Jacques Stephen Alexis

This was Alexis's last full-scale novel, intended as the first part of a tetralogy. It's basically grand opera: La Niña Estrellita and El Caucho catch sight of each other in the crowds celebrating Palm Sunday in Port-au-Prince, are smitten immediately, and provide us with some three hundred pages of gloriously passionate arias in free indirect speech before they end up in bed together. They are both Cuban exiles living in Haiti: she's a sex-worker in the waterfront Sensation Bar, with a column of US Marines queuing up outside her bedroom door; he's a mechanic and trade-union organiser in a shipyard. Alexis structures the story around the days of Holy Week and the senses, as their relationship progresses from sight through smell, hearing, taste and touch to that sixth sense that lovers are supposed to have.

Along the way we learn more than we might expect to about the situation of the working classes in the Caribbean and what should be done to improve it. Alexis does exploit the exotic brothel setting for all it's worth (including rather more male-gaze-type lesbian soft porn than strictly necessary), but he also makes it clear that the women are every bit as much exploited workers and victims of capitalism as the men in the shipyard (it's no accident that the US Navy is in port).

Fun, in the sort of way Porgy and Bess would be with a libretto by Friedrich Engels and Henry Miller...… (mais)

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Alexis-Compere-general-Soleil/92384

> COMPÈRE GÉNÉRAL SOLEIL, par Jacques Stephen Alexis (Gallimard, 1982, Poche, 364 pages). — Hilarius Hilarion, jeune nègre infortuné de Port-au-Prince, vole pour manger. La police l'attrape et le rosse. Il se retrouve en prison, où il fait la connaissance d'un militant communiste qui lui apprend que les maîtres américains privent les nègres de toutes les bonnes choses de la terre. À sa sortie de prison, Hilarion est communiste. Il se marie avec Claire-Heureuse qu'il a connue sur la plage, et qui lui donne un enfant. Hilarion connaît enfin la joie.
Pas pour longtemps, hélas ! Des assassins fascistes le tuent. Il meurt en plein soleil.
Ce roman de Jacques Alexis, qui est haïtien, est profondément marqué par le style des «tireurs de contes» et prolonge l'art des «sambas», les trouvères indiens d'Haïti. Alexis, l'auteur de ce roman illuminé par la joie de vivre, est mort comme son héros Hilarion. Lui aussi a été assassiné.
—Johnny Gimenez (Culturebox)… (mais)

Compère Général Soleil was Jacques Stephen Alexis's first novel, written between 1951 and 1955, and is set in Haiti and the Dominican Republic ca. 1935-1937, during the presidency of Sténio Vincent.

When we meet our ironically-named hero Hilarius Hilarion, he is down in the depths of despair with no resource left to him except to steal. But he has the good fortune to make friends with a communist political prisoner in jail, and with his help meets the communist junior doctor Jean-Michel (presumably an idealised portrait of the author as a working-class hero) who cures his epilepsy, gets him a job, recruits him to evening-classes in Haitian history, and helps him to set up home with the lovely Claire-Heureuse. The two of them work hard to better themselves, but naturally, this good fortune can't last. When we discover at the beginning of Part III that Hilarion and Claire-Heureuse have been forced to emigrate to cut cane in Trujillo's Dominican Republic, we have a pretty good idea of how it's all going to end.

So, it's outwardly a classic working-class tragedy, like hundreds of other socialist propaganda novels written between the 1860s and the 1960s. But there's a bit more to it than that. For a start, Alexis clearly knows what he's talking about. Hilarion and Claire-Heureuse are not (quite) abstract political types, they are complex individuals with a particular background and cultural identity, full of details that could only come from Alexis's first-hand experience. Haiti itself, with all its historical and natural idiosyncrasies, also seems to be treated as an independent character in the story. We frequently get long chunks of free-verse or prose-poetry in the best Aimé Césaire tradition apostrophising the city, the river, the Haitian landscape, etc. And sometimes the story jumps unpredictably away from the central characters for a chapter to highlight some other social problem Alexis wants to draw to our attention.

It frequently skates on the verge of being naive and/or bombastic (it would make a great opera!), but I think Alexis gets away with it most of the time, thanks to a powerful mix of obvious honesty and (concealed) technical skill. Oddly enough it reminded me quite strongly of Berlin Alexanderplatz, even though that is a much less explicitly political novel. I think the similarity must be in the humanity with which Alexis treats his suffering hero.

Overall, I don't think this is a "this-book-will-change-your-life" novel, but it is definitely one that will teach you something about what life looks like at the bottom of the heap.… (mais)