Shamelessness as a Creative Mechanism in Jean Genet's Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs and Dany Laferrière's Comment faire l' amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer

Shamelessness as a Creative Mechanism in Jean Genet's Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs and Dany Laferrière's Comment faire l'amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer Frieda Ekotto «Le nègre est un meuble.» Code Noir, art. 1, 1685, as quoted by Dany Laferrière. The States and people that favor this equality and amalgamation of the white and black races, God will exterminate . ... A man cannot commit so great an offense against his race, against his country, against his God ... as to give his daughter in marriage to a negro ... a beast. ( 1867) —Bucker H. Payne Because you are denied your official history you are forced to excavate your real history. —James Baldwin THERE IS NO NEED TO STRESS THAT an affect so fundamental as shame alters us, nor that one of the accompanying feelings can be guilt, which often sets damaging limits to life by blocking the power to create new possibilities for action. And yet, I know today that creative activities are instrumental in unveiling shame, and that is why, for years, I have tried to turn my veil of shame into a protective armor of shamelessness by being creative. As Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark suggest in Scenes of Shame, creative works lend themselves to the process of unveiling shame: If severe feelings of shame compel us to hide and conceal inner reality from others and from ourselves , it is often countered in the writer by a creative ideal, a defiant and even ruthless decision not to turn away or to lie, a courageous and almost shameless will to see and to know that which internal and external sanctions conspire to keep us from looking at and exploring.1 This paper examines shame within processes of subjectification, as they operate with different degrees of intensity through affects and passions. More specifically, I want to analyze the ways specific characters produce the creative dimensions of shamelessness by their descent into a primordial flux of energy out of which they invent new rituals and mechanisms of shamelessness . To do so, I will use the excluded figure of the prisoner, the narrator, Jean, in Jean Genet's Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (1951)2 and two characters, Bouba and Vieux (the narrator), in Dany Laferrière's Comment faire l'amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer (1985).3 Genet's and Laferrière's novels share two fea80 Winter 1999 Εκοττο tures: both take up problems of exclusion by focusing on the related confining spaces (a prison cell and a "nutshell," a small, filthy room), which seem to exude shame and in rum to mark the identities of their inhabitants with that same shame of exclusion. As Doreen Massey observes in Space, Place and Gender, identity is related to space since it is constructed by "economic, political and cultural social relations each full of power and with internal structures of domination and subordination."4 It is not that the spaces themselves are shameful, but rather, as Massey observes, that spaces are intersections of networks of social relations. Massey continues, [W]hat gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus. If one moves in from the satellite towards the globe, holding all those networks of social relations and movements and communications in one's head, then each "place" can be seen as a particular, unique, point of their intersection. It is, indeed a meeting place. Instead then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations, experiences and understandings [...]. (154) Just as in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956),5 in Genet's Notre-Damedes -Fleurs and Laferrière's Comment faire l'amour the most shameful spaces are creative and miraculous rooms where each character learns mechanisms of shamelessness. These are spaces of exclusion into which all of them have been pushed and marginalized by their social conditions, conditions which in rum are determined by the impact of social, cultural, economic, and ideological forces: in these texts...