How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired

This is a sharp, provocative little novel that centers on the Black male immigrant experience in Montreal. I read the English translation by David Homel, which includes a fantastic foreword about the thoughtfulness behind translating something this layered. Every word choice matters when tone, race, and satire are intertwined. It’s raw, uncomfortable, and aware. Montreal is vivid and caricatured through its neighborhoods, jazz pretensions, and literary name-dropping (Leonard Cohen, of course). The writing is rough and alluring, filthy and philosophical, repulsive and attractive. It reminds me of Luster by Raven Leilani and Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, each explores desire, alienation, and power. This one dissects how we fetishize and show more flatten each other across lines of race, class, and sex. It’s about sex, but it’s really about fear and control. We like things that scare us, it arouses us. But why does it scare us? Anyway, wow. I recommend it, but I also know you probably won’t like it. It’s gritty, dirty, messy, short but not sweet. show less

...history hasn't been good to us, but we can always use it as an aphrodisiac.

It's rare that a novel so punchy, vibrant, and hilarious is also so thoughtful, fierce, and precise. In How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired—a title that perfectly sets up the wry boldness of the book—Laferrière captures the infernal heat of a Montreal summer spent drinking cheap wine, listening to jazz, philosophizing, and fucking white women.

And if you thought you could avoid the thorny sexual politics of that last bit, you’d be dead wrong. The coupling of black men and white women is the central case of this book. Our unnamed narrator is constantly reckoning with it, assessing his own sexual value compared with the upper-crust white show more girls he beds, grappling with the fact that their perception of his virility comes largely from a racist colonialist narrative that he is savage and unclean. And it gets more subtle than that, even—fantasy and exoticism and history and stereotype and feminism all have a part to play.

I think that when you mix black man and white woman you get blood red… Why? Because sexuality is based on fantasy and the black man/white woman fantasy is one of the most explosive ones around.

He goes on to talk about how the most visceral sex is rooted in inequality. (Oscar Wilde comes to mind: “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.”) And everyone knows their place in the Great Chain of Being, so to speak—in the fucked-up racial pyramid of North America, white women might be below white men, but they are above black men. So, as our narrator puts it bluntly: “Put black vengeance and white guilt together in the same bed and you had a night to remember!”

Incendiary? You bet. Nobody comes out of this story looking perfect, which is part of the reason I like it. Almost everybody is under somebody’s thumb, and almost everybody acts out their desires and frustrations indirectly—through sex, food, charity, tea-making.

There is the undeniable class element, too. These WASP-y McGill students come to visit the narrator in his filthy apartment while neither he nor his roommate has a job or enough money to buy regular meals. One of his flings, 'Miz Literature,' beautifies the place with peonies and does the dishes and stocks the fridge with pâtés and cheese. It’s impossible not to see the white guilt here, or the noblesse oblige, and even if it’s purely subconscious for her, our narrator clocks it immediately: “Europe has paid her debt to Africa.” His tone is knowing and sardonic but not indignant; he knows the score. You get it however you can.

Imagine: she’s studying at McGill (venerable institution to which the bourgeoisie sends its children to learn clarity, analysis and scientific doubt) and the first Negro to tell her some kind of fancy tale takes her to bed. Why? Because she can afford that luxury. I surrender to the least bit of naivete, even for a second, and I’m one dead n*gger. Literally. I have to be a moving target, otherwise, at the first emotion, my ass would be grass.

This is what I'd call a "hangout novel"—the two main characters don't change much (if at all) from beginning to end. The only real progression is that of the narrator’s literary pursuit: he spends hours at his Remington 22 writing a novel that's implied to be the one we're reading now. On the one hand, a character writing their own book elides the author entirely. On the other, it highlights the parallels between character and author. Was Laferrière trying to produce a novel that contained within its mere existence the fulfillment of its protagonist's wishes to be published, to be famous? Or was he simply writing what he knows (which is writing)? I don't know. It's an interesting element to chew on.

If you couldn’t tell by my excessive quotations, I love Dany Laferrière’s style. I find it simultaneously clever and conversational. It has an incredible musicality and a forward motion that feels electric. Sometimes, often during sex scenes, he will go off on these feverish tangents, occasionally making it difficult to tell what’s actually happening, but I was more than happy to go on those tangents with him. This narrator is unforgettably witty, ambitious, and critical. This book is full of gems and remains provocative and hilarious despite the thirty-odd years since its publication. Buy it, read it—it’s a quick one, and well worth your time.

Making love to a Negro isn’t frightening; sleeping with him is. Sleep is complete surrender. It’s more than nude; it’s naked. Anything can happen during the night, when reason sleeps. Do we dream our lover? Do we penetrate his dreams? Shifting sands, says the Western world. Danger. Beware. Danger of osmosis. Danger of true communication.

____________________

Global Challenge: Haiti show less

This is one of those books with fantastic passages where the author let’s rip. Sometimes funny and often shocking. At one point my mouth was hanging open. But by the end of the book my teeth were gritted and I was repulsed and revulsed by the picture of people reduced below the level of humanity, each just a type and each type just a collection of desires. Life so small and so squalid. Art reduced to the acquisition of money and the appreciation of art defined by the type of person.

Not that this is a bad book. The author’s doing this on purpose. There’s literary quality here and it’s certainly effective. I appreciated it but didn’t enjoy it.

Dany Laferriere was a journalist in Haiti when Papa Doc Cuvalier was in power. "When a colleauge was found murdered by a roadside, Laferriere took the hint and went into exile in Canada." He settled in Montreal, took a factory job and started writing this novel. Although it is fiction there are quite a few autobiographical details so we get an idea of the immigrant experience and also the black experiences in a predominately white culture.

The narrator is living in a squalid room on St-Denis with a view of the cross on top of Mont Royal. He shares this room with his friend Bouba who sleeps, plays jazz, reads the Koran and acts as a guru to a number of white women. It is a sweltering summer and, of course, there is no air conditioning in show more the apartment. The narrator has one steady girlfriend, a white rich girl referred to as Miz Literature, but also a few ancillary girls he takes to bed. The way he tells it the white girls like black men because they are so much better in bed than white men. However, that is not all there is to our hero. He reads voraciously and has a vast knowledge of modern and ancient literature. He also is nice to the women he is involved with. I never got a sense that he just saw them as sex objects alone; he genuinely likes them. There are a few misogynistic remarks about women that aren't beautiful but thinking of the times (the book was published in French in 1985) I'm sure most men probably felt the same. Ultimately the book is a celebration of life in a vibrant, multi-cultural city.

Despite the race preference espoused by the narrator of the book Laferriere himself is married to a black woman and that marriage has persisted for over forty years. Given that bit of knowledge I suspect that Laferriere wrote the book with tongue firmly planted in cheek, using a belief common among racist whites that black men just live to f**k. CBC picked this book as one of the 100 Novels that Make Us Proud to be Canadian and I think it was a good choice. show less

The narrator of this novella is a young Haitian man who is living in a dodgy apartment on the rue Saint-Denis in Montreal along with his African roommate Bouba, the "Black Buddha" of the city. He spends his days in his filthy and pest-ridden flat working on his first novel, Black Cruiser's Paradise, and his nights are generally spent in the company of his girlfriend Miz Literature, a privileged and attractive white literature student at McGill University, or in a variety of bars and cafés with other black émigrés, who discuss the plight of black men in the city and their never ending pursuit of white women, and vice versa.

Despite its short length I found this book to be tiresome and less than believable, filled with trivial show more discussions about literature, jazz and black-white relations in Montreal and in the United States. show less

I love the `Motifs' series. The cover design is great.

Jazz, littérature et questions raciales.