Jacques Roumain

Jacques Roumain was born on the fourth of June 1907 at Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the eldest of eleven children of Auguste Roumain — a coffee-planter and engineer of the elite mulatto landholding class — and Émilie Auguste Roumain. His paternal grandfather Tancrède Auguste had served as President of Haiti from 1912 to 1913. The Roumain household was the most established mulatto family of early-twentieth-century Port-au-Prince. He was educated at the Institution Saint-Louis de Gonzague at Port-au-Prince through his fifteenth year and at the Institut Grünau at Bellevue, Switzerland, from 1922 to 1925, the Gymnasium of Zurich from 1925 to 1926, and the Institut des Sciences Politiques at Paris from 1926 to 1927.

He returned to Haiti at twenty in 1927 during the United States Marine Corps occupation that had been in place since 1915. The occupation produced the conditions of his political activation. He co-founded the literary review La Trouée in 1927 and the Indigenist review La Revue Indigène in 1928 — the founding journal of the Haitian indigenist movement that sought to recover the African and Vodou inheritance of Haitian culture against the Francophile orientation of the mulatto elite.

He was imprisoned three times by the Haitian colonial-collaboration administration between 1928 and 1934 for political organising. He founded on the eighteenth of June 1934 the Parti Communiste Haïtien — the first communist party of the Caribbean — and was sentenced two months later to three years at the National Penitentiary of Port-au-Prince. He spent the years 1934 to 1937 in confinement.

He lived in exile in Belgium, France, the Soviet Union and the United States from 1936 to 1941. He completed during the exile years his foundational ethnographic studies of Haitian Vodou — Le sacrifice du tambour-assoto of 1943 — and his decisive novel Gouverneurs de la rosée. The novel — describing the return of a Haitian peasant from Cuban sugar-cane labour to his drought-stricken native village — was completed in late 1944 but published posthumously in 1944 in Port-au-Prince and in 1947 in French translation. It is now widely considered one of the founding novels of twentieth-century Latin American literature.

He died of complications of an unspecified illness at Port-au-Prince on the eighteenth of August 1944, at thirty-seven.

He is honored here as the founder of Haitian Communism and the author of Gouverneurs de la rosée.