Writer, intellectual, and honorary doctorate Dany Laferrière on freedom, boredom, and obstacles that have confronted his own path.
By Anaïs Clercq
Translated by Zahra Habib
On June 4th, writer and intellectual Dany Laferrière was the first Honorary Doctorate to accept the award from Faculty of Arts’ 2018 Spring Convocation. In this article, we highlight the unforgettable ideas of his acceptance speech, as well as in an exclusive interview conducted with the Faculty.
In Praise of slowness
On the morning of June 4th, the first graduating cohort of Arts students waited with particular impatience for their ceremony to begin. A recent storm caused a major power outage throughout the outdoor venue, a tent with a 5,000 seating capacity, and with no other recourse but to wait in darkness and anticipation for the proceedings, the wait seemed to drag.
When power was restored hours later and Dany Laferrière strode onstage, he began an address full of sensitivity to the unexpected way the mornings’ had unfolded. Adapting his introductory remarks on the spot, with his unique style of mixing humor and depth, he stressed the importance of moments that force "extremely serious" questions, such as “what should we do when our plans are interrupted?” Appropriately, he began on waiting and desire:
The moments that prevent us from carrying out our activities as planned is an important moment in an era, where everything moves at high speed, but pushes us against a wall that is immobile. There will always be hindrances that you don’t expect, coming up at moments that seem inconvenient.
With strong autobiographical elements scattered throughout his thirty-odd books, Dany Laferrière is a kind of writer-rock star, with work recognized throughout the globe. When asked if he considers his own life as a work of art, he responds without hesitation:
Yes, because I wrote a lot. And writing a book takes time, and a certain kind of concentration. Thirty books is a high number, and if I spent thirty to forty years writing my blood could turn into ink. Writing is a daily thing, it is what I’ve done for most of my life. I’m returning to fiction every day of my life, to the point where I no longer see the difference.
A love for slowness was what attracted him to the French Academy. That it thirty-five to forty years to produce each edition of the Academy’s dictionary breaks a smile across his face ("the Academy is in no hurry"). Although his work engages contemporary ideas of community, and the relationship between social communities and their surroundings, whether in Montreal, Port-au-Prince, or Paris, Laferrière says he is above all interested in literature and avoids the influence of current issues. He admits the French Academy’s condemnation of inclusivity in literature, is something that "will take me five years before I have anything to say. I do not think about it because the newspapers are already talking a lot. "
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The author of The Almost Lost Art of Not Doing is finds the pursuit of novelty constant, everywhere. Too much reliance on new technologies is worrying, and Laferrière laments the collateral loss of our taste for boredom.
"We sometimes forget that before this technological explosion replaced our hands with a device, boredom could be a sweet companion, something which caused nostalgia while preserving what was important.”
In an interview for Radio-Canada’s Tout le monde en parle, he declared he is a ‘defender of the hand’. Quite literally true, as wrote and self-illustrated his most recent book ‘Self Portrait of Paris with a cat’ (In French, Autoportrait de Paris avec chat) entirely by hand.
The hand possesses a capacity for memory that the computer does not. It remembers everything it has touched. It is the hand that caresses the skin of a child, the bark on a tree, that knows the sensation of cold and hot... it squeezes so many other hands, it has loved, it refuses to reach out to those it despises. The hand has lived. We forgot it. It is the first tool of man and has served us for fifteen thousand years.”
Laferrière concluded his speech with an adage on boredom, saying “it is not boredom that is the problem, but that we are doing everything to avoid it". He encourages showing patience and sensitivity to people and our surroundings. Not only are his words an inspiration for graduates entering a new phase of their lives, but so is the incredible journey of his life and the trajectory of his career.
Praise for freedom
Laferrière’s work is based on the concept of freedom, deconstructing and erasing stereotypes and labels, and in turn allowing him to live freely. These were the things that had caused him to leave his country under dictatorship. When asked about the importance of freedom he assigns on a personal basis, Laferrière responds:
I do not try to understand freedom, I live it. For me, it's an extremely simple thing. I’ve noticed that the less we think about freedom, the freer we are. And if I ever do think of liberty, it is when I see hindrances in the way. A child should be able swim in a river, but if there’s an obstacle to it, or if they are forbidden, they will look for another way to get there. We might say he frees himself when he overcomes what is stopping him, but he should have been free to go in the first place.
In his work, Mr. Laferrière testifies to his personal difficulties throughout life, things which have prevented his ideal of living without concern, and which forced him to develop his own strategies to feel free depending on shifting social contexts of his time.
I am often asked: would I have written the same things had I stayed in Haiti? I don’t think so. It was precisely the prison of Haiti’s dictatorship that made me write The cry of the crazy birds. I tried leaving this prison by taking certain liberties from the rules of the dictatorship.
Leaving Haiti brought new constraints to Laferrière’s life. Racism, he recalls, was a penitentiary of its own.
When I arrived in North America, there were other prisons, like racism. I experienced it at the very beginning. Racism is no different from social exclusion and contempt, only that you are perceived as illegitimate faster, you can be identified from afar. Everyone suffers an appetite for power, a taste of domination. The real question is of class and not of race. I developed certain reflexes in this new prison, and when I came out of this identification and gained a kind of legitimacy by becoming a known writer, then another obstacle presented itself; the prisons I experienced externally became internal, ingrained in the mind.
The reductive tendency to categorize a writer based on geographical origin is another limitation encountered by Laferrière.
I was always identified as a Haitian or Caribbean writer. And that is another fight: identity, which is completely separate from what I was fighting in Haiti. Similar to what women are fighting for, this fight to be seen as a writer is to say I am a human being who should not have less rights than another. This is a Western fight, in my case.
For Laferrière, rather than an acquired object that might be taken away at any moment, freedom is a long series of obstacles to be overcome, with the knowledge that after each small victory another battle awaits. Following this difficult and sinuous path towards an ideal where one simply ‘feels free’ is the only way forward. Laferrière praises literature as a valuable tool towards that, a space of total freedom that only the words of the book, the imaginary it unfolds, can engender.
[1] Quoted quotes are taken from this speech by Dany Laferrière at McGill University on June 4, 2018.
This article was originally written in French