Masters of the Dew

“Nevertheless, the fete went on. The peasants forgot their troubles. Dancing and drinking anesthetized them-- swept away their shipwrecked souls to drown in those regions of unreality and danger where the fierce forces of the African gods lay in wait.”

Jacques Roumain’s Masters of the Dew, translated into English by Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook, remains one of the most important works in Haitian and Caribbean literature. Roumain, member of Haiti’s elite (his grandfather, Tancrede Auguste, was president of Haiti), also founded the Communist party, which explains the strong Marxist tones of the novel. Roumain studied abroad in Europe and traveled, thus the international context of Masters centers on a character that was part of the Haitian immigrant braceros communities, who labored on often American-owned plantations in Cuba.  An understanding of Cuban and Haitian history is required to fully comprehend the background of Manuel, the protagonist. In the first few decades of the 20th century, American investors and landholders, alongside their white Cuban allies, imported thousands of black workers from Haiti and the British West Indies for cheap labor, and because of the poor economic conditions of these other Caribbean islands, hundreds of thousands came. Manuel spends several years cutting cane in Cuba, where he and his other braceros gain a worker, or proletariat consciousness and use it or for a huelga, or strike. Unlike the peasants of Haiti, who continued to face extreme exploitation, political exclusion and few opportunities for wage labor, the Haitian and other black workers in Cuba used their labor power collectively to demand higher wages and rights. The novel focuses on Manuel endeavoring to bring this revolutionary, Marxist-influenced notion of worker/peasant consciousness to the people of his village of Fonds Rouge in Haiti. Along the way, he encounters resistance from the religious traditions and a feud between two main families, and he must end the drought that has driven the village to starvation and deeper poverty. Roumain, though obviously not from Haiti’s peasant society, nonetheless uses peasant cultural and religious practices in the novel, such as the coumbite tradition of collective labor among villagers to work on agricultural projects for the entire village. For Manuel, the only way to save agriculture in the village and end poverty is to overcome the feud and form a permanent coumbite that will gradually incorporate more peasants to take back political power.

Now, I enjoyed reading this novel, but the obvious Communist features limited the character development by reducing some to allegories, such as the rural policeman Hilarion. Hilarion, Florentine the storeowner, the police lieutenant, and the magistrate represent the predatory Haitian state that sells goods to Haitian peasants at high prices, loans money and supplies at usurious rates, and attempts to limit peasant political activity to ultimately expropriate their lands. This portrayal of the Haitian state is largely true, but Hilarion and the other ‘villains’ have very little characterization. I believe this is partly due to the tendency in Marxist literature to reduce human beings to allegories, thereby ignoring the real complexities one finds among all humans. Furthermore, Roumain’s portrayal of Catholicism and Haitian Vodou is problematic for many reasons. One must agree that, as Manuel tells the peasants of Fonds Rouge, the people cannot resign their fates and sacrifice animals to the loas or Christ and put their faith in prayer, but must work collectively in the material world to better their condition. Manuel, though still a believer in Vodou and its cultural and religious relevance to the peasant community, represents a thoroughly secular political movement among villagers, which is problematic for multiple reasons. First, it ignores the potential power of Vodou to actually improve lives, especially through medicine and its importance for building ties between families and villages across Haiti. Second, Roumain sees Vodou (and Catholicism for that matter) as distractions that, though relevant for cultural reasons, essentially divide people from focusing on the present world around them and leads to putting one’s faith in God(s) instead of taking agency. 

If one has a better understanding of Vodou, one would realize that the belief system is based on the present existence and lived history of the people, and fundamentally fosters communal relations by encouraging collective responses to the vicissitudes of modern life. Vodou, a religion of collective goodwill, is essential for building worker consciousness among peasants because it’s a hybrid fusion of various religious and cultural traditions that brings people together. In Roumain’s defense, however, his critique of religion is not as strong as I describe it, it merely subordinates Vodou to class and economics, instead of focusing on how all the aforementioned conditions are challenged by Vodou. Vodou, however, can and has been abused in Haiti, as the case of the houngan Dormeus who overcharges the peasants for his services. The ultimate strength of Vodou lies in its cultural hybridity, which avoids the hegemony of instrumental reason by emphasizing human collective goodwill rather than categorizing and ranking individuals that occurs consequentially in the super rationalist Western epistemological and Marxist traditions that perpetuate binary thinking. Any social theory that ignores the unique and organic conditions of resistance of the people is bound to fail, and only reproduces Western domination. In the novel, however, Manuel ultimately succeeds by not working against the local religious and cultural beliefs of his community. Though he brings in outside ideas, how the coumbite forms to irrigate the farmlands of the entire village is essentially Vodou, or even the best form of Christianity. Personal sacrifice, as the cost of human life, forces the village to recognize the futility of the feud, work together. Thus, religions play a vital role in the process of resisting the oppressive state by encouraging a compromise between personal avarice and the society’s well being. I must restate that Roumain does not overtly attempt to negate this point, but does tend to overlook it.

The novel interestingly follows the peasant novel tradition of Haitian literature, which is dominated by mulatto writers since most Haitian peasants were illiterate in the 1930s and 1940s. Due to the overwhelming numbers of non-peasant, non-black writers attempting to portray Haitian rural life, one must wonder how accurate or realistic these novels are. Roumain, an ethnologist, Communist, and nationalist influenced by Jean Price-Mars, provides an accurate depiction of peasant life because of the addition of Creole expressions and the communal practices of the people, such as the coumbite. Unfortunately, Roumain overemphasizes his Communist ideology as the tool for Haitian liberation and economic growth, and some of his characters lacked depth, such as the police officer Hilarion and the peasant resistant to Manuel’s plans of change, Gervilen. Moreover, I find aspects of the novel’s conclusion very clichéd and predictable, especially Manuel’s grieving lover being pregnant as the peasants succeeded in irrigating their fields. 

In spite of these previously mentioned flaws, Masters does provide a powerful counter to the status quo of Haitian society and espouses a different Marxism, focusing on agricultural labor rather than Marx’s industrial economy. Roumain, as part of the international black literary and political world, had contacts with important figures like Langston Hughes and others of African descent. Indeed, Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnes de la Terre derives its title from a work by Roumain, thereby illustrating his importance in Pan-Africanist, anti-colonial and socialist movements. Manuel also demonstrates the transnational radical consciousness of the Black Atlantic during this period, since his experiences in Cuba with Haitian braceros and other Caribbean laborers including forming multi-ethnic and multi-national collectives to battle white capitalist control of the sugar plantation industry for higher wages. Historically, the fall of the sugar industry led to massive deportations of Caribbean laborers, and racialized notions of civilization led to many Cubans demanding the deportation in order to save jobs for Cubans, even though few Cubans, white or black, desired to work on exploitative plantations. Regardless, nationalities of the Black Atlantic are always crossing porous borders and forming a counterculture of modernity, to use Paul Gilroy’s terminology. This novel provides additional evidence of that, and transcends its literary limits as a Marxist novel.