How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired

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“WHEN MY BOOK came out,” Dany Laferrière recalls with bitterness and amazement, “nobody believed it was written by a black man. They said, Whoever wrote it writes almost like a black. Everyone was so sure it was written by a white. A black couldn’t write like that, they said.”

But the famous photo of Dany sitting in the Carré St-Louis, in his Miller/Bukowski attitude with gym shoes, typewriter and booze-in-a-bag, left the doubters no way out: the Negro of the title was indeed black.

Why did so many readers doubt the narrator’s identity, even after he had revealed his true colors? After all, these same readers were acquainted with black writers rising up to take a stand. The names of some of them are mentioned in this novel as icons, some of which are worn out, others still powerful: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Chester Himes. But what confounded the expectations of Laferrière’s unsuspecting readers was this erotico-satiric novel with the come-on title that plays both sides of racial and sexual stereotypes against the middle, and takes fatal and uproarious aim at all manner of sacred cows — including young gifted black writers. Here was a novel by a black man that begins by pronouncing a funeral elegy for the myth of the Great Black Lover. And when Laferrière describes himself and his brothers, he uses the word nègre— “Negro,” or even “nigger”—instead of the more politically and socially correct noir—“black.” What kind of Nègre was this anyway? Not one whom readers, white or black, had met before.

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