There is a gap on the first page, but it is not due to the scorching sun that has fallen into the Caribbean Sea as an “infrared bird” in the opening movement. It is a sign of the times that individual words in the manuscript have faded. Sixty years separate the posthumous publication of “Der Stern Wermut” and its date of origin around 1960. It is the last literary project of the great Haitian writer Jacques Stéphen Alexis. With regard to the author’s biography, the blank spaces in the text also stand for the inopportune moment at which the dissident’s life was violently stolen.
In April 1961, a few days after the invasion of American troops in the Bay of Pigs, Alexis boards a ship in Cuba to return to his totalitarian homeland after a long exile in socialist countries. He was arrested by the military police while still on the beach and taken to a torture prison. Under the influence of the decolonization movement in Paris in 1956, he had sworn the participants of the “First Congress of Black Artists and Intellectuals” to a “literary Bandung”, a counterpart to the political decolonization movements that the countries of the “Third World” agreed on in Bandung, Indonesia had. He himself would not have lived to see it: The day Alexis is murdered is his 39th birthday.
A tropical storm throws all hope into the sea
Like the life of the doctor and communist, “Der Stern Wermut” remained unfinished. As little is known of Alexi’s last hours, it is as uncertain whether the protagonist Églantine will succeed in the “reconstruction of her heart” that her “bitter-sweet struggle for survival” is supposed to accomplish. Églantine deserted – because of her name, her job as a sex worker in the port environment of Port-au-Prince and a “high-voltage love” whose electrical charge is not only negative but toxic.
In 1959 Alexis published the novel “L’espace d’un cillement”. In it he told in detail about that dangerous romance between El Gaucho, a rebellious dock worker and part-time pimp, and Eglantina, like him from Cuba and known in the “Sensation Bar” only as “La Niña Estrellita”. In the fragment of a sequel, the initial situation is as simple as it is sophisticated: As a celebrated “little star”, Eglantina has earned a meager loan, which she uses to charter a sailing ship and crew with an acquaintance and dare the dangerous crossing to the “Great Saline”.
Jacques Stéphen Alexis: The Star Wormwood. Translated from the French by Rike Bolte. Litraduct, Trier 2021. 132 pages, 12 euros.
By entering the salt trade, the women hope to escape the conditions of exploitation that have gripped the Caribbean island since the first sugar plantations were established. But before the nerve-wracking story dies down without punctuation, the business idea is thwarted by a tropical storm that makes the salt crystals sparkle all the brighter, but all hopes are thrown into the raging sea. In the Haitian context, the political symbolic content of this shipwreck can hardly be overlooked: Églantine’s attempt to overcome their bondage through entrepreneurial skill fails, as do the repeated attempts by the Haitian population to free themselves from the disastrous maelstrom of expropriation, enslavement, occupation politics and despotism.
It’s been a long time since the last German edition of “L’espace d’un cillement”, the translated title (“Die Mulattin”) and the book cover (ein “Mulattin”) now seem like the inedible fruits of male fantasies that have matured too long. The fact that Alexis can be rediscovered through his impetuous late work is thanks to the initiative of the Litraduct publishing house, which has been trying to convey Haitian literature for years, and the translation by Rike Bolte, which occasionally threatens to oversteer, but is accurate qualified as a suitable counterpart to the nerve-wracking original text.
Alexis’ late work, created under tragic circumstances, visualizes facets of postcolonial literature that are often neglected in current debates. His literary absinthe star combines synesthetic excesses of perception with strong political symbolism and a visual language that seems surreal. Alexis, who wanted to make a specifically Haitian contribution to the then little-known magical realism, does not derive his material from a mysterious realm of dreams, but from historically inherited conditions of social misery and alienation. Rather than being surrealistic, one would have to describe such a writing as sursocialist.