I’d like to keep going with the same energy. The writer doesn’t have to stop to hand out bits of wisdom. It’s a tree where young people come to pick the fruit in the wrong season.
From his grandmother Da’s house in Petit-Goâve to the golden armchairs of Quai Conti, Dany Laferrière has never stopped being a wandering writer, constantly traveling between childhood, books, and the world. Talking with him is like going through a conversation where the violence of the present meets Borges, the holy fatigue of creation, and the fervor of the Grenadiers. A hula-hoop enthusiast, author of forty books, Médicis Prize winner, and immortal, Dany Laferrière embodies a literature that counters the world’s brutality with gentleness, art, and unwavering generosity.Between Movement and Stillness
Philippe Barthélémy: In The Enigma of Return, your return to the country was driven by intimate grief and the poetry of ghosts. Today, you’re traveling through Haiti for a series of public talks. How has this act of ‘returning’ evolved for you, moving from a personal quest to this urgency of direct transmission?
Dany Laferrière: Oh, you know, these are things that depend as much on chance as on planning. I have a schedule packed with things to do, the two most important being writing and reading. But Haiti has never left me. I didn’t notice time passing. Suddenly, I had a strong desire to be in the country. Maybe the fever of the Grenadiers had something to do with it.Philippe Barthélémy: You captured your youthful days in Montreal and your journey of learning to write while riding in an old Ford, a symbol of freedom and movement. How would the young man in that Ford view the writer you are today, touring the streets of Haiti to meet an audience that itself experiences a kind of internal exile?
Dany Laferrière: I am, as you say, a writer on the move. It’s no coincidence that one of my books is titled Chronicle of a Gentle Drift or that another is called I Am a Japanese Writer. I move in every direction. I also don’t forget that I was born from the stillness of a grandmother who was always sitting, watching people pass by in the street while drinking her coffee. Both movement and stillness—that’s my identity. As for what the reader experiences, or what the female reader thinks, I can’t know.Philippe Barthélémy: You’ve always been known as someone extremely curious. You gorge yourself on reading until you’re bloated the next day. But you do it all over again. Reading a lot to write, that’s your motto.
Jean d’Ormesson, your counterpart, in the novel C’était bien, said that you start getting old when curiosity disappears. And Borges, in his short story “The Other,” published in The Book of Sand, when meeting his younger self, tells him that at his age, everything new is just a repetition. So, do you think you’re old?Dany Laferrière: I’m not sure that Borges was talking about age, more about time, I think. Of course, the past constantly talks with the present, and it’s not always the same one that wins out. Repetition is at the heart of Borges’ work. For me, it’s no different, because I have made the spinning wheel the foundation of my aesthetics. In short, a wheel spins on itself to move forward. You’re right, I put reading at the highest point, maybe even higher than writing. Actually, no, because writing is another way of reading.
Facing violence, gentleness, and art
Philippe Barthélémy: Your work has always been built on refusing self-pity and celebrating small joys. Yet, your recent perspective, in Grand intérieur rouge, faces urban violence and the contemporary crisis in Port-au-Prince more directly. Do art, color, and the living word remain, in your opinion, the only effective defenses against destruction?Dany Laferrière: If I’ve focused on this horror that is the situation we find ourselves in right now, it was to oppose the blue of gentleness to the red of destruction. But I don’t completely reject red — even though I absolutely denounce the violence done to people, animals, plants, and even objects that are dear to humans — because art also arises from a certain kind of violence, against conformity, for example. I don’t believe that art is the only barrier against violence. Sometimes it’s good to face violence on the same level too.
There’s another violence of the same kind, and that’s public insult, which is so common these days. Anyone feels entitled to insult someone else just because that person has more talent than they do. Instead of spending your time humiliating someone who takes great care to say what they think, you could try to share your own thoughts.Philippe Barthélémy: Writing is an act that demands a lot. Finding inspiration. Finding the right words. Reading. Rereading. Sometimes even giving up and then starting over later. It’s an exasperating pleasure. How would the young writer you once were manage to preserve this necessary slowness in the creative process, given a world that’s increasingly pressed for time and facing artificial intelligence?Dany Laferrière: The ant never dies under a bag of sugar. When you take pleasure in doing something, even if it requires a certain courage in the face of the surrounding laziness, you joyfully continue on your way. You have to go slowly, as you say, because that’s our way of keeping unnecessary speed at bay. I’m not against speed or urgency, but I believe we need to increasingly take care with our work to stand out from careless things. You have to work for a long time, head down, to lift it up at the right moment. Don’t let yourself get distracted. After that, we’ll move on to another mode of collective participation. You have to do your individual part, otherwise you’ll just spend your time criticizing what you can’t manage to do.Philippe Barthélémy: A large part of your work explores the figure of the father and lineage. Today, facing this Haitian youth coming to listen to you and looking for their own bearings in an uncertain world, what kind of memory or spark do you hope to pass on to them through this tour?
Dany Laferrière: Why pass on? Because I just feel alive. Why see my end already? Well, I get it, it’s because we have a short life expectancy. Besides, you can die at any age. I’ll keep writing without paying attention to what’s happening around me, because this country runs through my veins. Also, I don’t write for a group or a particular community, I write for those who read me.I would like to keep going with the same energy. The writer doesn’t have to stop to hand out little pieces of wisdom. He’s like a tree where the young come to pick fruit out of season. He must, like the tree, keep giving fruit for new generations of readers — oh, don’t get mad, they read more than you do, guys. The movement doesn’t stop.From the Writer’s Fatigue to the Fever of the Grenadiers
Philippe Barthélémy: In 2001, with the book I Am Tired, you told us that you were tired of the creative process and of fame, even though at that time, you had only about a dozen books to your name.
By 2026, twenty-five years later, you have published at least twenty-seven more, have been inducted into the French Academy, and added other skills to your repertoire: cinema, Japanese poetry — haiku —, painting, and the list goes on. At this point, don’t you think that we would all like to be tired the way you were in 2001?Dany Laferrière: Being tired doesn’t mean being dead. A brief rest, in this case, is a courtesy we give to our mind. No one can know when the song will come back. One morning, you wake up and the machine is there, new, ready to work for another twenty-five years. You have to stay active for that. Keep writing in your head, or chatting with good writers, young poets, or novelists, just by reading them.
We occupy this tiny space that is writing, but which ends up triggering a tidal wave: reading. You’re alone as a writer, but the crowd of readers is waiting for us, impatiently, and that’s why we write. To spark something new, something alive, that brings crazy joy.I’m still impressed by the fever, the sheer passion that sports can ignite. It can bring enemies together, who end up in each other’s arms at the end of a match, just as easily as it can drive apart people who thought they were close, only to realize that a round ball, chased by twenty-two players on green grass, can put them on opposite sides.
It can go even further: the same ball can awaken, for a moment, a people not asleep, but hurting. This miracle happened in the summer of 2026, a suspended moment in contemporary Haitian history. They need to be named, because they entered History with a name still unacceptable in some parts of the world: the Grenadiers.Those who are against this symbol ignore that it’s not a symbol, it’s our flesh, our blood, our past as well as our future: Vertières.
We’ll meet again to go further in 2030.
Comments collected by Philippe Barthelemy
