4 - Dany Laferrière. Master of the New

Summary

[The] postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently.

(Umberto Eco)

A nation that remembers its traditions is by definition a virtuous nation.

(François Duvalier)

Dany Laferrière is not a Haitian writer, a Caribbean writer, a francophone writer, or an exiled writer. He is, he insists, a writer from Haiti and the Americas, who writes in French, and who was initially compelled to leave his homeland, but who now chooses to live on the outside. Eschewing all national and racial labels, he has famously stated that: “I am from my readers' country. When someone from Japan reads me, I become a Japanese writer.” There is something audaciously postmodern in this statement, something archly defiant in Laferrière's insistence that authorial identity is not “natural” or given, but is fluid and always to be made and remade, particularly when this author comes from Haiti, a country where writers have long been charged with the task of glorifying history, race, and nation. At the risk of imposing one more restrictive classification, this chapter reads Laferrière's work, and in particular his 1996 book, Pays sans chapeau, as a bold leap away from Haitian modernism, and into denationalized, deracialized, broadly American postmodernism.