Reflections on Lola [The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao] (Part 1 of 2)

The third was to demonstrate how this system plays out, even today, where straighter hair, lighter skin,and keener features is envied and still desired, and it is still common practice to point out desirable and undesirable features and to catch hell for what you have that others may envy and to catch more hell for features you have that don’t conform to set standards of beauty.

This is why, in a later passage, Lola notes ” I never caused trouble, even when the morenas used to come after me with scissors because of my straight-straight hair.”

And this is why my best friend in the world carries a lot of scars from being deemed too pretty, too different. She caught so much shit in school from other girls for possessing features that other girls found desirable.

“You think you’re special because you have long hair/light skin/green eyes? Do you bitch?”

On the flip side, taunts about not conforming to the ideal are often just as harsh. I had another darker skinned friend who told me that Biggie’s line “black and ugly as ever” was shouted at her on a few different occasions, prompted by the simple act of walking down the street.

Dismissing these complicated navigation of beauty ideal and cultural manifestation of those ideals as simply “internalized racism” reminded me of why I can sometimes be wary of the application of anti racist terms. Throwing light skin privilege in with the genocide of the Haitians also had me scratching my head as to how one small term can encompass all the issues involved with both of those situations, things that Diaz takes great pains to parse out in the book. It also drives me nuts that these things were tagged as “internalized racism” when there are some extremely powerful outside forces dedicated to maintaining these types of hierarchies. Yes, there are those in our communities of color that take it upon themselves to maintain these fucked up standards, but let’s not act like these issues materialized out of thin air.

Hell, even Wei – “the Chinese girl whose father owned the largest pulpería in the country” and besieged by racist remarks herself – felt the need to tell Belicia:

You black, she said, fingering Beli’s thin forearm. Black-black.

Moving on to the issue of internalized sexism, I have to run back to Asking the Wrong Questions and tackle the sexism assertions line by line:

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.

So, this only happens in the DR and immigrant neighborhoods? Can they pass this memo around to other 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.

Thanks for ranking racism and sexism, and for never even thinking that the two could possibly complicate each other. For example, a lot of women of color have been othered by these rigid eurocentric standards of beauty and start to adopt the type of hyper-conformity that borders on performance. If women – of all races and backgrounds – are informed that the key to self-worth is being found attractive by a man (and not a man of their choice, any man at all that gazes upon them) and at the same time women of certain races are told that they are out of the bounds of attractiveness of various reasons, it only stands to reason that some of us will go above and beyond to ensure conformity and try to capture some semblance of the ever-out-of-reach ideal.

Oscar, fat and unattractive, at least survives his childhood, but when a neighborhood girl is similarly afflicted, she goes crazy with self-hatred.

Hmm, and Olga couldn’t possible serve the purpose of illuminating that disparity?

Nearly every female character in the novel has a boyfriend who slaps her around, and to whom she goes back again and again.

And this is still a major problem in our communities. That hasn’t changed.

Not a single one of them seems to consider that she doesn’t need a man in her life.

This was my head desk moment. This was the point where I felt like the gulf of experience was a bit too big to hope to bridge.

I must have been reading a different book.

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