The Sauron of Santo Domingo

The many references by Junot Diaz to J.R.R. Tolkien's universe in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao prove to be more than just an allusion to the fantastical works. The recurring comparisons of the Trujillato to the power of Sauron are more than just metaphors. They are descriptions. Diaz uses his references to describe people and situations, in real life, that have no other way of being described. The first direct quote of Oscar de Leon is, “What more sci-fi than Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles?” (6). Diaz gives direct meaning to this statement through Yunior’s knowledge and love of the speculative genre, which he picked up from Oscar, and parallels the world we live in with the fantastical world of Middle-Earth, from The Lord of the Rings. The text delivers a reckoning blow, which demands that we must rethink what we deem “speculative.” Yunior makes us realize that there are people and places as evil and as powerful and as terrifying in this world as there are in, what seem, unrealistic fantasies. The dictatorship of Trujillo was not like the rule of Sauron; it was the rule of Sauron. No matter how much we may choose to claim that it is impossible for our world to have in it an evil as terrible as Sauron, Diaz maintains it does.

The first and most consequential allusion to Tolkien’s alternate world is the one in which the dictator of Santo Domingo, Rafael Trujillo, is described as The Dark Lord of Mordor - Sauron. Diaz writes, “at first glance he was just your prototypical Latin American caudillo, but his power was terminal in ways that few historians or writers have ever truly captured or, I would argue, imagined. He was our Sauron” (2). Diaz wastes no time in declaring how he, and the people of Santo Do...

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..., without killing them, rendering them a “vegetable” (251). This kind of horror is something that is not believed to exist in the real world. It is brushed aside into the speculative genre alongside lava pits and crocodile pools; nevertheless it does exist. These things did happen. And Oscar seems to be the only one who can see that these aspects of what is deemed a fictional world are actually real. The acts and deeds of the Trujillato were so terrible, so unworldly, that Diaz cannot describe the pureness of evil that they were without explaining it through The Lord of the Rings. Diaz declares that the evil we believe exists only in sci-fi and fantasy is not merely a fictitious attribute of horrific rulers. Both this evil and the dark forces that possess it thrive in our world with the same intensity as they do in Middle-Earth. Both were Sauron. Both were Trujillo.