An Interview with Dany Laferriere
- An Interview with Dany Laferrière
Dany Laferrière: A Special Section
On March 11, 1998, I met with Dany Laferrière in New York City when he was invited to participate in a bilingual reading series (“Voices From the Francophone Caribbean”) sponsored by the Americas Society, Columbia University, and New York University. Subsequently, the novelist responded in French to a series of written questions. The “written” interview follows, with responses translated into English. If the spontaneity of an impromptu oral interview is sacrificed, the gain is the thoughtful responses from Dany Laferrière. (C.C.)
Dominique Demers stated in an interview in the Canadian newsweekly, L’Actualité (1 Sept. 1991) that you had given more than 250 interviews. I can’t imagine what the figure would be more than seven years later. There is a great disparity between interviews that I have read: some journalists asked fairly obvious questions about your attitudes to race and sex, possibly with a view toward eliciting sensational answers, while others asked more thought-provoking questions, eliciting highly informative answers from you. Let’s see whether we can add somewhat to what has already been written about you and your fiction.
I think it is fair to say that much of the early critical reception to both Comment faire l’amour . . . and Éroshima focused on the “sensational” elements of eroticism (some have probably classed those elements as sheer “pornography”) and the relations between black men and white women. If this observation is roughly on target, tell us from your own perspective what those readers/reviewers were missing in your first two novels.
Not enough attention has been paid to what is new in my style nor to my passion for literature. In those first two novels, I often wrote about books and writers that fascinate me, or did fascinate me at the time. More than being works by a writer, Comment faire l’amour . . . and Éroshima are books written by a young man who was passionate about literature. At the time, I spent all of my time reading in my bathtub. That’s the privilege of the unemployed.
As for style, I had a tough battle casting off the marks of my “maternal” literary heritage. I openly turned away from the writers who had influenced me (as an adolescent), [Jacques] Roumain and [Jacques Stephen] Alexis. My goal was to write the way I felt, with regard both to form and substance. Of course, North American critics cannot know exactly the path I took since they do not know Caribbean literature and its constraints. And Caribbean critics reproach me for the excessive distance I put between the themes and style of my literary heritage.
Another thing not noticed by journalists at that time was that I have a good ear for dialogue, but you have to know how to write it. [End Page 910]
The final point is that, behind my constant humor, there was a kind of extreme despair. A few critics noticed, but many others failed to see that fundamental trait.
Let’s skip some of the obvious biographical questions, for the moment, and focus on the development of your career and your writing strategies. What can you tell Callaloo readers about your first impulse to write and the actual beginnings of your career as a writer?
I began writing without realizing that I was doing it—the greatest stroke of luck I ever had. That means that I never thought of myself as an artist. I began writing little portraits of painters for Le Nouvelliste [the oldest existing daily in Port-au-Prince and Haiti] when I was 18 or 19 years old. At that age, young men in Haiti usually write either poetry or political articles more or less denouncing the regime in power. I was more interested in prose. I was aware of the political situation, but I didn’t want that to be the primary focus of my writing. So, I stayed in my corner doing little portraits of painters. I went to their studios, sat down to the side to watch them paint, and wrote what I felt...
