Title Of Article :
GHOSTWRITING: PEDAGOGY, PERSPECTIVE, AND PERFORMATIVITY IN DANY LAFERRIÈRE’S COMMENT FAIRE L’AMOUR AVEC UN NEGRE SANS SE FATIGUER
Abstract :
In his novel Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer (in English, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired), Dany Laferrière parodies the genre of the instruction manual. Unlike the ‘How To’ and ‘For Dummies’ series intended for amateurs retiling their bathrooms, this text purports to instruct in the elusive methods of seduction and sex. However, the title is a cover – quite literally – for other forms of instruction and exploration. Though How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired claims to instruct white women in how to manage their black male lovers’ sexual stamina, the reader will find nothing of the sort. The title is a teaser, a clever marketing ploy by an even cleverer writer who plays on the cliché: sex sells. Indeed, this novel, Laferrière’s first, has met with great success and put Laferrière on the map in both Caribbean and Quebecois literature. Laferrière’s play with cliché and provocation begins with his title and continues throughout the text. In How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, Laferrière tirelessly provokes through the deployment of identity clichés that wed race with gender and sexuality. The black male Nègre and the white female Blanche are the principal stereotypes Laferrière invokes, tied to one another in a relationship of sexual contingency and taboo. The lessons Laferrière offers are not about love-making, though there is quite a bit of that in the novel. Rather, Laferrière lays bare the consequences of slavery and colonialism on contemporary interracial, heterosexual relationships, and uses sex as one example of how uneven power plays out. His ironic title is a playful hook masking pedagogy of another kind.
