“Nothing ever ends”: Archives of Written and Graphic Testimony in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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.