General Sun, my brother
/ Jacques Stephen Alexis ; translated and with an introduction
by Carrol F. Coates. - Charlottesville : University of Virginia
press, 1999. - XLVIII-299 p. ; 24 cm.
ISBN 0-8139-1889-8
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| How extremely exciting to have Jacques Stephen Alexis' masterpiece, Compère Général 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.
Edwige Danticat |
DESCRIPTION : 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 of 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. Carrol F. Coates is professor of French and Comparative
Literature at the State University of New York, Binghamton. He
has translated numerous books, including The « Festival
of the Greasy Pole » (Le
mât de cocagne), by René Depestre, and « Dignity »,
by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, both published by the University Press
of Virginia in Charlottesville.
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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.
- « Compère
Général Soleil », Paris : Gallimard,
1955 ; Port-au-Prince : Éd. des Antilles, 1994
- « Les
arbres musiciens », Paris : Gallimard, 1957 ;
Port-au-Prince : Éd. Fardin, 1986
- « L'espace d'un cillement »,
Paris : Gallimard, 1959 ; rééd. Gallimard
(L'Imaginaire, 114), 1983
- « Romancero aux étoiles »,
Paris : Gallimard, 1960 ; rééd. Gallimard
(L'Imaginaire, 194), 1988
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| mise-à-jour : 28 juillet 2009 |
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