General Sun, My Brother

And yet, General Sun is a great man—he has always been the friend of poor black men, the guiding spirit who shows only one yellow eye to the living, but he fights for us at each turn and always shows us the way. Just as he always conquers night and wrests a season that he controls each year, workers can change the times and find a season to live without misery.

Compère Général Soleil (1955), by Jacques-Stephen Alexis, a Haitian novelist, Communist, and victim of Duvalier’s regime, is widely considered required reading in Haitian and Francophone Caribbean literature. Alexis, a man of the elite committed to democratization and socialism, lost his life when he landed with a small group of revolutionaries from Cuba in a poor attempt to overthrow Papa Doc in 1961. Though a descendant of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the father of Haitian independence, and other black Haitians of social prominence, Alexis clearly identified with the poor, peasant majority of Haiti exploited by white American imperialism, Haitian dictatorships, Trujillo’s anti-haitianismo, natural disasters such the flooding of the Artibonite, and extreme social inequality. Translated into English as General Sun, My Brother, Alexis, as the sympathetic third person narrator, ‘humanizes’ nature by using the Sun as a metaphor for the struggle of the poor. Indeed, the narrator’s voice in this narrative is fascinating, for the excessively described natural wonders and animal life of Haiti abound in the novel’s pages, as well as the narrator’s tangents on life, parenthood, and the world of the 1930s, when this novel is set.

However, I cannot help but feel a little disappointed with the novel since I was expecting a much longer portion of the text to focus on the 1937 genocide of Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans by Trujillo’s soldiers, targeting Haitians by asking dark-skinned Dominicans to pronounce the word perejil, parsley, knowing that Haitians often have trouble with the Spanish r. Edwidge Danticat wrote her Farming of the Bones as a tribute and reinterpretation of the genocide through the lens of a female character rather than Alexis’s Hilarion, but I was surprised to find that most of the novel is set in Port-au-Prince and Leogane rather than the Dominican Republic and the massacre. Nevertheless, Alexis’s novel succeeds in demonstrating how the poor majority of Haiti participated in a much larger world of ideas, nation-states, and struggles than one would think, especially the Communist movement in Haiti. Indeed, the character of Pierre Roumel, founder of the Haitian Communist Party, is based on Jacques Roumain, Haitian Communist, writer and political prisoner of the Haitian state forced into exile. Pierre Roumel opens up Hilarion’s eyes, helping him see himself in a larger historical struggle in the forces of capitalism, imperialism, and workers’ organization.

Unfortunately, much like Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood and Roumain’s Masters of the Dew, the explicit socialist undertones do limit the story since everything can be reduced to pro-Communist propaganda rather than fully developed characters. In this case, however, Alexis’s narrator and the life of Hilarion help avoid the limits of socialist parable tales because of the universal themes of race, gender relations, and religion, in addition to the critiques of the disconnected lives of Marxists themselves, who are often unable to ever truly connect with the masses of workers. Hilarion, child of Haitian peasants, formerly a restavek due to his mother’s poverty, and previously ignorant and unaware of the larger struggles taking place around himself and the world, eventually applies the lessons he learns from Communists like Roumel and Jean-Michel to understand the power of collective worker actions. In fact, the lessons of the ‘Reds’ pays off when the Haitian sugarcane workers (including Hilarion and his cousin, Josaphat, who fled to the Dominican Republic after killing a Haitian policeman who was raping his sister) join a strike inspired by Communist activists and succeed in getting most of their demands met by the American management.

There also are several references that praise peasant and lower-class Haitian culture that reaffirm the humanity and dignity of the black poor. Like Jean-Price Mars, a Haitian intellectual founder of negritude, best known for Ainsi parla l'oncle, which praised Haitian folklore and traditions, perhaps going as far as romanticizing it. Throughout the novel, the narrator commends Haitians for their work ethic, their skills and experiences as musicians, the cuisine, and the beauty of the natural landscape (the sea, the mountains, the Artibonite river) as a tribute to Haiti, and the island of Hispaniola. Furthermore, the narrator inserts several Creole expressions, proverbs, and words that are not translated to present the world as seen through the eyes of Hilarion, his wife, Claire, and others. The narrator’s reliance on Creole phrases and the mix of French, Spanish and Creole in the text’s original French form reveals the multi-ethnic, pan-Caribbean dimensions of the Communist movement, too. Alexis’s mother, of Dominican descent, would have encouraged Alexis’s pan-Caribbean framework, as well as the fact that the viejos, or Haitians who worked in Cuba or the Dominican Republic during this period often returned to Haiti with tales of the outside world or brought more Haitians to neighboring islands. 

These transnational communities, as well as the spread of communist ideas led to creations conducive for international communism, labor movements from Cuba to the Dominican Republic, and negritude. Once one gets past the exterior differences between Haitians and Dominicans, such as Spanish versus Creole, Alexis’s narrator points out the numerous similarities that unite the two nations, despite Trujillo’s attempts to eradicate those unable to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley with the Spanish, rolled r. Haitians and Dominicans share a common culture rooted in cock fights, a common status as oppressed workers under the thrall of American imperialism, merengue (of Haitian origin, but popular in the Dominican Republic), a mixed Creole-Spanish language near the border, and mutual African ancestry. Moreover, the narrator goes out of his or her way to explain how it was Trujillo and his followers, not the Dominican people, who carried out the killings of Haitians. Dominican soldiers, with guns and machetes, were the ones who pursued, killed, and tortured Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans. Dominican people, such as the cowherd, or Concepcion, help Hilarion, Claire, and their baby escape from Macoris, fleeing toward the Haitian border. Some of the Dominican characters who help them flee also cannot escape feeling some sense of responsibility for the massacres, despite the risks of being caught helping them.

Overall, this novel is able to overcome its possible limits from the strong undercurrents of Communism. Hilarion’s transformation from petty thief of Port-au-Prince to a dedicated father, husband, and worker with class consciousness is only partly due to his education by Marxists, and partly due to the unique experiences of Haitians oppressed by American occupation, Vincent, the corrupt president, and the elite classes that profit from the hyperexploitation of the Haitian poor. In addition, Hilarion and the series of disasters he overcomes are partly due to economics and class, but also due to the natural world around him (the flooding of the Artibonite, which forces thousands of peasants to come to Port-au-Prince in search of food and work). Likewise, his informal marriage to Claire and becoming a father help Hilarion develop into a mature, rational human being with purpose in his life. Now that he is a father, a life of crime and meaningless leeching on a society of other poor will not provide for his child. 

Alexis also demonstrates the importance of recognizing the common threads that unite humanity, beyond class to include music, language, and religion in the case of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. General Sun, My Brother also delivers a scathing critique to social elites on both sides of the island, as well as the exploitation of the poor by religious officials and leaders, including a houngan who overcharges the Haitian peasants in Josaphat’s village near Leogane for a burial service. In the end, like the Sun, the people must take their lives and put it in their own hands to make the world around them a better place. Like the Sun that conquers night, individuals have the ability to improve their lot in life, and cannot meekly accept the established social order. Thus, compared to Masters of the Dew, Hilarion breathes more a real human being than Manuel, who seems to only be a spark for the collective, koumbite consciousness necessary to restore his village.