I Am a Japanese Writer

by Dany Laferriere

  THE BJORK VOODOO DOLL

  THE CROWD KEPT its eyes on the Kiss Inc. trio, who’d given the same show in Berlin, Paris, Milan, Tokyo, London and New York. I knew as much because I had seen their poster in the bathroom. There wasn’t room to add Rome, Amsterdam and Sydney. Those cities too had seen Kiss Inc.’s act; Montreal was the last on the list. The world is crawling with market systems in which people and things are bought and sold. It used to be the silk road, the sugar road, the spice road. Now we have the professional tennis circuit, the golf tour, the environmentalists and the all-powerful heads of state. Complex networks. Impossible to lose yourself in the natural world—nature’s slice of the pie keeps dwindling and dwindling. Workers have their own subway line. The line that runs from the workers’ neighborhood to the factory doesn’t change on the way back. Fifty years of round trips, looking at the same sights every day. Kiss Inc. studies fashion shows, the paths taken by rock stars who want to marry models. Kiss Inc. doesn’t move in the world of rock stars and Kate Moss, but hangs around the edges, hoping for a few crumbs. The whirlwind of fashion and music carries in its golden path a colorful, living, cool, non-conformist crowd awaiting the slightest signal from its leaders to pack up and move from the Sarajevo to Olympic Stadium, where Bjork is putting on a show. Bjork could have been at the Sarajevo. Bjork at the Sarajevo—what a poster that would have made! With Kiss Inc. as the warm-up band. But for that to happen, chance would have had to wave its magic wand. Bjork coming to town a day early because she absolutely had to see the big voodoo art show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The great masters of Haitian painting. The peasant painters celebrated by Malraux. The first worldwide show since the one organized at the Mellon, in Manhattan, in the 1950s. Bjork intrigued by voodoo. Bjork, as a little girl, receiving a voodoo doll as a gift. Bjork identifying with the doll, putting herself in the shoes of a little black girl who had to hide her doll because pleasure was forbidden. Bjork talking to the doll, and the doll answering her. Look at the strange turn of Bjork’s mouth and you’ll understand you’re not dealing with a pure-hearted, well-behaved little Icelandic girl, but a voodoo doll bloated with blood. The doll has taken the girl named Bjork’s place.

  Bjork hasn’t grown an inch since. Bjork is the doll. And Bjork absolutely wants to see the show and meet the voodoo painters discovered in the 1940s. They’re still alive—how can that be? The doll’s eyes glow from deep within the shadows. Paging through a magazine, Bjork comes across an ad for the Montreal show. Is she in Paris, or London, or New York or Berlin (don’t forget Berlin), or is it Rome? A hotel room, in any case. A hotel room is a universal space. White sheets. Magic number. Incognito, Bjork chooses room 17 wherever she goes. She calls her producer and orders her to cancel the Melbourne show so she can get to Montreal in time to see the museum. The producer thinks the best solution is to extend the show so Bjork can see it. The producer gets on the line to Montreal. She speaks the name “Bjork” and is immediately put through to the curator of the Museum of Fine Arts, relaxing in Bermuda. The curator is “profoundly touched.” A call from Bjork—actually, it’s her producer, but on behalf of Bjork. He’s a fan, well, not really, his wife is, not really his wife, but their daughter. The curator stammers and stumbles. The producer, very amused, waits on the other end of the line. You never get enough of that sort of pleasure. Just the name of that tiny sliver of a woman can stupefy one of the major thinkers of modernity. Just say “Bjork.” Such an ugly sound—Bjork. So (with the right authoritarian tone), will you be extending the show for Bjork? Of course, I can’t make a decision of that sort all on my own. Not without the board of directors. What the hell? How many are there? Seven. And where are they? On vacation, as I am. Where? I have no idea, Madame. All right, leave it to me. The producer calls an agency that specializes in this kind of emergency. It’s said they could find Bin Laden, no problem, and put him on the line with George Bush. The last miracle the agency pulled off was tracking down the daughter of one of the heads of Canadian Pacific, even though she was in Tangiers and they had no clues to go on except the fact that she liked sun, sand and solitude. She wasn’t carrying her cell phone, and none of her friends knew where she was. To catch up to her, the agency contacted an enormous number of people, from the Dalai Lama to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the French writer.

  In no time at all, this agency gets a hold of the members of the board of directors of the Museum of Fine Arts (the famous group of seven). They will be delighted to cooperate, and all want to meet Bjork. The producer calls her. “Everything’s okay. The museum will keep the show up for you.”

  PRIMITIVE PAINTERS

  AND THE VOODOO painters? What are you talking about, Bjork? The ones who come with the show. We’re going to see paintings, not painters. Sure, but people don’t just want to hear my music, they want me to come and play it for them. They want to see the chef, that’s why the tv is full of cooking shows. People want to see the designer, the dress and the girl wearing the dress they’d like to wear. They want to see everything. That’s what your job is for. You make it possible for them to see me. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that. Come on, what did you think? This telephone is an extension of my ear. So I want to see the voodoo painters. I want to get to know them, one by one. Okay, whatever you like. If you think it’s just a whim, then you shouldn’t be around me. A whim? Since I started working with you, I’ve stopped bothering with the difference between what’s real and what’s fantasy. You, Bjork, you live in your fairy-tale universe, it’s normal for you, it’s solid, you can walk on it, but I have to sell it to people for whom reality means working in a windowless office eight hours a day, wearing gray suits and believing that money can buy everything, including the imagination. I have to make them see that your world is more real than theirs, and that’s why they should bow down before you, the ice princess. I know all that, just find me the painters. That won’t be easy—if they’re as important as you say, they won’t give a damn whether you’re the princess of Iceland or a clown from the Cirque du Soleil. I’m not talking about calling them—it’s the museum’s administrators you need to get to. In that case, no problem. We can work it out, Bjork. We’ll ask them to extend the show a day or two. Make it two days at least, the producer of Bjork’s international tours spits into her cell phone. All right. Bjork loves you already. The man turns red, and it isn’t the Bermuda sun. His color spreads to Paris, Berlin, London, Rome, Milan, Sydney—you never know where Bjork might be. The little girl who played dolls with a voodoo goddess, the most fearful one of all, Erzulie Dantor, can’t tell the difference between the atlas of the world and her clothes closet. She lives in a parallel universe where the days are named for cities. She doesn’t say Tuesday, she says Berlin; not Thursday, but Milan. The curator calls back. Sorry, the voodoo painters have no intention of putting off their journey for Bjork. Yes, we explained everything to them. They didn’t seem to understand what was at stake. Bjork is ecstatic. She didn’t expect any less of them. Melbourne is canceled. It’s not the first time a city has been canceled at the last moment. Melbourne is wiped off Bjork’s map. Days, like cities, can be made to disappear. The voodoo painters won’t wait for Bjork. So many of them have already died. The ones left are stars. They live in cloistered rooms, use no salt on their food, require no light and speak only to members of the staff. The museum has put seven rooms at their disposal, but they refuse to split up. A small group of men wearing hats at the far end of the room. The dim light casts shadows on the wall. Dewitt Peters, an American from Boston, a professor of English at Pétion College in Port-au-Prince, discovered them when he first arrived in Haiti in 1944. He was visiting the country when, on the road to Saint-Marc, he saw a strange painting on a door: a snake with the head of a man. It was Damballah! He entered the voodoo temple and found the walls covered with paintings, as if he had gone through a doorway that led into another world. It was the universe of Hector Hyppolite, the grand master of voodoo painting. Breton was crazy about him. The world
of dreams at your fingertips. Dewitt Peters announced he was opening an art center. Rigaud Benoit, a Port-au-Prince taxi driver, was the first to cross the threshold of the center, with a self-portrait entitled Taxi Driver. A small hat riding lightly on his head. He was followed by Jasmin Joseph, the painter who painted only rabbits—fifty years painting nothing but rabbits. Jasmin Joseph and Rigaud Benoit, two beings who were perfect opposites (one was tall, thin and nervous; the other small, round and serene), never left each other’s side, and entered into glory hand in hand. One morning, a boy came looking for work, and the Center happened to need someone to sweep the floors. His job was to open up the Center every morning, once he’d swept out the building. He spent hours staring at the paintings. He decided to trade in his broom for a brush. His name was Castera Bazile. Dewitt Peters needed to see a friend in the country. He decided to go through Croix-des-Bouquets, well known for its lively market. Peters liked to visit cemeteries which, for him, were open-air museums. There he discovered the heavy crosses sculpted by Georges Liautaud. Modest graves, and such powerful crosses. The great sculptor lived close by; Peters went to see him and was able to convince him that he was an artist. That wasn’t easy, because the sculptor Liautaud was no man for jokes. One morning, Préfète Duffaut brought in his first “imaginary city.” He explained to Pierre Monosier, Peters’ young assistant, that Erzulie (or was it the Virgin, he couldn’t be sure) had unveiled the city of the future for him. At first the city was uninhabited; it took him twenty years to see people in it. In Petit-Goâve, on the road that leads to Les Cayes and the Deep South, lived a man who knew the language of roosters and painted only scenes of daily life. Scenes stolen from the market. And also, this apocalyptic triptych: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. A man who wore a straw hat, boney, agile and serious: Salnave Philippe-Auguste, a judge from Saint-Marc. He painted only jungles, a follower of the Douanier Rousseau. Here they are today, in a room at the Ritz-Carlton. They have their passports in the inside pocket of their jackets, along with their return tickets. They do not eat. They are waiting to be taken to the airport. The curator shows up with a little girl he is leading by the hand. This is Bjork, he says. Bjork sits on the bed. The curator exits, closing the door discreetly as he goes. No one moves a muscle for at least ten minutes. Then Bjork gets off the bed. She announces, “I’d like to sing you something.” Silence. Bjork begins to sing a ballad. Then a rock song. And a third, in Creole this time, without an accent. She pays her respects. A voodoo doll. Hector Hyppolite picks her up and slips her into the inside pocket of his jacket. A small black doll with slightly slanted eyes. A couple comes for the group. It’s time to leave. A white van is waiting for them in front of the hotel. They reach the airport, go through immigration and get to the security zone. Their suitcases are searched, x-rayed. The security agents discover, on Hector Hyppolite’s person, a statuette of Bjork sculpted from ebony. The statuette will find its rightful place in a temple in Croix-des-Bouquets. Midori is already considering becoming a voodoo doll like Bjork. It’s the only way to be a star without dying.

  OBJECTS

  TINY, WELL DESIGNED objects, made for the eye and the palm, have spread across the planet. They attract the skin, beg for an absentminded caress, the kind you might give the cat. The cat is a living object. We know the hand’s taste for the black, oblong object. How to touch the heart of an object? Is it an issue of volume or body? Extreme pleasure is bound up in this comfort. At its center, each object contains a miniscule object with the same configuration. An object at the heart of the object. Its hard core. Empty. A step into the void. Tropics. My gaze has been conditioned by tropical fruit. Round, colorful, perfumed and edible. With a nut in the center. A fruit that will become one with our body loses its mystery. Whereas our relation with the object can’t go beyond the surface. The object penetrates us, but we can’t touch its heart. It is as impenetrable as a samurai. Yet the object spreads and gives us the illusion of warm contact. There are so many of them that we have stopped paying attention to their presence. With no modesty, we undress in front of objects. We eat as they look on. We quarrel in their presence. We have sex right in front of them. And we keep devising more objects, which end up, in turn, sculpting our lives. More and more frequently, living bodies must use objects to touch. The domination of the object in our sexual lives is undeniable; the emergency rooms at hospitals have seen their share. Japan is frantically fabricating handsome objects that have no function. Why? So we’ll fall in love with them? Is there a greater plan behind it all? Do the new objects ready to invade our shores intend to replace our pets? We need to rethink our relationships with the mineral world. The animal and vegetable realms are losing emotional ground. As for the object, it never grows old. I always carry my own personal movie camera on me; it is the only object that knows how to see.

  THE MIDORI GANG

  AFTER THE SHOW, I go with Midori and her gang to an opening on Sherbrooke Street, across from the Museum of Fine Arts. Just girls: Eiko, Fumi, Hideko, Noriko, Tomo and Haruki. The courtesans of Princess Midori. Along with an androgynous photographer by the name of Takashi—so flat he reminds me of a lighter in Kate Moss’s palm. Midori looks at the big banners hanging along the columns of the museum, advertising the primitive painters show.

  “I’d like to see that show.”

  “Didn’t you read in the paper what happened to Bjork?” asks Hideko, leaning so close to Midori that she brushes her ear.

  Everyone in the group knows that Midori has the most sensitive ears. They are the seat of all her sensations.

  “Don’t you ever do that to me, you understand?”

  Midori turns on her.

  “Do you understand, Hideko?”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose . . . Why are you making such a big deal?”

  “She’s right, Midori,” Fumi says.

  An observer paying the slightest attention would understand quickly enough that in this princess’s court, the same intrigues take place as in any other. Midori is the sun around which revolve the seven planets, giddy and sad. So giddy and so sad that I wonder if I’ll be able to tell the difference. You don’t see the tears that flow inside them, but you do hear their manga laughter. I’ve spent endless hours looking for signs that might distinguish one from the other. They never stop orbiting, which makes it hard to pin them down. Above all, this is a group. You can’t study one member until she breaks away a little. I film them in my head in cinema-verité style. A short black-and-white film. Distant, discreet, I film them from my point of view. No editing. And no hesitation about using my imagination to fill in the conversations I’m too far away to hear, or the hidden emotions. We all do that. Takashi is leaving tomorrow to do a photo essay on Yoko Ono, whom Midori calls “yesterday’s grandmother,” but we know he’ll be back. No one ever leaves the group for long. Yoko Ono has a weakness for nubile young boys, but “Widow Mao” (razor-sharp Eiko’s name for her) has no chance against Midori. Midori: a “fresh talent,” the writer Ryu Murakami called her, in a long article in the New Yorker about the next generation of pretenders to Yoko Ono’s throne. Her voice makes you think of Basquiat’s first graffiti in the New York subway: both crude and sophisticated. Tomorrow begins the duel between Midori and Yoko Ono as seen by Takashi. He’ll photograph Yoko Ono. He hopes to bring back a lot of new information about Yoko and lay it at Midori’s feet. The widow knows she’s being spied on. Every young Japanese woman is working to crack the mystery of Yoko Ono in the hopes of dethroning her. Ono is the goddess of discord. The woman who has survived it all. Thanks to her, we’ve understood that hatred is an emotion sometimes more durable than love. Takashi will get a close-up view of how she has fought off the hatred of every Beatles fan in the world. She told Ryu Murakami that she’s still holding fast, “halfway down the slope.” Her position protects her from the herd of noisy, average talents. Midori is situated between Bjork and Yoko Ono. Murakami concluded that there are three groups of artists: a small group with exceptional talent, a very l
arge group with enough talent to survive, and a third group, much smaller than you’d think, of really mediocre people. The public, interested only in what is rare, often prefers a lowgrade artist with a good agent over a middle-grade artist with just as good an agent. According to Ryu Murakami, our era likes everything that is rare—even if it’s bad.

  A POISON KISS

  RIGHT NOW, a little drama is being acted out in the left corner of the room, by the window. Midori has no idea what happened to Bjork. Since information is at the heart of power, she’s pretending to know. Never show your hand until you must. It takes nerves of steel to stay in the circle. You have to know how to keep quiet. No one gets close to Midori easily. I have observed the crafty politics of space that surround her. One at a time, the girls revolve around her light. Hideko nearly burned her wings a little while back. She got too close to Midori. There’s no flow chart. Each must decide where to place herself in the hierarchy, and what risks she’s willing to accept to keep her spot. A single surprised or scornful look from Midori, and the imprudent adventuress is dismissed from the circle. That happened to Haruki, who spent the rest of the evening trying to win back her place. Tomo is her last recourse. They carry out lengthy confabulations. Zoom in: Tomo talking to an evasive Midori. Tomo is her bodyguard. She sleeps at the foot of her bed. Every afternoon she trains as a wrestler at the Park Avenue Y. Close-up on Takashi’s face. He’s telling me every detail about the life of the group. Takashi loves wearing makeup, and this lets him go wherever he wants. He travels in both worlds. In fact, there is only one world, since men talk about women and women talk about women too. For the last three years, Takashi has been photographing the lives of women’s washrooms. Makeup, gossip, tears. Naked faces. Tomo lives for Midori, who hardly ever looks at her. You don’t look at the one looking at you. Tomo suffers, but in silence. She’d even defend Midori against herself. Midori is a perfectionist who sometimes sinks into depression. The other girls know they must never say anything about Midori when Tomo is around. Takashi points to a girl lighting a cigarette. Fumi is the most brilliant of them all; she speaks eight languages fluently and is doing her doctorate on Françoise Sagan. She has read everything Sagan has written, and knows every detail about her life—a real expert. You’ll see, Takashi told me, Midori will never confront her in public. She’s the mind behind her shows. She’s a quick thinker, but she can be nasty too. Noriko could tell you more about that. Who’s Noriko? The girl sitting on the floor, back against the wall. Listen, you won’t be able to recognize them after just one meeting. It took me a whole week. They don’t look that much alike, do they? No, but they move in a pack; you think you can tell them apart, and suddenly they melt into a single person. They have their periods at the same time. Noriko is pretty interesting, you’ll see.