| Wednesday, April 25, 2007 10:18PM | | | | Provoking controversy | Posted By: Catherine Texier
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| Tags: Dany Lafferière, Alain Mabanckou | Dany Lafferière is king of one-liners, and cracks up the audience every time he opens his mouth. Alain Mabanckou looks up to him like he would a mentor, "like Richard Wright for James Baldwin. He's my Richard Wright, " adding with a modesty that he will exhibit all evening, "even if' I'm not Baldwin."
The two have known each other for ten years, and they were a good team to pair for this conversation mediated by Anderson Tepper of Vanity Fair, which was supposed to be about "subverting stereotypes" and "playing with language" - even if they ended up talking mostly about sex.
With his dry wit and impeccable comic timing, Laferrière was off to a good start when Anderson Cooper asked him about his international best-seller "How to Make Love to a Negro." The book was published in Canada (where Laferrière, a Haitian, has lived since 1986) under the original title "How to make love to a Negro without getting tired." Laferrière was hilarious when he told the audience that the US newspapers - including the New York Times - couldn't stomach printing the full title, and reviewed the book as "How to make love to a Negro". Cautiously, his editor warned him: "they cut your title, but it's supposed to be a good paper." Lafferière responded: "I don't want a good paper, I want to sue them. I want a scandal!" He got a good paper, and he didn't sue. But when the movie came out, the NAACP put its foot down: Negro was an "ugly" word. It couldn't be used. The title was cut some more. It became "How to make love." But the foreign editions were even more fanciful: the Dutch called it "How to make love to a Negro without turning black" and the Japanese translator threw in the towel, explaining that the Japanese didn't have an expression for "making love" nor for "Negro!"
The movie “Heading South” which was based on Laferrière short stories, and follows three middle-aged American and Canadian women who go to Haïti for sex-tourism, also broke taboos. Laferrière claimed the story was inspired by a line by French novelist Françoise Sagan, who wrote: “Love is something so beautiful that when I am old, I’ll pay to get some.” “Even when you pay for love,” he added, enjoying the provocation, “it’s still love.”
With his newspaper’s cap and his sincere smile, Mabanckou, who’s just won the prestigious French Prix Renaudot for his latest novel, “Memoirs of a Porcupine,” was more subdued and serious than his “mentor,” whom he met in Paris at a book signing. Mabanckou was born and raised in the Congo and has lived in France. Now he teaches Francophone literature in California. His own claim to controversy is “African Psycho,” which just came out in the States with Soft Skull Press. The book is apparently a take on Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho.” Mabanckou admires Ellis, whom he compared to an “earthquake.” “When I read American Psycho,” he said, “I thought Bateman was the perfect serial killer. Then I decided to write a parody of that book. My character would be a serial killer, but he would fail every time.” Mabanckou wanted to explore the noir influence on African youth, who love to watch Scarface, Pulp Fiction and American Westerns. His new book, he said, is inspired by the arrival in the 80’s of Zaïre women to become prostitutes in Brazzaville. The title is “La Révolution Horizontale” – in English: The horizontal revolution.
Which prompted Lafferière to pipe in that in Haïti, they practice “The Vertical Fuck,” while dancing in the dark. More laughs and guffaws in the audience.
No matter how much Anderson Tepper tried to keep the conversation lofty and serious, Lafferière couldn’t resist another bon mot. But wasn’t he also, after all, “playing with language” and “subverting stereotypes?” Lafferière got one of his biggest laugh when he suggested that the US was a homosexual nation because of the way baseball players show off their great butts to each other, and the slow, sensual game looks like “preliminary phases of desire,” and that because of that, “they should play naked.”
To Mabackou, who was flattering him by calling him a “poet,” Lafferière opposed a flat comeback: “I am not a poet,” he said, claiming he just leaves blank spaces between paragraphs to make a book look longer, and when readers see blank spaces, they automatically think it’s poetry. He then quoted French writer Paul Morand who said about Haïti: “Everything ends with a poem in this country,” adapting the quote to Haïti’s present reality: “now everything ends with a bloodbath.” He made fun of the tv crew shooting a documentary about him in Haïti, who requested a armored trunk, several changes of vehicle, and six armed guards. With biting humor, he deadpanned: “we are not killing each other all the time. After all we’ve gone from 7 million inhabitants to 8 million.” Perhaps Lafferière should consider a late night talk show job.
The controversial topic of the Francophone writing manifesto that Laferrière and Mabanckou both signed was raised by Anderson Cooper, but the debate wasn’t as illuminating – especially for an American audience - as it should have been. It’s a sticky topic, this question of “French” writers vs “Francophone” writers, since – to everyone’s surprise – “Francophone” (but not “French”) writers picked up a good amount of the major literary prizes in 2006. American Jonathan Litell won the Prix Goncourt, Nancy Huston won the Prix Femina, and Mabanckou himself won the Renaudot. Those writers don’t want to be segregated as “Francophone” writers anymore, but want to be recognized as writers who write in the French language just like the French writers. The francophone issue became muddled with another “hot” topic, that of the so-called “navel-gazing” reputation of French literature. Mabanckou said he saw himself as a “migratory bird” and that living in exile gave him something new to feed his creation. Laferrière, for his part, suggested that with all their traveling, writers ended up talking so much to their readers, they were reenacting the African “oral” tradition of the “griot,” which gave him and Mabanckou a head start over their colleagues.
Unfortunately, the issue of how much writers coming from outside the French metropole could widen the scope of local “domestic” literature and give it a breath of fresh air and a whole other perspective, was only touched upon briefly. | | |
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| 4-29-07 10:08AM: Catherine said...
Oh God, I wrote too fast! Thank you so much.
I corrected the mistake.
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| 4-26-07 12:14PM: Shona said...
Moderator's name is Anderson Tepper, not Anderson Cooper!!
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