When an author’s highly popular first novel is entitled Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired), readers expect sex, sex, sex, and more sex. And rightly so. When said first novel is shortly followed by Éroshima (Eroshima), then readers know that the author has no problem with sex. None whatsoever.
Fanfan, a seventeen-year-old boy living in Port-au-Prince during the Duvalier years, seduces Madame Saint-Pierre, the principal at his sister’s school, who suddenly feels as though she’s woken up. Fanfan, it must be added, also drives every girl crazy, making them backstab each other. Christina, a New Yorker whose husband Harry works at the American Embassy in Port-au-Prince, worries that her teenage daughter June is too much of a bookworm until she sees her having sex with their servant Absalom on the veranda. Charlie, Fanfan’s best friend, is particularly handsome and lives off the money and gifts he receives from various women. When his parents start having problems with their employers’ niece, Charlie decides to seduce the latter to lighten her up. Brenda, Ellen, Sue are some of the women who come to Haiti on erotic holidays. Some stay, other go back to unloving marriages, all feel alive for the first time in years.
Though presented as a novel, Dany Laferrière’s Heading South is a collection of oft-unconnected stories rife with sex. All kinds of sex. Sex for power, happiness, gain; sex to help the country’s economy. So much sex that the book doesn’t go anywhere, as though the sex itself is more important than the story, leaving readers unsatisfied despite the numerous orgasms on every page or so.
Just when a storyline seems to begin, when a recurring character makes a request or takes an action that could potentially develop into an actual story, nothing happens. Full of vignettes, Heading South just doesn’t have a story proper, and the exploration of the power of sex and desire, though interesting at first, becomes tiresome when the book doesn’t reach a climax.
While in L’énigme du retour Laferrière’s writing is sexy and evocative even when describing Haitian paintings, in Heading South, his seduction of the reader often seems to limit itself to actual sex-related scenes. His language ranges from pure porn (“He parts its fragile lips and, with a single, swift thrust, enters her”) to weird word choices: “I heard nothing but cries, chuckles, whimpering. A curious lexicon of onomatopoeias, chuckles, borborygmi. Then the keening of a wounded beast.”
Heading South is a recent translation of Vers le sud, originally published in 2006. Wayne Grady, a Governor-General’s-Award–winning translator, renders the text beautifully and flawlessly. The words flow as effortlessly as a teenager’s libido.
Dany Laferrière’s film Comment conqueror l’Amérique en une nuit, about a young Haitian’s experiences in Montreal, will be shown today (April 25) at 2 pm, as part of the Blue Metropolis literary festival, at the Delta Hotel, 777 University St. The film will be followed by a discussion with the author. For more information see www.bluemetropolis.org.
Mélanie Grondin is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in carte blanche, Room, Nashwaak Review and other literary magazines. Mélanie is also associate editor at the Montreal Review of Books.
