After reading the praise of Alexis's last novel in Le cri des oiseaux fous from the Dominican prostitute Mercedes, one felt compelled to read Alexis's tale of a Cuban prostitute in 1940s Port-au-Prince during Holy Week. Translated by Coates and Edwidge Danticat, one can feel satisfied knowing Danticat's lyrical voice and storytelling would capture the voice of the author. Alexis creates a vivid portrait drawing on all the senses to bring Port-au-Prince to life, particularly the crossroads of Portail Leogane and the heterogeneous Caribbean working-class. Jamaicans, Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians, and others mingle in a society on the cusp of change as the upcoming Bicentennial Exposition and labor unrest in Cuba and Haiti foreshadow social and political change. Furthermore, unlike General Sun, My Brother, which felt occasionally overly didactic, this tale of love and redemption features the author's unavoidable socialist politics without the sounds of a protest novel.
Nonetheless, as a pivotal figure in the annals of Haitian Left, Alexis' novel provides some interesting opportunities to see how his literary imagination and Marxist inclinations coalesced. Here, it seems that the Caribbean woman La Niña, cannot find true sexual pleasure or love and, due to capitalism and imperialism, finds her options limited. Becoming a prostitute who rejected any pimp did afford a certain amount of power to her, since she was able to save her earnings, but the brutalized nature of her work (including servicing of American marines, which naturally brings to mind the US Occupation of Haiti as well as US imperialism across the region) prevents this virginal sex worker from finding any form of happiness. However, as she and her fellow residents of the Sensation Bar indicate, all women in sexist, capitalist societies are reduced to a similar status, regardless of bourgeois morality and religion denigrating sex workers. Indeed, Alexis's pro-labor politics even has a character contemplate a labor union of prostitutes.
El Caucho, the Cuban mechanic (also, of Haitian descent through his mother) who needs La Niña just as much as she needs him to reawaken, or resurrect her past self in this Holy Week where rara drums are inescapable, represents the insurgent Caribbean worker on the move. However, he, like La Niña, is searching for love, something to complement his socialist vision of a greater future where love and reason unite for a post-capitalist order. Perhaps this is the marvelous realism of a socialist aesthetics and politics in the Caribbean, where love is selfless and the Caribbean unites. El Caucho as an allegorical Caribbean proletarian, particularly in his critiques of the Haitian political system, the limitations of the Bicentennial Exposition (millions wasted that could have been used to build factories and create jobs for La Saline or other slums of Port-au-Prince), the confused garbling of Marxists in the Fédération des Travailleurs Haitiens, or his own need for true friendship and intimacy, is seeking a rebirth or redemption like La Niña.
The novel is truly an engaging read that sensually walks one through the romance as two bodies (re)discover themselves and contemplate their place in a larger Caribbean world. Cuba's Oriente, unsurprisingly, is central here, especially as a region with strong links to the rest of the archipelago. The sun, sea, flora, fauna, landscape, colors, aromas, sights, religious fervor, and music are vividly described in great detail. This pattern resembles General Sun, My Brother but within a pan-Caribbean universe that rejects easy conclusions or answers. The novel seems to function as proof that marvelous realism, finding the marvels of everyday reality, could be the necessary component for Caribbean socialist literature to embrace local ways of knowing and being in the world. As an example of the working-class literature in the years after 1946, it also serves as a testament to a changing Port-au-Prince in which organized labor was on the rise while transitioning to the urban behemoth it is today with its semi-employed or unemployed living in ever-growing slums.
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