Exile, Return and Mourning in Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and Dany Laferrière's L'Énigme du retour

This article explores the relationship between exile, return and mourning, in relation to two outstanding works of Caribbean literature: Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, from 1939, and Dany Laferrière's L'Énigme du retour, published in 2009, the year after Césaire's death. The article shows how Laferrière's text refers to Césaire's, and is in a sense a work of mourning, haunted by Césaire's epic poem. I begin with a short analysis of Césaire's poem as a document of grief, related to return, and proceed in the greater part of the article to a full analysis of Laferrière's book. Throughout, I develop the notion of the traveller's return as an act of grieving and mourning.