At the bottom of this post is a link to the first review.
From The Back List
The Masters Of The Dew by Jacques Roumain. Translated and Introduction by Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook. Reynal & Hitchcock. New York. Fiction. Hardcover. Published in 1947. Out-Of-Print.
Narrowing his eyelids as though he were watching a long road unfold before him, he replied, "It isn't time so much that makes you old, it's what you have to put up with in life. Fifteen years I spent in Cuba, fifteen years, every day cutting sugar cane, oui, everyday, from sunrise to dusk-dark. At first, the bones in your back get all twisted up like a corkscrew. But there's something makes you stand it. What? Tell me, do you know what it is?"
He clenches his fists as he talked.
"It's being mad - that's what! Being mad makes you grit your teeth and tighten your belt when you're hungry. Being mad's a great power. When we went on strike, each man stood in line, armed to the teeth with being mad - like a gun. To get mad, that's your right, your justice!"
-from Masters Of The Dew
It's an interesting contradiction, but in the Wikipedia article on Haiti there is a section dealing with deforestation that seems to ignore a history that both of the authors here take for granted.
In its place there is what seems to me to be a very modern assessment of Haiti's supreme ecological (and therefore also economic) issue. That of deforestation. Below is what can be found on Wikipedia.
In 1925, Haiti was lush, with 60% of its original forest covering the lands and mountainous regions. Since then, the population has cut down an estimated 98% of its original forest cover for use as fuel for cookstoves, and in the process has destroyed fertile farmland soils, contributing to desertification.
The statistic is obviously shocking. 98% is a lot of food being cooked, which I'm sure would bring an ironic smile to many Haitian faces. Cookstoves. Right. The hungry have burnt up all the trees while cooking their food. Let's just put that to the side for now.
In both Vieux-Chauvet's and today's work by Jacques Roumain there is a different accounting of where the lumber went and it is one that does not favor the United States so well.
In both of their books these two writers seem to almost take for granted the role of U.S. businesses in the ruination of their once lush farmland. Sure, both point to the bourgeois Haitian sellout of forest to US logging firms but both are also clear about the bribing and political manipulation that protected U.S. companies once they'd made their diabolical deals.
It goes something like this: A wealthy family owns 200 acres of land on a mountain. Forty percent of that land is cleared and being used to cultivate coffee and fruit. The other sixty percent is dense forest. A logging company comes along and offers a pretty penny for the virgin woodlands and since they produce no income for the landowner they agree to sell. One-hundred percent of the trees are harvested and shipped off for processing. Things go on as normal for a little while.
Season after season the rains come and without the protection of the trees the process of erosion occurs at incredibly fast rates. In less than a generation the lands are stripped of their topsoil, and as more trees leave from other lands, the weather patters shift and winds dry out the remaining soil. In time the land is as worthless as a desert.
Such is the situation that Manuel, the angry young man of Roumain's evocative novel of agrarian Haiti after the logging. Manuel comes from a proud tradition of Haitian farmers. He has spend his formative years in Cuba, being paid to harvest sugar cane. Upon his return to Haiti he finds the previously verdant land worthless and uncultivated. This does not improve his indignant outlook.
Roumain and Vieux-Chauvet both hail from upper class, mulatto families. Their approach to writing is similarly sober. The major difference in style is that Roumain slides heavily to the polemical. His moments of distilled clarity are purely argumentative. Roumain does not sing a dirge to the individual but rather sends a prayer message to the working Haitian. Stand up. Demand what you need. Be strong because there are those that would have you be weak.
While Vieux-Chauvet was fearful of her own writing, hiding and self-censoring the publications out of fear of retaliation from the brutal regimes it critiques, Roumain attempted to work from within the power structure. Not only was Roumain the leading literary figure in Haiti during his life (1907-1944) but also a political activist who advocated communism in his homeland and who served in many facets of the Haitian government.
Another key difference is that while Vieux-Chauvet wrote of mulattoes struggling with racial identity and the loss of their essentially inherited colonial status, Roumain writes of the black Haitian, of the farmers and agrarian culture. It is in that sense that you might call Masters Of The Dew a sort of Haitian The Grapes Of Wrath.
Roumain is of that romantic breed of social realist, which imbues the hero with remarkable strengths and passionate faults. The defeated natures of the generation previous to his own helps mark out his resilience and power.
Both books are filled with rage, but in Masters Of The Dew it is stitched into the banner Roumain had unfurled long before writing the book. It is, at least in this sense of repetition, the most contrived aspect to an otherwise very convincing story.
The final and perhaps most essential strength of Roumain's novel is that unlike Vieux-Chauvet, Roumain tries to prescribe a solution to Haiti's problems. Both books take place in the same period of time. One from the vantage of a beleaguered upper class and the other from a downtrodden lower one.
This has been a revealing process for me. The combination of French education and Haiti's turbulent history combine powerfully in its literature. I would love to hear about other Haitian writers, perhaps untranslated or less known. Just like Marques or Rushdie called to attention the modern literature of their cultures, so too do these writers proclaim their own.
Haitian Literature Part I - Marie Vieux-Chauvet
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