Migrant autobiographical space in Kokis and Laferrière

Abstract

To these days, a great number of literary works have focused on the fragmentation of the contemporary subject, specially through the voyage, errance and exile, movements that denounce the problem of identity and alterity; in the context of “migrant literatures” in the Americas, these aspects are recurrent. Many contemporary narratives bring autobiographical traces of their exiled of immigrant authors, who explore the errancy through their very particular angle. It is the case of Sergio Kokis and Dany Laferrière, who adopt in several novels their homelands as fictional space of the characters – respectively, Brazil and Haiti. Especially in the novels Errances (Kokis) and L’énigme du retour (Dany Laferrière), that have to do with the return of the exiled characters, the autobiographical aspect is present, thus weakening the borders between fiction and truth: the characters are migrant writers who take their ways back to their homelands in important political moments, the end of dictatorships. Both Kokis and Laferrière affirm, in autobiographical texts, that they use personal experiences as literary material for their fictional works, especially in the thematic field (the totalitarian regimes that led them to exile are alluded in several novels, and migrant subjects are also frequent). In this context, we intend to analyze certain questions about the by these authors in migrant literature in Quebec and the place these authors occupy, taking the mentioned novels as a starting point to explore the tension theses authors create between fiction and reality.