A Prophetic Vision of the Past: Jacques-Stéphen Alexis and ‘Le Réalisme Merveilleux’

Abstract

The role of Jacques-Stéphen Alexis as a student activist in 1946 was to all appearances an undistinguished one. One cannot help but feel that he stood, at that time, in the shadow of his vocal contemporary René Dépestre who was very much both the ideological and literary voice of that generation. Alexis’s writings in 1946 were restricted to the stridently anti-establishment column in La Ruche entitled ‘Lettre aux hommes vieux’ and signed ‘Jacques La Colère’. Indeed, even in the general outline of his career there is little to distinguish him from Dépestre or, for that matter, many of the student leaders of that generation. Like the rest, he was deeply influenced by Jacques Roumain when the latter returned from exile in 1941. After the fierce political engagement of the mid-forties he left, like so many, for Europe to further his studies — his particular field was medicine, specialising in neurology, which may explain his ability to evoke a range of mental states in his novels; from madness to catalepsy. He returned to Haiti in 1955 and along with his contemporaries of 1946 was actively involved in the politics of that period. His violent opposition to the Duvalier regime, which eventually led to his death, was also characteristic of the general Marxist opposition to Duvalier’s politics of racial mystification.

revolutionary literature is a filial impulse … Maturity is the assimilation of the features of every ancestor

Derek Walcott, The Muse of History

This phrase is taken from the Martinican novelist Edouard Glissant. He uses it in the preface to his play which treats the Haitian war of independence — Monsieur Toussaint (Paris: du Seuil, 1961). He speaks, like Alexis, of the need ‘to unveil the past, deformed or obliterated by others, which allows us to better understand the present’.