Le parcours identitaire de Dany Laferrière : autoreprésentation et invention d’identités

The social and cultural fabric of Québec has been profoundly transformed for about twenty years. Québec, and in particular Montréal, have now become increasingly plural. In an almost irreversible way, the borders move or are reduced. Dany Laferrière, a writer originally from Haiti who decided, following his voluntary exile in Québec, to publish exclusively in Montreal and in French and to live in Miami, writes from a space which is at the same time both within, and peripheral to Québec society. His marginality is expressed both explicitly in the thematic material of his writing and textually through choices of language and form. «Auteur déplacé», he does not like classifications: black, Haitian, French, Quebec, etc., but he is considered an American writer. His Americanness, accompanied by an opaque, nomadic, and wandering writing style, reveals a plural identity belonging and a hybrid cultural belonging. Montréal, Miami, New York are just his writing spaces, because for Laferrière literature is a journey and not a place of confinement.