Writing Home: Haiti and Vietnam in the Autofiction of Dany Laferrière and Anna Moï

This thesis examines depictions of home in autofictional return narratives written in French by Dany Laferrière (Haiti) and Anna Moï (Vietnam): Pays sans chapeau and L’Énigme du retour, by Laferrière; Le Pays sans nom, L’Année du Cochon de Feu and Nostalgie de la rizière, by Moï. In these narratives, the narrators return to their homelands after having experienced exile. I investigate the ways in which these narratives illuminate the relationship between diaspora and home, more specifically by looking at former French colonies. I contend that the autofictional form of these return narratives functions as a means of renegotiating, and contesting, the relations in which the diasporic returns find themselves. The thesis departs from geographical understandings of home, which foreground the ways in which ‘home’ is produced materially, as well as socially, ideologically and imaginatively. This interdisciplinary study, drawing on postcolonial and gender theory alongside mobility and tourism studies, emphasizes the role of the diasporic returnee in shaping, reshaping and contesting spaces of home. Firstly, I examine depictions of domestic labour, in which the domestic servant appears as both an exploited tool in projections of domestic space and a disruptive figure in associations between family and home. Then I explore how these texts highlight and complicate tensions between mobility and immobility, which also evoke the associations between spatial and social mobility. Finally, I turn to the returnee narrator’s position as both visitor and guide in their homelands, and the function of these narratives in global consumption of place. Throughout my explorations of these aspects of home, these autofictional narratives call into question the position of the returnee narrator in the complex array of local and global power dynamics, affected by colonialism, gender and economic privilege. In doing so, they contribute to understandings of diasporic writing and the relationship between displacement, mobility and home.