Being a Japanese Writer
Dany Laferrière’s capricious postmodern musings on identity.
What does it mean to be of a certain ethnicity or nationality? If you have always lived in the same country and belonged to the ethnic majority, it is likely that this question has not crossed your mind often. Perhaps even less so if you come from a homogeneous region, like Maine, Latvia, or rural Japan. Japan! Dany Laferrière’s brief book Je suis un écrivain japonais (2008) made me reflect about these questions. Like me, Laferrière grew up in the Global South but has lived for a long time in the Global North. His idols — Basho, Faulkner, Proust, Borges, Senghor — come from every corner of the world. In our globalized world, feeling like a citizen of the world is far from an uncommon experience. Yet it still feels like one often. Why?
I start this brief piece with a disclaimer: I did not enjoy this book as much as I expected. Its aimlessness, a trait that I often enjoy in literary texts, frustrated me: I could not tell what Laferrière wanted me to feel, and uncertainty bothers me, as it confronts me with my own shortcomings as a reader. However, while I do not love Laferrière’s loose narrative itself, I appreciate the feelings it evokes. It’s a capricious text. A writer declares himself to be a Japanese writer. He has no particular reason for this declaration: he is a Black man of Haitian origins in Montreal, one who is not even too curious about Japan. What he is curious for is what this performative utterance (to cite J.L. Austin) does to the intellectual and material realms. As a title, Je suis un écrivain japonais is so intriguing that people eagerly expect the book, even as nearly nothing is known about its contents. The Japanese are especially perplexed and enthralled by it: why is a foreigner claiming filiation with Japan? Is this good PR for our nation? Is this, on the contrary, an entitled Westerner making fools out of us? They demand to know.
Though brief, Laferrière’s reflections on identity are the meat of the book. Memories from Port-au-Prince, the realities of experiencing everyday manifestations of systemic racism as a black man in a white majority country, and the global culture that formed his own artistry make us wonder if Laferrière wants to be from any nation at all, let alone Japan. By awkwardly dancing around the subject of ethnicity and nation, Laferrière is drawing the reader to it without recurring to too familiar tropes of the diaspora writer. He gets to be a Japanese writer and not a Caribbean one whether we want it or not, for in literature all is possible. As readers, we’ve come to expect minority writers to be flag-bearers and amateur ethnographers — roles that are burdensome and uncomfortable, at least at times. We should welcome efforts to disrupt that.
So, if Je suis un écrivain japonais is certainly not the typical diaspora novel, what is it? Perhaps it is not trying to be any one category. Absurdism, bildungsroman, ethnographic writing, diasporic writing, novel-within-a-novel, art and music criticism, erotica, crime novel…a postmodern experiment, really. One that sometimes, tired of the irony and self-deprecation, takes you to unexpected theories about the labels humans assign to themselves and to others.
