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  • Dany Laferrière and the Autobiography of Disorderly Past Times
  • Jean L. Prophète (bio)
    Translated by Carrol F. Coates (bio)

Dany Laferrière: A Special Section

After Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer and Éroshima, two extensive undertakings in irony and the denunciation of ethnic and social stereotypes, Dany Laferrière has sniffed L’odeur du café, which rises and spreads with all the tenderness and ingenuity of boyhood memory. An esthetic that might be Proustian recreates for us the taste of coffee by evoking the bucolic atmosphere of a coastal Haitian village, with its unpretentious landscape, its useful ruins, its medieval infrastructures, its dusty streets, its mischievous boys and girls, its unctuous, starched city fathers, its folkloric characters, its customs, its austere virtues and hidden vices, its shudders, its myths, and its mysteries. Everything is put in order in a certain number of brief, concise paragraphs, each bearing a title like so many little prose poems. In an autobiographical narrative, this book retraces the ten year-old’s impressions, caught in their most intense instants by the enhanced memory and sensitivity of the forty year-old child. This retrospective glance of the adult was presented, in L’odeur du café, as a pious and grateful homage to the author’s grandmother and to all those good souls who witnessed the important jokes of his childhood. In the same way, Le goût des jeunes filles recapitulates the initiation of the adolescent to the mysteries of poetry and women. And, once more, Pays sans chapeau, taken as a fine homage to his mother and Aunt Renée, follows the wandering and interrupted experiences of the young adult who has gone into the battle of life in Haiti. “I recall that at the moment of leaving Haiti, twenty years ago, I was perfectly happy to escape from the hullabaloo. Silence exists in Port-au-Prince only between the hours of one and three in the morning” (13). 1

But Pays sans chapeau is much more than an autobiographical narrative. Of course, it is a book written more or less in the same vein as L’odeur du café, keeping the same structures, the same sweep of poems in their organic sequence and linkage. But it is also the adult memory that has rediscovered, after a twenty-year absence, the concrete and sentimental framework of an entire period of his existence, the age when he was trying to assume a social importance and get into the great battle of life. It is the testimony of the spirit seeking time past. It is the shy disappointment of the exiled diasporian, a disappointment resulting from the shock of the return, the shock of disorderly past time, of time congealed in habit, fear, the mother’s tenderness, time that has deteriorated, rotted as much in the physical aspect of the country as in the topography of political and social mores.

Through a sort of regular give and take between the imagined and real countries, [End Page 947] the symmetrical alternation between the humble hope for a better past and disappointment in the face of a futureless present, Dany Laferrière specifically assumes not only the “I” of the narrator but also openly reveals the identity of places and persons: “For two days I’ve been trying to reach Dr. Legrand Bijoux, the well-known psychiatrist. Whom should I say is calling? Laferrière. Oh, you’re the writer? Of course! I saw you on television last night. Professor J.B. Romain spoke to me about you” (Pays 84). There you are—persons taken from reality who have become fictional characters in this work that the author is proposing to the public as a novel. The imaginary element is there in full bloom, subtle, imperceptible, converted into a fine lyrical prevarication and transformed into that particularly subjective and sincere truth of the autobiographical novel to which Dany Laferrière’s writing has been devoted from L’odeur du café, presented as a narrative, to Le goût des jeunes filles and Pays sans chapeau, two works that have been aggressively classified by the author in the category of “novel.” The...

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