From Port-au-Prince to Montreal to Miami: Trans-American Nomads in Dany Laferriere's Migratory Texts

"Si le nomade peut être appelé le Déterritorialisé par excellence," Deleuze and Guattari write, "c'est justement parce que la reterritorialisation ne se fait pas après comme chez le migrant" ["If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialization afterward as with the migrant"]. ¹ In this paper, however, I am interested in Dany Laferrière as a nomadic migrant writer. ² Like other contemporary francophone migrant writers, such as Flora Balzano, Mehdi Charef, Linda Lê, and Leïla Sebbar, Laferrière deliberately resists definitive location and deterritorializes the dérive and déracinement of the nomad. By resisting location, nomadic migrant writers also elude the fixity of the identity categories by which the country of adoption attempts to define them—le nègre ['the black'], le migrant ['the migrant'], l'autre ['the other']. Laferrière is rootless and adrift, but also a deterritorializing force within Québec that aspires to sovereignty and nationality and within the U.S., increasingly multicultural and transnational. He writes out the diasporic and exilic dislocations of nomadism: linguistic, geopolitical and schizo-social. Laferrière—deracinated (déraciné), drifting (dérivant), deterritorializing (déterritorialisant).

Having worked as a journalist in "Baby Doc" Duvalier's Haiti in the early 1970s, Laferrière fled the country after one of his colleagues was found dead. In Chronique de la dérive douce [Drifting Year], Laferrière writes, "J'ai quitté Port-au-Prince parce qu'un de mes amis a été trouvé sur une plage la tête dans un sac et qu'un autre croupit à Fort-Dimanche" ["I left Port-au-Prince because one of my friends was found on the beach with his head in a sack and the other is rotting away in Fort-Dimanche"] (55/50). ³ In 1976, he entered Québec as an exiled writer, yet even his status as exile is treated with cool, dispassionate humor: "Je n'ai pas été exilé. J'ai fui avant d'être tué. C'est différent" ["I wasn't an exile; I fled before they could kill me. That's different"] (Chronique 27/25). Throughout Chronique, an account of his first year in Québec, Laferrière, who now lives in Miami, resists the possibility of establishing roots in the pays d'accueil, yet he also frustrates the possibility of return to the pays natal:

Quitter son pays pour aller vivre dans un autre pays dans cette condition d'infériorité, c'est-à-dire sans filet et sans pouvoir retourner au pays natal me paraît la dernière grande aventure humaine. (133)

[To leave one's country to go and live in another country in inferior conditions, that is, without a safety net and without recourse of return to one's native land, this seems to be the last great human adventure. (116)]

As a migrant writer, Laferrière's feelings for both, country of adoption and homeland, are deeply ambivalent. He notes that coming to Québec meant new experiences—the four seasons, young women, but also misery and solitude. Remaining in Haiti, which he describes as the place "où l'on va à la mort par routine" ["where you go to your death out of habit"] (Chronique 134/117), Laferrière's experiences would have been limited to his family, his friends, "et peut-être" ["and perhaps"], he adds sardonically, "la prison" ["prison"] (Chronique 132/115). Thus, Laferrière resists both nostalgia and migration, nomadically traversing and deterritorializing the territories of each. Laferrière, the exile-émigré-migrant,becomes le nomade.

I have three critical trajectories in this essay: first, I explore Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's concept of le nomade as outlined in Plateau 12 of Mille Plateaux [A Thousand Plateaus]; second, I examine Laferrière's parodic troping...