Languages of return: Aimé Césaire and Dany Laferrière

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores the multiple forms of language used to imagine the return to the “native land” in works by Aimé Césaire and Dany Laferrière. In Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939), the return is a dual movement, encapsulating both the rediscovery of Martinique and the spectre of a fantasised reconnection with Africa. The article analyses the languages that evoke and create these returns in the Cahier alongside those of Dany Laferrière’s L’Enigme du retour (2009), which narrates a return to Haiti from Canada that is both immersed in Césaire and depicts a perhaps even more ambivalent experimentation with the languages of return. Both texts suggest that return can be dissociated from myths of origins to become a multifaceted and continued process of movement. The writing of return for Césaire and Laferrière also dissociates return from any notion of an originary mother tongue and generates an eclectic linguistic experimentation.