How To Make Love To A Negro Without Getting Tired

Finally read this short but excellent (and hilarious) satire by Dany Laferrière. In some ways it was quite reminiscent of Salih's "Season of Migration To the North" in the explicit racial and sexual commentary on interracial relationships between white women and black women, the emphasis of the meta-textual story. Bouba and the narrator, two African immigrants (one from the Ivory Coast?) are working-class intellectuals living in Montreal who read the Koran, enjoy jazz (especially Bouba, the black Buddha who lives on his couch, reading Freud) consume literature (Miller, Bukowski, Hemingway, Baldwin, and a variety of other writers whose works I am not familiar with are alluded to), have sex with various types of white women (who serve as 'types' or models of various forms of white femininity) and white femininity's innate desire to rebel or undermine the moral order of Western civilization (where the black male/white female sex dynamic is part of the rupturing of white supremacy while also maintaining it through desire), and exposing the hypocritical liberal attitudes of Montreal, McGill, and Canada.

In that regard, Laferrière's satirical text, which at times seems to endorse embracing racial stereotypes of the black Other to make it with white women, leaves a more serious message about the prospects for racial equality for black immigrants in white-dominated countries, such as Canada. It ends on somewhat pessimistic terms, with the narrator completing his dream of finishing a novel about his life in a dream! But throughout all the satire and racial and gender commentary on life in the West, I see How To Make Love To A Negro as being a funny way of trying to address racial dynamics in society with a metaphor of white women and black men, given their unequal powers in societies and how deception and racial stereotypes prevent both black men and white women from seeing each other truly as individuals in their sexual relationships. Anyway, check out the short and fun novel for some laughs and some perspective on Black Montreal.