The Latin American Identity and the African Diaspora: Ethnogenesi ...

worldview of these philosophies is the idea of destiny. Destiny, however, is not just the end result but also the path that leads one to the end result. Herein lie the forces of thoughts, ideas, words, and actions that become integrated to determine one's fate or one's personal aura. Is fukú, then, the hand of fate, the hand that leads to destruction, or is fukú one's positive karma that leads to success? Or, can our energy matrix be a combination of the two? Just as he, the author, specifically assigned Ogún to Maritza and to no one else in the novel, Diaz is quite successful in showing that, in Kilometer Zero (i.e., Hispaniola), each person's Oricha is different and acts according to a preplanned destiny. The personality traits of Diaz's characters do not overlap. Oscar Wao, the principal figure, is blessed with the attributes of an African bloodline that evolves into an Afro Latino reality, and his fukú bestows on him the karma that ultimately decrees his fate. While the penultimate chapter of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, “Curse of the Caribbean,” appears detached from the ending, it is, nonetheless, the instance where Oscar's fukú reveals its definitive hand.

The spiritual presence of fukú as a perception that can be invasively malignant at times may assume various phonemic shapes throughout the Americas without compromising the spiritual base, be it fufu or juju. It is a concept fully understood in all environments that received the African captive and are now home to his descendants. In his study of the black African element in Puerto Rican Spanish, Manuel Alvarez Nazario begins his explanation of the term with the entry Fufú, and associates it with “Black people along the coasts of Puerto Rico and even in English-speaking North America” (288–289) as a referent to witchcraft and malignant spirits. However, it is in the Caribbean area of Colombia, in Venezuela's Falcon State, and in Santo Domingo where the switch to fukú becomes most evident, according to Alvarez Nazario's research (288–289). While the art of Junot Diaz is fiction, the fundamental base for this art relies in large measure on the historic verisimilitude of the African in the American space as an Afro Latin reality.

From an examination of the cited entries and from other available bibliographies it can be concluded that novels, poetry, and even song lyrics, although fictive in content, can be understood as an artist's interpretation