1 - Jacques-Stephen Alexis. Janus in Limbo: Urbanization, Exoticism, and Creolization

Summary

It is a cruel irony that Jacques-Stephen Alexis should provide the thematic and formal foundations for the Haitian novel's movement into exile, displacement, and wandering in the second half of the twentieth century. For Alexis was the epitome of the Haitian patriot, a descendant of Dessalines, and his works exude his deep, inexhaustible sense of attachment to Haiti. His novels, moreover, express an undying belief in a future political liberation and in a consequent satisfying enracination for all Haitians. And yet, reading his novels retrospectively, through the lens of a postwar history that has dragged Haiti through the tragic reality of noiristes dictatorships, violence, corruption, and poverty, a different story emerges, one where Alexis's calls for social justice, proletarian solidarity, and cultural nationalism become but faint echoes of a Marxist indigenist past, drowned out by the clamor of history. Reading Alexis retrospectively, it becomes clear that he sets much of the thematic agenda for his successors, and that they all in some way address his work in their own exilic narratives. This chapter pursues this alternative (re)reading of Alexis, reads his works as hinges upon which twentieth-century Haitian fiction swings, and shows how they feel simultaneously both the inward pull of the past of indigenism, La Ruche, and Roumain, and also the draw of the future, unending, outward movement into migration and wandering.

Alexis was born on 22 April 1922 in the Haitian town of Gonaïves. The year was a significant one in many ways; under American occupation since 1915, Haiti and its constitution were undergoing some important transformations.