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  • Time and Space in Dany Laferrière’s Autobiographical Haitian Novels
  • Dennis F. Essar (bio)

Dany Laferrière: A Special Section

I. Autobiography

Born in Haiti in 1953, exiled to Montreal in 1976, and living in Miami since 1990, Dany Laferrière has in the period 1985–1997 published nine books of fiction, all closely reflective of the shifting geographic center of his concerns and attention. Already in 1994, after the fifth novel, Jacques Pelletier could suggest that Laferrière’s production comprised two distinct groupings: “a critical and ironic description of America as perceived by a Caribbean black man; a nostalgic evocation of Haitian childhood, that paradise forever lost” (11). 1

To assign Laferrière’s eight first-person, broadly autobiographical novels and one multi-voiced book of short stories to one or the other of the Haitian or North-American sequences is a fairly straightforward task; the novelist’s literary oscillations between the two geographic and cultural poles signalled by Pelletier are easy to map. To the first or North-American manner, in chronological order of publication, belong Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer (1985), Éroshima (1987), Cette grenade dans la main du jeune Nègre est-elle une arme ou un fruit? (1993), and Chronique de la dérive douce (1994). These novels deal with the immigrant experience of racial difference, degradation, and exclusion, and a subsequent movement towards self-affirmation through sex in the first instance, and writing in the second.

At the opposite pole stand Laferrière’s four Haitian novels: L’odeur du café (1991), Le goût des jeunes filles (1992), Pays sans chapeau (1996), and Le charme des après-midi sans fin (1997). Presenting certain continuities of theme, locale, point of view, and structure, they speak of Haiti as the formative space of the autobiographical narrator’s pre-exile years, and particularly as the theater of his emergence from sexual and political innocence. A fifth book in the Haitian sequence, La chair du maître (1997), stands apart from the four first-person novels in that the short stories of which it is composed are with one exception recounted at a greater degree of narrative remove from Laferrière’s actual experience. As their links with traceable elements of the author’s biography are more distant, La chair du maître will not be accorded detailed attention in the present study.

Despite the geographic polarization so clearly visible in Laferrière’s writing, commentators have pointed out that the line dividing the two manners in fact remains somewhat blurred. Indeed, Pelletier himself, having affirmed the difference, proceeds [End Page 930] to stress the narrative homogeneity of the autobiographical novels: “The two groupings are nonetheless indissolubly linked, unified by a similar point of view, astonished, lucid, and confident, of a world to be seized and conquered” (11). Further, the apparent distance between the geographic extremes is in some cases illusory. The dominant sequence of Le goût des jeunes filles, for example, which requires placing it in the Haitian group, takes the form of a film scenario entitled “Week-end à Port-au-Prince,” which in fact is imagined by the narrator as he soaks in his Florida bathtub. In a broader thematic sense as well, the overlap is unmistakable: the pervasive sexuality of the American sequence, still embryonic in L’odeur du café, is paramount in both Le goût des jeunes filles and La chair du maître. And finally, if the act of writing is central to Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer and Cette grenade dans la main du jeune Nègre est-elle une arme ou un fruit?, it is also predominant in Pays sans chapeau. This foreshadowing and echoing of voices, themes, and locales throughout the range of Laferrière’s writing compel us to repair to the common ground of the author’s imagination and experience as the only terra firma which allows us to contextualize the dramatic variety of his fiction.

It would be fastidious to specify at every step in this study that a distinction is to be made between the author and his...

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