In front of the students of UEH, writer Dany Laferrière explained, with examples, on Monday, July 13, his method of literary construction of childhood.
Arriving in Haiti on Saturday, July 11, for a two-week tour at the invitation of the rectorate of the State University of Haiti (UEH), Dany Laferrière began his first official activity of the stay on Monday, July 13: a meeting with students at the UEH rectorate in Port-au-Prince, in the presence of Rector Dieuseul Prédélus. After a brief welcome speech, the writer gave a talk focused on childhood, in dialogue with Darline Alexis, chair of the visit’s coordination committee, and Francesca Mintor, a master’s student in Modern Literature at the École Normale Supérieure. Right from the start, he clarified the angle of his talk: “I’m not going to tell you about my childhood, I’m going to tell you how I write about childhood.”Looking back on the making of his works from The Scent of Coffee (1991) to I’m Crazy About Vava (2006), which won the Governor General’s Award in Canada, Dany Laferrière emphasized the need for any writer to resist the temptation of artifice in their early texts. “Sometimes we fall into artificiality: we take a topic that our thoughts and studies allow us to approach, and that gives us the chance to show readers how interesting we are,” he explained, before adding the principle that, in his view, should come above all: “You should always write a book for yourself.”
The author then broke down the construction of the first sentence of his story about childhood, where he puts himself on stage as a little boy alongside his grandmother, Da. He emphasized the necessary distance between the writer and the child he once was: ‘There is a phenomenal distance between me who writes and me who watches.’ He pointed out that this technique has a direct lineage from Victor Hugo, who opened a poem with: ‘This century was two years old.’Asked about his writing method, Dany Laferrière advocated for simplicity and attention to detail rather than metaphor. Citing a childhood memory related to rain, he illustrated this principle: ‘I knew that rain had never exceeded the 36th row of bricks. When you include a detail like that, the reader can’t know it.’ He drew a broader lesson for students: ‘Don’t try to be poetic. Life is more poetic than you.’
The writer also spoke about the special relationship Haitians have with rain, illustrated by a personal memory from 2007, when a prison escape was interrupted by a torrential downpour. ‘Haitians aren’t afraid of bullets, that we know. They’re not afraid of cannons. They’re afraid of the rain,’ he summed up.Drawing finally from Haitian popular culture, Dany Laferrière presented peasant work songs as a source of style in their own right, citing, for example, the gestures of transplanting rice in the Artibonite. He made sure to illustrate his point with a popular song: ‘Jete bliye / ranmase sonje. […] No one has ever written lines faster than that.’ He closed his talk with a call to draw from the Haitian imagination rather than imported mythologies, mentioning the figure of the peasant god Zaka as an alternative to Greek or Norse pantheons favored by contemporary popular culture.The talk led to a lively exchange between the students and the immortal of the French Academy. It was also an opportunity for the author of I’m Tired of Pretending to meet with these young people from various departments of UEH, most of whom shared their understanding of his work with him. They also took the chance to ask him about his writing process, among other things.
It’s worth noting that after his visit to Port-au-Prince, where he will meet with academics, artists, writers, and readers, the tour will continue to Petit-Goâve, the town where he spent his childhood, as well as Cap-Haïtien, Vertières, and the Henry Christophe campus in Limonade. The rector’s office will take this opportunity to pay a well-deserved tribute to Dany Laferrière, “a worthy son of Haiti.”
