Forty Years Later, Dany Laferrière’s How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired Remains as Free as Ever

Dany Laferrière is today the most widely translated Haitian writer in the world. Yet despite the honors, awards, his statue in the garden of Quebec’s National Library, his new wax figure at Musée Grévin in Paris, his Canadian postage stamp, and his seat at the French Academy, he has never severed the thread that connects him to his native country. Each of his returns to Haiti resembles a declaration of love: he walks, observes, listens, meets people, and engages in conversation, as though he had come to take the pu