Dictature et mémoire auditive: le territoire en écho chez Dany Laferrière

Abstract

L’Odeur du café (1991) represents a turning point in Dany Laferrière’s oeuvre, as it is the first novel in which the author returns to his native Haiti and immerses both himself and his readers in an autofictional childhood narrative imbued with slowness, softness, and the emblematic aroma of coffee. This referential universe is revisited multiple times in Laferrière’s work, notably in Le Goût des jeunes filles (1992) and Le Charme des après-midi sans fin (1997), which have also been praised for their playful and sensual qualities. Together, they form a loose sequel to L’Odeur du café, with the action of these three novels unfolding respectively in 1963, 1965, and 1968. This narrative period is significant for two key reasons: it portrays the narrator-protagonist’s transition from childhood to adolescence and is deeply rooted in the historically violent context of the Duvalier dictatorship, whose destructive rule spanned from 1957 to 1986 in Haiti.
Through this corpus, the article seeks to better situate Laferrière’s writing in relation to this political crisis. By examining themes of memory and childhood (Boucher, 2013), intertextual dynamics (Sabo, 2018), and the affective and sonic dimensions of these three novels, we argue that the apparent lightness and playful nature of these texts do not entirely conceal the era’s underlying turbulence. Furthermore, the polymorphic depiction of the pre-exilic territory emerges as a defining feature of Laferrière’s aesthetic, showcasing his ability to intertwine the intimate and the political in a narrative style where gentleness coexists with the unrest of the historical context.