Sunday, April 8, 2012
fuku vs zafa
After looking through my notes and thinking about what I wanted to write about from what we've discussed in class, the thing that seemed to be a trend in my notes is Beli and her life as well as the idea of fuku vs zafa. After I read Shelbi's post about Beli and her beauty I started to think about her life and everything we've talked about and how Beli's beauty is both zafa and fuku. She was the "third and final daughter" (in the Abelard in Chains section- sorry I don't have page numbers on my kindle) of a well to do family and her birth came at a time that was an "apocalypse" for her family and what they were going through. I see her birth as a blessing and kind of a slap in the face to Trujillo because of what he did to Abelard. Abelard was able to father one more daughter, and a beautiful daughter at that. Beli's beauty though, I think is both a blessing and a curse. She was blessed with the same beauty that got her father in trouble for hiding his other daughter and blessed with a tie to her family but a curse for what she goes through because of it. When she realizes what her beauty can do for her, she naively gets involved with someone she shouldn't have, i.e. the gangster and her beauty almost gets her killed. Her beauty is what attracts these men and then they leave her because her beauty can't keep them with her. This to me is quite a curse because all the loves of Beli's life, leave her and she ends up a bitter woman who treats her kids like crap. Do you see Beli's beauty as zafa or fuku?
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I think her beauty caused her more harm than good, so I guess I would say fukú, though I don't know if I buy into the whole fukú idea anyway. Yunior seems to believe it, but it's still left pretty vague.
ReplyDeleteAnother note about Beli's beauty, though: her situation and Oscar's are the exact inverse because of their looks. La Fea (the Gangster's wife) is notorious for both her cruelty and her ugliness; Beli is the beautiful lover that her husband takes, and it makes her furious. El capítan is described as stunningly handsome, and Oscar, his rival, is...not very attractive (which, Yunior suggests, is the only reason the capítan doesn't shoot him outright). They both end up getting the same treatment, but the circumstances are reversed.
I'm also pretty up in the air about fuku vs. zafa. I just keep thinking that maybe, like her beauty, they are one in the same concepts. Like neither can exist without the other potentially?
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point, Shelbi. We started this conversation in class, about good luck in surviving vs. bad luck of being in the situation. The concept of luck is a very culturally based one. Some cultures believe that luck will follow certain plants or animals if one carries them as a charm (ie Chinese and crickets). On the other hand, it seems very likely that, at least in this case, the characters here make their own luck. It is for them to decide, and to act, where the good things are in their lives.
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