Jacques Stephen Alexis

Jacques Stephen Alexis was born on the twenty-second of April 1922 at Gonaïves, Haiti, into a household where letters and politics were the daily air. His father, Stephen Alexis, was a journalist, historian and diplomat in the Haitian foreign service; his mother, Lydia Nuñez, carried the blood of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the formerly enslaved revolutionary who founded the Haitian nation. From that inheritance of liberation Alexis drew both his craft and his conscience.

Trained as a physician — completing his medical studies in Paris and practising as a neurologist — he served the body while writing to awaken the spirit. His novels stand among the treasures of Haitian letters: Compère Général Soleil (1955), Les Arbres musiciens (1957), L'Espace d'un cillement (1959), and the luminous tales of Romancero aux étoiles (1960). In them he forged what he called "marvellous realism," rooting the extraordinary in the lived faith and folklore of the Haitian people.

Alexis was a man of committed action as well as art. Drawn early to the Left, in 1959 he founded a left-wing political party and stood in open resistance to the dictatorship of François Duvalier, work that forced him into exile. In 1960 he travelled to Moscow among representatives of communist parties from across the world, adding the Haitian voice to their common declaration.

In April 1961 he returned by sea to his homeland, landing near Môle-Saint-Nicolas, where he was seized and, after cruel imprisonment, killed by his captors. He was not yet forty. We honor Jacques Stephen Alexis — healer, storyteller, and son of Dessalines — whose pen lit a lamp for his people that no tyranny could extinguish.