STELLA VINCENOT
Dany Laferrière is a Haitian journalist-turned writer who was born to a family known for its opposition to the Duvalier dictatorship. He started his literary career while in political exile in Montreal, Canada with the 1985 publication of the notorious novel, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired.
In 1991, the publication of An Aroma of Coffee marked the beginning of a project of writing an American autobiography that comprised 10 books. This project was meant to describe how a writer who lives between Haiti, Montreal, New York and Miami inhabits the Americas. Writing an American autobiography was therefore a means to reject narrow racial and national identifications. The project of exploring the possibilities of a hemispheric identity for a writer was eventually completed in 2006. That year was also supposed to mark Laferrière’s goodbye to literature. He announced that he no longer wanted to be a writer but wanted to be considered a filmmaker. In 2005, he had already directed a film based on his screenplay called How to Conquer America in One Night.
This year, however, a new book provocatively entitled Je suis un écrivain japonais (I Am a Japanese Writer) breaks the promised silence. How to understand its appearance? How to understand the puzzling title? This novel probably heralds a literary rebirth for Laferrière. The dedication to “all of those who wanted to become someone else”, suggests that he will return with a new vigour to the problematic question of the writer’s identity and the role of literature.
In this fast-paced, fragmented, witty send-up of a novel – partly picaresque, partly autobiographical – a narrator, pushed by his editor as well as pressing financial circumstances, takes on the challenge of becoming a Japanese writer. This challenge is made even greater because the narrator has never visited this country, does not know the language, and is determined to learn about Japanese identity only through “clichés (myths and snapshots) that could be found in women’s magazines”.
In the process of writing the book that spans the course of the novel, he makes several random encounters. Among these, three stand out particularly: the literary encounter with 17th-century poet Basho; with Midori, a Japanese pop singer and her wild entourage; and with M Tanizaki, a former literature teacher who now works in the Montreal branch of the Japanese consulate.
Laferrière’s interest in Japan is not entirely new. An important reference was already made to this country in Eroshima, a novel that describes a young black writer who refuses to leave the bed of his lover, a Japanese photographer. This time around, Japan is seemingly the antipodes of the Americas. Its clichés encompass everything that is opposed to the supposed racial and cultural reality of the black American writer in the novel: a closed, “age-old and refined culture” where black people, literally and symbolically, do not fit in.
Laferrière, a staunch advocate of total freedom of the creative mind, is obviously not interested in discovering Japan’s authenticity. According to him, knowing a country is dreaming one’s own version of this country. His Japan “is an invented Japan which does not concern anyone but me”.
For Laferrière, authenticity is fraudulent. It is the result of dishonest and deceitful manipulations of an economic and political elite who monopolise the means of defining national identity. He writes: “In the international market place, the fake has now caught up with the real. Authenticity is for the country bumpkin.”
Because he is using clichés of Japanese society – mere snapshots that do not capture authenticity but rather evoke aspects of reality – Laferrière sees no problem with identifying himself as Japanese. He considers the process of destabilising fixed personal or national identity (a process he calls the “displacement of identity”), a condition of possibility of literary creativity. For him, being a writer means dissociating national and artistic identities, breaking free from his roots, his ethnic background, his past and his national literature. The claim of becoming a Japanese writer when one was born in Port-au-Prince and lives in North America, is a way of making literary identity open and unstable. This openness allows the writer to pursue his wandering across racial, economic and geographic boundaries.
The distance Laferrière sees between national identity and artistic identity also implies that the writer rejects the role assigned to African and Caribbean writers since the anti-colonial period. Many of the writers who were politically engaged in the struggle against colonial oppression saw themselves as spokespersons for a racial or national community.
Laferrière argues that writers who see themselves as the voice of their nation not only limit the scope of their creativity, but also run the risk of participating in misguided endeavours that could even lead to dictatorships. As he suggests in J’écris comme je vis, indigenist writers who attempted to revalourise Haiti’s African heritage paved the way to Duvalierism.
Laferrière, who, for personal as well as intellectual reasons, has been acutely aware of the danger posed by nationalist literature, has always refused to define himself as an engagé writer. However, that does not mean that literature, as he sees it, has no impact on the world. At the end of the novel, there is a proliferation of gestures echoing the narrator’s provocative identity shift. A group of young Japanese writers denounce Japanese nationalism and transform its literary field by promoting a manifesto entitled I Am a Malagasy Writer.
Arguably, the most significant of theses echoes comes about when ordinary citizens start to catch the spirit of irreverence and rebellion contained in the travelling title of a book, ironically, that will remain unwritten. For instance, in the novel there is a “husky tattooed truck driver” who moonlights as a drag queen and has a hit with a song entitled I Am a Japanese Geisha. It is such ordinary people, and not the writer himself, who transform society. The capacity of a catchy book title to proliferate and become translated into different contexts shows that literature could indeed have a transformative power.
For Laferrière this power lies not in the writer’s ability to be the true voice of his nation but rather in the reader’s willingness to capture and re-appropriate a writer’s vision. Je suis un ecrivain japonais represents Laferrière at his most provocative in this regard and augurs well for his re-emergence as a major writer.
This story, and others, features in Chronic Books, the review of books supplement to Chimurenga 16 – The Chimurenga Chronicle (October 2011), a speculative, future-forward newspaper that travels back in time to re-imagine the present. In this issue, through fiction, essays, interviews, poetry, photography and art, contributors examine and redefine rigid notions of essential knowledge.
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