Jacques Stephen Alexis, Compère Général Soleil (1955)

Jacques Stephen Alexis, Compère Général Soleil (1955) Overview Compère Général Soleil is Jacques Stephen Alexis's debut novel, published by Gallimard in 1955, and one of the most politically and formally ambitious works in the Haitian literary tradition. The novel follows Hilarius Hilarion, a young Black man from the Port-au-Prince slums, through a life of poverty, police violence, political awakening, love, and finally death. The trajectory is explicitly political: Hilarion moves from petty theft and imprisonment through encounter with communist organizers to ideological commitment, marriage to Claire-Heureuse, fatherhood (his son is named Désiré), and death at the hands of fascist assassins — killed "en plein soleil," in full daylight, by the political forces opposing his movement.