Dany Laferriere : Essays on His Works

By Guernica

This collection of essays looks at the body of work of Quebec writer Dany Laferrière, including his notorious first novel, Comment faire l'amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer, through a variety of critical and analytic lenses. Issues such as identity, privilege, memory, exile and return are examined in relation to his writing. Among the contributors are: Ng'ang'a wa Muchiri, Gabrielle Parker, Lucy Brisley, Lynn Penrod, Amy J. Ransom, and Lee Skallerup Bessette.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: Dec 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781550717426

Book preview

Dany Laferrière:

Essays On His Works

Edited By Lee Skallerup Bessette

GUERNICA ESSENTIAL WRITERS SERIES 39

TORONTO – BUFFALO – LANCASTER (U.K.) 2013

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: How to Read Dany Laferrière Without Getting Tired

Performance: Popular Culture as the People’s Intervention in Dictatorial Regimes

Dany Laferrière and the Artist without Borders: Memory and Trauma in Éroshima and Je suis un écrivain japonais

Returns to the Native Land: Dany Laferrière’s Unresolved Dilemma

On the Vicissitudes of Nostalgia: Dany Laferrière’s Haitian Childhood Redux

Childhood in a Slightly New Key

Myth, Vodou and Hybridity in Dany Laferrière’s Le Cri des oiseaux fous

Interview with Dany Laferrière

Biography: Dany Laferrière

Contributors

Copyright

Introduction

How to Read Dany Laferrière Without Getting Tired

¹

Lee Skallerup Bessette

I chose this particular title for the introduction to this book of essays on albeit a small selection of Laferrière’s oeuvre because he is a difficult author to read. Not that his books in and of themselves are hard, but to read him, as an author, is challenging, as he is an elusive subject. While compiling and writing this book, he has released a new book (L’Art presque perdu de ne rien faire, made up in part of radio pieces from over the years and traces of his newspaper writings from the past five years), rewritten an old one (Tout bouge autour de moi), starred in a documentary about his life (La Dérive douce d’un enfant de Petit-Goâve by Ruiz Pedro), and appeared in countless interviews promoting his newest book. This from a man who famously, in 2001, declared that he was tired of writing:

Voilà, je décide, aujourd’hui, que je suis fatigué de tout cela. Fatigué de grater du papier. Fatigué de barboter dans l’encre. Fatigué aussi de regarder la vie à travers la feuille de papier. Fatigué surtout de me faire traiter de tous les noms: écrivain caraïbéen, écrivain ethnique, écrivain de l’exile. Jamais écrivain tout court. (Je suis fatigué 44)

If he couldn’t be un écrivain libre de toute catégorisation (Laurin) then he wasn’t going to be an author at all. His ten-book Autobiographie Américaine now complete, Laferrière walked away from writing.

Sort of.

In the interim, between giving up writing his novels and the release of his 2007 book, Je suis un écrivain japonais, Laferrière wrote a weekly column for the Montreal daily, La Presse, revised and rereleased the novels Le goût des jeunes filles, Cette grenade dans la main du jeune Nègre est-elle une arme ou un fruit? and Vers le sud (which originally published under La Chair du maître), wrote and directed the movie Comment conquérir l’Amérique en une nuit, adapted his books about his childhood in PetitGoâve as a children’s book, Je suis fous de Vava, and oversaw the release of a collection of his writings from the early 1980s from the New York newspaper, Haïti-Observateur, in Les années 80 dans ma vieille Ford.² Laferrière never really disappeared from view, and his prominence on both sides of the ocean grew, with previously unavailable works being published in France, as well as published pocketbook versions in Quebec. Keeping up with Laferrière’s output, even thought he technically stopped writing, became ever more challenging.

Despite his large literary output, it paradoxically seemed that Laferrière was rarely read at all, even when he was writing his novels. In another scene towards the beginning of Je suis fatigué, Laferrière is sitting in square St. Louis in Montreal, where the action of his first novel, Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer (1985), largely takes place. Someone recognizes him from back in the day and asks where he had disappeared to. Laferrière answers, à la télé, (18) as a result of the notoriety he received from the aforementioned book. The stranger then asks, Et comme ça, tu as passé quinze ans à la télé? (19). Laferrière wrote nine subsequent books (at the publication of Je suis fatigué) but many people knew him as the author who wrote that book about sex and race and as a result became a media darling, especially in Quebec. Laferrière became the first Black person to appear as a news anchor on network TV in Quebec, hired to do the weather for then-upstart station TQS. Even after leaving his position at TQS, he remained a fixture on Quebec television, appearing on current affairs and cultural shows. His notoriety grew with the 1989 release of the movie adaptation of his first novel. Newspapers across North America banned the title (in English, How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired) and the movie itself received wide coverage, with reviews in The New York Times, Rolling Stones, The Los Angeles Times, and even one by Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

This level of media exposure (at least in Quebec and in France) grew as he continued, at a pace of about one per year, to write his Autobiographie Américaine. As put by his friend and La Presse columnist Nathalie Petrowski: A new book would come out, he’d talk about it on TV, be everywhere, and people would think they didn’t have to read it (quoted in Ackerman). Boréal, Laferrière’s current publisher in Quebec, set out to fix that when he came to them with the following complaint, I am very famous, but not many people read me (quoted in Ackerman). This repositioning worked, culminating in Laferrière winning the prestigious Prix Médicis from France for his 2009 book, L’Énigme du retour. People now not only know who Dany Laferrière is, but also read his work.

This is not to say that Laferrière wasn’t widely read or known, particularly in academic circles. Hopefully the Bibliography compiled at the end of this collection shows just how widely Laferrière has been written about over the course of his literary career. But, as mentioned above, Laferrière was largely dissatisfied with how he was written about and categorized within academic circles. His first novel, Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer, was at first understood as a visible minority, neo-quebecois view of the linguistic divide in Quebec, then as a commentary of race relations in Quebec, then America more generally. Éroshima (1987), with its clichés about Asians (specifically the Japanese, but not exclusively), did little to dissuade the critics that Laferrière was a writer who was largely and almost exclusively interested in writing about race.

But Laferrière notes that he was driven to write and explore an issue of more universal concern: class distinctions and transgressions. As he notes in the book-length interview, J’écris comme je vis, one of his earliest and most powerful literary influences was D.H. Lawrence: "Ce livre, L’amant de lady Chatterley, m’a poursuivi très longtemps et a eu une influence certain dans ma manière de voir la sexualité en tant d’écrivain et, bien sûr, en tant qu’être humaine aussi. Si on regarde attentivement la grande majorité des scènes sexuelles que je decries dans mes livres, elles tiennent touts leur source dans ce vieux principe que l’attraction est plus forte quand on a en présence deux personnes de races ou de classes sociales différentes" (61). This idea of class and class distinctions, transactions, and transgressions is one of the threads that link all of his novels, regardless of the setting, North America or Haiti.

More recently, he wrote the following in Un art de vivre par temps de catastrophe (2010):

Ma position d’écrivain, c’est de faire entendre la voix de ces anonymes désarmés qui se retrouve face à une élite économique toujours assoifée de sang, d’argent et de pouvoir. Mais comment parler de tout ça dans un roman sans l’alourdir? C’est ce que je me dis chaque matin en entrant dans la petite chambre où je travaille. J’y arrive en plongeant dans la vie quotidienne qui, tel un fleuve, emporte tout sur son passage: les drames personnels comme les événements historiques. Il suffit de suivre la vie (sans protection) d’un individu ordinaire pour que se déroule une époque sous nos yeux. De plus j’ai pour principe de ne jamais céder le premier plan au dictateur. Mon but c’est exposer dans ses multiples facettes, la vie des gens dont la dictature empêche l’épanouissement. Cet aspect moral tisse en filigrane la trame de mes romans. (9-10)

One of the most powerful commentaries on class comes from his book Chronique de la derive douce, a long-form poem that describes his first year in Montreal in 1976. In his book, a young Laferrière, here called Vieux, gets off of the plane from Haiti and enters a Montreal in the throes of the 1976 Olympics. The colour and life found in the first few pages quickly gives way to the day-today challenges of being a new immigrant in a strange city. The narrator lives at first on the street, and then in a slum apartment, eating pigeon and passing the time watching alcoholics, welfare bums and strippers in his building. When he finally does get a job, it is in a tannery, responsible for taking pelts and making them into leather and fur rugs. The reason he got the job?

Le gars qui travaillait sur la machine avant moi a eu l’avant-bras broyé. Au lieu de changé la machine défectueuse, qui coûte une fortune, faut le dire, la direction a préféré donner le poste à un immigrant. Les gars font tout ce qu’ils peuvent pour qu’il m’arrive quelque chose. Avec deux accidents dans la meme semaine, le boss serait bien obligé d’acheter une machine neuve. (67)

His one friend is l’Indien. The Indian is responsible for cleaning the skins. There are multiple symbolic cues at play here: we have the Indian once again being used for the fur/skin trade, much like during the early days of colonialism. Initially, the Native was essential to the fur trade, as they were the guides to French hunters and traders. Now, he has been reduced to picking the maggots off of rotting pelts for mass production and consumption. But he is able to clean over 150 skins a day, a fact that stands in opposition of the stereotype of the lazy, barbaric Native. More significantly, being a new immigrant doesn’t eliminate the sharp class distinctions that exist within the city.

The namelessness of the narrator’s friend beyond simple l’Indien can be seen as a reflection of the narrator’s own lack of identity in his new home. Both are types. Laferrière’s narrator, Vieux, explains this concept in Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer: De plus, on ne parle jamais de tel tigre. On dit ‘le tigre.’ C’est pareil pour les Noirs. On dit ‘les noirs.’ C’est une espèce. Il n’y a pas d’invidus (Comment 156). [And we never talk about specific tigers. We say, the tiger. It’s the same thing for blacks. People say, the blacks. They’re a type. There are no individuals (How to 112)]. This namelessness, however, can also serve another function. It is an indication of the narrator’s and the Indian’s lesser status in the society but it is also a stand against the colonizing forces; they refuse to be named anything at all, a type that they can shape how they see fit. In a reversal of the stereotypical roles each type is expected to embody (alcohol for the Indian and sex for the narrator), the narrator misses work because of a drunken binge and the Indian runs off with the boss’ daughter.

This anonymity is paradoxical for Vieux/Laferrière. On the one hand, he is silenced, pushed to the margins by a society that isn’t interested in his story. As he observes someone reading Pierre Vallières’ Nègres blancs d’Amérique (when it appeared in English the title was translated as White Niggers of America), a Quebec nationalist manifesto that attempts to show the English’s exploitation of the French, he states: C’est bien, mais faut pas qu’on/oublie qu’il y a aussi des/Nègres noirs en Amérique (Chronique 75) [That’s fine, but you can’t/forget that there are also/black Negros in America]. Later on in the narrative, his coworkers dismiss his claims of racism, claiming that he is exaggerating (Chronique 90) and he realizes: ne jamais se plaindre du racisme/si tu ne veux pas être perçu/comme inférieur (91) [never complain about racism/if you don’t want to be perceived/as inferior]. The most striking example of the anonymous and silent suffering is the story of two of Vieux’s coworkers, Joseph and Josaphat. They never speak to anyone, never take a lunch break at work. In the country illegally, they were told, s’ils ne travaillent pas comme/des bêtes on les renverra/chez eux (119) [if they didn’t work like/ beasts they would be sent/home]. Further along, the police show up and take the two brothers away. Vieux is watching TV when the news comes through the screen:

Ils ont dit au nouvelles

qu’un des Haïtiens s’était pendu

et qu’on craignait que son frère

ne suive son exemple.

Si Josaphat écoute là télé

en ce moment, il sait ce qu’on

attend de lui.

Ce soir, au 60, un documentaire sur le drame des immigrants qui vivent dans la peur et se font exploiter par des patrons sans scrupules. Un professeur de l’Université de Montréal donne longuement son opinion suivie de commentaries acerbes venant de leaders communautaires. J’éteins la télé et je reste un long moment dans le noir. Un homme est mort. (130-1)

Even more marginalized than the narrator’s own situation is the situation of those fellow immigrants in the country illegally, who are silenced and spoken for. Laferrière, while unable to tell their whole story, nonetheless inserts them into his own narrative, to remind readers of all those immigrants/migrants who did not survive the experience, often ignored by history.

Laferrière’s novels that take place in Haiti were often seen as nostalgic, tropical, or reactions to the crushing dictatorships of both Duvaliers (Papa and Baby Doc). But one aspect that often gets ignored is how much hope and creativity he celebrates in his books, through either the community spirit and generosity of Petit-Goâve in L’odeur du café and Le Charme des après-midi sans fin or the youthful exuberance of the girls who lived across the street from him in Port-au-Prince and the local music they listened to.

All of this, and we have yet to address the issue that has run through much of the criticism of Laferrière’s work: how should it be classified? Autobiography? Fiction? Auto-fiction? Alter-biography? Early in J’écris comme je vis, Laferrière talks about the ongoing argument he has with his aunt Raymonde (who we meet at the beginning of Le goût des jeunes filles) about the authenticity of his novels: J’ai beau essayer de lui faire comprendre que mon travail ne consiste pas à dire les faits mais plutot à faire surgir l’émotion qui compte et rien d’autre, pour elle, je déforme la réalité (44). In other words, for Laferrière, emotion trumps what most of us would consider a factual description. Reality and emotion for Laferrière are not mutually exclusive, and one cannot exist without the other, but for him, emotion fuels the recreation of reality, not the other way around. Elsewhere, he puts it as follows: As for the matter of the percentage of true facts in fiction or fiction in true materials, I have my way of being a writer. When I talk about my books, I always say that they are an autobiography of my feelings. I’m not interested in recounting my life in any traditional way ... The life I dream is as true as my actual life (Larrier 22). This impacts how we understand Laferrière’s writing more generally.

Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw suggests that this hybrid action between the real and unreal, between real life and dream life, is a reflection of Laferrière’s refusal to be easily categorized: Just as his writer’s ‘I’ has no fixed or rooted nationality, so too does Laferrière inhabit a liminal identity, dancing at the borders, forever in motion (157). Gillian Whitlock suggests that what Laferrière is doing is a part of a larger tradition of Caribbean life writing: In place of authenticity and a unified, organic sense of subjectivity one finds a profoundly historical, political, and contingent sense of self-identification ... Caribbean subjects have never been able to take for granted the occasion for speaking, nor the terms in which they will be heard and recognized (128). Laferrière not only explicitly comments on the subject of authenticity and subjectivity through his elusive I identity, he also problematizes the issue of who is privileged, or authorized, to speak.

These are just two possible entries into the rich and elusive world of Laferrière’s writing. The essays collected here represent other