Dany Laferrière was born in Port-au-Prince in 1953. Winner of the Prix Médicis in 2009 for “The Enigma of the Return” (Grasset), he was elected to the French Academy in 2013. He is the author at Grasset of “I am a Japanese writer” (2008), of “The almost lost Art of doing nothing” (2014), of “The child who looks” (2022) and of three drawn novels, “Self-portrait of Paris with cat” (2018), “Exile is worth the journey” (2020) and “On the road with Bashô” (2021).
In this book, the first he devotes to racism, Dany Laferrière focuses on what is perhaps the most important racism in the Western world, the one that is devouring the United States. Black Americans: 43 million out of a total population of 332 million – more than the entire population of Canada. 43 million going down all exploited and often martyred people. 43 million who still often experience racism. Far from organizing a Manichean opposition between Black and White, precisely, Dany Laferrière specifies: “It must be understood that the word Black does not contain all Blacks, just as the word White does not contain all Whites. It is only with the nuances that one can advance on such a mined ground. »
Here, then, is a book of reflection and tact, a literary book. Combining short forms that could be compared to haikus, where he generally addresses the sensations that black people experience, and brief essays where he studies more general questions, Dany Laferrière traces a serious path, without ever being demonstrative, in the seemingly unquenchable violence of American racism. “Contempt”, “Rage”, “Ku Klux Klan” alternate with portraits of the great old men, Blacks or Whites, who acted in Black or in White: Charles Lynch, the inventor of lynching, but also Eleanor Roosevelt; and Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Bessie Smith, to whom the book is dedicated, and Angela Davis. This A short treatise on racism in America ends on a note of hope, the one that Dany Laferrière entrusts to women. “Toni, Maya, Billie, Nina, come on girls, the world is yours! » (Presentation of Grasset editions).