Jacques Stephen Alexis
(Haiti)
Authored by the father of Haitian literature and militant Marxist: Hilarion is imprisoned with an activist who schools him in the Marxist view of history, and later in life becomes embroiled in a strike that ends in the “Dominican Vespers,” the 1937 massacre of Haitian workers by the Dominican army. The novel personifies the sun as the ally, brother, and leader of the peasants.
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Join us on Saturday 9/30 at 1pm ET in-person on Zoom for our monthly book club meeting! (Note: this month’s meeting is virtual only)
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Whether it be stories borne of the brutal violence of imperialism, or futures where working people have triumphed over their oppressors, fiction gives us the opportunity to experience the truth of another life, allowing us to experience the fullness of their emotions, their struggles, and their dreams.
The People’s Forum and 1804 Books invite you to join us as we explore the genre of communist and radical fiction. How does a text change when we read it not only for the plot, but for the injustices it reveals? How does a story’s meaning transform when we think of it as a prompt to organize and take action? Fiction can be a tool for exploring the conditions of the world, a way of understanding how things are, for what changes we demand, and what futures we can dream. There is so much literary fiction that is produced by struggle and that are in and of themselves beautiful works of revolutionary art and culture.
We’ll meet once each month to discuss a featured novel, talk about the history it comes from and responds to, and how we can understand its meaning in our own contexts and work. Please join us in this collective practice of revolutionary reading and imagining!
