Nancy Huston e Sérgio Kokis, escritores “latinos do Norte”?

Abstract

The writer Sérgio Kokis was born in 1944 in Rio de Janeiro, where he lived for more than twenty years, but went into exile from his home country to escape the military dictatorship; now living in Montréal, he has chosen the French language to build his entire literary work. Nancy Huston, a Canadian born in Calgary, but who had chosen French as the main language of her creative process, has a much more distant relationship with Brazil, where she has only made a short trip, having also read books on Brazilian culture. Childhood memories fueled the fiction in Le pavillon des miroirs, Kokis' first novel, published in 1994, while notes on Brazil and capoeira served as the framework for the narrative of Danse noire, published in 2013. With different aesthetics and different degrees of knowledge of Brazil, the two fictions offer a look at Brazilian otherness and, more broadly, convey images, between stereotypes and deconstruction of representations, about Latin cultures in South America. Wouldn't Canada's French-speakers, those "Latinos of the North", find in Brazil and Latin America a mirror to interrogate their cultural and linguistic identities within a mostly English-speaking country? Wouldn't Latin American imaginaries be a fascinating source for renewing imaginaries? These are the questions that guide our study of the novels by Kokis and Huston.