Fuku!

I've been reading more about fuku. Truthfully, I couldn't find that much about it online. Everything I found was a reference to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. But the definition that most critics and readers all seem to agree with is that fuku is a "curse of bad consequences." That got me thinking how everyone in the book, Beli, Lola, Oscar, and others, were able to surpass the fuku curse in some way. In one chapter, Beli miraculously survives a brutal assault by Trujillo's henchmen: "Cursed people, after all, tend not to drag themselves out of cane fields with a frightening roster of injuries and then happen to be picked up by a van of sympathetic musicians in the middle of the night." Lola bounces back from her debilitating rebellious stage and Oscar finds love before his demise. I think that's why Diaz opened with the background of fuku; to show the persistence of the Cabral family in context of the dreaded fuku curse. I wold stretch to say that fuku is the presiding theme in the book. I just find it so fascinating that Trujillo became more than a man- his existence manifested into a curse. A curse that spanned countries, from the Dominican Republic to the United States. Trujillo's terrifying power is undeniable. But what I took from the book is that fuku may be a death sentence in the end (but what isn't?) but it doesn't have reign over the little victories that we must seek out in our own lives.