Jacques Roumain

Jacques Roumain

Jacques Roumain (born June 4, 1907 in Port-au-Prince , † August 18, 1944 ibid) was a Haitian writer, politician and ethnologist. His main work is the novel Gouverneurs de la rosée (Lord of the Dew) , published posthumously in 1944 . Roumain was "one of the major authors of the Négritude ".

Life

The son of a wealthy landlord continues his schooling ( Saint Louis de Gonzague ) at his father's request in Bern and Zurich , where he learns not only German but also Swiss German . Stays in Germany, France, Great Britain and Spain follow. Here he studies less agronomy , more bullfighting, which fascinates him. The sporty boy also likes to box and runs the 100 meters in 11 seconds. But Darwin , Schopenhauer and Heinrich Heine also impress him. He himself begins with lyrical attempts.

Returned to his native Port-au-Prince in 1927 (at the age of 20), he co-founded the magazine La Revue Indigène , in which he published a lot, and Le Trouée , later also editor-in-chief of Le Petit Impartial. Journal de la Masse . He also translates from Spanish and German. He is also politically active, since Haiti has been occupied by the USA since 1915. This lasted until 1934, with regimes by US grace followed. In 1928, for alleged violations of the press laws, Roumain was imprisoned for the first time. He is friends with the authors Nicolás Guillén and Jacques Stephen Alexis and continues to publish. 1929 Marries Nicole Hibbert, who gives birth to son Daniel in 1930.

"Treason"

From 1930, after the overthrow of President Louis Borno , Roumain took over various government offices. In 1931 he made his debut novel. He meets the colored US writer and supporter of socialism Langston Hughes . In 1934 Roumain initiated the founding of the Communist Party and served as its general secretary. It will soon be banned. Roumain is sent to prison again (for three years) for "treason". One of the incriminating evidence is Romain's political essay Analyze schématique 32-34 . In this detention, Roumain very likely contracted the diseases that would kill him a few years later.

Released early in 1936, Roumain went into exile with his wife and children in Brussels and Paris , where he studied ethnology and paleontology and continued to write. He works at the Musée de l'Homme as Paul Rivet's assistant . In 1937 daughter Carine is born. This year Roumain takes part in the communist Paris peace congress. Since the Second World War could not be stopped, Roumain went into exile in the USA from 1939, interrupted by visits to Cuba and Martinique . He is often in need of money; his wife Nicole runs a boutique in New York City . The election of Élie Lescot as president in 1941 enabled the family to return to Haiti. Roumain founds the Institut d'Ethnologie with Jean Price-Mars . He also met the anthropologist Alfred Métraux . A year later, the government sent him to Mexico as consul - as some believe: on the sidelines. However, due to his poor health, he returned to Haiti in 1943. While working on his main work, the novel Gouverneurs de la rosée , he was already severely ill. He dies in the summer of 1944 - the cause of death remains unclear; various sources offer malaria , anemia , intestinal ulcer, and liver cirrhosis .

Lord of the dew

Roumain's best-known book Gouverneurs de la rosée , published posthumously in 1944, had a profound influence on the debates of the intellectual circles in Port-au-Prince, as well as on contemporary and later Haitian literature. It saw numerous translations. The first German edition was published by Volk und Welt in East Berlin in 1947 . The translation was by Eva Klemperer . Further editions followed, including a rororo paperback in 1950 with an initial print run of 50,000 and an edition by Suhrkamp in 1982. A film adaptation by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea was released in 1964 under the title Cumbite (Conjuring).

In her article Amerika, Karibik for Munzinger Online , Frauke Gewecke states that Roumain has overcome “primarily folkloric indigenism ” with Herr über das Tau . “In it he combined the concerns of the indigenists with a clear political-ideological statement that reconciled tradition and modernity. For him, too, the place of the central conflicts of action is a village in which the people, bound to the traditional way of life, live in extreme poverty due to a period of drought (which is also self-inflicted through permanent deforestation); Even with him, the aspects of village life that are so important to the indigenists, including vodou, are by no means left out. But since the hero of the novel, who lived for a long time as a sugar cane cutter in Cuba , combines the experience of trade union organization made there with the traditional Haitian koumbit , a form of collective neighborhood help , he manages to manage the village through collective action - specifically the construction of one Irrigation system - to get out of this misery. And by the protagonist well recognize the village lifestyle for themselves as identity, but the efficiency of Vodou as a means of Reality coping calls into question finally the the Vodou inherent regressive - concretely here: passivity promoting - unmasked moments as an obstacle to development and destructive. "

For Kindler's Neues Literaturlexikon , Roumain's novel has "become one of the great works of world literature" due to an "artful combination of plot and symbolism, which are arranged in such a way that there are diverse meanings and reading methods in different contexts."

Works (selection)

• Les Fantoches , Roman, Port-au-Prince 1931
• La Montagne ensorcelée , novel, Port-au-Prince 1931
• A propos de la campagne antisuperstitieuse , Essays, Port-au-Prince 1942
• Gouverneurs de la rosée , Roman, Port-au-Prince 1944

Roumain also published, among other things, numerous poems. Detailed lists of works can be found at Lehman.

literature

• Roger Gaillard: L'universe romanesque de Jacques Romain , Pourt-au-Prince 1965
• Ulrich Fleischmann : Ideology and Reality in Haiti's Literature , Berlin 1969
• Hénock Trouillot: Dimension et limites de Roumain , Port-au-Prince 1975
• JP Makouta-Mbouko: Romain. Essais sur la signification spirituelle et religieuse de son ouvre , Lille / Paris 1978
• Claude Souffrant: Une négritude socialiste. Religion et développement chez Jacques Roumain, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Langston Hughes , Paris 1978
• Martha Cobb: Harlem, Haiti, and Havana. A Comparative Critical Study of Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain, and Nicolas Guillén , Washington DC 1979
• Carolyn Fowler: A knot in the thread, the life and the work of Roumain , Washington DC 1980
• Jacques André: Caraibales. Études sur la littérature antillaise , Paris 1981
• Roger Dorsinville: Roumain , Paris 1981
• J. Michael Dash: Literature and ideology in Haiti 1915-61 , London 1981
• Léon-Francois Hoffmann: Le roman haitien. Idéologie et structure , Sherbrooke 1982
• Léon-Francois Hoffmann: Essays in Haitian Literature , Washington DC 1984
• Léon-Francois Hoffmann: Littérature d'Haiti , Vanves (France) 1995
• MA Pean: The Peasant in the Haitian Novels 1923-1982 , Diss. Boston College, 1985
• Christiane Chaulet-Achour: Gouverneurs de la rosée de Jacques Roumain: la pérennité d'un chef d'œuvre , Paris 2010

documentary

• Arnold Antonin : Jacques Roumain, la passion d'un pays , 2008, 118 minutes

Web links

• Literature by and about Jacques Roumain in the catalog of the German National Library
• Colloquium 2007
• College in Martinique

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Winfried Engler : Lexicon of French Literature (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 388). 3rd, improved and enlarged edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-520-38803-0 .
2. ↑ Yves Dorestal, 2010 , accessed 11 May 2012
3. ↑ Léon-François Hoffmann ( Memento of the original of March 4, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed on May 11, 2012 
4. ↑ Yanick Lahens : Dance of the Ancestors . Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 2004. ISBN 3-85869-271-9 . P. 111.
5. ↑ America, Caribbean , Critical Lexicon for Contemporary Foreign Language Literature (KLfG), in the Munzinger Archive , accessed on May 9, 2012 ( beginning of the article freely accessible)
6. ^ Edition Munich 1988
7. ^ Lehman , accessed May 11, 2012