Cultural Nomadism By Dany Laferrière

Dany Laferrière, a member of the Académie Française since December 2013, is a native Haitian writer who moved to Montreal during the period of the dictatorship of Duval and now lives in Miami. His first novel, Comment faire l'amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer, published in 1985, after having taken almost nine years to complete, was a great success. Starting with this novel, the next three, Eroshima (1987), Cette Grenade dans la main du jeune Nègre ou est-elle une arme à fruit? (1993), and Chronique de la dérive douce (1994), also address the problems of a Haitian's adaptation in North America. Laferrière, who is so multi-faceted and complex, the author of several novels, but also a journalist and radio reporter, highlights the various shocks he underwent when beginning to write in French in a foreign and English-speaking country, embodying the figure, rather than of the "migrant writer", of the "nomadic" writer, who deterritorializes so as to resist a definitive identity or a localization. This study aims to examine the cultural contribution of Laferrière, who has always tried to avoid materializing a social identity, embodying rather a dynamic identity, and returning, in this way, to a concept dear to Edouard Glissant: identité rhizome. That is, an identity that does not have a single root, but a multiplicity of roots that come together. His status as a permanent exile can be seen as an obstacle: he is not exactly a Haitian but neither is he a Canadian. He calls himself "Américain", i.e. an inhabitant of the American continent; "un écrivain américain à qui il est arrivé tout simplement d'écrire en français", emphasizing that he belongs to a plural America because Petit-Goâve, Port-au-Prince, New York, Miami, and Montreal, are on the same continent. This America is synonymous with the New World, "un monde à la fois réel et rêvé", a plural world.