3 - Boys to Men: Masculinity in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and City of God

Summary

In one scene of City of God, Rocket and his friend Squirt magically travel back to the past to the origins of their favela. Instead of seeing building upon building, a haunted mansion glows in the moonlight. The Baron of Taquara sits upon a steed as slaves labor in the fields. When the terrified boys are discovered after seeing a runaway slave having his leg cut off, they manage to escape. The 1997 film City of God connects the horror of the past with the realities of the present and reflects how the legacy of slavery lives on today.

Whereas the preceding chapter focused on Afro-Cuban communities in Cuba and the United States, this chapter examines other areas of displacement— transnational communities in the Dominican Republic, the United States, and urban ghettos in Brazil. In City of God by Paulo Lins, the narrative style itself reflects the houses and apartment buildings of a favela, with sentences and paragraphs jumbled together. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is divided into multiple parts that reflect the life of a migrant family that moves backward and forward between the island and the mainland. In both, the environment plays an important role in a young boy's coming-of-age journey. In City of God Rocket cries when the natural surroundings that he associates with his childhood are destroyed. As a hybrid who grows up in two countries, Oscar feels out of place in both and at times does not want to go back to the home of his ancestors.

As in the other novels examined in this study, Blackness is a significant theme, but here narrators portray the impact of slavery and whitening projects in Dominican Republic and Brazil. While skin color largely determines socioeconomic status in this Lusophone South American country, being dark skinned on the Caribbean island of the Dominican Republic can mean death, as it did for the more than fifteen thousand Haitians massacred during Trujillo's regime. Furthermore, the two boys do not fit into the places where they live because they do not have the type of masculinity possessed by their peers. In Rocket's Brazilian favela, masculinity is largely defined by criminality and the aptitude to be a gangster.