On the Commerce of Intimacy: Dany Laferrière on How to Make Love to a Negro… and Heading South

The Only True Sexual Relation is between Unequals.

—Dany Laferrière, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired (Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer)¹

Forced from his native Haiti into exile by Jean-Claude Duvalier's repressive regime in 1976, Dany Laferrière immigrated to Montreal, Quebec, where he transitioned from journalist to writer while employed in various factory jobs.²

Among literary honors, Laferrière was inducted in 2015 to the Académie française, becoming the first Haitian and second personage of African descent (the first being Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1983) to be elected to this prestigious literary council.³

Novelist, essayist, poet, journalist, and filmmaker, a raconteur of extraordinary insight and artistic achievement, Laferrière's fiction mines all manners of truth about the human condition, foregrounding such fraught subjects as migration and exilic/diasporic identities and the determinations of race and sexuality under conditions of postcoloniality—that thing called "desire" in its societally aberrant iterations. Indeed, ever more compelling, his writings and film adaptations unsettle, torment, as they embarrass, at once provoking denial, anger, admiration of literati, academics, and readers alike.

At the epicenter of Laferrière's fiction, and I should say convictions, is privileged and without equivocation, "imagination," that irreverently challenges and debunks received notions about the "dynamic" of [heterosexual] raced encounters in such interstitial crannies of the postcolonial and cosmopolitan world; and, in doing so, sets himself apart, and at odds, with some of his literary kin. Which is to say, such contemporaries who elide the great social issues of the day in the cauldron of civilizational tumult and who traffic in the banalities of the everyday that surely matter to individuals but not history.

Figure 1.

Dany Laferrière. Image courtesy of IU Cinema.

There is palpable tension distinguished by respect and humor in the following conversation which engages with the author/producer bound to and by the mechanics of an art form and its signifying intentions. One reading of this relationship, and suggested in the conversation, is Laferrière's insistence that his stories are fiction, however much they resonate the actuality of historical activity and gesture something more than the imagination of the writer. Restating what is a complex of ideas and personal investments is to recall the author/producer's privilege and right to not bear the weight of history.

And what I think is contested here in the exchange is both the historicity of Laferrière's fiction as it remarks upon race and sexuality and, too, the not unrelated, yet equally charged register and designation itself "black writer." In an alternately delightful encounter marked by humor and adherence to civil protocols, we engaged in conversation on the occasion of Laferrière's visit to the Indiana University Bloomington campus, 15–17 February 2017.

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Michael T. Martin: Mr. Laferrière, I would like to focus on a subject of sustained interest to you, the intersectionalities of race, gender, and sexuality and begin this conversation with a quote from your novel, Why Must a Black Writer Write about Sex?⁴ Your address of this subject is evinced in the exchange between the two black male protagonists, one who urges the other to accept a magazine's offer of a writing assignment.

Here, one says to the other, "They don't want some guy who's going to turn everything into a black man–white man kind of thing." The other responds, "Forget it then, because that's the only thing that interests me." The former man then says with a laugh, "You're into the black man, white woman thing." He replies, "That's one way of examining the issue."

So, with this exchange between the men as our starting point, two fundamental things appear evident: that whether or not white men are present, there is a power relationship...