The marvellous life of a Haitian refugee: James Noël’s Belle merveille

This article examines the marvellous realism of two Haitian writers, past and present. Building on earlier schools of literary and socio-ethnographic thought, including Haitian indigenism, French surrealism and the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s ‘marvellous real’, Jacques Stephen Alexis theorized marvellous realism at the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956. Some 60 years later, James Noël published Belle merveille, a novel that depicts a refugee who survives the earthquake of 2010 and embarks on a journey to understand his place among international aid groups that proliferate in the aftermath. The article suggests that Noël’s novel is both a tribute to and a creative rethinking of Alexis’s ideological commitment to the intersection of literary and social realism. It argues that by filtering events through the imaginary of the refugee, Noël interrogates the very categories of the marvellous and the real undergirding Alexis’s aesthetic and political project. After providing theoretical and historical context for Noël’s work, the article carries out close readings of Belle merveille to illuminate the ways in which its redeployment of marvellous realism delivers a critique of humanitarian aid.

El Romancero aux étoiles de Jacques Stephen Alexis como sutura de una nación escindida

En 1960, Jacques Stephen Alexis, como continuador del indigenismo haitiano cuya piedra angular es el Ainsi parla l’oncle de Jean Price Mars, publica Romancero aux étoiles, un libro de relatos en donde invita a un lectorado culto a defender las raíces de lo popular haitiano, para suturar una nación escindida en una acomodada elite urbana y una masa analfabeta de campesinos. Entrelazando una oralidad de rasgos populares con una escritura neobarroca, esta publicación implica un gesto político nacionalista: en el contexto de la sangrienta dictadura de François Duvalier, Alexis exalta el ámbito rural y lo considera un arma poderosa para defender la identidad nacional frente a la cultura imperialista extranjera, que avanza auspiciada por el régimen duvalierista.

Poétiques du réalisme merveilleux chez Jacques Stephen Alexis et Miguel Bonnefoy

The critical comments about the narrative work of the Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis (1922-1961) and the French-Venezuelan writer Miguel Bonnefoy (1986) establish a connection between the production of these narrators and the notion of marvelous or magical realism. In the following pages, we aim at analyzing the specific strategies used by these authors in their narrative works to set up a link with the real and the marvelous, in the light of the existing conceptualizations concerning this aesthetic. Furthermore, we want to read these results in view of the following target, which has been outlined by Alexis and Bonnefoy in critical essays and interviews: marvelous realism has been adopted to model their narrative works.

Vodou, mystique et Égypte antique dans Les Arbres musiciens

This article examines the dual themes of vodou and mysticism in the novel Les arbres musiciens (1957) by Jacques Stéphen Alexis (1922-1961). If Compère Général Soleil (1955), his first novel, barely touches the question, it is his second novel, Les arbres musiciens, that develops this aspect. This one testifies to an excellent knowledge of Haitian vodou and its origins. The article thus shows the relationship that Jacques Stéphen Alexis has in his poetics with ancient Egypt, in particular, and Africa in general.

L’humanisme panaméricain de Jacques Stephen Alexis

This essay analyses Jacques Stephen Alexis’ masterpiece Romancero aux étoiles (1960), which can be considered as a practical application of his sociopoetic theories for a Panamerican humanism. Indeed, in this collection of folktales, Alexis revolutionises the popular imaginary and the genres of orature, but he also reintroduces the Taino/Native contribution to the Haitian identity and culture, devoting two tales to two mythical Taino figures: the queen Anacaona and the viens-viens. The analysis of these two tales, “Dit de la Fleur d’Or” and “Le sous-lieutenant enchanté”, allows to understand the new conception developed by Alexis, that of the influence of orature in literature and also his openness to a pluriethnic and pluricultural Americanism.