There are delicate subjects, such as racism, an area where “a simple word can explode in your face like a grenade”. The Canadian-Haitian academician Dany Laferrière knows this well, so he weighs them, these “simple words”, in this luminous A short treatise on racism in America. “I am still on the dictionary commission”, he reminds us with a laugh, before explaining to us that he “wanted to put flesh and pain back into this tragedy of racism”. The chapters follow one another, alternating the reasons for affliction and pride of Black Americans, also alternating temporalities, from the lynchings of the Ku Klux Kan to ordinary racism. Wouldn’t the 69-year-old writer’s key word ultimately be nuance? : “We must not fall into the trap of accusing everyone and their opposite”, enjoins this despiser of cultural appropriation and wokism, who is also happy to point out to young people the dazzling breeding ground of artists blacks, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Alex Harley, Langston Hughes, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Mamie Smith…
L’Express: Is racism a subject that has been close to your heart for a long time?
DL : Yes, I spoke about it in a diluted way in some of my fictions like How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired Where This pomegranate in the hand of the young Negro… in which I wanted to show that a black man could talk just as well about Baldwin as about Norman Mailer, about Basquiat, about Truman Capote. In short, I often mentioned the subject in an ironic mode, whereas here, I do it in a serious mode, with a bit of humor all the same, out of simple courtesy (laughs).
Was there a detonator to this “little yet terrifying book” as you call it in your introduction?
The George Floyd case. In fact, I was less shaken by the case itself than by seeing all of America – and almost all of the West – be amazed that a police officer could be tried for choking someone in front of the world for ten minutes. And then there is this notion of “involuntary murder”…
You restrict yourself to racism in the United States.
Yes, that’s the most interesting, there are 48 million blacks, an enormous mass, and as many possibilities of wrongdoing and acts of racism. What’s additionally fascinating is that alongside everyday racism, where people get bullied by police officers, the United States is teeming with presidents of big corporations, black mayors and governors, not to mention the former -President Obama and the intelligentsia. Moreover, America is perhaps the only country where slavery took place on its national soil, and which settled the question by a civil war. Finally, I know the country well, I lived more than twelve years in Miami and New York.
You have chosen an original form, short texts, almost haikus, alternating with longer paragraphs…
I like this form that I have already used in other books such The enigma of the return, but this time I used it with young black readers in mind. I can’t bear to see them always using the same clichés, and I wanted to remind them through fluid texts that during the Civil War, many young white people died fighting against slavery; in this regard, I also wanted to rehabilitate Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that was reviled in the 20th century, when this 19th century bestseller somehow caused this war. At the same time I am not afraid to “shock” the reader. Thus the text on suicide. During slavery, the suicide of a black man was in fact equated with an act of sabotage. I wanted to express here the idea of belonging to someone: your wife, your children, your joy, everything belongs to the master. And time does nothing.
You remind that it is necessary to “target the enemy”.
If I use this vocabulary specific to young people, it is because it is indeed a war in the United States. We really kill. Equality requires equal protection for all. We read all the time that white people complain about not going to black neighborhoods, but we never say that no black people go to a white neighborhood or even to a city with a high concentration, like Boston. When a white man gets lost in a black neighborhood, he is afraid that he will be prevented from calling the police, when a black person passes twice through a white residential neighborhood, people get scared, call the police, who will bring the Black at “the border”. The city is a book: if you see electricity pylons, lots of pylons, and ransacked parks, you are among the blacks, and if you see trees, you are among the whites.
Conversely, there are some, you say, who take out the racial card as if it were a business card, while the name African-American bristles at you…
Black people want to have a past, I can understand that – which the white American does too, by the way, who does not hesitate to say that he comes from the Mayflower, to recall his blue blood if I may say so. But the problem is that they then lose the title of American, because there is no hyphenated identity. As soon as there is a hyphen, there is a problem. We haven’t listened enough to the sociologist and historian William Du Bois, a great Harvard scholar, who clearly explained the difference between the African-American with his two identities and the Franco-Moroccan, for example, and his two nationalities. The African-American was not born in Africa, he may have never even been there, moreover he does not like the heat… Similarly, pointing out the contribution of black Americans does not of meaning, we can speak of the contribution of the Koreans, yes, but the black man is a constituent of America. It’s little words like that that cause trouble. By trying to win on both counts, we find ourselves pushed back to the margins, we no longer occupy the center, and the war is fought in the center. Besides, just because I’m black doesn’t mean I trust all black people and am dumb enough to think there aren’t black thieves. It is important to write, that too.
In a crisp paragraph, you evoke the complaint of the association of Japanese writers against you during the publication of your book I am a Japanese writer…
This is a nod to the subject of cultural appropriation. This intrusion from people who don’t read is unbearable. When you write, you are everyone, you are the whole library. As soon as you take up the pen and as soon as you like to read, you cannot be for appropriation. When I went to conferences of black writers, I was struck by the fact that they were always quoting black writers even though they were all reading Rimbaud in secret. For me, the writer erases the borders of race, class, he circulates, the book is a passport.
Will this settle down?
This is an intellectual Covid (laughs). I do not know.
It’s a bit like wokism…
I don’t like to use this word which encompasses too many things, Chinese things like important things – some call themselves “antiwoke” to deny any challenge to established power. That said, Chinese and nonsense is unacceptable, and many of the intransigent challenges come from people who don’t read. For example, if someone tells you that they want to remove the word “nigger” from all the books, you point out to them that it’s going to be complicated because the works are full of it. It is unbearable to ban this word, like all other words, and banning does not prevent people from thinking… This cleansing is extremely dangerous because we will not know how the times lived. Literature is made to express true feelings and not to express good feelings. If you hate a book, challenge it, call your friends to ask them not to read it, write against it, but don’t create another form of violence.
About violence, you speak of that of social networks comparable, according to you, to the blackmail exercised in his time by Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI.
The violence of social media is absolutely relentless, allowing many to wake up in the middle of the night to throw their gall at people they don’t know. It’s no longer power at the end of a gun, it’s power at your fingertips! It is very interesting to observe how individuals use this power, we recognize the little chiefs, the little dictators, and we see their souls a little dirty. We used to say “tell me what you read, I’ll tell you who you are”, today we can say, “tell me what you write on social networks, we see who you are”.
But you yourself are not on social networks…
No, I’m not going, I don’t have a site, I’m invisible and it pisses off the sociopaths (laughs). But I would like to come back to the why of this book, born, apart from George Floyd, whom I finally mentioned little, from a founding image. When I was 8 years old, in Petit-Goâve, there was a very sweet white woman, a Breton I believe, who had married a cabinetmaker. It was the first time that I had seen a white woman in my neighborhood, moreover always barefoot and the mother of a child with frizzy hair whom she had called Choualam, an extraordinary and original name, which means “my horse” in Creole. This way of changing culture was for me the most revolutionary, the most incredible thing. This image lives in me since then, I discovered the world and understood that I could never put barriers or borders between races, between people.
A short treatise on racism in America, by Dany Laferriere. Grasset, 254 pages, €20.90.