Master of the New: Tradition and Intertextuality in Dany Laferrière’s Pays sans chapeau

Dany Laferrière occupies a very particular place in contemporary Haitian writing. Something of a one-man literary movement, Laferrière stands between the 1960s generation of exiled Haitian authors (Franck Fouché, Paul Laraque, Roger Dorsinville, Roland Morisseau, Anthony Phelps, and Émile Ollivier) and a newer group that has less direct experience of the violence and tension of the Duvalier years and which includes Joël Des Rosiers, Stanley Péan, and Edwidge Danticat. Laferrière's reputation has been built on the success of a series of ten books, the publication of which began in 1985 with Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer, a work whose irreverent presentation of interracial sex assured it a sensational media and critical reaction, and effectively established Laferrière as an important new voice. Laferrière's standing has subsequently been confirmed by the publication of the other nine works, which together constitute what he calls an "American autobiography." The ten books narrate the life of "Old Bones," the pet name given to Laferrière by his grandmother, Da. The narrative looks back to Old Bones's early childhood experiences in Petit-Goâve, in L'Odeur du café, passes through his move, just after the death of Papa Doc, to the chaos of Port-au-Prince in Le Goût des jeunes filles, narrates his last night in Haiti before going into exile in Le Cri des oiseaux fous, and comes full circle with Pays sans chapeau, which sees Old Bones finally return to Haiti after twenty years' absence. The books are not, however, "straight" autobiography; they have much in common with the contemporary hybrid mode of "autofiction" in that Laferrière mixes the real with invented passages. In this way, his work shares the contemporary fascination in French metropolitan literature with writing the self, with defining and redefining the relationship between autobiography, biography, and fiction. Laferrière's authorial playfulness marks a break with the ideologically charged high seriousness of previous generations of Haitian writers. Now living once again in Montreal (after a period in Miami), Laferrière rejects all collective movements in Caribbean writing, from Négritude to creolité, and francophonie in general, as neocolonial traps. He is tracing a very idiosyncratic trajectory, eluding all attempts to classify and attach labels while at the same time producing one of the most important bodies of work of all contemporary Haitian-born authors.

One of the most striking ways in which Laferrière's work stands apart from that of his contemporaries is in his relentless debunking of Haitian literary tradition. Unlike, say, Edwidge Danticat, who deals with questions of history, memory, and exile in a distinctly serious, earnest way, and who sees her work as a continuation of a Haitian tradition that began with the mid-twentieth-century fiction of Jacques Roumain and Jacques-Stephen Alexis, Laferrière's exilic perspective casts an ironic gaze on Haiti and makes highly suggestive observations on the relationships between history, literature, politics, and the tragic decline of the "first black republic in the New World."¹ In this article, my broadest intention is to analyze the intricate, understated workings of Laferrière's subtle though unequivocal critique of Haitian literary tradition in his 1997 work Pays sans chapeau (Down Among the Dead Men), the book that completes the exilic cycle, which takes the narrator/protagonist "Old Bones" back to Haiti after two decades in exile.²

Laferrière's commentary on the Haitian literary tradition in Pays sans chapeau, and indeed throughout his "American autobiography," is largely effected through ironic intertextual reference to canonical works. From his very first published work, Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer, Laferrière has used veiled, at times almost imperceptible, intertextuality to play with literary archetypes, to subvert them, and ultimately to situate his own work in relation to that of his predecessors. In The Other America, J. Michael Dash identifies the understated intertextual relationship between Laferrière's first book and Marie Chauvet's...