Understanding Across Differences in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Les neuf consciences du Malfini and in Dany Laferrière’s Autoportrait de Paris avec Chat

Abstract

The connection between the social and the environmental comes through Donna Haraway’s words: “Right now, the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge” (Anthropocene, Capitalocene 160). Amidst the push to strengthen walls, two Franco-Caribbean writers provide refuge from boundary thinking because the way they write animals broadens the eco-social landscape. In Patrick Chamoiseau’s Les neuf consciences du Malfini and Dany Laferrière’s Autoportrait de Paris, animals are positioned meaningfully together with humans, illustrating the reality of our interconnected world. In this way, the authors perform co-constitutive power. The message is clear: to redefine material-discursive terrain, we must understand each other across our differences. Chamoiseau’s updated animal fable highlights the links between climate change and social conflicts. His characters Foufou (a hummingbird) and Malfini (a hawk) lead us toward a material practice that is both ecologically and socially viable. Laferrière co-constitutes a portrait of Paris, in Paris, with Chat. Chat is a cat who plays the role of intermediary and recuperates the multiple artistic voices who have inhabited Parisian spaces. Paris’ legacy is drawn while it provides refuge for the artists. The authors’ renderings of displacements, movements and intellectual exchange align with Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation. In performing new ways of relating to others and to our environments, their work is emblematic of a contemporary French-language counter-aesthetic to dominating and totalizing discourse. The novel-forms of both writers open up the field of vision and comprehension about the world we live in and our place in it.