In Port-au-Prince

Dany Laferrière is known for writing novels that tend to be autobiographical or at least autofictional. He talks about his immigration to Montreal from Port-au-Prince and his early days as a writer in his 1985 debut, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (later published in English as How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired). Memories of his childhood drive Le Goût des jeunes filles, from 1992 (translated as Dining with the Dictator in 1994). He has also penned some remarkable and very personal works of non-fiction. In Tout bouge autour de moi, he relates the experience of finding himself in Haiti during the 2010 earthquake, on the heels of receiving the prestigious Prix Médicis (The World Is Moving Around Me was published two years later). Quite a few others remain, regrettably, untranslated, such as his remarkable essay collections L’Art presque perdu de ne rien faire (The almost lost art of doing nothing) and Journal d’un écrivain en pyjama (Diary of a writer wearing pyjamas), from 2011 and 2013, respectively.

In 2013, Laferrière became the first Haitian and the first Canadian to be elected to the Académie française. A few years later, his literary production took a significant turn when he published his first self-illustrated title. Written and drawn entirely by hand, Autoportrait de Paris avec chat (Self-portrait of Paris with cat), from 2018, is a magnificent large-format edition, with art in full colour. He’s released a book every year or so since then, and many of them are irreverent, hand-drawn graphic novels.

L’Obsession du rouge (The obsession with red) is another such volume. However, it stands out from Laferrière’s previous works, both illustrated and not, by being one of the few in which he himself is not a character or a narrator. Instead of talking about his memories and impressions from chapters of his life in Port-au-Prince, Montreal, or Paris, Laferrière takes up the issue of the violent gangs currently plaguing Haiti. But this is a book about more than gangsters; it is about art — and it is as visual as it is literary. The pared-down cover — lemon yellow marked by a simple red circle near the centre — is strikingly simple, in contrast with the multitude of colours, shapes, lines, and fonts found inside.

A young and remarkable (fictional) Haitian painter, Nix, has been brutally killed by Izo, the notorious (and real) gang leader. The story of Nix’s life is largely told through the voice of his unnamed brother, with other points of view woven throughout, including those of the young artist and of his best friend, a poet named Nox. The journalist Jim Lehrer, who covered the 2010 earthquake for the American network PBS, becomes a character who is investigating the killer’s motives. Many of these pages include textual collages, often set to fit around bright paintings. Different fonts represent different voices and discourses, including excerpts from Nix’s diary, passages narrated by his brother, mock news articles, photos, and poems. Some images articulate elements of the plot, while some are meant to be the work of Nix. Others are reminiscent of famous pieces of art. Intertwining facts and fiction, this book demands that the reader be prepared to navigate a maze of perspectives in what the title page labels a “cinéroman.”

Nix was inspired by many painters who lived before him. As is the case in some of Laferrière’s earlier books, the visual elements are clearly influenced by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vincent Van Gogh, and, most notably, Henri Matisse. Because Nix was such a promising artist, his untimely death attracts international attention. A Japanese magazine wants to prepare a special issue dedicated to him, and a curator at the Centre Pompidou in Paris travels to Haiti to see a posthumous exhibition of his work. At the gallery, when she reads Nix’s description of the setting sun over the ocean, which he compares to an artist’s studio, she suggests that it could have been Matisse’s, collapsing the chronological and metaphorical distance between the two artists. The title itself comes from Nix’s fixation with Matisse’s Grand Intérieur rouge (Large red interior), from 1948. But it also invokes the blood spilled by the gangsters: “Matisse’s red is radiant, while Izo’s is the red of darkness.” Although red was the object of Nix’s obsession, it is not the only or even the main colour that dominates these spreads. Many shades, especially of blues and yellows, appear throughout. In one passage, Nix’s brother mourns his loss through colour; he explains that red is life, blue is the ocean and “sometimes the sky,” yellow is the light, and black is death.

With L’Obsession du rouge, Laferrière is attempting to shift the way we think about Haiti. The country may be plagued by natural disasters, economic insecurity, and violence, but it is also a place of vibrant culture and creativity. In one of Lehrer’s “editorials” about the death of Nix, he writes that “we should participate in spreading the word about this young artist instead of repeating platitudes about Haiti: misery, dictatorship, armed gangs, corrupt political elite, corrupt upper class, raging armed gangs, all of this is true, but it won’t change anything to spend a lifetime saying this is the case.” Breaking down boundaries between nations, languages, and cultures, between politics and art, and between text and image is an underlying principle in much of Laferrière’s writing. It seems even more important today, at a time when we are seeing a return to rigid borders, protectionism, and isolationism — and when the role of art in resistance is increasingly questioned and threatened.