Meet Jake Lamar
Jake Lamar is one of the most visible, outspoken American expatriates in Paris. He often offers an American perspective regarding the changes in and challenges to French and American politics in the twenty-first century. For instance, in 2018, Lamar was interviewed on the cultural television program Stupéfiant! in a feature titled "What Is Blackface?" after Antonine Griezmann, a soccer player on the French National team, was lambasted for appearing in blackface as a Harlem Globetrotter. In his interview with Stupéfiant!, Jake Lamar explains to a French audience the pain and insult that blackface summons for many African Americans as well as the cultural disconnect between representations of blackface in a French context versus an American context. Also, in 2012, Lamar contributed to the anthology Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness with an essay entitled “French Impressionism.” In his essay, Lamar describes his first and lasting impression of “racial impartiality” in France as receiving a cab in the fashionable center of Paris at two in the morning though he was wearing urban street wear and an “elegantly dressed white French couple” was requesting the same cab (94). His essay highlights the positive impression that this experience had on him as an African-American man.
As a writer, Lamar is foremost a storyteller. In 2019, Lamar's fictional drama of Clyde Morton, an African-American-Harlem gangster known as "The Viper," was produced by France Culture in a ten episode radio series entitled Viper's Dream. Set in the mid-twentieth century, Viper's Dream strengthens the connections between the writing careers of Lamar and Chester Himes—the latter also wrote fictional gangster stories set in mid-century Harlem. In fact, Lamar embraces the tradition of African-American-expatriate writers in Paris. His play Brother's in Exile (2013) is about the well-known dispute between Richard Wright and James Baldwin (with Chester Himes present). France Culture produced a full-length radio adaptation of Brothers in Exile, and Lamar has read excerpts of his play to audiences in Paris.
Lamar’s novels reveal his mastery of thriller, fluency in the French language, and broadened range of subjects. His last published novel, Postérité/Posthumous (2014), is only published in French. In writing Postérité, Lamar departs from writing in the thriller/detective fiction genre and creating African-American characters. Before Postérité, Lamar wrote Ghosts of Saint-Michel (2006) and Rendezvous Eighteenth (2003), which make up his Paris detective fiction series. These two novels have the character Marva Dobbs in common and expose the Eighteenth arrondissement and Montreuil (a suburb just east of Paris) as sites that challenge historical notions of black Paris. Prior to Rendezvous Eighteenth and Ghosts of Saint-Michel, Lamar wrote If 6 Were 9 (2000), Close to the Bone (1999), and The Last Integrationist (1996)—the latter won the Grand Prix du Roman Noir Étranger. Though his first three novels are written in Paris, these novels largely deal with politics and current events in the United States.
Lamar made his entrée into Paris in 1993 on the heels of winning the Lyndhurst Prize for his first book, Bourgeois Blues: An American Memoir (1991). With the prize, Lamar decided to live in Paris and write for a year. He came to Paris because of its history of being a creative haven for American writers. Leading up to his departure for Paris and the debut of Bourgeois Blues, Lamar wrote for Time magazine, contributing Milestones, “a weekly tally of the deaths and childbirths, marriages and divorces, indictments and convictions of the famous and infamous” (Bourgeois Blues 116) and features that appeared in TIme's most prestigious Nation section. At Harvard, he wrote for the Crimson while completing his bachelor's degree in American history and literature. During his early education in the Bronx, New York, he was exposed to writers such as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Angela Davis. Jacob "Jake" Lamar III was in alignment to be a prominent writer in the American expatriate tradition in Paris.
