Psychopathologies of the island: curses, love and trauma in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost their Accents and Junot Díaz’s This is How You Lose Her

The connection between national and personal traumas is a key concern in two Dominican-American short-story cycles, Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and Junot Díaz’s This is How You Lose Her (2012). Both texts link the inability to establish long-lasting romantic relationships to the violent collective past of the Dominican Republic, but they do so very differently. With its regressive chronological structure, Alvarez’s narrative casts its characters as inescapable victims of a history destined to repeat itself. By contrast, Díaz eschews Alvarez’s etiological quest, highlighting the question of personal responsibility. Only marginally successful in rejecting traditional models of national identity, the protagonist-narrator of Lose Her continues the reconceptualization of Dominicanness begun in Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007).