As escritas de si e - do outro - na autobiografia americana de Dany Laferrière

Abstract

Dany Laferrière arrived in Quebec in 1976 fleeing from the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier (most commonly known as Baby Doc) in Haiti. Once in foreign lands, Laferrière wrote a collection of ten works, which he defined as his “American autobiography”. Although the author uses the term “autobiography”, this should not be the word used to describe the writing in these works. This is so because the accounts of his life in Haiti until the age of 23 (Haitian cycle) and the accounts of his life in Canada and the USA as a black immigrant (American cycle) are imbued with fictional situations, in a way that the verity contract which characterizes an autobiography does not occur (LEJEUNE, 2008). Nevertheless, other classifications are possible. Therefore, the analysis of the personal writing which represents Laferrière’s american autobiography will take into account Diana Irene Klinger’s thesis submitted at UERJ (2006): Escritas de si, escritas do outro: autoficção e etnografia na narrativa latino-americana contemporânea.