Professor Carrol Coates hopes that his latest translation project, General Sun, My Brother will reach two audiences: younger Haitians who have probably heard of author Jacques Stephen Alexis but cannot easily read the original French text, Compère Général Soleil, and English-speaking readers interested in exploring Haiti, which has an exceptional history of literature and culture dating from its independence in 1804.
“Although published in 1955 in Paris, this is the first complete English translation of the novel,” said Coates. “An important reason that Alexis has been neglected is that he was an avowed communist. This novel takes a critical view of the first U.S. invasion and occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) and of the continued American manipulation of Haitian affairs which would probably have made it suspect during the McCarthy era.”
Set in the late thirties, the novel describes the social reality of the majority of Haitian workers and peasants, which includes the hardship brought on by such natural disasters as hurricanes and floods.
The novel opens with a petty theft and the arrest of Haitian laborer, Hilarion Hilarius. Sentenced to a month in prison, Hilarion meets a communist activist, Pierre Roumel, (a character modeled on the founder of the Haitian Communist Party, Jacques Roumian), who helps the young man to find a job. With the inspiration of Roumel and a young communist doctor, Hilarion learns to read and begins to study history from a socialist perspective. On his release, Hilarion settles down with Claire-Heureuse, a young woman of his own class, and they open a small grocery store in downtown Port-au-Prince.
After hoodlums set fire to the neighborhood where Hilarion and Claire-Heureuse live and work, they emigrate to the Dominican Republic. Hilarion joins thousands of other Haitians working at sugarcane cutting and in the sugar factories. A strike of the sugarcane workers, both Dominican and Haitian, becomes the pretext needed by President Trujillo for an act of “ethnic cleansing” that was termed the “Dominican Vespers.”
As many as 20,000 or more Haitian workers, women and children were massacred when the Dominican army and police moved in at the beginning of October 1937. Wounded by soldiers as he flees, Hilarion dies in his wife’s arms on the Haitian side of the Massacre River and this forms the abrupt conclusion of the novel.
“I have been thinking of translating this novel for some years because Alexis is an important Haitian writer who is well known internationally but has never been made available to English-speaking readers,” said Coates. “Besides, General Sun is a gripping story that gives an intimate view into the daily life of the common people of Haiti — their religion, their proverbs and games and their own Kreyòl language.”
Alexis’ details of the struggle between popular movements and dictatorial or capitalist governments of the 1930s was also another reason for Coates’s interest. Coates was drawn to history because of the chasm that separates the common people from the elites who wield power across world, a reality he continues to find fascinating. In particular, Coates has a continued interest in U.S. foreign policies in the Caribbean and the Americas.
“A consummate irony is that my translation of Alexis’s story of the 1937 massacre, behind which lay governmental corruption on both sides of the border, has appeared at a moment when history is very close to being repeated: the Dominican government is once again expelling thousands of Haitian workers, with rumors of violence and police brutality.”
Coates has a longstanding interest in Haiti and has translated a number of works by Haitian authors, including The Festival of the Greasy Pole by René Depestre (published in 1990) and Dignity, Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s account of his exile during the Cédras junta period (1991-1994). He is a frequent speaker on the topic of Haitian culture at universities, clubs and colloquia around the country.
| Professor Carrol Coates, recently translated the 1955 Haitian novel General Sun, My Brother from French to English. The novel, which explores the social reality of Hatitian workers and peasants, was written in French by Jacques Stephen Alexis.
|
|
He is also translating a West African novel by Ivory Coast author, Ahmadou Kourouma, Awaiting the Vote of the Savage Beasts. All of these translations involve an effort to convey the discourse of complex cultures in Africa and the African diaspora that have been affected by the colonist intervention of Western countries. “With General Sun, My Brother, I will consider that my work has had some success if I get any evidence that Haitians who do not read French are enabled to deepen their contact with their own roots by reading in English, the work of an important Haitian,” Coates said. “The novel has important cultural and historical insights that are still relevant for Americans and other observers of the troubled political scene in Haiti.” |
