Vacuité, déchets et fragmentation dans La Brûlerie d’Émile Ollivier

Abstract

Émile Ollivier (1940–2002) is one of the Haitian diaspora writers who, in collaboration with Italian-Québécois authors and critics, contributed to the transformation of migrant discourse in the 1990s, both theoretically and critically, as well as scripturally. Two works by Émile Ollivier are analyzed: the essays Repérages (2001) and the novel La Brûlerie (2004), whose narrativity is based on the dynamic tension between disappearance and recovery, both considered within a ongoing projectivity, the central point being the void of the present that must be filled and materialized using the remnants of the past. This writing of the in-between manifests itself at different levels of text organization: spatiality, temporality, characters, plot, function of language. Ollivier's poetics contributed to the integration of migrant discourse into the Quebec canon of the new millennium, presenting analogies with the works of several Quebec authors (Dickner, Vadnais, Kurtness, Mavrikakis, Britt) and manifesting similar tendencies.