From the Haitian writer Dany Laferrière , I had already read the first novel, How to make love to a negro without getting tired (1985), and another Pays sans chapeau (1996). The first light was located in Montreal, Canada, the second, already much more serious in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Enigma with back (2009), Laferrière continues to spin the theme of exile, in a more personal vein, although still modest, and to do that makes a big difference between Quebec and the Caribbean, between the North and South. The "return" which he digs the "enigma" is triggered by the death of the father, Windsor, in exile as the son in a large city in North America, New York. One was removed by Papa Doc, the other fled Baby Doc. A father he has thereby so little known and whose death he learned on the phone in the middle of the night in Canada: "The new cut in half the night. / The fateful phone call / That every man mature / Receives a day. / My father just died. " So begins the novel, the writing alternates between prose and free verse.
After briefly followed his father's footsteps in Brooklyn, the narrator decides to go more than thirty years after his exile, Haiti. As a traveling companion with the Notebook of a return home , Aime Cesaire. In Port-au-Prince, he found his mother which will be seen from the two men in her life and that he must announce that the first will never return, while the second will leave soon, his nephew named Danny who dreams of becoming a writer, his old friends that lead somehow the life he fled, the old friends of his father, who became ex-minister, who peasant among the chickens. All of them tell the story, past, present and future of his absence.
much for the characters "real" that dominates the mother figure generous, strong and sacrificed. But The Enigma of return is less populated faces carnal but also living penned by Dany Laferrière. It yal'Exil, of course, bite more insidious than the Canadian winter, injury sharper than the Haitian sun. Yal'Art it, too, that the writer deep in the forests of Quebec or the painters of Petionville. There's Death, above all, pervasive, dark glasses at the time of the Tontons Macoutes in Kawasaki yellow under the reign of gangs. There Hunger finally crawls, eats the entire city of Port-au-Prince, sparing only the rich perched on the hillside ...
Dany Laferrière's writing, a tribute to the poetic tradition Island, is sensitive and beautiful. After reading this book, you find yourself moving his lips to the rhythm of syllables. You feel swallowed up, lost in the ambience of Port-au-Prince and the hinterland, a trip while feeling and restraint. Pain without tears. Beauty without its charms. Intimacy without proximity. It may be that, in exile.
The Enigma of Return
Dany Laferrière
Grasset, 2009
300 p., 18 euros
Read other chronic The Enigma of Return on blogs In AnnDeKerbu and Well-Tempered Clavier .
also read the exchange between Dany Laferrière and Lyonel Trouillot: "Words of Haitian writers' .
