Dany Laferrière Interview

Still life bathed in warm light: a porcelain bathtub with claw feet, sumptuous white towels draped over the edge, a table set with a stack of books and a glass of red wine. A Monday night in May, and 400 people fill the darkness of Montreal’s Place des Arts’ Cinquième Salle, waiting for Dany Laferrière. He seems to glide onstage, slim, tall, impeccably dressed in a dark suit and a white shirt open at the neck — a gentleman writer or, as the French are saying, un grand écrivain.

Instant applause. They know him well, maybe too well. How as a penniless refugee from Haiti, he chucked his menial job to write a novel about a penniless Haitian refugee writing a novel about himself. A mythical summer in a sweltering apartment on rue St-Denis, drinking, womanizing, reading, writing about the meaning of it all, sure it would lift him out of poverty and obscurity. He took the manuscript first to Jacques Lanctôt, the former FLQ activist turned publisher, warning him to expect a bomb. And he was right.

To the monoculture of Quebec, caught up in the sovereignty debate, Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer offered an exhilarating mix of provocation and humour. Politics, too, but nothing to do with local obsessions. “In the scope of Western values,” the narrator announced, “white woman is inferior to white man, but superior to black man. That’s why she can’t get off except with a Negro. It’s obvious why: she can go as far as she wants with him. The only true sexual relation is between unequals.”

Published in 1985, it was an instant bestseller in Quebec. The translation by David Homel, How to Make Love to a Negro, came out a year later, drawing delirious reviews across Canada as well as in the UK and the US. And, as in the novel, life obeyed art. The author was invited on Denise Bombardier’s popular Radio-Canada TV show, leading to an avalanche of publicity, which he parlayed into a media career spanning the gamut from TV weatherman (a job he famously once performed naked) to talk show regular, literary columnist, and filmmaker. His second book, éroshima, found the author reading the Japanese poet Basho and enjoying sex with Japanese girls. A new book followed every year or so, always first person, in the same pithy style and often very funny — a chronicle of the life and times of a narrator everybody figured must be Dany Laferrière.

Excerpt from 'The Work of Art' by Marianne Ackerman. First appeared in Sept. 2010 issue of The Walrus.