An Aroma of Coffee

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

While Laferriиre’s first two books (How to Make Love to a Negro and
Eroshima) focused on expatriate life in Montreal, this third novel
recalls the Haiti of his youth. Composed as a memorial to a Haitian way
of life that is rapidly disappearing, An Aroma of Coffee vividly
captures the people, the colors, and especially the smells of this
corner of the Caribbean.

Generated by a summertime convalescence and abruptly ended by the
sudden loss of grandmother Da’s house, the novel follows the rhythms
of the young narrator’s consciousness as he explores his mundane yet
fascinating world. This world, depicted in tiny fragments, is relayed in
the naive yet intimate manner of an oral storytelling that is governed
by the principles of movement, transformation, and inversion caught up
in a ritual of contamination and purification that parallels the
narrator’s own journey through a feverish summer.

Significantly, Laferriиre points beneath the exotic surface to
Haiti’s desperate situation. Here, in the underworld and in the
fissures, live the ants, metaphors for humans struggling in their own
excrement. Such scatological references counter any attempt to situate
An Aroma of Coffee comfortably within the genre of fond childhood
memories.