Jacques Roumain and Gouverneurs de la rosée

The year 2007 was the centennial of the birth of Jacques Roumain, the greatest Haitian author of all times. During his short life (he died in 1944) he cultivated a number of literary genres, publishing poems, novels and essays. All these have been collected for the first time in an impressive volume edited by Léon-François Hoffman: Jacques Roumain, OEuvres completes, (Roumain, 2003). Here we find Bois-d’ébène (1945), as well as other poetry, the two volumes of short stories, La proie et l’ombre (1931) and Les fantoches (1931), both dealing with the Haitian upper class, and his two great peasant novels, La montagne ensorcelée (1931) and Gouverneurs de la rosée (1944), his absolute masterpiece, published only after his untimely death at the age of 37, as well as his essay on the sacrifice of a voodoo drum, Le sacrifice du tambour-assôtô(r) (1943).