The Nonmagical Realism Of Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs De La Rosée

Et, quand nous disons que l'homme est responsable de lui-même, nous ne voulons pas dire de sa stricte individualité, mais qu'il est responsable de tous les hommes.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Existentialisme est un humanisme

Gouverneurs de la rosée has received more critical attention than any other Haitian novel, and much of that attention has been focused on the "realist" credentials of that novel. That realism has been variously defined—from those who have read the novel as a thinly disguised Marxist treatise to those who see in it a kind of fictionalized ethnography, allowing the reader a glimpse of the "real" daily life of the peasants of the mornes.¹ Not all such judgements have been favorable, and it is remarkable how many readings of the novel excoriate it for its failure to live up to the aims that they, in fact, ascribe to it. Thus, the novel has been criticized for purporting to address the real problems of the peasants while ignoring the documented historical travails of analogous peasant communities in the Plaine du Cul-de-Sac in the 1930s; Roumain has been accused of eluding the contradictions inherent in applying a Marxist revolutionary theory to an undeveloped agrarian society by transforming his hero, Manuel, from militant into messiah; ethnologists have drawn attention to Roumain's supposed ignorance of the informal laws of land tenure and succession observed in Haitian rural communities and of the way that Vodou was actually practiced by the peasants.²

The common thread running through such readings is that, whether through ignorance, revolutionary zeal or, conversely, bourgeois conditioning, Roumain somehow wrote the "wrong novel." I believe that he wrote precisely the novel he intended to write—the problem lies in determining just what that novel is.

I start from an observation: not of something that is present in Jacques Roumain's masterpiece, but of something that is missing. He wrote to a comrade in 1933: "J'ai beaucoup vécu avec les paysans. Je connais leur vie, leur mentalité, leur religion."³ If he knew the peasants' "mentality" as well as he claimed, he would surely have been aware that fundamental to that mentality is a belief in magic—specifically, a belief in magical causation. Gouverneurs de la rosée is replete with references to Vodou—especially insofar as that religion is seen to breed resignation—but magic is notably absent. My contention in this article is that the absence of magic in the novel is connected to the other absences detailed by earlier critics. As I show, Roumain was well aware of the very real socioeconomic pressures felt by communities such as Fonds-Rouge; he also knew that the peasant "mentality" was steeped in magical belief, that the peasant worldview was conditioned by a belief in magical causation. If both of these factors are excluded from the novel, it is, I argue, because Roumain regarded both economic causation and magical causation as pretexts. In this, he had much in common with his contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre: when human beings convince themselves that their actions are caused (as opposed to conditioned) by factors beyond their control—be they imperialist capitalist expansion, the whims of the lwa, or the enchantments of sorcery—they cease in one important respect to be human. It is my contention that Roumain wished to place individual responsibility at the heart of his novel: the responsibility that is the correlate of the realization that humans are autonomous human agents.

Between Socialist Realism and Fictionalized Ethnography

Over seventy years after its publication in 1944, Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosée is now established as perhaps the one undisputed world classic of Haitian literature, but the novel's status as classic does not imply that its meaning has stabilized over time. Critics have, for example, expressed widely diverging views on the novel's "realism," and this article is, in part, a further contribution to that debate. If Roumain's earlier novel La Montagne ensorcelée is held to mark the invention of the...