Eroshima

"Incredible! The idea for this book came upon me one day, suddenly. An image. This one: a young couple making love in the city of Hiroshima, the morning of the atomic Bomb, in 1945. The Bomb falls at the very instant they attain orgasm. Eros and Hiroshima. Eroshima. Sex and Death. The world's two oldest myths."

Eroshima is one of Dany Laferrière's weaker novels. While hardly a single narrative (the text shifts to different characters, sometimes famous individuals as well as the autobiographical narrator), the themes of sex and death are explored by the black writer who examines Japan, identity, interracial romance, and the constant threat of destruction wrought by the Bomb. Thus, at the most basic or primordial level, the text is about life and death, creation and destruction. Unfortunately, the novel does not really go anywhere as in other Laferrière novels, but I do love the intertextuality, allusions, and influence this work has one future works, especially Dining With the Dictator and I Am a Japanese Writer, which feature lesbianism, Japanese culture and literature, a group of young women, and even some of the same characters. 

Laferrière's sense of humor is engaging and includes fictionalized versions of famous writers, including V.S. Naipaul, visiting Port-au-Prince with the young women who appear in Dining With the Dictator. Haiku, Japanese tea ceremonies and cuisine, and even Basquiat populate this bizarre and seemingly disjointed novel. As in other tales by the author, the city of Montreal (also, New York City) is the main setting of this story in which the fictionalized version of the author comments on race relations and interracial sex, just as in How To Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired. Laferrière's gift for prose also helps carry this novel. Last, but certainly not least, I am impressed by how many objects or persons symbolize the Bomb in this text. It's rich in detail, description, and humor for such a short read. 

Favorite Quotes

"The battle of Zen and Voodoo."

"The first man on the planet was black. The last will be black, too. A Negro in repose."

"The volcanic sexuality of the jungle versus the careful sensuality of Kyoto, Black versus yellow."

"Lennon died so a Negro could make it with a Japanese girl."

"Lao Tsu says that everything comes to he who knows how to stay in bed."

"The fate of Judeo-Christian civilization hangs in the balance, at this very moment, between a black and a Japanese woman born in Los Angeles."

"One of those sunsets whose beauty burns your eyes. A marvel of copper fusion. A show of incredible delicacy created by pollution. There's nothing like smog to create such magnificent sunsets."

"I am interested only in cliches, and the foremost cliche concerning Japan is eroticism."

"The Apocalypse will come, of that there is no doubt, on a magnificent summer's day. The kind of day when the girls are more splendid than ever. It has been said that no one will be recognizable afterwards."

The Enigma of the Return

"Only a journey without a return ticket can save us from family, blood and small-town thinking."

Laferrière's The Enigma of the Return is a mixture of verse and prose on identity and exile for an autobiographical narrator clearly based on Dany himself. After hearing of his father's death, the narrator, Windsor, returns "home" to Haiti and discovers more about himself, his family, and to which 'homeland' he truly belongs. Central to the narrative is one of Aimé Césaire's most important writings, a poem, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, which greatly enhances this novel if one is familiar with it. Indeed, Laferriere seems to reject the "anger" of Césaire's significant text, and waxes poetic on the meaning of being an exile and the role of memory and childhood. Yet, the text contains some moving satire and critical passages on the state of Haiti, one in which the Haitian elite, the legacy of colonialism, and the Duvalier dictatorship share the blame for the sad state of Port-au-Prince and the countryside. 

In addition, there is more Vodou symbolism and metaphorical allusions to Haitian painting and culture in this text, making it, in my opinion, one of the author's best works since An Aroma of Coffee. Laferrière's ability to capture the beauty of the Haitian countryside, the colors, the dusty streets, and retain his passion for his 'homeland' while also being fully of the icy North is quite impressive (hats off to David Homel's translations). Furthermore, this work provides a sort of response to the Dalembert novel I recently read, coming from the Diaspora instead of focusing on those trapped in the island who have to leave to make a life for themselves. The novel asks some of the same questions about the flight of people to the North, whether or not one can stay and make a life by remaining in Haiti, and what it means to be an immigrant, a traveler, and what does home mean (similar to I Am a Japanese Writer, too). 

Favorite Quotes

"In my dream, Cesaire takes my father's place."

"We're stuck in a bad novel ruled by a tropical dictator who keeps ordering the beheading of his subjects."

"Entire populations travel northward in search of life."

"I miss my childhood more intensely than my country."

"For most people the hereafter is the only country they have any hope of visiting."

"If you're not thin when you're twenty in Haiti, it's because you're on the side of power."

"There are so few tourists in this country we should pay them to stay."

"The Tonton Macoutes of my era had to hide behind dark glasses. Serial killers. Papa Doc was the only star."

"Every family has its absent member in the group portrait. Papa Doc introduced exile to the middle class. Before, such a fate was reserved only for a president who fell victim to a pup or one of those rare intellectuals who could also be a man of action."

"Why stay in this mud hole mixed with shit trampled by crowds hemmed in by malarial anopheles when you could lead a dream life?"

"In the international media, Haiti always appears deforested. Yet I see trees everywhere."

"The owners reside in New York, Berlin, Paris, Milan, or even Tokyo. Like in the days of slavery when the real masters of Hispaniola lived in Bordeaux, Nantes La Rochelle, or Paris."

"Kidnapping has become such a lucrative business that the rich weren't going to miss out on the action for long."

"The night before, I drank some fruit juice from a stall along my way, just to prove that I was still a son of the soil. Nationalism can trick my mind, but not my guts."

"I had forgotten about culture in the provinces, so refined and so musty."

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.