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Como Fazer Amor Com Um Negro Sem Se Cansar
Nascido no Haiti em 1953, Dany Laferrière deixou seu país em 1976 fugindo da ditadura de Baby Doc. Emigrando para Montreal, no Canadá, onde trabalhou inicialmente num curtume, foi obrigado a reinventar a sua vida contando unicamente com a poderosa mola propulsora da literatura.
Seu livro de estreia, sucesso de público e crítica, Como fazer amor com um negro sem se cansar, publicado em 1985 e logo levado ao cinema por Jacques W. Benoît, é o primeiro título da "autobiografia americana" de Dany Laferrière. Ambientado na década de 1970 em Montreal, no Quebec, num pequeno apartamento da rua Saint-Denis e seus arredores, o livro põe em cena dois jovens negros exilados: um aspirante a escritor, que vive várias aventuras amorosas, e seu curioso companheiro de quarto, o "filósofo" Buba, que passa o tempo a dormir, ouvir jazz e a ler o Corão. No centro da trama estão as diferenças entre cultura de origem - o trópico caribenho e, no fim das contas, a África - e cultura de inserção - a próspera sociedade quebequense da América do Norte. É esta discrepância que vai turbinar as relações entre os sexos numa época em que a maioria das jovens universitárias estava decidida a passar por cima das fronteiras de cor, credo e classe social.
Retrato divertido do cotidiano e das fantasias de dois outsiders, mas também inédito acerto de contas com a América, Como fazer amor... combina altas doses de humor, erotismo, sarcasmo e poesia para dar voz a esse diálogo intenso, vivo e exuberante que se trava na pele, mas também no imaginário de diferentes culturas.
Seu livro de estreia, sucesso de público e crítica, Como fazer amor com um negro sem se cansar, publicado em 1985 e logo levado ao cinema por Jacques W. Benoît, é o primeiro título da "autobiografia americana" de Dany Laferrière. Ambientado na década de 1970 em Montreal, no Quebec, num pequeno apartamento da rua Saint-Denis e seus arredores, o livro põe em cena dois jovens negros exilados: um aspirante a escritor, que vive várias aventuras amorosas, e seu curioso companheiro de quarto, o "filósofo" Buba, que passa o tempo a dormir, ouvir jazz e a ler o Corão. No centro da trama estão as diferenças entre cultura de origem - o trópico caribenho e, no fim das contas, a África - e cultura de inserção - a próspera sociedade quebequense da América do Norte. É esta discrepância que vai turbinar as relações entre os sexos numa época em que a maioria das jovens universitárias estava decidida a passar por cima das fronteiras de cor, credo e classe social.
Retrato divertido do cotidiano e das fantasias de dois outsiders, mas também inédito acerto de contas com a América, Como fazer amor... combina altas doses de humor, erotismo, sarcasmo e poesia para dar voz a esse diálogo intenso, vivo e exuberante que se trava na pele, mas também no imaginário de diferentes culturas.
152 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1985
132 people are currently reading
3265 people want to read
About the author
Dany Laferrière
76 books471 followersNé à Port-au-Prince en avril 1953, Dany Laferrière a grandi à Petit-Goâve. Il écrit pour le journal Le Petit Samedi soir et fait partie de l’équipe de Radio Haïti. Il quitte son pays natal à la suite de l’assassinat de son collègue et ami, le journaliste Gasner Raymond. Il s’installe au Québec où il occupe plusieurs emplois avant de commencer à écrire.
Son premier roman, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer, paraît en 1985 (VLB). Le succès est immédiat et les réactions nombreuses. Laferrière devient alors l’un des principaux représentants d’une nouvelle génération d’écrivains dans le paysage littéraire québécois.
Dany Laferrière écrit ensuite Éroshima (1987), puis L’Odeur du café (VLB, 1991), qui est récompensé par le prix Carbet des Caraïbes. En 2000, près de vingt-cinq ans après son arrivée au Québec, il signe Le Cri des oiseaux fous (Lanctôt), roman dans lequel il témoigne des raisons qui l’ont poussé à quitter Haïti et qui remporte le prix Carbet des Lycéens. En 2006, le prix du Gouverneur général du Canada est décerné à son album jeunesse Je suis fou de Vava.
Habitant en alternance Montréal, New-York et Miami, l’auteur se considère avant tout comme un citoyen de l’Amérique. C’est dans cet esprit qu’il rédige ce qu’il appellera son Autobiographie américaine, un grand projet regroupant une dizaine de ses titres et qui dresse un portrait de l’Amérique, d’Haïti à Montréal, en passant par les États-Unis.
Dany Laferrière mène, parallèlement à ses activités littéraires, une carrière de journaliste et de chroniqueur, tout en faisant quelques apparitions à la télévision et au cinéma. Il a également scénarisé quelques longs-métrages, le plus souvent des adaptations cinématographiques de ses romans.
Édités en France chez Grasset, les livres de Dany Laferrière ont été traduits dans une douzaine de langues, dont le coréen et le polonais.
Laferrière a publié cinq romans aux Éditions du Boréal. Son plus récent livre, L'Énigme du retour, est en lice pour le prix France Télévision, le prix Wepler et le prix Décembre. En plus, il se trouve déjà en deuxième sélection pour le prix Médicis 2009 ainsi que pour le prix Fémina 2009.
Biographie tirée du site Internet des éditions Boréal.
Son premier roman, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer, paraît en 1985 (VLB). Le succès est immédiat et les réactions nombreuses. Laferrière devient alors l’un des principaux représentants d’une nouvelle génération d’écrivains dans le paysage littéraire québécois.
Dany Laferrière écrit ensuite Éroshima (1987), puis L’Odeur du café (VLB, 1991), qui est récompensé par le prix Carbet des Caraïbes. En 2000, près de vingt-cinq ans après son arrivée au Québec, il signe Le Cri des oiseaux fous (Lanctôt), roman dans lequel il témoigne des raisons qui l’ont poussé à quitter Haïti et qui remporte le prix Carbet des Lycéens. En 2006, le prix du Gouverneur général du Canada est décerné à son album jeunesse Je suis fou de Vava.
Habitant en alternance Montréal, New-York et Miami, l’auteur se considère avant tout comme un citoyen de l’Amérique. C’est dans cet esprit qu’il rédige ce qu’il appellera son Autobiographie américaine, un grand projet regroupant une dizaine de ses titres et qui dresse un portrait de l’Amérique, d’Haïti à Montréal, en passant par les États-Unis.
Dany Laferrière mène, parallèlement à ses activités littéraires, une carrière de journaliste et de chroniqueur, tout en faisant quelques apparitions à la télévision et au cinéma. Il a également scénarisé quelques longs-métrages, le plus souvent des adaptations cinématographiques de ses romans.
Édités en France chez Grasset, les livres de Dany Laferrière ont été traduits dans une douzaine de langues, dont le coréen et le polonais.
Laferrière a publié cinq romans aux Éditions du Boréal. Son plus récent livre, L'Énigme du retour, est en lice pour le prix France Télévision, le prix Wepler et le prix Décembre. En plus, il se trouve déjà en deuxième sélection pour le prix Médicis 2009 ainsi que pour le prix Fémina 2009.
Biographie tirée du site Internet des éditions Boréal.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 201 reviews
December 18, 2013
Biting, still relevant satire about race and sex. Some really fascinating erotic moments. This is a whip smart book.
October 3, 2025
Ao contrário do que possa parecer à primeira vista, este livro, que cá por casa provocou risinhos e olhares inquisitivos, não é um manual de instruções. É antes uma paródia muito arguta sobre o fetichismo a que por vezes se vota o outro, aquele que é diferente de nós, sobretudo se estiver envolto em mitos e estereótipos, como acontece com os homens de raça negra.
O preto é do reino vegetal, Os brancos esquecem-se sempre que também têm cheiro. A maioria das raparigas da McGill cheiram a talco para bebé Johnson. Não sei a sensação que vos dá fazer amor com uma rapariga (maior e vacinada) que tresanda a talco de bebé. Pela minha parte, não consigo resistir ao desejo de lhe fazer cócegas.
Nesta farsa, porém, ninguém está a salvo, nem sequer os chamados aliados.
“Se dizem isso dos negros, que dirão então os negros de nós, colonialistas. Eu também acho que o engate é degradante para a mulher, mas o que é um engate inocente ao lado do tráfico de negros?” Por instantes, os presentes ficam desconcertados diante da perversidade de tal argumento.
A sátira não é género que costume interessar-me por ser demasiado óbvio e forçado, mas “Como fazer amor com um negro sem se cansar” consegue criar um protagonista carismático e divertido, sempre com a resposta na ponta da língua, em situações bem pensadas para ilustrar uma crítica ou um remoque.
- De onde é que tu és? – pergunta com bruteza a rapariga que está com Miz Literaratura.
Sempre que me fazem este género de pergunta, assim sem mais nem menos, sem prevenir, sem que se estivesse a falar da ‘National Geographic’ sinto crescer em mim um desejo irresistível de matar. (...)
- De que país és? - volta ela a perguntar.
- Quinta-feira à noite, venho de Madagáscar.
Dany Laferrière é um autor de origem haitiana, fugido ao regime de Baby Doc, que vive no Canadá desde os anos 70, pelo que deve haver algo de autobiográfico na história deste Cota que encontramos perante a sua Remington 22 a escrever “Paraíso do Preto Engatatão”, inspirando-se em Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Blaise Cendrars e Chester Himes.
Comprei-a num comerciante de velharias da Rue Ontário que vende máquinas de escrever com pedigree. Máquinas velhas. Vende-as a jovens escritores, pois quem mais, sem ser um jovem escritor, seria tão lorpa para acreditar num truque comercial tão vulgar?
Quando não está a tentar pôr James Baldwin a um canto, está a ouvir jazz com o seu companheiro de casa, ou lá fora no engate, ou no seu andrajoso colchão em grandes acrobacias sexuais com uma série de mulheres brancas, geralmente jovens, burguesas e estudantes: Miz Literatura, Miz Snobe, Miz Suicídio, Miz Sophisticated Lady, Miz Punk.
Para não termos de nos haver com a Gloria Steinem, escrevemos Miz.
Qualquer feminista que se preze poderia facilmente criticar a forma como as mulheres são retratadas e usadas nesta obra, mas se ainda não fosse claro que tudo isto é uma provocação, teríamos sempre as palavras do próprio aspirante a escritor numa entrevista imaginária:
A Miz Bombardier vira-se para mim: “Li o seu livro, e ri com gosto, mas você não gosta de mulheres, pelo menos foi o que me pareceu.
R: Dos pretos também não.
A Miz B. sorriu. Eu tinha ganhado o primeiro assalto.
P: No entanto...
R: O que digo é que, quando começamos a pôr cá para fora os fantasmas, toda a gente recebe a sua dose. Faço-lhe notar que neste romance, quase não há mulheres, apenas tipos. Há pretos e brancas. Do ponto de vista humano, o preto e a branca não existem.
O preto é do reino vegetal, Os brancos esquecem-se sempre que também têm cheiro. A maioria das raparigas da McGill cheiram a talco para bebé Johnson. Não sei a sensação que vos dá fazer amor com uma rapariga (maior e vacinada) que tresanda a talco de bebé. Pela minha parte, não consigo resistir ao desejo de lhe fazer cócegas.
Nesta farsa, porém, ninguém está a salvo, nem sequer os chamados aliados.
“Se dizem isso dos negros, que dirão então os negros de nós, colonialistas. Eu também acho que o engate é degradante para a mulher, mas o que é um engate inocente ao lado do tráfico de negros?” Por instantes, os presentes ficam desconcertados diante da perversidade de tal argumento.
A sátira não é género que costume interessar-me por ser demasiado óbvio e forçado, mas “Como fazer amor com um negro sem se cansar” consegue criar um protagonista carismático e divertido, sempre com a resposta na ponta da língua, em situações bem pensadas para ilustrar uma crítica ou um remoque.
- De onde é que tu és? – pergunta com bruteza a rapariga que está com Miz Literaratura.
Sempre que me fazem este género de pergunta, assim sem mais nem menos, sem prevenir, sem que se estivesse a falar da ‘National Geographic’ sinto crescer em mim um desejo irresistível de matar. (...)
- De que país és? - volta ela a perguntar.
- Quinta-feira à noite, venho de Madagáscar.
Dany Laferrière é um autor de origem haitiana, fugido ao regime de Baby Doc, que vive no Canadá desde os anos 70, pelo que deve haver algo de autobiográfico na história deste Cota que encontramos perante a sua Remington 22 a escrever “Paraíso do Preto Engatatão”, inspirando-se em Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Blaise Cendrars e Chester Himes.
Comprei-a num comerciante de velharias da Rue Ontário que vende máquinas de escrever com pedigree. Máquinas velhas. Vende-as a jovens escritores, pois quem mais, sem ser um jovem escritor, seria tão lorpa para acreditar num truque comercial tão vulgar?
Quando não está a tentar pôr James Baldwin a um canto, está a ouvir jazz com o seu companheiro de casa, ou lá fora no engate, ou no seu andrajoso colchão em grandes acrobacias sexuais com uma série de mulheres brancas, geralmente jovens, burguesas e estudantes: Miz Literatura, Miz Snobe, Miz Suicídio, Miz Sophisticated Lady, Miz Punk.
Para não termos de nos haver com a Gloria Steinem, escrevemos Miz.
Qualquer feminista que se preze poderia facilmente criticar a forma como as mulheres são retratadas e usadas nesta obra, mas se ainda não fosse claro que tudo isto é uma provocação, teríamos sempre as palavras do próprio aspirante a escritor numa entrevista imaginária:
A Miz Bombardier vira-se para mim: “Li o seu livro, e ri com gosto, mas você não gosta de mulheres, pelo menos foi o que me pareceu.
R: Dos pretos também não.
A Miz B. sorriu. Eu tinha ganhado o primeiro assalto.
P: No entanto...
R: O que digo é que, quando começamos a pôr cá para fora os fantasmas, toda a gente recebe a sua dose. Faço-lhe notar que neste romance, quase não há mulheres, apenas tipos. Há pretos e brancas. Do ponto de vista humano, o preto e a branca não existem.
August 2, 2020
" 'When people reveal their fantasies, you'll usually find something for everyone---or against everyone. Let me point out that for all intents & purposes there are no women in my novel. There are just types. Black men & white women. On the human level, the black man & the white woman do not exist. Chester Himes said they were American inventions, like the hamburger or the drive-in. In my book, I give a more . . . personal version of them.' (Interviewee)
'Very personal indeed. I read your novel. It takes place around Carré St. Louis. In a nutshell, it's the story of two young blacks who spend a hot summer chasing girls & complaining. One loves jazz; the other literature. One sleeps all day or listens to jazz while reciting the Koran; the other writes a novel about their day-to-day experiences.' " (Interviewer) - Pg. 145
📚
It takes a certain kind of author to be clever enough to tell you exactly what their novel is about without ruining it, and Dany Laferrière did just that with that excerpt I shared from his intelligent, laugh-out-loud funny, debut novel, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired.
Though published in 1985, How to Make Love to a Negro is still relevant. At its essence it is an immigrant story. We follow two black men, who migrated from the Gold Coast to Montreal, & we basically hear them riff on Jazz, Literature, America, race, (& especially) white women, among other things.
In the excerpt above our unnamed narrator mentioned types being the main characters in this satire, he's right. You have the "Black Stud" encountering/interacting throughout with the "Innocent/pure" white woman.
📚
"This house breathes calm, tranquillity, order. The order of the pillagers of Africa. Brittania rules the waves. Everything here has its place---except me. I'm here for the sole purpose of fucking the daughter. Therefore, I too have my place. I'm here to fuck the daughter of these haughty diplomats who once whacked us with their sticks. I wasn't there at the time of course, but what do you want, history hasn't been good to us, but we can always use it as an aphrodisiac." - Pg. 95
📚
You'll be glad to have spent time with this bold and thoroughly entertaining satire.
'Very personal indeed. I read your novel. It takes place around Carré St. Louis. In a nutshell, it's the story of two young blacks who spend a hot summer chasing girls & complaining. One loves jazz; the other literature. One sleeps all day or listens to jazz while reciting the Koran; the other writes a novel about their day-to-day experiences.' " (Interviewer) - Pg. 145
📚
It takes a certain kind of author to be clever enough to tell you exactly what their novel is about without ruining it, and Dany Laferrière did just that with that excerpt I shared from his intelligent, laugh-out-loud funny, debut novel, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired.
Though published in 1985, How to Make Love to a Negro is still relevant. At its essence it is an immigrant story. We follow two black men, who migrated from the Gold Coast to Montreal, & we basically hear them riff on Jazz, Literature, America, race, (& especially) white women, among other things.
In the excerpt above our unnamed narrator mentioned types being the main characters in this satire, he's right. You have the "Black Stud" encountering/interacting throughout with the "Innocent/pure" white woman.
📚
"This house breathes calm, tranquillity, order. The order of the pillagers of Africa. Brittania rules the waves. Everything here has its place---except me. I'm here for the sole purpose of fucking the daughter. Therefore, I too have my place. I'm here to fuck the daughter of these haughty diplomats who once whacked us with their sticks. I wasn't there at the time of course, but what do you want, history hasn't been good to us, but we can always use it as an aphrodisiac." - Pg. 95
📚
You'll be glad to have spent time with this bold and thoroughly entertaining satire.
June 10, 2024
Hilarious, reflective, engaging, thought-provoking.
I can just imagine how this was recieved when it was just released. It is clear the author wanted to provoke the reader and push the enevlope with this one.
An engaging read.
I can just imagine how this was recieved when it was just released. It is clear the author wanted to provoke the reader and push the enevlope with this one.
An engaging read.
May 12, 2015
I laughed from beginning to end. Many may find the pages crass, boring or something else. For me, it was just an opportunity to get another black man's perspective on interracial dating. Given that this has been such a major part of my identity, I felt a near instant connection to the principle characters. Obviously, it's dated and it's (depending on who you talk to) misogynistic interactions with women may strike many as (to say the least) problematic. While some may find something like this forgivable (at least forgivable enough to get through it) others won't. I can sympathize. But I think that in many ways, the trivialization goes both ways. The desire to not give any of these women names may be matched by the otherness that many of the women view these men. Obviously no one is looking for a permanent mate, given the nature of many of these encounters. With that said, I cannot help feel that even if the author and his roommate were to fall in love with one of these ladies, that the reason why the encounter would not go beyond some athletic bedroom sessions is that black men are only viewed as just a means of completing a white woman's sexual education. Not to say that this doesn't happen the other way too, it just seems to play a part of a larger narrative on black men being a part of white people's education. The author acknowledges as much through the pages here. Couldn't help but break my neck with my nodding. I may be able to lob more criticism at a work like this were there additional works that explored interracial hookups/dating through a more sensitive and nuanced lens. Until those works arrive, this is what I have. And, while it's not perfect, it's a glorious start.
January 3, 2023
Provocative, allusive satire/Künstlerroman.
Read for ENG356: African Canadian Literature.
Read for ENG356: African Canadian Literature.
January 4, 2025
Deliciosa e inteligente sátira aos estereótipos de raça, classe e sexo! E muito mais profundo do que faz supor à primeira vista.
June 16, 2009
The English translation omitted part of the French title -"without getting tired" In a dptl meeting I proposed it for a lit course and felt myself blushing. Maybe we can see this as a Haitian's answer to Philip Roth. Very shallow readers have accused him of misogeny, but this is of course a hilarious parody on the classic Bildungsroman. Laferriere relentlessly pokes fun at his readers -presumably all white, middle class educated, trying so hard NOT to be racists- and does not suffer fools lightly.
June 23, 2019
Hilarious, provocative, and thought-provoking. I didn't get every reference but that didn't hinder my enjoyment. Rollicking stuff. What a laugh riot.
July 17, 2019
To think that a “Canadian” wrote this — originally a Haitian! Big up to Haiti! But real talks, to think that a Canadian wrote this and a Canadian went THERE; wow! This is a very interesting short piece of art. I can totally see how when this book was released this guy might have to have gone into hiding. It’s provocative as fuck, explosive, exposing and I can’t say that it’s right, conceptually, but fuck it feels right and it feels right on the money.
The thing that stands out to me here is — how much sex/sleeping with a white woman means to the black male psyche, and how much of nothing it means to the white woman beyond like “personal exploration” at one time or another in their lives, typically their youth. The exchanges are all power, reward and conquest based and are completely passionless and loveless. It speaks a lot to insecurity, it speaks a lot to inferiority complexes. I’m sure many men of colour have this same experience but it’s just that the experience of black men and white women has led to so much death and pain; that this is an interesting sort of observation almost. It’s unique how comically this writer captures this experience. I had heard there was a film about this or based on this book and I definitely want to watch the film.
“Ice burns up everything here..” — this is a line that stands out to me as well. It brings so much into context about this book, the writer’s being Canadian, exposed to winter, the cold; the influence of feeling okay to chase white women in Canada without fear of death, etc, the hollowness of it all. It’s a very interesting dynamic.
The thing that stands out to me here is — how much sex/sleeping with a white woman means to the black male psyche, and how much of nothing it means to the white woman beyond like “personal exploration” at one time or another in their lives, typically their youth. The exchanges are all power, reward and conquest based and are completely passionless and loveless. It speaks a lot to insecurity, it speaks a lot to inferiority complexes. I’m sure many men of colour have this same experience but it’s just that the experience of black men and white women has led to so much death and pain; that this is an interesting sort of observation almost. It’s unique how comically this writer captures this experience. I had heard there was a film about this or based on this book and I definitely want to watch the film.
“Ice burns up everything here..” — this is a line that stands out to me as well. It brings so much into context about this book, the writer’s being Canadian, exposed to winter, the cold; the influence of feeling okay to chase white women in Canada without fear of death, etc, the hollowness of it all. It’s a very interesting dynamic.
October 12, 2017
Ce roman traine (trône?) sur mon étagère depuis un bon moment. A côté, ses confrères: Odeur du café, Pays sans chapeau, Je suis un écrivain japonais, L'Énigme du retour. J'ai lu ce dernier il y a quelques mois, et j'en étais tellement ensorcelée que je m'étais résolue d'enfin prendre entre mes mains ce récit dont le titre même risque de me faire rougir.
J'ai l'habitude d'éviter les bouquins qui servent libéralement du verbe baiser, alors pour achever cette lecture, j'ai dû créeer de nouvelles habitudes. Certes, Laferrière a des visions uniques de la drague, des rapports sexuels, de la séduction, et des relations entre les Blanches et les Nègres. Mais les visions sont loin d'être romantiques. Au contraire, elles suggèrent ce qu'il y a d'inassouvi chez tous les personnages. C'était plutôt déprimant. Les autres romans de Laferrière ne sont pas pour autant des récits joyeux aux dénouements nets ou satisfaisants; mais ils recèlent une poésie que je chéris et qui rend abordables les gouffres de la solitude et du désespoir.
J'avoue que mes tendances pudiques peuvent se révéler à l'origine de mon opinion blasée du roman, mais j'espère que ce n'est pas le cas. Au moins, je suis contente d'avoir lu un livre dont je n'étais pas extasiée pour renforcer la nécessité de "ne pas juger un livre par sa couverture."
J'ai l'habitude d'éviter les bouquins qui servent libéralement du verbe baiser, alors pour achever cette lecture, j'ai dû créeer de nouvelles habitudes. Certes, Laferrière a des visions uniques de la drague, des rapports sexuels, de la séduction, et des relations entre les Blanches et les Nègres. Mais les visions sont loin d'être romantiques. Au contraire, elles suggèrent ce qu'il y a d'inassouvi chez tous les personnages. C'était plutôt déprimant. Les autres romans de Laferrière ne sont pas pour autant des récits joyeux aux dénouements nets ou satisfaisants; mais ils recèlent une poésie que je chéris et qui rend abordables les gouffres de la solitude et du désespoir.
J'avoue que mes tendances pudiques peuvent se révéler à l'origine de mon opinion blasée du roman, mais j'espère que ce n'est pas le cas. Au moins, je suis contente d'avoir lu un livre dont je n'étais pas extasiée pour renforcer la nécessité de "ne pas juger un livre par sa couverture."
October 4, 2021
Un chef d'œuvre, tout simplement.
September 28, 2011
One stunning moment that this book produced was when I looked into the author Chester Himes. Laferriere's protagonist pounds out his work on a Remington22 that purportedly belonged to Chester Himes.
When I looked him up, I read this little story that choked me up,
"A tragedy took place that would profoundly shape Himes's view of race relations. He had misbehaved and his mother made him sit out a gunpowder demonstration that he and his brother, Joseph Jr., were supposed to conduct during a school assembly. Working alone, Joseph mixed the chemicals; they exploded in his face. Rushed to the nearest hospital, the blinded boy was refused treatment. "That one moment in my life hurt me as much as all the others put together," Himes wrote in The Quality of Hurt.
"I loved my brother. I had never been separated from him and that moment was shocking, shattering, and terrifying....We pulled into the emergency entrance of a white people's hospital. White clad doctors and attendants appeared. I remember sitting in the back seat with Joe watching the pantomime being enacted in the car's bright lights. A white man was refusing; my father was pleading. Dejectedly my father turned away; he was crying like a baby. My mother was fumbling in her handbag for a handkerchief; I hoped it was for a pistol.""
"I hoped it was for a pistol."
...wow.
Seminar presentation
September 2011
Jana Evans Braziel suggests that within How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, Dany Laferriere’s “representations of the negro enter into stereotype in order to parody, hyperbolize, and pervert them by nomadically taking flight from within them” (Braziel 871). My discussion of Laferriere concerns itself with what is standing as the central concern of these stories: confronting the stereotypical myths about black male hyper-sexuality and the construction of the sexually rapacious black masculinity as a black masculine type.
Reading Laferriere’s texts alongside, and in conversation with other texts and theorizations of black masculinity and black male sexuality so as to understand the way that Laferriere is reframing the constructions of racialized sexuality at the level of the sub-text. I contend that Laferriere’s stories, while satirical and exaggerated to the point of hilarity, are in reality deeply political. I argue that Laferriere’s sub-textual engagement with African American writers, artists and musicians (and not the protagonist’s relations with white women) make up the political heartbeat of this text.
Who is Laferriere in bed?
Argument:
Laferriere’s literary engagement and conversation with black men (James Baldwin, Miles Davis, Chester Himes, Richard Wright, and more obliquely (but also more profoundly) Frantz Fanon among others, and black women (Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Toni Morrison, and Bessie Smith) is at the political centre of his text.
- How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired (as well as the metanarrative Black Cruiser’s Paradise) draw on a long history of racial violence against black men depicted at sexual predators.
1. Lynchings and Rape:
3 quotes: p. 86, 87, 41-2.
Unpack these three quotes:
First set up a rudimentary timeline based on the theme (write out on board):
- Ida B. Wells:
o Documented lynching in the US
o Asked why are blacks lynched? (failing to pay debts, not appearing to give way to whites, competing with whites economically, being drunk in public)
o Pioneer of anti-lynching campaigns
o Article: “Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All It’s Phases” (1892) includes mentioning the fear that white women are sexually at risk of attacks by black men
• Having examined many accounts of lynching based on alleged "rape of white women," she concluded that Southerners concocted rape as an excuse to hide their real reason for lynchings: black economic progress, which threatened not only white Southerners' pocketbooks, but also their ideas about black inferiority.
• Under sub-heading: Self Help in “Southern Horrors”: “The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.”
o Pamphlet “The Red Record” or “The Red Summer” (1919)
• Just prior to the writing of “The Red Record,” 10,000 protest lynching and racial injustices down NYC’s 5th Avenue. The outcome of which: 36 lynched.
• One step forward 36 steps back
• Around this time W.E.B. DuBois organizes the first Pan-African Congress, race riots break out across the country
• One more step forward: 83 steps back
• Wells chronicles the lynching of 83 African Americans that occurs in a single summer, the summer of 1919.
- The black Motown song about a lynching in St. Louis
o I couldn’t find the direct reference for which Motown song Laferriere is speaking of, but I found the lynching
o 1894 Lynching of John Buckner who was charged with sexually assaulting two black women and a white woman
- Richard “Dick” Wright
o “Between Me and the World” (1935)
• tarring and feathering poem
• written from the midst of a lynching
• part of a legacy of protest art
o Native Son (1940)
• Bigger Thomas
• Rape and Murder of a white woman
o 12 Million Black Voices (1941)
• 90 photographs from the Security Farm Administration compiled during the Great Depression with text by Wright
• representations of black poverty and origins of black oppression
- Billie Holiday
o “Strange Fruit” (first recorded in 1939)
• play recording
• image that inspired the initial poet a the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith (1930)
- Chester B. Himes
o If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945)
• Chester Hime’s figures prominently in the text by means of the “Remington 22” typewriter
• P. 51-2 (additional references to Himes: 51 chapter title, 61, 87, 100, 102)
• So what does this choice signify?
• African American author who fled the racism and criminalization of black men in the US, lived and wrote in France, then Spain
• Most famous novel evokes old nursery rhyme (eeny, meeny, miney, mo…) – violence captured even in a children’s rhyme
• Story of Bob Jones educated black man working at a docking shipyard as a manager, fights back the urges to fight, to kill and to rape as ways to overcome the power that ‘colour’ has over him
• Constantly has violent thoughts against the violent and abusive treatment of white people but never acts on them
• Co-worker Madge expresses sexual attraction towards him and proclaims, “Rape me!” He wants to rape her as a reaction against “whiteness” but doesn’t carry through in disgust
• Imprisoned after accused and wrongly convicted of raping a white woman
- Frantz Fanon
o Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
• Will deal with Fanon extensively later in the discussion
- James Baldwin
o Going to Meet the Man (1965), with special focus on the title story
• Sexually flaccid despite wanting to have sex with his wife
• White Sheriff recalls attending a lynching as a child
• Genitals cut off
• Aroused, tells wife he’s going to have sex “like a black man” (with implications on rough sex)
How to Make Love to a Negro… is not a guide for literally “how to make love to a black man,” but rather points to the ways in which black masculinity and sexuality are already framed by a racialized sexual history that literally traps and threatens black masculinity.
2. Lynching as Sexual REVENGE: Re-reading Fanon through Laferriere
Laferriere takes up the mantle of Fanon and forces his American readers to confront their own complicity in the framings of black masculinity – though in radically different textual ways from Fanon’s overtly political arguments; Laferriere’s more subtle textual unravellings are, though, no less political. Both Fanon and later Laferriere assert that white masculine anxieties about black masculinity are at root a perceived sense of sexual inferiority in which the black phallus comes to signify what Laferriere chapter title refers to as “The Black Penis and the Demoralization of the Western World” (119). This is a reference to Fanon’s conception of the demoralization of white masculine heteronormativity and symbolic threats to white masculine power.
Fanon:
- (Fanon 137)
- This sense of sexual inferiority and the subsequent violence towards the black male body is motivated by what Fanon defines as “sexual revenge” (137).
- Fanon figures lynching as a form of sexual revenge. The body of the black man is not merely violated, but sexually violated by a white man: The Negro is castrated.
- (Fanon 140)
Laferriere:
- In the chapter mentioned above, the protagonist is speaking with a white woman in a Montreal bar. The white woman asks what the protagonist thinks of the dance floor, he replies: “Nothing except that black and white are accomplices” (93). She asks, “Where’s the murder?” To which the protagonist replies, “Sexually, the white man is dead. Completely demoralized” (93), and ends the conversation with the comment, “When you mix black man and white woman you get blood red” (94).
Fanon:
Chapter 5 “The Lived Experience of the Black Man:
- the chapter opens by describing a fragmentation process where, under the scrutiny of the white man’s eyes, the black man feels himself to be nothing, nothingness, the negation of whiteness. A young girl calls out:
o Fanon 91
o Confronted by these voices, the black man, according to Fanon experiences further fragmentation.
Laferriere:
- reiterates Fanonian concerns:
o Laferriere echoes Fanon’s passage in the novel: “Look, Mamma, says the Young White Girl, look at the Cut Negro. A good Negro, her father answers, is a Negro with no balls” (17).
Laferriere’s echoes of Fanon underscore the violence of the gaze as both racialized and sexualized: the black man who is regarded first by the white child and later by her mother, then father is sexually violated in this visual framing of his body: the father’s eyes, or the white man’s eyes, regard the black man in sexual - “A good Negro is a Negro with no balls.”
- Laferriere is picking up on another passage in Fanon
- Fanon 135
- The anxiety at its base, Fanon concludes (and Laferriere echoes) is a desire to dominate black male bodies. It is about white masculine anxiety about sexuality, sexual reproduction, and the domination of both black bodies (castration) and white female bodies (interracial sexuality). What Fanon and Laferriere are both talkinga about is a prohibition against miscegation, or the fear of interracial sexuality and their potential children.
3. Miscegenation
Fanon:
- Fanon mimics the white masculine voice: “Our women are mobbed by the Negroes. For the Negro has a hallucinating sexual power. That’s the right word for it, wince this power has to be hallucinating” (136).
- Why? The fear of the sexual potency of the black man.
- (Fanon 143,144)
Laferriere:
- White females sublimated desires for black males: (Laferriere 18) – fucking black is fucking exotic…
- Desire is entangled with fear (Laferriere 62-3)
- Parody of voices afraid of black masculinity and black sexuality (Laferriere 63).
4. The Dawn
The last chapter of Laferriere’s novel is suggestively entitled, “You Are Not Born Black, You Get That Way” a title that echoes and evokes Simone de Beauvoir’s most famous lines from her feminist treatise and tome, The Second Sex: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” (Simone de Beauvoir) = identity (not as inherent, but rather as constructed), also indirectly alludes to Frantz Fanon’s theorizations of race and racialized identity formation (again: not as biological, but psychocultural) = interracial relations between the black and the white as paralyzed with oppressive social-cultural constructions.
Laferriere’s passage poetically and philosophically parallels the final lines of Fanon’s chapter “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” in which he laments, “All I wanted was to be a man among other men…I wanted to be a man, nothing but a man … My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recoloured, clad in mourning in that white winter day. (113).
- Laferriere: Dawn came up, as always independent of my will. Sweet adolescent dawn. The lances of the sun without their sting. Gentle and cajoling. My novel stares at me from the table, next to the old Remington, in its fat red folder. My novel is a handsome hunk of hope. My only chance. GO. (117).
The strategy of Laferriere: If stereotypes are established through iterating fears over and over until patterns of create a reality, they may also be destabilized through strategic reiteration. Reading Laferriere’s texts alongside, and in conversation with other contemporary theorizations of black masculinity and black male sexuality allows us to understand the sub-textual reframings of racial and racialized erotics, as well as sexual and sexualized constructions of race, that are a part, if not the entire fabric of Laferrier’s sub-textual engagements.
When I looked him up, I read this little story that choked me up,
"A tragedy took place that would profoundly shape Himes's view of race relations. He had misbehaved and his mother made him sit out a gunpowder demonstration that he and his brother, Joseph Jr., were supposed to conduct during a school assembly. Working alone, Joseph mixed the chemicals; they exploded in his face. Rushed to the nearest hospital, the blinded boy was refused treatment. "That one moment in my life hurt me as much as all the others put together," Himes wrote in The Quality of Hurt.
"I loved my brother. I had never been separated from him and that moment was shocking, shattering, and terrifying....We pulled into the emergency entrance of a white people's hospital. White clad doctors and attendants appeared. I remember sitting in the back seat with Joe watching the pantomime being enacted in the car's bright lights. A white man was refusing; my father was pleading. Dejectedly my father turned away; he was crying like a baby. My mother was fumbling in her handbag for a handkerchief; I hoped it was for a pistol.""
"I hoped it was for a pistol."
...wow.
Seminar presentation
September 2011
Jana Evans Braziel suggests that within How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, Dany Laferriere’s “representations of the negro enter into stereotype in order to parody, hyperbolize, and pervert them by nomadically taking flight from within them” (Braziel 871). My discussion of Laferriere concerns itself with what is standing as the central concern of these stories: confronting the stereotypical myths about black male hyper-sexuality and the construction of the sexually rapacious black masculinity as a black masculine type.
Reading Laferriere’s texts alongside, and in conversation with other texts and theorizations of black masculinity and black male sexuality so as to understand the way that Laferriere is reframing the constructions of racialized sexuality at the level of the sub-text. I contend that Laferriere’s stories, while satirical and exaggerated to the point of hilarity, are in reality deeply political. I argue that Laferriere’s sub-textual engagement with African American writers, artists and musicians (and not the protagonist’s relations with white women) make up the political heartbeat of this text.
Who is Laferriere in bed?
Argument:
Laferriere’s literary engagement and conversation with black men (James Baldwin, Miles Davis, Chester Himes, Richard Wright, and more obliquely (but also more profoundly) Frantz Fanon among others, and black women (Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Toni Morrison, and Bessie Smith) is at the political centre of his text.
- How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired (as well as the metanarrative Black Cruiser’s Paradise) draw on a long history of racial violence against black men depicted at sexual predators.
1. Lynchings and Rape:
3 quotes: p. 86, 87, 41-2.
Unpack these three quotes:
First set up a rudimentary timeline based on the theme (write out on board):
- Ida B. Wells:
o Documented lynching in the US
o Asked why are blacks lynched? (failing to pay debts, not appearing to give way to whites, competing with whites economically, being drunk in public)
o Pioneer of anti-lynching campaigns
o Article: “Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All It’s Phases” (1892) includes mentioning the fear that white women are sexually at risk of attacks by black men
• Having examined many accounts of lynching based on alleged "rape of white women," she concluded that Southerners concocted rape as an excuse to hide their real reason for lynchings: black economic progress, which threatened not only white Southerners' pocketbooks, but also their ideas about black inferiority.
• Under sub-heading: Self Help in “Southern Horrors”: “The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.”
o Pamphlet “The Red Record” or “The Red Summer” (1919)
• Just prior to the writing of “The Red Record,” 10,000 protest lynching and racial injustices down NYC’s 5th Avenue. The outcome of which: 36 lynched.
• One step forward 36 steps back
• Around this time W.E.B. DuBois organizes the first Pan-African Congress, race riots break out across the country
• One more step forward: 83 steps back
• Wells chronicles the lynching of 83 African Americans that occurs in a single summer, the summer of 1919.
- The black Motown song about a lynching in St. Louis
o I couldn’t find the direct reference for which Motown song Laferriere is speaking of, but I found the lynching
o 1894 Lynching of John Buckner who was charged with sexually assaulting two black women and a white woman
- Richard “Dick” Wright
o “Between Me and the World” (1935)
• tarring and feathering poem
• written from the midst of a lynching
• part of a legacy of protest art
o Native Son (1940)
• Bigger Thomas
• Rape and Murder of a white woman
o 12 Million Black Voices (1941)
• 90 photographs from the Security Farm Administration compiled during the Great Depression with text by Wright
• representations of black poverty and origins of black oppression
- Billie Holiday
o “Strange Fruit” (first recorded in 1939)
• play recording
• image that inspired the initial poet a the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith (1930)
- Chester B. Himes
o If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945)
• Chester Hime’s figures prominently in the text by means of the “Remington 22” typewriter
• P. 51-2 (additional references to Himes: 51 chapter title, 61, 87, 100, 102)
• So what does this choice signify?
• African American author who fled the racism and criminalization of black men in the US, lived and wrote in France, then Spain
• Most famous novel evokes old nursery rhyme (eeny, meeny, miney, mo…) – violence captured even in a children’s rhyme
• Story of Bob Jones educated black man working at a docking shipyard as a manager, fights back the urges to fight, to kill and to rape as ways to overcome the power that ‘colour’ has over him
• Constantly has violent thoughts against the violent and abusive treatment of white people but never acts on them
• Co-worker Madge expresses sexual attraction towards him and proclaims, “Rape me!” He wants to rape her as a reaction against “whiteness” but doesn’t carry through in disgust
• Imprisoned after accused and wrongly convicted of raping a white woman
- Frantz Fanon
o Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
• Will deal with Fanon extensively later in the discussion
- James Baldwin
o Going to Meet the Man (1965), with special focus on the title story
• Sexually flaccid despite wanting to have sex with his wife
• White Sheriff recalls attending a lynching as a child
• Genitals cut off
• Aroused, tells wife he’s going to have sex “like a black man” (with implications on rough sex)
How to Make Love to a Negro… is not a guide for literally “how to make love to a black man,” but rather points to the ways in which black masculinity and sexuality are already framed by a racialized sexual history that literally traps and threatens black masculinity.
2. Lynching as Sexual REVENGE: Re-reading Fanon through Laferriere
Laferriere takes up the mantle of Fanon and forces his American readers to confront their own complicity in the framings of black masculinity – though in radically different textual ways from Fanon’s overtly political arguments; Laferriere’s more subtle textual unravellings are, though, no less political. Both Fanon and later Laferriere assert that white masculine anxieties about black masculinity are at root a perceived sense of sexual inferiority in which the black phallus comes to signify what Laferriere chapter title refers to as “The Black Penis and the Demoralization of the Western World” (119). This is a reference to Fanon’s conception of the demoralization of white masculine heteronormativity and symbolic threats to white masculine power.
Fanon:
- (Fanon 137)
- This sense of sexual inferiority and the subsequent violence towards the black male body is motivated by what Fanon defines as “sexual revenge” (137).
- Fanon figures lynching as a form of sexual revenge. The body of the black man is not merely violated, but sexually violated by a white man: The Negro is castrated.
- (Fanon 140)
Laferriere:
- In the chapter mentioned above, the protagonist is speaking with a white woman in a Montreal bar. The white woman asks what the protagonist thinks of the dance floor, he replies: “Nothing except that black and white are accomplices” (93). She asks, “Where’s the murder?” To which the protagonist replies, “Sexually, the white man is dead. Completely demoralized” (93), and ends the conversation with the comment, “When you mix black man and white woman you get blood red” (94).
Fanon:
Chapter 5 “The Lived Experience of the Black Man:
- the chapter opens by describing a fragmentation process where, under the scrutiny of the white man’s eyes, the black man feels himself to be nothing, nothingness, the negation of whiteness. A young girl calls out:
o Fanon 91
o Confronted by these voices, the black man, according to Fanon experiences further fragmentation.
Laferriere:
- reiterates Fanonian concerns:
o Laferriere echoes Fanon’s passage in the novel: “Look, Mamma, says the Young White Girl, look at the Cut Negro. A good Negro, her father answers, is a Negro with no balls” (17).
Laferriere’s echoes of Fanon underscore the violence of the gaze as both racialized and sexualized: the black man who is regarded first by the white child and later by her mother, then father is sexually violated in this visual framing of his body: the father’s eyes, or the white man’s eyes, regard the black man in sexual - “A good Negro is a Negro with no balls.”
- Laferriere is picking up on another passage in Fanon
- Fanon 135
- The anxiety at its base, Fanon concludes (and Laferriere echoes) is a desire to dominate black male bodies. It is about white masculine anxiety about sexuality, sexual reproduction, and the domination of both black bodies (castration) and white female bodies (interracial sexuality). What Fanon and Laferriere are both talkinga about is a prohibition against miscegation, or the fear of interracial sexuality and their potential children.
3. Miscegenation
Fanon:
- Fanon mimics the white masculine voice: “Our women are mobbed by the Negroes. For the Negro has a hallucinating sexual power. That’s the right word for it, wince this power has to be hallucinating” (136).
- Why? The fear of the sexual potency of the black man.
- (Fanon 143,144)
Laferriere:
- White females sublimated desires for black males: (Laferriere 18) – fucking black is fucking exotic…
- Desire is entangled with fear (Laferriere 62-3)
- Parody of voices afraid of black masculinity and black sexuality (Laferriere 63).
4. The Dawn
The last chapter of Laferriere’s novel is suggestively entitled, “You Are Not Born Black, You Get That Way” a title that echoes and evokes Simone de Beauvoir’s most famous lines from her feminist treatise and tome, The Second Sex: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” (Simone de Beauvoir) = identity (not as inherent, but rather as constructed), also indirectly alludes to Frantz Fanon’s theorizations of race and racialized identity formation (again: not as biological, but psychocultural) = interracial relations between the black and the white as paralyzed with oppressive social-cultural constructions.
Laferriere’s passage poetically and philosophically parallels the final lines of Fanon’s chapter “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” in which he laments, “All I wanted was to be a man among other men…I wanted to be a man, nothing but a man … My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recoloured, clad in mourning in that white winter day. (113).
- Laferriere: Dawn came up, as always independent of my will. Sweet adolescent dawn. The lances of the sun without their sting. Gentle and cajoling. My novel stares at me from the table, next to the old Remington, in its fat red folder. My novel is a handsome hunk of hope. My only chance. GO. (117).
The strategy of Laferriere: If stereotypes are established through iterating fears over and over until patterns of create a reality, they may also be destabilized through strategic reiteration. Reading Laferriere’s texts alongside, and in conversation with other contemporary theorizations of black masculinity and black male sexuality allows us to understand the sub-textual reframings of racial and racialized erotics, as well as sexual and sexualized constructions of race, that are a part, if not the entire fabric of Laferrier’s sub-textual engagements.
May 11, 2025
Je n’avais aucune attente en commençant ce classique de Dany Lafferière et je dois dire qu’il m’a agréablement supris. Bon, c’est vraiment pas le plus féministe des livres, mais sa satire sur le racisme est très intelligente! J’ai adoré le duo que forment Bouba et le personnage principal. On sent toute la jeunesse des personnages et leur vie de bohème dans le Montréal des années 80. C’est un livre frais, court, drôle et si bien écrit, parfait pour l’été! Coup de cœur.
May 9, 2023
4.7⭐️ Muito gostado e adorado. Muito fora da caixa e que aborda questões muito importantes, interessantes e actuais. Cheio de boas referências ao nível da literatura e da música jazz.
April 26, 2025
« Elle passa une tête dégoulinante par la porte entrebâillée de la salle de bain pour me demander deux ou trois choses à la fois : une serviette pour cacher ses seins, une seconde pour passer autour de ses hanches (chic, Gaugin !), une troisième pour ses cheveux mouillés et une dernière pour ne pas poser ses pieds sur le plancher sale.
Elle me sourit en sortant de la salle de bain. Ça m’a coûté quatre serviettes de voir sa dentition. »
J’ai bien adoré ce livre et je vais certainement le relire un jour. L’écrivain décrit le quotidien de façon malin et honnête qui crée une représentation de la race, du genre, et de la vie à Montréal dans les années 1980 à laquelle je me suis identifiée 40 ans plus tard.
Elle me sourit en sortant de la salle de bain. Ça m’a coûté quatre serviettes de voir sa dentition. »
J’ai bien adoré ce livre et je vais certainement le relire un jour. L’écrivain décrit le quotidien de façon malin et honnête qui crée une représentation de la race, du genre, et de la vie à Montréal dans les années 1980 à laquelle je me suis identifiée 40 ans plus tard.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 4, 2024
3.5 ⭐️
March 6, 2025
é sempre difícil encetar uma conversa normal com uma pessoa que se acabou de conhecer, assim sem mais nem menos. além disso, quando se trata de um negro e de uma branca, que se encontram a anos-luz de distância metafísica um do outro, a menor distância física agrava muito a dificuldade.
July 2, 2021
Vraiment pas intéressant. Surprenante déception.
July 21, 2012
4.5
I really liked pretty much everything about this book. The voice was distinct and unique paired with a fresh and seemingly simple, journalistic style that made the pages turn. Despite the short number of pages there was incredible character development. For me, the characters were the best part of the story; Bouba was almost too fantastic to believe but partnered with the narrator he worked. The world of Montreal was also vibrant although a little hazy for someone whose never been.
From the eye catching title to the narrator’s hobbies and the different encounters he relates How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired is a highly charged, tongue in cheek tale that leaves you laughing and thinking and wondering just how far along our egalitarian society has come as you read between the tense lines. Also, before I forget, the translation is great! The care Homel took is plain to see.
I really liked pretty much everything about this book. The voice was distinct and unique paired with a fresh and seemingly simple, journalistic style that made the pages turn. Despite the short number of pages there was incredible character development. For me, the characters were the best part of the story; Bouba was almost too fantastic to believe but partnered with the narrator he worked. The world of Montreal was also vibrant although a little hazy for someone whose never been.
From the eye catching title to the narrator’s hobbies and the different encounters he relates How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired is a highly charged, tongue in cheek tale that leaves you laughing and thinking and wondering just how far along our egalitarian society has come as you read between the tense lines. Also, before I forget, the translation is great! The care Homel took is plain to see.
March 11, 2015
I HAD TO READ THIS FOR FRENCH CLASS AND THE TITLE IS SATIRICAL I'M REALLY NOT A HORRIBLE PERSON
Now that that's been cleared up-- I get it, I really do; Laferriere exaggerates stereotypes to make fun of them and hopefully get rid of them. But I don't know how effective it is. I don't know, the only thing I really felt throughout the entire thing was a thorough hatred for every single character. Which, again, is probably part of the point. But... not really up my alley. I feel like there are more effective ways to comment on racial and gender-related issues in society.
(I did manage to get away with reading this one in English though, so yay for that).
Now that that's been cleared up-- I get it, I really do; Laferriere exaggerates stereotypes to make fun of them and hopefully get rid of them. But I don't know how effective it is. I don't know, the only thing I really felt throughout the entire thing was a thorough hatred for every single character. Which, again, is probably part of the point. But... not really up my alley. I feel like there are more effective ways to comment on racial and gender-related issues in society.
(I did manage to get away with reading this one in English though, so yay for that).
October 5, 2022
Ça fait longtemps que je veux lire Laferrière.
J’ai tellement été déçue.
Une mise en abyme interminable et narcissique où on apprend que l’auteur a) baise b) connaît 12 jazzmen qu’il nous cite aux 2 pages c) connaît 12 auteurs qu’il nous cite à l’autre page. Sans parler des citations coraniques qui alourdissent le texte.
Le mérite du livre vient de la critique sur l’objectification des Noirs autant sociétaire que sexuelle. Dommage que pour marquer son point il objectifie des personnages féminins unidimensionnels. Eh.
J’ai tellement été déçue.
Une mise en abyme interminable et narcissique où on apprend que l’auteur a) baise b) connaît 12 jazzmen qu’il nous cite aux 2 pages c) connaît 12 auteurs qu’il nous cite à l’autre page. Sans parler des citations coraniques qui alourdissent le texte.
Le mérite du livre vient de la critique sur l’objectification des Noirs autant sociétaire que sexuelle. Dommage que pour marquer son point il objectifie des personnages féminins unidimensionnels. Eh.
July 15, 2025
I am grateful to have spent a few days engrossed by the sheer brilliance of Dany Laferrière.
As I approached the end of this short but powerful novel, I pondered on the best approach for this review. I am happy Laferrière helped me out when he (I assume this novel is autobiographical) quoted Jean-Ethier Blais' review of Black Cruiser's Paradise (the novel one of his characters worked on): ‘I have never read anything so strong, so original, yet so obvious. This is the most horrifying portrait of Montreal I have read in years. If what this young man says is true, then we must conclude that our brand of liberalism is the most incredible hogwash that ever existed (something I’ve always suspected).’
I am at a loss for words. This is perhaps the most brilliant account of the intersectionality of race and sex I have read in a long time. The satire, the humour–often dry– made reading this book enjoyable but enlightening.
As I approached the end of this short but powerful novel, I pondered on the best approach for this review. I am happy Laferrière helped me out when he (I assume this novel is autobiographical) quoted Jean-Ethier Blais' review of Black Cruiser's Paradise (the novel one of his characters worked on): ‘I have never read anything so strong, so original, yet so obvious. This is the most horrifying portrait of Montreal I have read in years. If what this young man says is true, then we must conclude that our brand of liberalism is the most incredible hogwash that ever existed (something I’ve always suspected).’
I am at a loss for words. This is perhaps the most brilliant account of the intersectionality of race and sex I have read in a long time. The satire, the humour–often dry– made reading this book enjoyable but enlightening.
September 8, 2025
Je suis profondément mitigée…
j’ai absolument adoré sa façon d’écrire, de philosopher, de satirer, de faire des parallèles, c’est un livre avec une voix complètement accrochante.
Mais son écriture des femmes me laisse avec l’envie profonde de transformer le livre en compost. Je comprends l’intention de cette écriture, mais en même temps it gets to a point… mettons que je rushais à lire certains chapitres.
j’ai absolument adoré sa façon d’écrire, de philosopher, de satirer, de faire des parallèles, c’est un livre avec une voix complètement accrochante.
Mais son écriture des femmes me laisse avec l’envie profonde de transformer le livre en compost. Je comprends l’intention de cette écriture, mais en même temps it gets to a point… mettons que je rushais à lire certains chapitres.
March 17, 2022
Très très bon. C’est cru, c’est drôle, ça choque, c’est léger. L’auteur raconte l'histoire de deux jeunes noirs qui passent un été à Montréal à chasser des filles et à se plaindre. L’un dort toute la journée ou écoute du jazz en récitant le Coran; l'autre écrit un roman sur ses fantasmes et leurs quotidiens.
April 11, 2023
Ri do início até ao fim.
Ao contrário do que sugere, este livro é uma representação significativa do fetichismo do desconhecido.
Um síndrome que se deposita naquele que é diferente de nós; e esta diferença é muito visível nas diferentes classes sociais, estereótipos e idealizações do "ser" de uma pessoa.
O autor brinda-nos estes aspetos numa demonstração satírica, carismática, divertida e com excelentes "remates" à crítica social.
Ao contrário do que sugere, este livro é uma representação significativa do fetichismo do desconhecido.
Um síndrome que se deposita naquele que é diferente de nós; e esta diferença é muito visível nas diferentes classes sociais, estereótipos e idealizações do "ser" de uma pessoa.
O autor brinda-nos estes aspetos numa demonstração satírica, carismática, divertida e com excelentes "remates" à crítica social.
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November 20, 2025Un vrai livre de ravagé. Pas de structure, phrases en majuscule, titres de chapitre a rallonge ("Et voila miz litterature qui me fait une énorme pipe" je cite ), parfois on comprend rien, à la fin discussion meta avec une critique sur tous les défauts du livre (notamment son énorme phallocentrisme). Ce mec a fini académicien, la vieillesse est un naufrage
December 24, 2025
« Les blancs oublient toujours qu'ils ont, eux aussi, une odeur. La plupart des filles de McGill sentent la poudre Bébé Johnson. Je ne sais pas ce que cela vous fait de faire l'amour avec une fille (majeure, vaccinée) qui pue la poudre de bébé. Pour ma part, je ne peux résister à l'envie de lui faire des guili-guili.»
April 28, 2024
Fin, léger, sublime! L'auteur traite un sujet aussi cru avec une finesse digne d'un génie. À lire absolument... bonne lecture !!
July 16, 2024
Rating 3,5 stars
Displaying 1 - 30 of 201 reviews