Series:

CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French

2 total works

Cover of In the Flicker of an Eyelid
In his third novel, Jacques Stephen Alexis brings his characteristically vivid scenes, political consciousness, and powerful characters to the dramatic age-old question of whether a prostitute can leave ""the life"" to find her own identity and true love. La Nina Estrellita is pursuing her trade against the colorful backdrop of Holy Week 1948 in Port-au-Prince. Amid the rowdy street festivals and pious celebrations of the liturgical season, she notices a fellow Cuban exile, El Caucho, a ship mechanic and union organizer, hanging around the Sensation Bar, and she begins to explore her attraction to him. In the Flicker of an Eyelid, first published in French as L'espace d'un cillement in 1959, appears here in English for the first time in a graceful, expert translation by the veteran critic Carrol F. Coates and the award-winning Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat. Alexis offers a highly sympathetic look into the daily lives and tribulations of the Haitian people through the eyes of La Nina and the humane, searching worker El Caucho. The racism of the U.S. military, the selfish and profit-oriented machinations of Haitian politicians, the oppression of workers by the Cuban dictator Batista, the exploitation of women, and the particularly noteworthy links between Haiti and Cuba all form the figurative backdrop for a novel driven by unforgettable characters.

Cover of General Sun, My Brother

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, Andre 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 (Compere General 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.