Reflections on Lola [The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao] (Part 1 of 2)
In all the reviews I have read about the novel since I finished the final page, the character of Lola is generally a footnote. Described as a beautiful girl, or a troubled girl, or Oscar’s sister, the strength of her narrative and her story seem overshadowed by the book’s focus – obviously, Oscar – or by the story of her mother, Belicia, the beautiful prieta who seemed forged partially from the steel intended to break her into submission. And yet, to me, Lola’s story was the most compelling, reflecting back in stark focus so many emotions, trials and ideas that were intimately familiar to me and the other girls I knew growing up.
Some seem confused at why Lola’s story was included or why things were so hypersexualized, but to me, it was so painfully true to life that I had to catch my breath after reading. Others have raised approximately half of the question, which is wondering why the female characters reflected on their bodies so often. The blogger over at Asking the Wrong Questions writes:
[C]ontinuing unabated through all these upheavals, a deep-seated racism that runs the gamut from the valorization of light skin to anti-Haitian genocides, and a misogyny that permeates every aspect of Dominican life.
If, that is, misogyny is even the right word. To hate women, after all, one must first acknowledge their personhood, if not their right to express it. In Díaz’s Dominican Republic, and in the immigrant neighborhoods in which Oscar, Lola and Yunior grow up, women are things, objects of desire, whose worth is measured solely by their attractiveness to men. And they all buy into it. The internalized racism on display in the novel is scary (Oscar’s dark-skinned mother is self-conscious of her skin color, and as a girl will only date light-skinned boys), but not nearly as terrifying as the internalized misogyny that every single female character–even the indefatigable Lola–drinks down with her mother’s milk. Oscar, fat and unattractive, at least survives his childhood, but when a neighborhood girl is similarly afflicted, she goes crazy with self-hatred. Nearly every female character in the novel has a boyfriend who slaps her around, and to whom she goes back again and again. Not a single one of them seems to consider that she doesn’t need a man in her life.
That blogger and I may have been reading the same book, but there is a chasm of cultural ideas and nuance that fall here, shading Diaz’s words and leaving us on different shores of understanding.
Damn, where do I even start?
Growing up young and brown, I cannot think of a time post puberty when your skin color wasn’t reflected upon, at least in passing. One hopes it becomes something we grow to love about ourselves and come to embrace – however, it can become a measure of worth and the perceptions of others have a strong hand in shaping that reality. One of my cousins realized early on that light skin was to be praised, and spent the rest of her days at the pool covering up with a beach towel so her skin would not tan. I escaped hearing much commentary about my mid-brown skin tone (not light enough to be tagged with “red boned,” “yellow,” or “light skinned” not dark enough to be called “midnight,” “darkie,” or “blackie”) but you start hearing the same refrains over and over again, sinking into a place underneath your skin, when you wonder why light skinned automatically translates into “more beautiful” and dark skinned automatically translates into “less beautiful” you never really get an answer. There are so many words used in Oscar Wao to describe skin color (morena, indio, prieta, mulatta, black) that I find it strange that the ranking systems so clearly pointed out in the book are re-interpreted as “being conscious” of one’s color.
In Oscar Wao – like in life – skin color references are cultural shorthand for other things. In the chapter surrounding Belicia’s (Oscar and Lola’s mother) life, her tone is used in multiple ways.
The first to mark her as different and possibly cursed – her parents did not share her coloring and Belicia being born dark was seen as a bad omen.
The second was to reinforce the contempt shown to those who are brown skinned. Light skin is associated with both desirability and class status and there are multiple scenes that take pains to show how she was treated, in spite of her great physical beauty, because of her tone.
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