uniforms on ethnic bodies was a
common one during this period. How, then, might such a global milieu enable us to
reframe our view, for instance, of Michael’s first appearance in his olive Marine Corps
uniform—especially given his later characterization as an “oily haired” foreigner
despoiling this “clean country”? Even the fate of Hyman Roth, I would add, would seem
imbricated in this international context. As we might recall, Michael is able to assassinate
Roth only after the latter’s petition to retire in Israel is rejected by the Israeli High Court.
206
Afterwards, Roth tries unsuccessfully to bribe the governments of Argentina and Panama
for residency before being forced to return to the United States, where he is gunned down
at the airport. The demise of the Jewish Roth, from a certain angle, might be seen as a
failure of connection between an American ethnic strongman and his international
counterparts, with the figureheads in Buenos Aires and Panama City effectively finalizing
the death warrant that Michael issues.20
The efficacy of this transnational symbolic economy, I would ultimately argue,
even encompasses the belated appearance of The Godfather: Part III, which was released
in 1990. While the end of the Cold War and the vicissitudes of multinational high finance
furnish the obvious immediate contexts, here I find the most evocative avenue for
periodizing the third film in the opening act image of the gray-haired, deteriorating
Michael Corleone, a Commendatore in an elaborate ceremonial uniform. More
specifically, in 1990 such a sight resonates powerfully with the spectacle the fading—yet
still grandly uniformed—caudillos that saw their long reigns come to an end around this
period, most notably Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay (1954-1989) and Augusto Pinochet
in Chile (1973-1990). The dictatorship of Pinochet, in particular, bears the striking
distinction of being nearly perfectly coeval with the production span of the Godfather
film trilogy (1972-1990); this, combined with the notorious neoliberal orientation of his
regime (“we’re all part of the same hypocrisy”)—well, that remains a conversation, or
dissertation, for another day.
20
The matter of the time period of the films’ production versus the time period of the narrative seems
important here. In 1958-1959, when the plot of The Godfather: Part II takes place, Argentina was governed
by the fragile left-wing administration of Arturo Frondizi, while Panama had long been a republic
dominated by a commercially-oriented oligarchy. By the 1974 of the film’s production, however, the
charismatic military strongman Juan Peron had returned to power in Argentina, while Panama was ruled by
the autocratic military regime of Omar Torrijos.
207
CODA
Tyrant and the Limits of the Strongman Genre
In the end, Coppola’s Godfather films provide a relevant capstone for this project,
if for no other reason than that the story of the Corleone family still represents one of the
most prominent and recognizable versions of the ethnic dictator trope in the realm of
American fiction. Although all the individual works I have examined in this dissertation
illustrate the deep interconnections between dictators, ethnic identity, and genre, The
Godfather is especially unique in that its long-cemented status as a cultural touchstone
has made it something of a subgenre unto itself—that is, a “Godfather” genre as a sort of
subset of “crime drama” or “family saga.” By way of some brief concluding remarks, I
now wish to turn to an instance where genre emerges as the weak link in the discursive
triumvirate I have laid out, and precisely because it overplays its hand at attempting to be
the dominant one.
In June 2014, the FX network premiered a new drama series called Tyrant, a
geopolitical thriller deliberately modeled after The Godfather. Tyrant centers around
Bassam “Barry” Al-Fayeed, the younger son of a repressive Middle Eastern dictator, who
has been living in self-imposed exile in the United States for twenty years. Wanting
nothing to do with his notorious family, Bassam maintains a quiet suburban life as a
pediatrician and family man in Pasadena, in all outward appearances an assimilated
American. The narrative begins when Bassam brings his American wife, son and
daughter back to his home country (a fictional nation called Abbudin) to attend his
nephew’s wedding. When his father unexpectedly dies, Bassam finds himself staying
208
indefinitely in order to advise his older brother and new president Jamal, and to help the
family navigate the political crises that follow.
Given such a premise, pretty much no review or commentary on Tyrant has failed
to mention its debt to The Godfather, to the extent that the FX series almost seems like a
meaningful creation only in relation to Coppola’s film. Indeed, it is largely through this
intertextual relation that many of the narrative cues in Tyrant become legible. As with
Michael Corleone, it is made clear that the composed and intelligent Bassam has always
been his father’s favorite, and will eventually embrace his unwanted destiny as the series’
titular “tyrant.” On the other hand, though Jamal succeeds their father first, he is depicted
as the most compelling evidence for the certainty of Bassam’s rise: hot-tempered, erratic,
violent and simple-minded, Jamal is both Sonny and Fredo Corleone combined.
If, as I argued in the last chapter, the relation between The Godfather and The
Godfather: Part II can be likened to that between a dynastic founder and his successor,
then a production like Tyrant resembles a kind of distant cousin or cadet branch member,
whose very existence as a relevant entity is still owed to the power and legacy of the
originary patriarch. At the same time, Bassam’s dilemma in the narrative is also the
series’, in that the family inheritance is both the enabling condition and the debilitating
obstacle. Judging from the reviews, critics generally agree that Tyrant is a middling show
at best, and not only because it tries to be The Godfather but fails, but also that its
overdetermination by The Godfather prevents it from being anything else of value. Much
is made, for instance, about the show’s tepid engagement with the geopolitics and social
realities of the Middle East. The Al-Fayeeds are secular autocrats in the vein of Saddam
Hussein or the al-Assads of Syria (to be sure, the particulars Bassam’s story shares strong
209
resonances with the real life ophthalmologist-turned-tyrant Bashar al-Assad), who have
previously been accused of using chemical weapons against their own people; a
snowballing protest movement is clearly meant to invoke the Arab Spring; and
nonspecific allusions are made to American military alliances and the economics and
politics of Western oil dependency. But ultimately, as one reviewer puts it, “Tyrant is less
interested in fomenting cultural controversy than in telling a Godfather-inspired family
melodrama, with its cultural [and political] trappings forming colorful background.”1
Considered alongside the other works in this dissertation, one might begin to see
how Tyrant, in proffering a contemporary, Middle Eastern take on the ethnic dictator
trope, also embeds this trope within what John Frow has called the “organized
constraints” and “regimes of reading” related to genre. And similar to these works,
Tyrant operates on a multiplicity of generic frames, some more visible than others, and
all of which are refracted through the figure of the ethnic dictator. Not unlike Wright’s
Black Power, it foregrounds the return of a diasporic subject to his homeland, as well as
this subject’s self-insertion into the politics of the home country (in Bassam’s frequent
and urgent counsels for his brother to take the “Western” and “rational” course of action,
I would suggest, we can detect echoes of Wright’s entreaties to Nkrumah on the “means”
“methods” and “instrumentalities” for governing his nation). And like the dictator novel
mode of Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, or even the spy novel mode of
Lee’s Native Speaker, Tyrant conceives of the ethnic dictator (in the character of Jamal,
at least) as an emblem of lurid, despotic excess. Paranoid, childlike, inexplicitly brutal
and a rapist to boot, the show’s depiction of Jamal has been highlighted as one of its more
problematic and offensive aspects, and rightly so. Reframing this portrayal as a function
1
Dennis Perkins, “Tyrant: Pilot,” in A.V. Club.
210
of genre, however—that is, as something akin to Diaz’s rendering of Trujillo, or Lee’s
rendering of Kwang—imposes a certain coherence upon the meanings and interpretations
of the character. Perhaps, on the most basic level, the matter is as simple as every
Godfather narrative needing a Sonny or Fredo in order for Michael to make any sense.
And finally, just as in Lee’s novel, Tyrant also links the diasporic subject and the
ethnic dictator through the intrigue of the espionage plot, which culminates in an act of
betrayal. This betrayal, however, does not play out according to the “horizon of
expectations” that genre forms have trained us to expect. Midway through the season,
Bassam’s conviction about Jamal’s unfitness to rule finally outstrips his fraternal love,
and he switches from trying to guide and advise his older brother to secretly plotting his
ouster. Much of the dramatic tension from the final episodes revolve around Bassam’s
orchestration of a coup, which entails recruiting key elites and allies to his cause, as well
as lobbying the U.S. State Department for their sanction and cooperation. Once again, the
show’s sense of suspense is inflected by the narrative cues of The Godfather, which
encourage us to anticipate Bassam’s fulfillment of the Michael Corleone narrative. And
for that same reason, we can’t help but feel subverted by the final-act dramatic reversal,
in which we learn that Jamal had long ferreted out the conspiracy against him, and
instead lures the unsuspecting Bassam into a trap. Thus, in contrast to the ascendant
Michael having his hand kissed as the new godfather, the first season of Tyrant ends with
Bassam languishing in a dungeon cell, and sentenced to death for treason.
And yet, Jamal’s outmaneuvering of his younger brother makes a striking sense,
and even seems obvious in retrospect. “We both need to pick our friends better,” he tells
Bassam. “You’ve known Hakeem [a key conspirator in Bassam’s coup] for how long?
211
Two months? I’ve known him for fifteen years. Two drinks and he confessed
everything.” This revelation, though doubtlessly quite mundane as a plot development,
nonetheless returns an important detail to the foreground: that Bassam, at the end of the
day, is still “Barry” from Pasadena, who indeed has not been in the country more than
two months and does not know its people or political culture. Like Richard Wright in
Ghana, Bassam’s desire to play an active role in governing the nation can only come off
as the meddling of an arrogant American interloper. As it turns out, this is something that
the series has hinted at from the beginning: for example, that Bassam resolves to remove
his brother from power only after a long night of drunken deliberation, and that he is even
holding a paper bagged liquor bottle as he makes assertions like “I am the one that kept
the tanks out of this plaza. I can hold this country together until elections,” and “I have
spent many years running away from it, but I am an Al-Fayeed.” To this last remark, the
response of the incredulous U.S diplomat proves especially astute and illuminating:
“You’re a goddamn pediatrician, and you’re drunk. Go home, sleep it off.”
In such moments, Tyrant reveals Bassam’s decisive action—his attempt to fill the
role of the ethnic dictator—for what it really is: not the shrewdness of a Michael
Corleone, but rather a reckless, paternalistic adventurism that seems closer, for that
matter, to Sonny. But my continued use of such analogies is also precisely what misses
the point: that as attractive and comforting as the familiar “constraints” of genre are, they
are undoubtedly constraining when it comes to grasping complex geopolitical, and even
interpersonal, states of affairs. Taking up Frow’s notion of genre as a “regime of
reading,” the failure of Bassam’s coup can be attributed a series of misreadings. First, he
misreads Hakeem’s loyalty and fortitude; second, he misreads his brother’s own
212
astuteness and authority; third, he misreads himself, as “an Al-Fayeed” rather than simply
“a goddamn pediatrician”; fourth, and closely related, he misreads his relationship to his
home country and its structures of political power. Furthermore, the show’s deliberate
invocations of The Godfather also invite viewers to commit a similar misreading: in
hastily equating Jamal with Fredo and Bassam with Michael, rather than seeing a leader
long-groomed for his position and his tourist American brother, we thus misrecognize the
show title’s true referent.
These sets of misreadings, I would argue, might in turn be articulated to the
broader critical “failure” of the show. That is, in evaluating Tyrant through familiar
generic frames, what reviewers tend to miss are those perspectives that fall outside the
purview of “a Godfather-inspired family melodrama” and its related forms. Here I would
argue that the fixation on genre occludes at least one significant, if provocative,
understanding of the “ethnic dictator” in relation to the Middle East. The crucial hint here
is to be found in Bassam’s evocative American nickname, “Barry,” which also happens,
of course, to be the moniker used by U.S. President Barack Obama during his younger
years. It goes without saying, certainly, that in proposing a symbolic correlation between
the character of Bassam Al-Fayeed and President Barack Obama (rather than, say,
President Bashar al-Assad) I am not indulging in paranoid “birther” fantasies. On the
contrary, the presidential resonance of this name reminds us of Bassam’s assimilated
Americanness, and his ultimate ideological allegiance to the U.S. nation state. It is from
this subject position, rather than as a returned diasporic subject, I would suggest, that
Bassam embarks on his ill-conceived mission of regime change. Compounded with our
contemporary context of military entanglement and proliferating drone warfare across the
213
Middle East, Tyrant’s implication—that the proper “ethnic dictator” in this context is not
the diasporic “Bassam,” but rather the Americanized “Barry”—is a deeply provocative
one indeed.
214
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