"How extremely exciting to have Jacques Stephen Alexis'
masterpiece Général Compère
Soleil finally translated in English for a whole new
generation of readers to enjoy, question, and admire.
This is another chance for all of us to continue to
celebrate this brave and timeless narrative and remember
this most committed and enormously talented writer."
Edwidge
Danticat, author of The Farming of
Bones
The first novel of the Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen
Alexis, General Sun, My Brother appears here for the
first time in English. Its depiction of the nightmarish
journey of the unskilled laborer Hilarion and his wife from
the slums of Port-au-Prince to the cane fields of the
Dominican Republic has brought comparisons to the work of
Emile Zola, André Malraux, Richard Wright, and Ernest
Hemingway.
Alexis, whose mother was a descendant of the
Revolutionary General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, was already a
mature thinker when he published General Sun, My Brother
(Compère Général Soleil) in France
in 1955. A militant Marxist himself, Alexis championed a
form of the "marvelous realism" developed by the Cuban
novelist Alejo Carpentier, who called for a vision of
historical reality from the standpoint of slaves for whom
the supernatural was as much a part of everyday experience
as were social and other existential realities.
General Sun, My Brother opens as Hilarion is
arrested for stealing a wallet and imprisoned with an
activist named Pierre Roumel--a fictional double for the
novelist Jacques Roumain--who schools him in the Marxist
view of history. On his release, Hilarion meets
Claire-Heureuse and they settle down together. Hilarion
labors in sisal processing and mahogany polishing while his
partner sets up a small grocery store. After losing
everything in a criminally set fire, the couple joins the
desperate emigration to the Dominican Republic. Hilarion
finds work as a sugarcane cutter, but the workers soon
become embroiled in a strike that ends in the "Dominican
Vespers," the 1937 massacre pf Haitian workers by the
Dominican army. The novel personifies the sun as the ally,
brother, and leader of the peasants. Mortally wounded in
crossing the Massacre River back into Haiti, Hilarion urges
Claire-Heureuse to remarry and to continue to work for a
Haiti where people can live in dignity and peace.
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"Absorbing and deeply satisfying fiction, suggesting that
its late author . . . is someone eminently worthy of being
rediscovered."
Kirkus Reviews
"Alexis's renewed popularity, the republication of his
books, the new translations, the new surge of scholarly
interest would seem to indicate that he helped keep alive
the revolutionary spirit."
Hal Wylie, World Literature Today
From Reviews of the French Edition:
"All of Jacques Stephen Alexis's tableaux come together
to make [of his narrative] an astonishingly humane
and true-to-life book in which the psychological detail and
the emotional content go beyond literary subtleties."
Magloire Saint-Aude, Optique
"This black man who writes in French weaves his language
from inherited words and rhythms. A timeless Africa, a more
recent Spain, a strong Caribbean tradition, and several
North American sites have taken root in the language of
Racine and Rimbaud."
Gabriel Venaisssin, Temoignage Chretien
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Jacques Stephen Alexis had already gained international
recognition for his fiction when he returned to Haiti from
Cuba in 1961 as part of a small invasion force. He
disappeared and presumably died at the hands of Duvalier's
Tontons Macoutes at the age of thirty-nine.
Carrol F. Coates is Professor of French and Comparative
Literature at the State University of New
York&emdash;Binghamton. He has translated numerous books,
including The Festival of the Greasy Pole, by
René Depestre, and Dignity, by Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, both published by the University Press of
Virginia.
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