Such a Charged Word

Dany Laferrière

Member of the Académie française

SUCH A CHARGED WORD

Translated from French by Asselin Charles

There is something fascinating about the word’s very makeup and about its startling sonority akin to the crack of a whip on a sweat-drenched muscular back on some sugarcane or cotton plantation. We sense the energy contained within those unassuming vowels and consonants. We cannot hear the word without turning our head. It is not one of those words that are to be whispered. And yet I know so many Haitian songs, especially those rooted in Vodou, in which the word sounds so sweet, so languorous. We hear it in Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew), the great Haitian literary classic, in the sweet nothings that a young peasant woman murmurs to her lover. It is not only a word that insinuates itself day and night into ordinary conversations; it is a word that permeates the whole of Haitian literature, sacred songs as well as secular songs, and sculpture. I should add morality, for we use the term “nègre vertical”1 to refer to one who rejects all forms of subjection. I was wrong to say that the word held no interest for me. In fact, because of its overwhelming presence (once it is heard it cannot be forgotten), it is a word that I position next to Legba, the name of the god who stands at the gate that separates the visible world from the invisible world. In the language of Vodou, one would say that it is a very “charged” word.

Poetry

I remember the first poem I memorized after Lafontaine’s fables. It was one of Carlos Saint-Louis’s poems. It lodged itself inside me and became part of my very flesh. Any child born before the 1970s knows the opening lines of this rather naïve poem: J’aime le nègre car tout ce qui est nègre est une tranche de moi.

I love the nègre

1 Dany Laferrière’s essay plays on the polysemy of the word nègre in Haitian French and of its equivalent nèg in Kreyòl. Nègre is a noun full of nuances used variously to designate Black people as a racial category, a human being in general, or a man and, in its feminine form négresse, a woman, Black primarily but also, depending on the context, of any race. None of the available words in the English language, including the historic and dated term “Negro,” conveys such varied and nuanced meanings. The word Negro cannot therefore properly translate nègre, hence my use of the original French in this translation. --Translator’s note.

for everything that is nègre is a slice of myself2 . I didn’t like the poem because it implied I was a melon, and on my list of detestable things melon came between carrot and clove.

Later on I found more to my liking the more evocative poems in which one sighted from a distance exquisite négresses (we say nègès in Kreyòl) bathing in a river. It was Léon Laleau who woke me up from my adolescent torpor with a short poem, “Trahison” (Betrayal), published in his collection Musique nègre (Negro music) in 1931: D’Europe, sentez-vous cette souffrance et ce désespoir à nul autre égal d’apprivoiser avec des mots de France ce cœur qui m’est venu du Sénégal.

other From Europe, do you feel my pain and my despair like none

of ever taming with words from France this heart of mine from Senegal.

Then came the whiplash of René Depestre’s Minerai noir (Black Ore), published in 1956, in which he points out that after the extermination of the Indians “they turned to the muscular river of Africa to ensure the continuity of despair.”3 We have now come to History, and I remember my passion for those stories full of vigor, hope, and folly, in which in order to conquer their freedom slaves hurled themselves against the grapeshot of the soldiers of the Napoleonic army led by General Leclerc. It was not in some parlor room but on the battlefields of Ravine-à-Couleuvres, Crête-à-Pierrot, and Vertières that the word nègre would take on a new meaning, from slave to human. The generals who fought in that horrible colonial war would hold on to the word after Haiti’s independence.

Art Nègre

But this word, dry, naked, without the blood and the laughter that irrigate it, is no more than an insult in the mouth of a racist. I don’t understand why we grant to an individual so much power over us. He only has to utter that one five-letter word and we go into shock, hands and feet tied, as though the word was stronger than the chains of slavery. The slaves did not do the revolution so that we could be at the mercy of the word nègre.

2 An alternate translation of these two lines is “I love black folks / for everything that is black is a slice of myself.” However, although it is an accurate translation, the term “black folks” still does not have the polysemous resonance of nègre.

3 The original French quotation is “on se tourna vers le fleuve musculaire de l’Afrique pour assurer la relève du désespoir.” –Translator’s note.

Don’t say I cannot understand the load of pain contained in the word nègre, for I have known dictatorship, first that of Papa Doc then that of Baby Doc. Later I have experienced exile, I have also experienced the factory, and the racism that is part of the everyday life of illegal workers. I have even experienced an earthquake. And all that in a single life. I think that before we call for the erasure of the word nègre from the public space it is necessary to know its history. Whereas this word is an insult when uttered by a racist, it has triggered an earthquake in the human imagination. With its throbbing pain and its river of blood, it opened the road to jazz, to Billie Holiday’s tragic song, to Bessie Smith’s poignant nostalgia. It prodded Africa, this immutable continent with its millenia-old civilization, to move by exporting a part of its population to a new world of terror. This word is at the origin of a particular art that the poet Senghor and a few Western intellectuals have inaccurately called art nègre. It would have been better to call it art des nègres, 4 or simply art. Any qualifier weakens the thing it is intended to define. But let’s move on, for this is a complex issue. In literature no one knows how many times the word has been used. It suffices to track the occurrence and different meanings of the word in our personal library to be readily impressed by its many interpretations in the history of literature. We can then understand the huge hole that would be left in literature if the word ever disappeared.

A Revolution in Language

If the word nègre disappears so will a whole section of the world’s library. Our personal wounds and our individual narratives only give it the energy to pursue its journey. It is not a word; it’s a world. Besides, we don’t own it. We simply find ourselves in its way at a particular moment. It made revolution possible in Saint-Domingue by becoming our American identity. Men and women captured in Africa became slaves in the Americas, then nègres when Haiti became an independent nation, this by virtue of the new country’s Constitution. It is not for us to teach lessons to the glorious combattants of the first revolution in history. If the word revolution means “a total shake-up of established values,” then the revolution achieved by those slaves to liberate themselves is the most complete one. The nègre Toussaint Louverture, the nègre Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the nègre Henri Christophe, and the nègre Alexandre Pétion founded Haiti on January 1st, 1804 after a long and horrifying colonial war. So when some racist hurls the word nègre at me, I turn around with a radiant smile and responds, «Honored to be one, sir.» Besides, Toussaint and Dessalines brought the word nègre to humanity’s consciousness by turning it into a synonym of the word human. A nègre is a human being, or better still, all human beings are nègres. Does the

4 Meaning, “the Negroes’ art.” –Translator’s note.

racist listening to us now know that he is a nègre by the grace of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the founder of the Haitian nation? It is by this dispensation that a large number of Whites were spared after Haiti’s independence. It is by this dispensation that all the Poles living in Haiti became automatically nègres, that is to say, human beings. Do you know any such revolution in language? The word that had been used to subjugate the slave would now be used to liberate the master. For him to be free, he must become a nègre. Hence the magical phrase, “This White man is a good nègre; spare him.” You understand that such a word is bigger than a personal wound and that if our personal narratives are undeniably important, they don’t weigh much within the scheme of History, a History we must know because it belongs to us, whether were are simply “nègres” or “good nègres.”

A Silly Expression

I understand that some people may want this terrible word to disappear when they ignore its history, which I have just barely sketched. But before one decides to do away with the word, one must find out more about it and give it more thought. Please don’t say that the Haitian saga doesn’t count because it is just Haitian, for on January 1st, 1804 it brought to an end three-hundred years of a slave system in which the whole African continent and a large part of Europe had been involved. It allowed those Haitians to legitimately add a new definition to the word. After slavery they said as a matter of fact that they were nègres, and they continue to say so up to this very morning in the year 2020. It wasn’t the act of some narrowminded individuals, of some “unchained monsters,” to use the horrible phrase of the usually elegant poet Musset; it was a carefully thought out act. And they intended to spread that freedom and that expression that describes free humans throughout the Americas. This is why, barely a few years after independence, Alexandre Pétion, the first president of the young republic, offered both asylum and military aid to an exhausted Bolivar, who would subsequently go on to liberate a part of Latin America.

We could still argue about the word, try to update it, make compromises, but please spare us that silly and unfathomably hypocritical expression, “the n-word,”5 an American invention like the hamburger and dry mustard. And I hope no one will have the impudence to utter it in the glorious presence of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the Founder of the Haitian nation, about whom it is said that he was the quintessential nègre.

© Dany Laferrière de l’Académie française

5 The English slur “nigger” has no equivalent in either Haitian French or Kreyòl, or in French generally, which explains Laferrière’s comment here referring to the English expression. –Translator’s note.

Dany Laferrière’s life is a bouquet with the scent of five cities. Born in Port-au-Prince, he spent his childhood with his grandmother in Petit-Goâve then was exiled to Montreal where he published all his books. He then took a long detour through Miami before going to Paris, where he is now sitting at the Académie française. From his first novel, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (translated as How to Make Love with a Negro without Getting Tired, 1987), which earn him immediate recognition, to L’Exil vaut le voyage, and the Medici Prize winning L’énigme du retour (translated as The Return, 2011), Dany Laferrière has patiently built a powerful body of work that illuminates the nights of readers all over the world. Commander of the Legion of Honor Commander of Arts and Letters Commander of the Order of the Pleiade Officer of the Order of Canada Officer of the National Order of Quebec Companion of the Order of Arts and Letters of Quebec