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About the woman of colour I know nothing about her.
-Frantz Fanon Black Skin, White Masks
Although numerous critics have noted the absence of black2 female characters in Québécois writer Dany Laferrière's first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro, few critics have looked in depth at the implications of the black woman's absence in the book.3 Daniel Coleman underlines the problematic nature of her absence with a provocative series of questions in his book, Masculine Migrations: Reading the Postcolonial Male in "New Canadian" Narratives:
Certainly, the black woman is a silent figure in Laferrière's text. How are we to interpret Vieux's silence about her? Why do black women play no significant roles in this text? Are they too sacred to be submitted to parody? Or are they so insignificant in Vieux/Laferrière's paradigm that they merit no attention? (76)
But Coleman's extensive examination of the text necessarily revolves around that which is included in the text rather than what is not included. Coleman concentrates on the racial and sexual parodie4 allegory involving the dynamic between the white man and woman, and the black man or "Black Stud" (Laferrière 94)/rapist-the three "types" or "typological figures" (Coleman 56) that compose a triangulated narrative of stereotypical, black/ white "racialized sexuality" (Coleman 58). This narrative foregrounds the main character Vieux's desire to "fuck"5 systematically every white woman he meets as a way of getting back at repressive colonial history and black oppression.
Critic Cameron Bailey further problematizes the black woman's absence by remarking that just as she has no presence in the text, neither do white francophone Québécois-all the white characters in the book are anglophones and the francophones are all black. In effect, the novel operates in a strange vacuum that disregards elements such as white francophones and black women who "do not fit Laferrière's plan" (86) to expose and counter the power relations that occur when a black male francophone immigrant decides to get back at white men by fucking white anglophone women.
In his book, Odysseys: Mapping African-Canadian Literature, George Elliott Clarke obliquely suggests the place of black women in Laferriere's novel:
Crucially, references to Black nationalist icons pervade [the novel]. Though few Black women appear..., Vieux catalogues an Afrocentric, religio-historical figure -'the Egyptian princess...