Compère Général Soleil

Jacques Stephen Alexis's debut novel follows Hilarius Hilarion, a young Black man from the Port-au-Prince slums, through poverty, police violence, political awakening, and death in the 1937 Dominican massacre of Haitian migrants. One of the most politically and formally ambitious works in the Haitian literary tradition, the novel depicts class violence, communist organizing, and the Trujillo-era ethnic massacre as continuous expressions of the same political forces. It remains the primary literary account of the Parsley Massacre in Haitian literature.