From Working in the Bathtub: Conversations with the Immortal Dany Laferrière. Published by Linda Leith Publishing in 2020.

In his Paris Review interview, Hemingway was asked what he thought about the idea of being politically engaged as a novelist. He said he had no problem with being a political writer, but that “All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last, you will have to skip the politics when you read it.” It stops being relevant.

Dany Laferrière: Yes, that’s it. It’s as simple as that. For me, being political is speaking about literature. It’s writing books. It’s being available and free, meeting people, travelling. Politics for me means drawing in a neat way the figure of a writer. For me a writer is the most subversive being, the most interesting. They are in this moment what priests used to be throughout history, these beings that were paid by the population to speak about spirituality. Whether we like it or not, I’ve always liked the figure of the priest.

ALG: What is it that you find interesting about priests?

DL: A priest is a type who is financially covered, who lives tax-free. He’s there, and all we ask him to do is speak about the soul three times per day, hold mass, take care of church affairs, hold rituals. People die, and he goes into their homes and greets the family. He blesses the children that are born, he marries people. I always found that it’s one of society’s best inventions, to create trades or groups that are completely removed from time, removed from the present, removed from urgency. To me, the writer is the modern embodiment of that.

ALG: In a secular way?

DL: It’s more secular, yes, because we are no longer a society dominated by faith, except perhaps in the Middle East, which is increasingly so. In the West, we’re no longer ruled by faith. The writer has to fill that need. And to do it well, he cannot endorse others. He has to have a deep understanding of the force of that spiritual function, so that he cannot take on any other functions. For me, a writer who is too engaged politically is a writer who has forgotten the energy that came over them when they wrote their first big book. When you’ve seen someone persist in that battle—Melville’s white whale, The Old Man and the Sea, Les misérables—if you become too engaged in the concrete realities of politics, it’s because you’ve forgotten that energy. That energy, it takes a life to get to the point where you’ve made something that contains that energy. And that absolute quality, you can find it in a book from any century, you open it, and you find that same energy. That, to me, takes a lifetime. For me, a writer who engages politically is a writer who doubts their own talent. Because they should have the talent to touch everyone everywhere at all times.

ALG: But you have to doubt your talent, don’t you?

DL: The engagement in writing is so profound, and requires so much energy, that it should take all of our mental, psychological, and aesthetic faculties. If we see that we have time to do other stuff, it’s that we’re no longer in it. If we feel we have to do other work to be part of our age, it means we’ve dropped it. In that case, it’s better to drop literature and go completely into the other role. Because your writing will disappear like the others. You know it, deep down, when you are no longer putting your life into a sentence. And when you know that, you should do something else. Even if you’re really talented. It’s lost time, because it will erase itself, it will sink. And we aren’t lacking books. That’s not what’s lacking. There are enough books out there to get us through to the time when the next batch of dinosaurs goes extinct.

ALG: But I imagine that you have had moments of doubt.

DL: All writers have doubts. That’s inside of the writing. There’s only doubt at the core of writing. It’s strange, I don’t have many doubts, because I seem to be speaking here as though literature was resting on eternity. And that’s not the way I write. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not saying, “Don’t write if you aren’t a genius.” Not at all, au contraire. Writing itself is linked to doubt, it moves forward that way. It’s an engine that advances by explosion. There’s a moment when the motor is stalled and we write a sentence and, boom—it’s back on. It nourishes itself on doubt. We can’t write without doubting the very universe to begin with, our own universe, our own reality, our own writing itself. That’s within the system. I’m saying if you really believe you can do something else better, do it.

ALG: To get back to this idea of the writer as priest, as a person who speaks about the idea of spirituality and the state of the soul—are you a spiritual person?

DL: No! I mean yes, certainly, like everyone else that is. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any readers, we wouldn’t listen to any music. That spirituality is a kind of eternity. We are in a total materiality and yet at the same time we have a need for spirituality that has nothing to do with God or religion. Spirituality is a leap beyond the present moment. We are jumping, right now, we’re leaving… Let’s say we have a very serious problem, a sick child. We meet our friend and we tell them our problem. We could be in Haiti, we have no medicine, no money. But then our friend tells us a story, and we start to laugh. For me, that’s spirituality. We start laughing. We leave the present moment, which is completely intense, and then brusquely, we have the impression that there’s another space in which we can laugh, which also means that all our problems are ephemeral. As though we were instantly transported forty years into the future. In forty years, we will have lost our grandparents, or parents, we will have known death, and got over it. It’s as though we are lifted out in that peal of laughter, by that peal of laughter. That’s what I call spirituality.