At first I couldn’t really find much to say about Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, much like we discussed how nothing can be said about Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, until the narrator mentioned imaginary in one of his footnotes. This is number 27 which appears on pages 224-225 and comments on “Homeboy dominated Santo Dominigo like it was his very own private Mordor.” He says in the footnote that Trujillo drew a border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti that “exists beyond maps, that is carved directly into the histories and imaginaries of a people.” This is particularly reminiscent of Benedict Anderson’s article “Imagined Communities” in which he considers how to define a nation. An imagined community is a bond with people one can’t see or meet. For instance, you can say you’re a New Yorker, and that you’re a part of that group even though you haven’t met every single other New Yorker. There’s a point in history when people did know everyone who was in their community, but then people started living greater distances apart and they had to start referring to people they’ve never met before but still belong in the same group. Nationalism, then, is like a kinship. One poignant example of this is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. There is absolutely no question as to what his nationality is. He’s buried in the United States, so he must be American, and he must have died fighting for our freedom and rights, so he is a hero and an honorable member of the community. No one actually knows his nationality, but we don’t need to.
The narrator, I believe, speaks directly to this conversation that Anderson started and been criticized for. He’s saying that when Trujillo made this border, he made two very distinct communities. People could no longer look at the Haitians as anything but the Haitians, separate from the Dominicans. They’re two different nationalities that have two different imagined communities. Anderson also expresses the difference between a nation and a state. The state is the physical line that involves politics, society, and cultural, whereas the nation is purely abstract. Apparently Trujillo used the imagination of his nation to draw a state line onto a map that clearly defined his nation from the next. This act still affects those Dominicans and Haitians alive today because, as the narrator says, it’s now a part of the history and how they imagine their nationalities.
The imagined community idea is worth pursuing further. With all the movement and migration back and forth from the states to the Dominican Republic, there seems to be some accompanying movement from imagined communities to real communities. The Diaspora (all the outpouring of Dominicans to New York and New Jersey) results in an imagined community, but with the “reverse” Diaspora when everyone returns in the summer, the dispersed immigrants coalesce into real communities (exemplified by the applause on the plane when they land in the DR).