How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired Read online

  PRAISE FOR How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired

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  “Laferrière brilliantly and hilariously sifts through the tired, frigid beliefs Western culture lays on African-derived males (and everyone else) . . . The 117 pages of How to form a heady meditation, a psychic tussle that resonates with the furious stuff in James Baldwin’s essays, or Louis Armstrong’s smiling trumpet, or Martin Luther King’s oratory. . . honest, brash, unsappy, new: non-fiction fiction that actually deals with a black man’s fatigue with and ambivalence about America and himself.” The Village Voice

  “A funny book fun to read and original in style and conception.” Times Literary Supplement

  “There’s a ribald high energy here, a go-for-broke chutzpah that makes other Canadian writing seem anemic and genteel by comparison . . . Laferrière’s book crackles and snaps with the profane and profound power of Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Eldridge Cleaver, James Baldwin and Charles Bukowski.”

  The Edmonton Journal

  “Laferrière’s prose is uncompromising. His observation is wicked and sharp. He takes no prisoners, least of all himself.”

  The Irish Press

  “I can’t remember a book that had me laughing and thinking at the same time like this one does.” Le Devoir

  “Dany Laferrière’s short novel has a terrorist side to it. Watch out! It’s no sputtering firecracker. It’s a little grenade, designed by a conscientious, clever demolitions expert.”

  La Presse

  “Laferrière is totally without respect for any kind of sexual morality.” Le Nouvelliste

  “The book is calculated to offend both blacks and whites, but most readers will forgive the brash writer. No matter how discomfiting his satire, he is always outrageously funny.”

  Hamilton Spectator

  HOW TO MAKE LOVE TO A NEGRO

  WITHOUT GETTING TIRED

  dany laferrière

  translated by david homel

  how to

  MAKE LOVE

  Copyright © 1985, 2010 by Dany Laferrière

  Translation copyright © 1987, 2010 David Homel

  First U.S. edition 2010

  10 11 12 13 14 5 4 3 2 1

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Douglas & McIntyre

  An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.

  2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201

  Vancouver BC Canada V5T 4S7

  www.douglas-mcintyre.com

  Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

  ISBN 978-1-55365-585-5 (B pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-55365-650-0 (ebook)

  Cover and text design by Peter Cocking

  Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens

  Text pages printed on acid-free,

  FSC-certified, 100% post-consumer paper

  Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  Contents

  How to Make Love with the Reader. . . Slyly

  The Nigger Narcissus

  The Great Mandala of the Western World

  Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, Lives Upstairs

  The Negro Is of the Vegetable Kingdom

  Cannibalism with a Human Face

  When the End of the World Comes, We Will Still Be Locked in a Metaphysical Discussion about the Origin of Desire

  Must I Tell Her That a Slum Is Not a Salon?

  And Now Miz Literature Is Giving Me Some Kind of Blow Job

  Miz Afternoon on Her Radiant Bicycle

  A Remington 22 That Belonged to Chester Himes

  Cruising in Place

  Miz Suicide on the Couch

  A Bouquet of Lilacs Sparkling with Rain

  Like a Flower Blossoming at the End of My Black Rod

  Negroes at the Exile Cafe

  A Young Black Montreal Writer Puts James Baldwin out to Pasture

  Miz Clockwork Orange’s Electronic Rhythm Drowning out Black Congas

  A Description of My Room at 3670 Rue St-Denis

  Miz Snob Plays a Tune from India Song

  Miz Mystic Flying back from Tibet

  The Black Poet Dreams of Buggering an Old Stalinist on the Nevsky Prospect

  The Black Penis and the Demoralization of the Western World

  The Black Cat with Nine Tails

  The West Has Stopped Caring about Sex, That’s Why It Tries to Debase It

  The First Black Vegetarian

  My Old Remington Kicks Up Its Heels While Whistling Oh Dem Watermelons

  The Negroes Are Thirsty

  You’re Not Born Black, You Get That Way

  How to Make Love with

  the Reader. . . Slyly

  “WHEN MY BOOK came out,” Dany Laferrière recalls with bitterness and amazement, “nobody believed it was written by a black man. They said, Whoever wrote it writes almost like a black. Everyone was so sure it was written by a white. A black couldn’t write like that, they said.”

  But the famous photo of Dany sitting in the Carré St-Louis, in his Miller/Bukowski attitude with gym shoes, typewriter and booze-in-a-bag, left the doubters no way out: the Negro of the title was indeed black.

  Why did so many readers doubt the narrator’s identity, even after he had revealed his true colors? After all, these same readers were acquainted with black writers rising up to take a stand. The names of some of them are mentioned in this novel as icons, some of which are worn out, others still powerful: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Chester Himes. But what confounded the expectations of Laferrière’s unsuspecting readers was this erotico-satiric novel with the come-on title that plays both sides of racial and sexual stereotypes against the middle, and takes fatal and uproarious aim at all manner of sacred cows—including young gifted black writers. Here was a novel by a black man that begins by pronouncing a funeral elegy for the myth of the Great Black Lover. And when Laferrière describes himself and his brothers, he uses the word nègre— “Negro,” or even “nigger”—instead of the more politically and socially correct noir—“black.” What kind of Nègre was this anyway? Not one whom readers, white or black, had met before.

  When the novel hit bookstore shelves in Montreal in the fall of 1985, it caused a sensation. Laferrière’s ambiguity, and the difficulty of pinning him down, was one of the reasons his book was so infuriating—and so seductive.

  Laferrière, meanwhile, was simply following the great tradition of satire, giving students of authorial intention a giant headache. Example: readers on the Left of the political spectrum were condemning this novel for not taking a clear enough stand against racism, even as they recommended it to friends. One critic went after Laferrière for making all his white women English-speaking, not realizing the stereotypical value such things might have for a recent immigrant from Haiti: White = English = America. As Laferrière says in one chapter, “America is a totality.”

  Laferrière knows about the totality of America from the underside. Born in Port-au-Prince, he practiced journalism under Duvalier. When a colleague with whom he was working on a story was found murdered by the ro
adside, Laferrière took the hint and went into exile in Canada. The year was 1978. He did what most immigrants do: start at the bottom. He worked tanning cowhides in a Montreal factory. How to Make Love to a Negro was begun around this time, and when the narrator says at the end of the novel that this book is “My only chance,” we can see where he’s coming from. That manic energy, that bold and sometimes outrageous tone is that of a man eager to get out of the factory and get some respect, a man suffocating in his social position the way the main character suffocates in his overheated room at 3670 rue St-Denis. Some immigrants get to the top through commerce of varying sorts. Laferrière, a voracious reader, understands the lesson of the great Jewish-American writers: you can get to the top with words too.

  On one level, How to Make Love to a Negro is a book about one man’s progress as an immigrant. It is, as Leferrière has remarked, the story of a young man who has acquired a culture he was never meant to have; he covets that culture, he wants you to know he’s acquired it (hence, punning literary allusions such as the title of Chapter One), but he doesn’t want to lose his identity in the meantime. That’s where Laferrière parts company with many immigrant novels: the narrator has a distinctly critical eye on the new culture around him, even as he is trying to move into it. Which is another source of ambiguity in the book.

  Just as knowing how to manipulate words gets you social mobility, so does making love. Voilà: the eternal marriage of sex and artistic creation. The coupling of white women and black man creates a lot of sparks in this book: the attraction of opposites, the potency of guilt, the weight of history. In one episode, the hero of the piece contemplates the Empire-style family portraits on the wall of an ivy-clad dwelling. What am I doing in such a mansion? he wonders, then answers his own question: I am here to take the daughter of the house to bed. Though nothing in his upbringing prepared him for such a cross-class encounter, he is astute enough to note, “History hasn’t always been good to us, but we can always use it as an aphrodisiac.”

  Despite the effective teaser title, in this book sex is mostly an indicator of class, ethnic, and historical conflict. When the hero fails to score, it is because he has committed, not a romantic, but a historical gaffe. Whether it is his praise of carbohydrates to a Scarsdale Diet girl, or his admission that, in his country, people eat cats, the results are hilarious and usually result in the hero sprinting out of his prospective lover’s apartment to try to catch the last subway of the night. Even in the most sensual moments, the hero’s calm, collected consciousness is evaluating the acts of love-making in terms of class and color. I suspect that this attitude, more than any erotic description, led that critic in a Trois-Rivières paper to pontificate that Laferrière “was totally without respect for sexual morality.”

  There is another reason for Laferrière’s success that has to do with the Quebec writing scene. His book makes an absolute contrast to virtually everything that has been written in Quebec over the last little while. To read this Nègre, after suffering through the novels of Jansenist isolation and pent-up madness, the stock in trade of so many Quebec novelists, is more than a breath of fresh air—it’s a gale-force wind. Recent Quebec fiction has been so completely fastened to its navel, so lost in grim retrospection, that we can only hope it will never be the same after Laferrière’s madcap characters and their excessive energy.

  And without burdening this new writer with the “ethnic” tag, part of the positive response to Laferrière came from the new image he was projecting of an immigrant Quebec. Quebec fiction has always worked with the problems of identity; readers seemed ready to accept Laferrière’s immigrant version of that age-old struggle.

  A word about the translation of this novel. When I first met Dany Laferrière and discussed the possibility of making an English version of the book, he said, “It’ll be easy. It’s already written in English. Just the words are in French.” If only that had been true! The problems started as early as the title. When Laferrière uses the potentially derogatory word, nègre, the translator has several choices, but he cannot automatically substitute “black,” despite what current English usage demands. Our word “black” is simply too free of stereotypes and too politically cool to be used in social satire. In this book, there are very few occasions when “black,” the politically correct word, can be used if the translator wants to retain Laferrière’s dynamic between the sexes and colors, in which blacks will always be nègre. I finally decided on “Negro,” alternating when the occasion called for it. “Negro” is outdated, it smells of pre–Black Power liberalism, and because of those echoes it is particularly well suited to Laferrière’s satirical intent.

  Laferrière is wily, well-read and scheming in the best sense of the word. I believe this writer deserves our attention and recognition.

  DAVID HOMEL

  The Nigger Narcissus

  I CAN’T BELIEVE it, this is the fifth time Bouba’s played that Charlie Parker record. He’s crazy about jazz, and this must be his Parker period. Last week I had Coltrane for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now it’s Parker’s turn.

  There’s only one good thing about this place: you can play Parker or Miles Davis or even a noisier cat like Archie Shepp at three o’clock in the morning (with walls as thin as onionskin paper) without some idiot telling you to turn it down.

  We’re suffocating in the summer heat, jammed in between the Fontaine de Johannie (a roach-ridden restaurant frequented by small-time hoods) and a minuscule topless bar, at 3670 rue St-Denis, right across from Cherrier. An abject one-and-a-half that the landlord palmed off on poor Bouba as a two-and-a-half for $120 a month. We’re up on the third floor. A narrow room cut lengthwise by a horrible Japanese screen decorated with enormous stylized birds. A fridge in a constant state of palpitation, as if we were holed up above some railroad station. Playboy bunnies thumbtacked to the wall that we had to take down when we got here to avoid the suicidal tendencies those things inevitably cause. A stove with elements as cold as a witch’s tit at forty below. And, extra added attraction, the Cross of Mount Royal framed in the window.

  I sleep on a filthy bed and Bouba made himself a nest on the plucked couch full of mountains and valleys. Bouba inhabits it fully. He drinks, reads, eats, meditates and fucks on it. He has married the hills and dales of this cotton-stuffed whore.

  When we came into possession of this meager pigsty, Bouba settled on the couch with the collected works of Freud, an old dictionary with the letters A through D and part of E missing, and a torn and tattered copy of the Koran.

  Superficially, Bouba spends all day doing nothing. In reality, he is purifying the universe. Sleep cures us of all physical impurities, mental illness and moral perversion. Between pages of the Koran, Bouba engages in sleep cures that can last up to three days. The Koran, in its infinite wisdom, states: “Every soul shall taste death. You shall receive your rewards only on the Day of Resurrection. Whoever is spared the fire of Hell and is admitted to Paradise shall surely gain his end; for the life of this world is nothing but a fleeting vanity.” (Sura III, 182.) The world can blow itself up if it wants to; Bouba is sleeping.

  Sometimes his sleep is as strident as Miles Davis’s trumpet. Bouba becomes closed upon himself, his face impenetrable, his knees folded under his chin. Other times I find him on his back, his arms forming a cross, his mouth opening onto a black hole, his toes pointed towards the ceiling. The Koran in all its magnanimity says: “You cause the night to pass into the day, and the day into the night; You bring forth the living from the dead and the dead from the living. You give without stint to whom You will.” (Sura III, 26.) And so Bouba is aiming for a place at the right hand of Allah (may his holy name be praised).

  CHARLIE PARKER tears through the night. A heavy, humid, Tristes Tropiques kind of night. Jazz always makes me think of New Orleans, and that makes a Negro nostalgic.

  Bouba is crashed out on the couch in his usual position (lying on his left side, facing Mecca), sipping Shanghai tea and perusing a volum
e of Freud. Since Bouba is totally jazz-crazy, and since he recognizes only one guru (Allah is great and Freud is his prophet), it did not take him long to concoct a complex and sophisticated theory the long and short of which is that Sigmund Freud invented jazz.

  “In what volume, Bouba?”

  “Totem and Taboo, man.”

  Man. He actually calls me man.

  “If Freud played jazz, for Christ’s sake, we would have known about it.”

  Bouba breathes in a mighty lungful of air. Which is what he does every time he deals with a nonbeliever, a Cartesian, a rationalist, a head-shrinker. The Koran says: “Wait, then, as they themselves are waiting.”

  “You know,” Bouba finally intones, “you know that SF lived in New York.”

  “Of course he did.”

  “He could have learned to play trumpet from any tubercular musician in Harlem.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Do you know what jazz is at least?”

  “I can’t describe it, but I’d know what it is if I heard it.”

  “Good.” Bouba says after a lengthy period of meditation, “listen to this then.”

  Then I’m sucked in and swallowed, absorbed, osmosed, drunk, digested and chewed up by a flow of wild words, fantastic hallucinations with paranoid pronunciation, jolted by jazz impulses to the rhythm of Sura incantations—then I realize that Bouba is performing a syncopated, staccato reading of the unsuspecting pages 68 and 69 of Totem and Taboo.

  THE EFFIGY of the Egyptian princess Taiah watches over the ancient couch where Bouba spends his days, horizontal or cross-legged, burning sweet-smelling resins in an Oriental incense-burner. He brews endless cups of tea on an alcohol lamp and reads rare books on Assyrian art, the English mystics, voodoo Vévés and Swinburne’s “Fata Morgana.” He spends his precious light admiring an engraving, purchased on St. Denis Street, of the fresh body of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Beata Beatrix.”