4 ideas
A Haitian writer in Montreal gets a night phone call telling him his father, exiled to New York by François Duvalier decades earlier, has died. There he completes, as a proxy, the homecoming his father never made.
Political exile can pass from father to son. The Duvalier father drove out the narrator's father, and the Duvalier son later forced out the narrator himself, so displacement becomes a family condition rather than a single event. Each generation loses a father to distance, and the son's return has to reckon with the absence he inherited as well as his own.
Going back after long exile does not restore belonging. It exposes the returner as a stranger in the place he left, which has kept changing without him, and in the country he adopted. The homeland he carried in memory turns out to be an internal construction, not a place he can get back to.
A father known mostly as an absence cannot be grieved in the abstract. The son works through the loss by travelling the father's route in reverse, back to the soil and village that formed him, and returning him there symbolically. In this account, grief for someone who was never present is done with the body and through place, not only through feeling.