Jacques Stephen Alexis

Jacques Stephen Alexis was born on the twenty-second of April 1922 at Les Gonaïves, Haiti, the son of Stephen Alexis — a journalist and diplomat in the Haitian foreign service of substantial mulatto-elite lineage — and Marthe Aurélie Pierre-Louis Alexis. His paternal great-grandfather Jean-Jacques Dessalines (placed in this archive) had been the founding Emperor of Haiti. He was educated at the Petit Séminaire Collège Saint-Martial of Port-au-Prince through his sixteenth year and at the École de Médecine of Port-au-Prince from 1939 to 1947, taking the medical degree at twenty-five.

He was active from his university years in the post-occupation Haitian student-left and in the 1946 Revolution that overthrew President Élie Lescot. He co-founded the Mouvement des Cinq de Genève in 1948 and the journal La Ruche, the central organ of the Haitian student-left of the late 1940s.

He lived in Paris from 1947 to 1955 — completing further medical training at the Hôpital Cochin and the Institut Pasteur, and producing through the same period the four novels that constitute his principal literary work. He published Compère Général Soleil in 1955, Les arbres musiciens in 1957, L'espace d'un cillement in 1959, and Romancero aux étoiles in 1960. The four novels — drawing the Haitian peasant economy of the post-occupation period and the dictatorship-era resistance — established him in the international francophone-literary world as the principal Haitian novelist of his generation and one of the foremost prose stylists of mid-century francophone letters.

He returned to Haiti in 1959 and founded the Parti d'Entente Populaire — a small Marxist-leaning party that opposed the Duvalier dictatorship that had taken power in 1957. He went into exile in 1960 following the regime's increasing repression. He returned clandestinely by sea from Cuba on the twenty-third of April 1961 with four party comrades to begin underground organising on the western peninsula. The landing-party was discovered by Tonton Macoutes militia at Môle-Saint-Nicolas. He was captured, tortured and killed at the Môle. His remains have never been recovered.

He was thirty-eight.

He is honored here as the author of Compère Général Soleil.