Dany Laferrière, des saveurs d'Haïti aux saveurs du monde. Bref voyage aux frontières du goût.

The Médicis Prize that the Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière, was awarded with in 2009, enables him to enter, albeit rather belatedly, the literary panorama of the Hexagon large audiences, even though his work began in 1985, when he published his first novel, and consists today of approximately fifteen books. Since then, critics, mainly from North-America, have kept on analysing his texts, investigating themes such as migration, identity, space-time and childhood. These are topics which are clearly visible, although they hide other, perhaps less obvious, thematics, such as that of nourishment. A thorough reading of the Autobiographie américaine (the title the author himself assigns to his fictional work as a whole), leads us to unveil the importance of the culinary issue in terms of both its connection to the place of birth (thus as an emotive and sensorial experience) but also (because it relies on a mixture of smells, flavours and memories which the exiled narrator brings with him) to the host country. Nourishment also manifests itself as the alter-ego of literature, and the narrator-writer’s interest in the two fields aims at unveiling their secrets, the mechanisms of their creation/preparation, their shaping anf their materialisation. Nourishment is also seen as an absence, a plague which hits his country of birth but which also touches Montréal, the modernised and developed town the narrator chooses as his domicile. Finally, we cannot avoid looking into the omnipresent female figures in Laferrière’s work (grandmother, mother, aunts, lovers) who claim their place in the kitchen of his country of origin. Yet, women play a fundamental role also in northern Canada, as the nourishment they provide the narrator with, satisfies both his stomach and his senses.