Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex?

John LeBlanc teaches English at Okanagan University College in Kelowna,
B.C.

This “novel” is one of a series of recent books on North American
society and culture by Canadian writers from the Caribbean. Like Marlene
Nourbese Philip’s Frontiers and Dionne Brand’s Bread Out of Stone,
it evokes the spirit of James Baldwin (literally here), lamenting that
relations between blacks and whites seem to have worsened since the
heady days of 1960s radicalism.

Laferriиre approaches racism by showing not only how whites continue
to limit blacks as primitive “others” but also how the current black
response to prejudice is often racist in character. His focus on the
controversial issue of sexual relations between the races allows him to
strip away, in the tradition of Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski, the
veneer that covers many of our attitudes toward others and ourselves.

Consisting of a series of field notes taken during a tour of America,
the work features personal impressions, incidents, and interviews—both
real and imagined. Laferriиre calls the book both a novel and not a
novel. Its superficiality and episodic nature, he points out, mirror
America itself, a place where fame (such as his own) is hollow and
fleeting. The concise style in which this thought-provoking and engaging
book is written reflects its author’s insistence that writing, like
living, is not a rarefied activity but a human, visceral one that
“eat[s] people up and shits out words.”