How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired (2 page)

There is another reason for Laferrière's success that has to do with the Quebec writing scene. His book makes an absolute contrast to virtually everything that has been written in Quebec over the last little while. To read this
Nègre,
after suffering through the novels of Jansenist isolation and pent-up madness, the stock in trade of so many Quebec novelists, is more than a breath of fresh air—it's a gale-force wind. Recent Quebec fiction has been so completely fastened to its navel, so lost in grim retrospection, that we can only hope it will never be the same after Laferrière's madcap characters and their excessive energy.

And without burdening this new writer with the “ethnic” tag, part of the positive response to Laferrière came from the new image he was projecting of an immigrant Quebec. Quebec fiction has always worked with the problems of identity; readers seemed ready to accept Laferrière's immigrant version of that age-old struggle.

A word about the translation of this novel. When I first met Dany Laferrière and discussed the possibility of making an English version of the book, he said, “It'll be easy. It's already written in English. Just the words are in French.” If only that had been true! The problems started as early as the title. When Laferrière uses the potentially derogatory word,
nègre,
the translator has several choices, but he cannot automatically substitute “black,” despite what current English usage demands. Our word “black” is simply too free of stereotypes and too politically cool to be used in social satire. In this book, there are very few occasions when “black,” the politically correct word, can be used if the translator wants to retain Laferrière's dynamic between the sexes and colors, in which blacks will always be
nègre.
I finally decided on “Negro,” alternating when the occasion called for it. “Negro” is outdated, it smells of pre–Black Power liberalism, and because of those echoes it is particularly well suited to Laferrière's satirical intent.

Laferrière is wily, well-read and scheming in the best sense of the word. I believe this writer deserves our attention and recognition.

DAVID HOMEL

The Nigger Narcissus

I CAN'T BELIEVE
it, this is the fifth time Bouba's played that Charlie Parker record. He's crazy about jazz, and this must be his Parker period. Last week I had Coltrane for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now it's Parker's turn.

There's only one good thing about this place: you can play Parker or Miles Davis or even a noisier cat like Archie Shepp at three o'clock in the morning (with walls as thin as onionskin paper) without some idiot telling you to turn it down.

We're suffocating in the summer heat, jammed in between the Fontaine de Johannie (a roach-ridden restaurant frequented by small-time hoods) and a minuscule topless bar, at 3670 rue St-Denis, right across from Cherrier. An abject one-and-a-half that the landlord palmed off on poor Bouba as a two-and-a-half for $120 a month. We're up on the third floor. A narrow room cut lengthwise by a horrible Japanese screen decorated with enormous stylized birds. A fridge in a constant state of palpitation, as if we were holed up above some railroad station. Playboy bunnies thumbtacked to the wall that we had to take down when we got here to avoid the suicidal tendencies those things inevitably cause. A stove with elements as cold as a witch's tit at forty below. And, extra added attraction, the Cross of Mount Royal framed in the window.

I sleep on a filthy bed and Bouba made himself a nest on the plucked couch full of mountains and valleys. Bouba inhabits it fully. He drinks, reads, eats, meditates and fucks on it. He has married the hills and dales of this cotton-stuffed whore.

When we came into possession of this meager pigsty, Bouba settled on the couch with the collected works of Freud, an old dictionary with the letters A through D and part of E missing, and a torn and tattered copy of the Koran.

Superficially, Bouba spends all day doing nothing. In reality, he is purifying the universe. Sleep cures us of all physical impurities, mental illness and moral perversion. Between pages of the Koran, Bouba engages in sleep cures that can last up to three days. The Koran, in its infinite wisdom, states: “Every soul shall taste death. You shall receive your rewards only on the Day of Resurrection. Whoever is spared the fire of Hell and is admitted to Paradise shall surely gain his end; for the life of this world is nothing but a fleeting vanity.” (Sura
III
, 182.) The world can blow itself up if it wants to; Bouba is sleeping.

Sometimes his sleep is as strident as Miles Davis's trumpet. Bouba becomes closed upon himself, his face impenetrable, his knees folded under his chin. Other times I find him on his back, his arms forming a cross, his mouth opening onto a black hole, his toes pointed towards the ceiling. The Koran in all its magnanimity says: “You cause the night to pass into the day, and the day into the night; You bring forth the living from the dead and the dead from the living. You give without stint to whom You will.” (Sura
III
, 26.) And so Bouba is aiming for a place at the right hand of Allah (may his holy name be praised).

CHARLIE PARKER
tears through the night. A heavy, humid, Tristes Tropiques kind of night. Jazz always makes me think of New Orleans, and that makes a Negro nostalgic.

Bouba is crashed out on the couch in his usual position (lying on his left side, facing Mecca), sipping Shanghai tea and perusing a volume of Freud. Since Bouba is totally jazz-crazy, and since he recognizes only one guru (Allah is great and Freud is his prophet), it did not take him long to concoct a complex and sophisticated theory the long and short of which is that Sigmund Freud invented jazz.

“In what volume, Bouba?”

“
Totem and Taboo,
man.”

Man. He actually calls me man.

“If Freud played jazz, for Christ's sake, we would have known about it.”

Bouba breathes in a mighty lungful of air. Which is what he does every time he deals with a nonbeliever, a Cartesian, a rationalist, a head-shrinker. The Koran says: “Wait, then, as they themselves are waiting.”

“You know,” Bouba finally intones, “you know that SF lived in New York.”

“Of course he did.”

“He could have learned to play trumpet from any tubercular musician in Harlem.”

“It's possible.”

“Do you know what jazz is at least?”

“I can't describe it, but I'd know what it is if I heard it.”

“Good.” Bouba says after a lengthy period of meditation, “listen to this then.”

Then I'm sucked in and swallowed, absorbed, osmosed, drunk, digested and chewed up by a flow of wild words, fantastic hallucinations with paranoid pronunciation, jolted by jazz impulses to the rhythm of Sura incantations—then I realize that Bouba is performing a syncopated, staccato reading of the unsuspecting pages 68 and 69 of
Totem and Taboo.

THE EFFIGY
of the Egyptian princess Taiah watches over the ancient couch where Bouba spends his days, horizontal or cross-legged, burning sweet-smelling resins in an Oriental incense-burner. He brews endless cups of tea on an alcohol lamp and reads rare books on Assyrian art, the English mystics, voodoo Vévés and Swinburne's “Fata Morgana.” He spends his precious light admiring an engraving, purchased on St. Denis Street, of the fresh body of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's “Beata Beatrix.”

“Listen to this, man.”

It's the thirtieth time this week I've listened to it. It's a Parker cut. Bouba's face is as tight as a mizzenmast; he's listening to it too. You could hear a tsetse fly buzz. Saint Parker of the Depths, pray for us. I listen as hard as I can. While Bouba literally drinks in every harsh note from Parker's sax. Right in the middle of the Big Phrase (so says Bouba), right when R.I.P. Parker (1920–1955) is about to embark on those precious seconds (128 measures) that revolutionized jazz, love, death and all our goddamn sensibility—the heavens choose to unfurl above our heads in the brutal form of an all-out fuckfest punctuated with strident keening, the cries of wounded beasts, a gut-ripping cavalcade of wild bucking horses, right there, right above our heads. The turn-table jumps like a treetoad with sticky fingers. What's going on? Is this the wrath of Allah? “Will they not ponder on the Koran? If it had not come from Allah, they could have surely found in it many contradictions.” (Sura
IV
, 84.) Is it Ogoum, the fire god of the voodoo pantheon? Bouba maintains we have rented the antechamber of hell and that Beelzebub himself lives upstairs. The racket resumes, more violently. Louder. More precipitously. The frenzied gallop of the four horses of the Apocalypse. Parker has just enough time to play “Cool Blues” and afterwards, that little gem of inventiveness, of audio madness, “Ko-Ko” (1945). The only piece of music that can stand up to this insanity comes from on high. The ceiling drops a millimeter in a cloud of pink dust. Then, silence. We wait for the end of the world, impatiently, holding our breath. A private, custom-made Apocalypse. Silence. Then this taut keening cry in high C, sharp and lasting, inhuman, first allegro, then andante, then pianissimo, an endless, inconsolable, electronic, asexual cry over Parker's sax; the only song this dawn.

The Great Mandala
of the Western World

THINGS ARE
going terribly wrong these days for the conscientious, professional black pick-up artist. The black period is over, has-been, kaput, finito, whited out. Nigger go home.
Va-t-en, Nègre.
The Black Bottom's off the Top 20.
Hasta la vista,
Negro. Last call, colored man. Go back to the bush, man. Do yourself a hara-kiri you-know-where. Look, Mamma, says the Young White Girl, look at the Cut Negro. A good Negro, her father answers, is a Negro with no balls. In a nutshell, that's the situation in the 1980s, a dark day for Negro Civilization. On the stock market of the Western World, ebony has taken another spectacular fall. If only the Negro ejaculated oil. Black gold. O sadness, the Negro's sperm is ivory. Meanwhile, Yellow is coming on strong. The Japanese are clean, they don't take up much space and they know the
Kama Sutra
like the back of their Nikons. The sight of one of those yellow dolls (4 feet 10, 110 pounds), as portable as a make-up case, on the arm of a long, tall girl (a model or salesgirl in a department store) is enough to make you cry the blues. I hear the Japs are as good at disco as Negroes are at jazz. It wasn't always that way. God didn't used to be yellow—the traitor! During the seventies, America got off on Red. White girls practically moved onto Indian reservations to earn their sexual
BA
s. The co-eds who stayed behind had to settle for the handful of Indian students still left on the campuses. Naturally, a great number of Redskins came running from a great number of tribes, attracted by the scent of young, white squaw. A young Iroquois had his pride, but a free fuck is better than a bottle of rotgut. White girls were doing it Huron-style. A Cheyenne screw was the hottest thing around. Don't underestimate the effect of fucking a guy whose real name is Roaring Bull. At night in the dormitories, each cry, according to its modulation, told of a Huron or an Iroquois or a Cheyenne inseminating a young white girl with his red jissom. It lasted until each and every Indian had come down with chronic syphilis. With the survival of the white Anglo-Saxon race in danger, the Establishment halted the massacre.
WASP
girls received drastic doses of penicillin, and the Indian students were sent back to their respective reservations to finish the genocide begun with the discovery of the Americas. The universities reverted to their daily routine, gray, washed out, going nowhere, and just as girls were about to succumb to boredom with the pallid, pale, faded Ivy League boys, the violent, potent, incendiary Black Panthers burst upon the campus scene. “Finally, some real blood!” came a choir of exultations from the Joyces, Phyllises, Marys and Kays driven desperate by the medicine-dropper sex of conventional unions and a gray life of frustration with the Johns, Harrys, Walters and Company. Fucking black was fucking exotic. And America loves to fuck exotic. Put black vengeance and white guilt together in the same bed and you had a night to remember! Those blond-haired, pink-cheeked girls practically had to be dragged out of the black dormitories. The Big Nigger from Harlem fucked the stuffing out of the girlfriend of the Razor Blade King, the whitest, most arrogant racist on campus. The Big Nigger from Harlem's head spun at the prospect of sodomizing the daughter of the slumlord of 125th Street, fucking her for all the repairs her bastard father never made, fornicating for the horrible winter last year when his younger brother died of
TB
. The Young White Girl gets off too. It's the first time anyone's manifested such high-quality hatred towards her. In the sexual act, hatred is more effective than love. But it's all over now. The second war fought on American soil. Compared to the war of the colored sexes, Korea was a skirmish. And Viet Nam a mere afterthought in the flow of Judeo-Christian civilization. If you want to know what nuclear war is all about, put a black man and a white woman in the same bed. But it's all over now. We came close to total annihilation without knowing it. The black was the last sexual bomb that could have blown up this planet. And now he's dead. Sputtered out between the thighs of a white girl. When you come down to it, the black was just a wet firecracker, but that's not for me to say. Make way for the Yellows. The Japanese are going to take us dancing on the volcano. It's their turn. The great roulette wheel of the flesh. That's how it turns. Red, Black, Yellow. Black, Yellow, Red. Yellow, Red, Black. The Great Mandala of the Western World.

Beelzebub, Lord of the
Flies, Lives Upstairs

HEMINGWAY SHOULD
be read standing up, Basho walking, Proust in the bath, Cervantes in a hospital, Simenon in a train (Canadian Pacific, anyone?), Dante in paradise, Dosto in the underground, Miller in a smoky bar with hot dogs, fries and a Coke . . . I was reading Mishima with a cheap bottle of wine by the bed, totally exhausted, and a girl in the shower.