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Abstract: This article reads The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) as a critique of metatestimonial fiction and of the tendency to overstate literature's power to heal cultural traumas. Metatestimonio bears figurative witness to historical atrocities and interrogates who is or is not allowed to speak of such events. Although Junot Díaz's narrator Yunior gathers testimony from multiple survivors of the Trujillo regime, he mediates their experiences through his own authorial voice. The novel suggests that in refusing to allow testimony to speak for itself, Yunior (and by extension metatestimonio as a genre) replicates the discursive practices of the regime it denounces. Furthermore, by referencing specific comic book series, the artwork accompanying the 2007 Riverhead edition of the novel generates a counter-narrative critiquing Yunior's project. This graphic counter-narrative illustrates that ending the Trujillato's hold on Dominicans is impossible- that certain traumas cannot be healed once and for all. Oscar Wao thus suggests that in claiming literature's power to heal the past, we (like Yunior) privilege our own desire for resolution over the lived realities of survivors, for whom the working through of trauma is an ongoing and incomplete process.
Keywords: testimony, trauma, Dominican Republic, comic books, Caribbean literature
"I like human endings," says Junot Díaz. "For me, human endings are ones that represent the full complexity of what I con- sider human experience. For me, the consequences of surviving sometimes give you great pause."
Ruby Cutolo, "Guns and Roses"
Fifty years after the assassination of the Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, officials in Santo Domingo opened the Museo Memorial de la Resistencia Dominicana (Memorial Museum of the Dominican Resistance). On its website, the museum is described as "un recinto para commemorar a los caídos en las luchas democráticas" ["a site commemorating those fallen in the democratic struggles"].1 There are many such fallen; official estimates suggest that at least twenty thousand people died at the hands of the Trujillo regime's operatives.2 In its effort to honor these caídos, the museum makes evidence of their lived experiences accessible to the public. Exhibits include video testimonials from survivors and thousands of documents detailing the regime's activities-even, devastatingly, photographs of victims seated in Trujillo's infamous "tronos" (thrones), or electric chairs. The museum likewise catalogues Sitios de Memoria...