Thinking in Public: Faith, Secular Humanism, and Development in Jacques Roumain

By Celucien L. Joseph and Schallum Pierre

Thinking in Public provides a probing and provocative meditation on the intellectual life and legacy of Jacques Roumain. As a work of intellectual history, the book investigates the intersections of religious ideas, secular humanism, and development within the framework of Roumain's public intellectualism and cultural criticism embodied in his prolific writings.

The book provides a reconceptualization of Roumain's intellectual itineraries against the backdrop of two public spheres: a national public sphere (Haiti) and a transnational public sphere (the global world). Second, it remaps and reframes Roumain's intellectual circuits and his critical engagements within a wide range of intellectual traditions, cultural and political movements, and philosophical and religious systems. Third, the book argues that Roumain's perspective on religion, social development, and his critiques of religion in general and of institutionalized Christianity in particular were substantially influenced by a Marxist philosophy of history and secular humanist approach to faith and human progress.

Finally, the book advances the idea that Roumain's concept of development is linked to the theories of democratic socialism, relational anthropology, distributive justice, and communitarianism. Ultimately, this work demonstrates that Roumain believed that only through effective human solidarity and collaboration can serious social transformation and real human emancipation take place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Apr 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781498203821

Celucien L. Joseph

Celucien L. Joseph is a Haitian-American theologian and literary scholar. He holds degrees both in theology and literature. He received his first PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas, where he studied Literary Studies with an emphasis in African American Intellectual History, Caribbean Culture and Literature, and African American Literature. His second PhD in Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics is from the University of Pretoria (Pretoria, South Africa). He has done additional studies in Religious Studies and Humanities at the University of Louisville. He has authored and co-authored many books, including Vodou and Christianity in Interreligious Dialogue (2023), Aristide: A Theological and Political Introduction (2023), Theological Education and Christian Scholarship for Human Flourishing Hermeneutics, Knowledge, and Multiculturalism (2022), Theologizing in Black: On Africana Theological Ethics and Anthropology (2020), Revolutionary Change and Democratic Religion Christianity, Vodou, and Secularism (2020), and Thinking in Public Faith, Secular Humanism, and Development in Jacques Roumain (2017).

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Introduction: Between Two Worlds

Rethinking Roumain, Rethinking Haiti and the Western World

Jacques Roumain was the reigning public intellectual and social critic of the generation of the American occupation in Haiti. His public intellectualism and cultural criticism are framed within the universal values of secular humanism, the doctrines of liberal communitarianism, and the trajectories of a postmodernist religious metissage and relativism worldview. Roumain championed the progressive aspect of faith that put greater emphasis on social salvation, civic engagement, and community building. For him, true religion is that which defends the cause of the oppressed, the poor, and the underclass in society. From a humanist perspective, Roumain’s concept of saving faith is the driving force that obliges us to be in solidarity with the wretched of the earth and to pursue the justice and emancipation of the economically disadvantaged and the most vulnerable from their oppressors and exploiters. He was not interested in the spiritual dimension of religion but in the scientific study of religious phenomena—in particular, the sociological and anthropological approaches to religion—to help us better understand the human condition and enhance human relations in the modern world.

Roumain challenged the popular consensus in Western societies that individual rights, freedom of choice, and free market capitalism provided a solid foundation for an effective democratic order. As an alternative to this worldview, Roumain put greater emphasis on the value of democratic socialism, distributive justice, civic responsibility, and the importance of cultivating civic virtue, tolerance, and self-sacrifice toward the common good. Roumain coined the phrase living together in this world to accentuate the ethics of interdependence and relational anthropology, and the imperative of community engagement, public service, and reciprocal mutuality. Once we materialize these ideas into practical life, they may contribute to a life of human and social flourishing, potential future possibilities, and may provide an adequate ethic that lead to the good life. We should not quickly label him a utopian thinker; Roumain’s public engagement and grassroots political activism will lead us to a different conclusion.

Roumain is classed as one of the most influential Marxist thinkers in Haitian history of the twentieth century. He was a founding member of the literary and cultural movement known as L’école indigène (Haitian indigenism) and its literary engine La Revue Indigène, which rejected the hegemony of French-Western values and culture in Haiti and reacted against the cultural and economic imperialism of the American military occupation (1915–34) in Haiti. As an anti-imperialist and anti-war writer, and a critic of Western colonialism and hegemonic domination in the world, Roumain questioned the logic and legacy of Western imperialism and its ensuing Third World oppression and suffering. In public speeches and criticisms, he also interrogated the rationality of World War II, European fascism and racism, and condemned Hitlerism, anti-Semitism, and American anti-black racism.

He advocated strongly for the decolonization of the colonized world and championed the liberation and human rights of those living in the margins of modernity. In 1934, the final year of the American Occupation, Roumain founded the Parti Communiste Haitien (PCH) (the Haitian Communist Party) and spread the gospel of Marxism and socialist communism. Through his grassroots activism and liberative rhetoric in the Haitian public sphere, he was able to mobilize Haitians of all social classes and economic and educational background, and articulate strategies for social development and political change in the country.

In his various publications, he analyzed issues pertaining to the relationship between Haiti’s oppressed underclass peasants, the working class, and the ruling Elite minority. From a critical Marxist social theory and secular humanism, Roumain wrote about religion, social development, and the role of the oppressed people in history as agents of their own liberation. He relentlessly addressed the global problem of economic inequality in the world and the manipulation of those living in the darker side of modernity.

As a public intellectual and cosmopolitan thinker, Jacques Roumain was particularly committed to the welfare of Haitian peasantariat and the universal proletariat, and the betterment of humanity. He was not only deeply concerned about the everyday experience of the black-brown masses and the economically-disadvantaged classes in Haiti, and the world’s poor, but how these groups of individuals repeatedly confronted some of the most egregious evils of modern times and the man-made social oppressions, abuses and exploitations. Seeking to educate the Haitian people about both moral and shared human concerns in life, Roumain wrote interdisciplinarily and covered in his regular columns, in various popular newspapers and journals in the country, a wide range of issues of universal value including the married life,¹ marriage,² homosexuality,³ friendship,⁴ conformism,⁵ conversion,⁶ medicine,⁷ reputation/fame,⁸ race,⁹ nationality,¹⁰ colonialism,¹¹ boredom,¹² intolerance,¹³ despair,¹⁴ gossip,¹⁵ discouragement,¹⁶ literature,¹⁷ painting and literature,¹⁸ poetic art,¹⁹ beauty,²⁰ music,²¹ dancing,²²meaning of life,²³ progress,²⁴ death,²⁵ suffering,²⁶ happiness.²⁷

Thinking in Public: Faith, Secular Humanism, and Development in Jacques Roumain provides a probing and provocative meditation on the intellectual life, ideas, and legacy of Jacques Roumain. As a work of intellectual history of ideas, Thinking in Public is an investigation of the intersections of Roumain’s religious thought, secular humanism (or secular intellectualism), and the concept of development within the framework of his public intellectualism and cultural criticism embodied in his prolific writings. The work of Jacques Roumain constitutes three main aspects: a politico-literary aspect, religious aspect, and scientific aspect, with a liberative intent; all of which frame the content and message of this book.

The book articulates a fivefold objective and argumentation about Roumain’s public intellectualism and his overall legacy. First of all, it provides a reconceptualization of Roumain’s intellectual itineraries and visibility against the backdrop of two respective public spheres: a national public sphere (Haiti), and a transnational public sphere (the global world). Secondly, it remaps and reframes Roumain’s intellectual circuits and his critical engagements within a wide range of intellectual traditions, cultural and political movements, and philosophical and religious systems—both Western and non-Western, theistic and non-theistic—including Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, Surrealism, Communitarianism, Democratic socialism, Historical Materialism, Hegelian dialectics, the Humanist Tradition, American Pragmatism, American Jeremiad Tradition, Black Political Tradition, Black Radical Tradition, Black Communism and Socialism, Black Internationalism, the Harlem Renaissance, Negritude, Creolite, Haitianism (or Haitian idigenism), Religious Liberalism and Progressivism, etc. Thirdly, the book argues that Roumain’s radical perspective on religion, social development, and his critiques of religion in general and of institutionalized Christianity in particular—for its ineffective role in society in fostering social change and contributing to human emancipation—was substantially influenced by a Marxist philosophy of history and secular humanist approach to faith and human progress.

Fourthly, Thinking in Public also contends that Roumain’s rejection of religious supernaturalism and divine intervention in human affairs and history was shaped by his non-theistic humanism, critical theory, and secular worldview on faith. Ultimately, this work demonstrates that Roumain believed that only through effective human solidarity and collaboration can serious social transformation and real human emancipation take place. Fifthly, the book advances the idea that Roumain’s concept of development is linked to the theories of democratic socialism, relational anthropology, distributive justice, and communitarianism.

Although, the writings of Jacques Roumain are full of biblical allusions, echoes, and somewhat downplay the potential role of religion to deal adequately with the ambiguities of life in this world; for he held that man not the divine was the measure of all things, and therefore, is his own agent of liberation. Consequently, he believed that individuals themselves must cooperate and unite in order to alter the social order toward a fruitful life of peace, harmony, and freedom. Finally, Thinking in Public not only underscores the rhetorical force of Roumain’s writings and ideas, it underlines Roumain’s substantial cross-disciplinary contributions to the humanities, social sciences, and critical theory.

Public Intellectualism as Engaged Thinking and Public Thinking

In The life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt reflects on the social, moral, and political value of thinking. She suggests that thinking prepares us to make judgments about the world, even the most horrible things that happened in the world.²⁸ She also points out that thinking prepares us ever anew to meet whatever we must meet in our daily lives.²⁹ Thinking preconditions us to make critical judgement, that is, according to her you have got to say ‘this is good, ‘this is bad,’ ‘this is right,’ ‘this is wrong,’ ‘this is beautiful,’ and ‘this is ugly.’³⁰

Nonetheless, her biographer Elizabeth Young-Bruefhl infers that for Arendt thinking involves a purposeless withdrawal from the world, with ‘pure motives,’ with love. Arendt felt that thinking was a very different matter than knowing. Knowing—scientific cognition—has an object and a purpose, while thinking is objectless and self-referential. Similarly, she thought that knowing’s result, truth, is a very different thing than thinking’s ‘result,’ meaning, or a meaningful story.³¹ There is a way, however, to construe thinking itself as a kind of acting³² or being in the world. Roumain’s literary corpus accentuates a life of thought and action. Roumain’s life of action was laborious and restless; he modelled an unselfish life that was devoted to the necessity of his neighbor, his country, and the oppressed and the poor.³³ To characterize Roumain’s public life as a journey of critical thinking also means that he was continuously engaged in critical contemplation:

Contemplation is the highest state of the mind is as old as Western philosophy. The thinking activity—according to Plato, the soundless dialogue we carry on with ourselves—serves only to open the eyes of the mind, and even the Aristotelian nous is an organ for seeing and beholding the truth. In other words, thinking aims at an ends in contemplation, and contemplation is not an activity but passivity; it is the point where mental activity comes to rest.³⁴

Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that there is an intrinsic connection between forms of life and forms of thought but does not then inquire directly into the scales of lifeworlds in relation to which thinking is forged.³⁵ What does it mean to think with Jacques Roumain in matters of faith, secular humanism, and development? To provide an adequate rejoinder to this query, we would like to borrow a thought from Gary Wilder’s recent work, Freedom Time; this excellent text explores the intellectual and political activities of Aimeé Césaire and Leéopold Senghor and their efforts to create another world that was both postcolonial and post-imperial. My judgment to bring Roumain in conversation with Senghor and Cesaire here is because of their endeavor to decolonize Western intellectual history and radically humanize colonial and imperial humanism toward a post-western and postcolonial future world.

Consequently, this present work endeavors to think critically and responsibly with Jacques Roumain by regarding his world and moment from his perspective, to appreciate his constraints and the possibilities he discerns, in order to understand his political and intellectual goals.³⁶ But thinking critically with Roumain is not an exercise in contextualization; it also means listening carefully and responsibly to what his analysis of his milieu and his life between two worlds—Haiti and the global world—might teach us about ours, treating him not only as a native informant symptomatic of his era but as a cosmopolitan thinker, and activist-intellectual whose formulations about Haitian and world politics, aesthetics, and epistemology might help us fashion frameworks with which to reflect upon phenomena.³⁷

As a work of intellectual history and public intellectualism, Thinking in Public seeks

to practice what Dominick LaCapra has referred as ‘dialogical history’—whereby the historian enters a critical dialogue with texts that are allowed, in some sense, to speak back. Such histories stage a dialogue between past and present in which historians are compelled to attend to how they too are implicated in their objects of study . . . Insofar as political imagination pivots around historical reflection, it requires us not only to examine the paths that led to our present but to remember that might have been.³⁸

Charles Pete Banner-Haley reminds us however that an intellectual is more than someone who loves ‘the life of the mind’ and is ensconced at far remove from the public.³⁹ Richard Hofstadter in his dazzling study, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, published in 1962, reckons that

Intellectuals affect the public mind when they act in one of two capacities: as experts or as ideologues. In both capacities they evoke profound, and, in a measure, legitimate, fears, and resentments. Both intensify the prevalent sense of helplessness in our society, the expert by quickening the public’s resentment of being the object of constant manipulation, the ideologue by arousing the fear of subversion and by heightening all the other grave psychic stresses that have come with modernity.⁴⁰

Reading Roumain critically and responsibly in the Surrealist tradition and Black radical tradition’s conceptions of emancipation involves the revolution of the mind. The idea of a revolution of the mind should not be construed merely a refusal of victim status, [it is also] about an unleashing of the mind’s most creative capacities, catalyzed by participation in struggles for change.⁴¹ As the surrealist writer Paul Garon has remarked:

Human freedom depends not only on the destruction and restricting of the economic system, but on the restructuring of the mind. New modes of poetic action, new networks of analogy, new possibilities of expression all help formulate the nature of the supersession of reality, the transformation of everyday life as it encumbers us today, the unfolding and eventual triumph of the marvelous.⁴²

Robin D. G. Kelley speaks about the potential emancipative power of Surrealism as a way of formulating new thought of liberation and reconceptualizing the structure of the mind toward the total emancipation of Black people and the common good of the oppressed of the world:

Surrealism can help us break the constraints of social realism and take us to places where Marxism, anarchism, and other isms in the name of revolution have rarely dared to venture . . . It breaks the chain of social realism and rationality, turning to poetry as a revolutionary mode of thought and practice . . . Surrealism recognizes that any revolution must begin with thought, and how we imagine a New World, with how we reconstruct our social and individual relationships, with unleashing our desire and building a new future on the basis of love and creativity rather than rationality.⁴³

Reading Roumain critically and responsibly also entails knowing the cultural, socio-economic, religious, and political issues—both national and international—which shaped his intellectual development, ideas, writings, and moral convictions. In particular, it is of paramount importance to grasp the historical concerns of Roumain’s native country in his own time, which had a momentous toll on his thought-process, public thinking, and political activism. Thinking with Roumain also involves understanding Haitian cultural nationalism, and Haiti’s relations with the global world—particularly, Haiti’s interplays with the United States during the period of the American occupation in Haiti. Critical thinking within this historical trajectory compels us to keep in perspective the wounds of the Haitian people and the indelible scars (of slavery, colonization, and imperialism) the Caribbean nation still bear to this day. As Richard Wright urges Black writers and intellectuals in his seminal essay, Blueprint for Negro Writing (1937):

Negro writers must accept the nationalist implications of their lives, not in order to encourage them, but in order to change and transcend them. They must accept the concept of nationalism because, in order to transcend it, they must possess and understand it. And a nationalist spirit in Negro writing means a nationalism carrying the highest possible pitch of social consciousness. It means a nationalism that knows its origins, its limitations; that is aware of the dangers of its positions; . . . a nationalism whose reason for being lies in the simple fact of self-possession and in the consciousness of the interdependence of people in modern society . . . The Negro writer who seeks to function within his race as a purposeful agent has a serious responsibility. In order to do justice to his subject matter, in order to depict Negro life in all of its manifold and intricate relationships, a deep, informed, and complex consciousness is necessary; a consciousness which draws for its strength upon the fluid lore of a great people, and moulds this lore with the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today.⁴⁴

In the words of Frantz Fanon, we should construe Jacques Roumain as a native intellectual, a revolutionary thinker committed to justice, to serve as a mirror for our reflections. In placing the mirror squarely before us, he warns not only of intellectual concealment; he also advises against an intellectualism that distances from justice struggles in order to offer truncated concepts of repression and liberation.⁴⁵ The attempt in this project is the presentation of Jacques Roumain as a native intellectual working in the complexity of Haitian political and civil society, as well as engaging in the transcultural and transnational public sphere. Joy James has commented on the responsibility and function of the native intellectual:

Fanon’s native intellectual is disciplined by the daily revolutionary struggle for independence, freedom, bread and land . . . Fanon’s native intellectual strategically responds to human oppression as if the life of the mind experienced political ethics and revolutionary politics as more than tropes. Viewing the political agency of intellectuals through the framework of Fanon’s revolutionary intent, we invariably find ourselves connected to those most vulnerable to exploitation and oppression. Since the prey of police, military, prisons, state executions, and wars are foremost in Fanon’s reflections, he sees the relevancy of engaged intellectuals as being tied to their proximity to political struggle.⁴⁶

Roumain’s intellectual visibility and activity encompassed both national and transnational public sphere. In addition to his works of fiction, we inventoried twenty-three major historical interventions, expressed through his writings (social and political essays), intellectual debates, and speeches. With a few exceptions, we will examine the message of each individual text in this book. We document some of these historical documents in the appendix section. Overall, Roumain wrote these texts in response to very specific historical moments and political issues of his era in the first half of the twentieth century—including the American occupation and cultural imperialism in Haiti, American anti-black racism and the lynching of black citizens, British colonization in India, the Spanish-Italian war, the genocide of Haitian peasant-farmers in the Dominican Republic, World War II, Hitlerism and anti-Semitism in Germany, the anti-superstition (Vodou) campaign in Haiti, social and political issues in Haiti, etc. In other words, these interventions reflect the internationalism and cosmopolitan outlook of Roumain’s writings and thought, and are indicative of his self-conscious role as a global thinker whose intellectual itineraries cover about ten countries—Haiti, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Germany, Spain, Cuba, Mexico, the United States, Martinique, etc.—and all the continents of the world. They are as follows:

1. Entre nous: Jacques Roumain (Haiti: 1927)

2. Le peuple et l’Elite (Haiti: 1928)

3. Un Homme Contre un Empire: Mahatma Gandhi (Haiti: 1928)

4. Manifeste à la Jeunesse (Haiti: 1928)

5. Manifeste àla Jeunesse des Ecoles (Haiti: 1928)

6. Un Prêtre à le droit d’être un soldat quand sa patrie est en danger (Haiti: 1928)

7. Autour de la taxe sur l’Alcool et le Tabac (Haiti: 1928)

8. American Promise Fallacious, Head of Student Body Charges (Haiti: 1930)

9. MaHatma Gandhi (Haiti: 1930)

10. Lettre à Tristan Remy (Haiti: 1933)

11. Analyse schématique: 32–34 (Haiti: 1934)

12. Introduction: Néessite de la Théorie (Haiti: 1934)

13. Intervention au Congrès des Ecrivains (Madrid: 1937)

14. La Tragédie Haitienne (Paris: 1937)

15. Sur la Liberte de l’ecrivain (Paris: 1939)

16. Discours de Jacques Roumain (Harlem: 1939)

17. Griefs de l’homme noir⁴⁷ (Paris: 1939)

18. Is Poetry Dead? (New York: 1941)

19. Le Medecin Rural, ou la science au service du peuple (Haiti: 1942)

20. Sur les Supertisions (Haiti: 1942)

21. Replique au Réverend Pêre Foisset (Haiti: 1942)

22. Réplique Finale au Révérend Pere Foisset (Haiti: 1942)

23. Le Sacrifice du Tambour-Assoto (r)⁴⁸ (Haiti: 1943)

Roumain’s Religious Ideal: The Interplay of Faith and Secular Humanism

Generally, contemporary scholarship on Roumain’s religious imagination and ideas seem to vacillate, even speculative, and suggest conflict of interpretations. In an important article entitled "Jacques Roumain et la Théologie de la Libération, Herold Toussaint ascribes atheism to Roumain’s religious feeling. He writes, Certainly, Roumain confesses his atheism (Roumain Confesse, certes, son atheisme"⁴⁹). Then, he qualifies his claim that Roumain’s atheism was an atheism of circumstance ("C’est un athéisme de conséquence⁵⁰). What seems confusing in Toussaint’s analysis, after professing Roumain’s atheism, is his additional comment that Roumain refuses to display his atheism in absolute (Roumain réfuse d’ériger son athéisme en absolut"⁵¹). This particular viewpoint is based partly on Roumain’s commitment to orthodox Marxism, and the Marxist traditional view on religion.

Toussaint, however, articulates an alternative view to what he has previously expressed; that Roumain’s critique about religion is categorically anti-fetishist and anti-idolatry. On the other hand, Toussaint is accurate to infer that, in the context of religious violence in Haiti, Roumain was prone toward religious pluralism because religious fanaticism, in his perspective, was a deadly poison.⁵² The difficulty with Toussaint’s multiple propositions about Roumain’s religious ideas pertain to his hermeneutical limitations to provide sound exegesis and interpretation of Roumain’s religious writings.

Moreover, in Jacques Roumain et le Vodou, Guy Maximilien, in his effort to study with rigor Roumain’s outlook on the Vodou religion, offers some valuable remarks that are relevant to our study here. First, he posits that Roumain addresses the Vodou religion in three categories of text including (1) his novels: La montagne ensorcellee et Gouverneurs de la rosée, (2) three articles about the antisuperstition campaign, and two of which are polemics with Father Foisset, and (3) his monograph Le Sacrifice du tambour-assotor, an ethnographic study on Vodou.⁵³ In his article, Maximilien is concerned primarily with two elements in Roumain’s engagement with the Afro-Haitian religion: what Roumain thinks about Vodou and what he knows about Vodou. Maximilien suggests that Roumain maintains an ambivalent position about Vodou and projects two antagonistic perspectives. On one hand, Roumain rejects Vodou, which is normal for a Marxist in regard to any form of religion; on the other hand, in his ethnographic studies, he valorizes Vodou. Further, he makes some important observations about Roumain’s religious writings:

D’une part, certains écrits presentment le vodou comme l’un des facteurs d’alienation du peuple haitien, un espace d’obscurantisme et de superstitions, un obstacle au progres social; d’autre part, d’autres écrits prennent la défense du vodou comme l’expression du sacre du peuple haitien, le véhicule d’une sagesse ancestrale, l’expression d’une vision du monde et de la place de l’homme dans le monde.⁵⁴

On one hand, some [of Roumain’s] writings present the Vodou religion as one of the factors alienating the Haitian people, a place of obscurantism and superstition, an obstacle to social progress; on the other hand, other writings defend the Vodou religion as a sacred expression of the Haitian people, the vehicle of an ancestral wisdom, the expression of a vision of the world and the place of man in the world.

Maximilien’s careful reading of Roumain’s engagement with Vodou contradicts the position of Ulrich Fleischmann on the subject, as expressed in this questioning statement: (Jacques Roumain has always kept his distance from Vodou in his works of fiction. First, there are those primarily of an enlightened bourgeois, then that of an ethnologist-observer and ultimately, that of a Marxist who is susceptible to dialectical materialism) ("Jacques Roumain a toujours gardé ses distances envers le vaudou dans ses oeuvres de fiction. Ce sont d’abord celles d’un bourgeois éclaire, ensuite celles d’une ethnologue observateur et, finalement, celle d’un marxiste qui se reclame du materialism dialectique").⁵⁵ To a certain degree, Fleischmann’s statement reflects the common attitude of Haitian intellectuals towards the Haitian Vodou in the first half of the twentieth century. We should not be too quick to characterize Roumain’s attitude toward the Vodou faith as ambivalent or unsettled; rather, we should look intently and responsibly at every particular historical circumstance or moment in which he engaged the popular religion of Haiti and hence interpret his reaction accordingly.

In the introduction to his own novel, The Beast of the Haitian Hills, the Haitian novelist and intellectual Philippe Thoby-Marcelin confesses that like all the people of the bourgeois milieu to which I belonged, I considered the Vodoun cult a body of superstitious practices, grotesque as well as dangerous, probably including human sacrifices and even ritual cannibalism.⁵⁶ Marcelin goes on to appraise the contemporary attitude toward the Afro-Haitian religion including his eventual change of mind: To be sure, contemporary Haitian authors had written about the popular religion of the country from a sociological and even a medical point of view, and had denied all the legends which linked it with witchcraft. It was Seabrook’s work which changed my attitude by revealing to me that the Vodoun cult constituted a rich mine of material in which humor and fantasy blended with pathos and poetry, and by showing me the excellent use I could make ot if in the literary field.⁵⁷ Arguably, the change-of-attitude toward Vodou among Haitian thinkers and writers, to a certain degree—apart from Price-Mars’s groundbreaking study, Ainsi parla l’Oncle, published in 1928—was probably due to William Seabrook’s 1929 book, The Magic Island, a text which Marcelin describes as painting a sensational and fanciful picture of the ruling class of Haiti, based on gossip of the country and its religious beliefs in a human and sympathetic light. Among other critical reviewers, Price-Mars has devoted an entire chapter (a 24-page critical review) in his book, Une étape de l’évolution haitienne, which was released shortly in the same year as Seabrook’s text, to critically assess the historical credibility of Seabrook’s narrative prose.⁵⁸ In the opening page of the chapter, he writes humorously:

Tel est le titre du nouveau livre que M. Seabrook vient de publier et qui a obtenu un success considérable aux Etats-Unis. Ce n’est q’une chronique, une chronique un peu longue, si vous le voulez bien, mais palpitante, passionnante, sensationnelle. Elle contient tout ce que M. Seabrook a vu ou croit avoir vu en Haiti pendant un sejour de quelques mois. Je m’empresse d’ajouter que le livre est tout à la fois tres amusant et tres cruel—amusant par la matière pleine d’un savoureux humour et abomidable parce que le lecteur americain et même haitien qui n’a pas le pouvoir de controller la véracité des faits avances se laissera amener a se demander: "Est-ce vrai, ce qu’il raconte? En tout cas, ces épouvantables histoires, telles qu’elles sont consignées, paraissent vraisemblables si elles ne sont pas variés.⁵⁹

[Such a title of the new book that Mr. Seabrook just published and obtained a considerable success in the United States! It might simply be a chronicle, a rather long narrative, if you like, but thrilling, exciting, sensational. It contains all that Seabrook has seen or believed to have seen in Haiti during a few months of stay. I hasten to add that the book is at once very amusing and very cruel—amusing by the content of the material that is full of tasty and abominable humor because the American reader and even the Haitian reader has no power to control and/or verify the veracity of these noted facts, which leave him to wonder: is it true, what he says? In any case, these appalling stories, as reported, seem plausible, as if they are not changed.]

After a critical appraisal of Seabrook’s grotesque description of Vodou rituals, Price-Mars concludes entertainingly that Mr. Seabrook is a clever man. He grabbed the distinction between Vodou considered as religion and Vodou exploited as magic or sorcery ("M. Seabrook est un homme habile. Il a saisi la distinction qui existe entre la vaudou considère comme religion et le vaudou exploite comme magie ou comme sorcellerie"⁶⁰). At the end of his long analysis of the books, Price-Mars casts doubts about the historical reliability and scientific nature of Seabrook’s account on Vodou, which is plain in this closing statement: From all our preceding remarks about the value of Vodou and its historical origin, evolution, and its relationship with the Haitian life, I myself have written an objective book because I wanted my observations to be scientifically credible ("De tout ce qui précedé, de la valeur du Vaudou, de ses origins historiques, de son évolution, de ses rapports avec la vie haitienne, j’ai tiré moi aussi, un livre de caractère objectif, parce que j’ai voulu que mes observations eussent des assisens scientifiques."⁶¹)

Additionally, Jean-Pierre Makouta-Mboukou, in his important monograph entitled Jacques Roumain. Essai sur la signification spirituelle et religieuse de son oeuvre, published in 1978, offers perceptive commentaries relevant to this present study. He explains:

Dans le cas de Jacques Roumain, l’environnement socio-religieux a eu sur lui une influence telle que nous négligeons de l’examiner avec soin. Cette analyse serait également incomplète si elle laissait de côté le rôle joue par les missions catholique et protestante au cours de l’histoire haïtienne, ainsi que l’exploitation politico-économique du vaudou.⁶²

[In the case of Jacques Roumain, the social and political environment had an influence on him that we have neglected and failed to carefully examine. This present analysis would be incomplete should it leave aside the role played by the Catholic and Protestant missions throughout the course of Haitian history, as well as the political and economic exploitation of Vodou.]

Further, in a brilliant paragraph, Makouta-Mboukou attempts to encapsulate the religious ideas of Jacquqes Roumain:"

La pensée de Roumain est foncièrement socio-politico-religieuse. Elle est centrée sur l’idée de libération socio-économique du peuple haïtien, et par delà ce peuple, la libération de tous les nègres et de tous les opprimés de la terre. Jacques Roumain réussit à ne pas faire de la libération un thème banal, mais une véritable théologie qui deviendra vite une idéologie politique. Il s’appuie sur l’aspect matériel et spiritual de la vie afro-haïtienne: sa culture, c’est-à-dire, la religion vaudou, considérée seule ou dans ces relations avec la religion chrétienne. Une question est soulevée: comment Roumain inculquera-a-t-il a une société aussi profondément croyant sa théorie socio-économique inspire du marxisme-léninisme, qui prêche le matérialisme, alors que les haïtiens croient que tout, sur la terre est œuvre de Dieu, aussi bien le Malheur que le Bonheur. Comment réussira-t-il à purger la conscience des haïtiens de la foi en un Dieu ou en des dieux qui leur promettent le salut par la grâce, pour la remplacer par une foi autogérant?⁶³

[The thought of Roman is fundamentally socio-political-religious. It is centered on the idea of the socio-economic liberation of the Haitian people, and beyond this people—the liberation of all blacks and all the oppressed of the earth. Jacques Roumain succeeds in not making liberation a banal theme, but a true theology that will quickly become a political ideology. He emphasizes the material and spiritual aspect of the Afro-Haitian life: its culture, that is to say, the Vodou religion, considered alone or in its relations with the Christian religion. A question arises: how will Roumain inculcate in a society that is profoundly religious his socio-economic theory inspired by Marxism-Leninism, which preaches materialism, while the Haitians believe that everything on earth is God’s work—both good and bad? How will he succeed in purging the conscience of the Haitians from the faith in a God or gods who promise them salvation by grace, and replace it with an autonomous faith?]

The scholarly works examined above contributed substantially to a greater understanding of the religious ideas and imagination of Jacques Roumain. By any means, they are exhaustive or intended to be. Like Toussaint, Makouta-Mboukou’s Roumain is an atheist Global thinker seized by the promise of Marxism and Leninism. In this present work, we study the religious ideas and imagination of Jacques Roumain from an interdisciplinary approach and comparative science to religion, which departs from the current scholarship on the subject matter. We attempt to investigate Roumain’s religious modalities within a wide range of religious traditions and systems—Western, African, and Eastern thoughts—and study them critically against the backdrop of Roumain’s intellectual formation and contours. In this study, we emphasize Roumain’s anthropological, sociological, historical, theological, and literary methods to the study of religion and its implications to build an adequate and sustaining ethic for a democratic order and toward religious pluralism and tolerance. This book also brings Roumain and his writings on religion in dynamic conversations with contemporary French, German, and American anthropologists and ethnologists, as well as other religious theorists and thinkers who have preceded him and shaped his works. The cross-disciplinary method to reassessing, rereading, and reinterpreting Roumain’s religious texts are often absent in the important works of both Mabouka-Mboukou and Toussaint, and other Roumain scholars (i.e. Fowler, Trouillot, Stephen, Souffrant, Cobb, Dorsinville, Ségolène, Leconte, Hoffmann, Maximilien, Fleischmann, etc.). Most of these noted writers do not move beyond the traditional understanding of Roumain as primarily a man of letter—not a public intellectual and man of action who thinks profoundly and critically about the role of faith in the public sphere and human culture and civilization. Thinking in Public seeks to bridge these intellectual gaps in Roumain scholarship, and Black and Haitian studies.

Like W. E. B. Du Bois, Roumain’s use of religious modalities turn his works into religious resources that fortify the varieties of work he wants to accomplish in the world: political protest, social uplift, the honoring of one’s ancestors, the development of moral ideals, and even the carving out of time for personal refletion.⁶⁴ Roumain employed the language of religion and Christian theology as well as social and critical theory to achieve a greater purpose: his program of social change, human emancipation, and the total liberation of the underprivileged, the lowly, and those who have been dehumanized by the despotic forces of modernity—both in his native land of Haiti and the global world. Roumain’s life of faith, nonetheless, is not a life of faithlessness or unfaithfulness; it is certainly not an existence without religious piety in the sense of orthodox virtue or tradition. His religious sensibility is a different form of devotion—a secularist piety informed by a thick metissage of religious postmodernist culture and ideas. Jacques Roumain would become the leading thinker of the Haitian Secularist Tradition in the twentieth-century.

Both the intellectual and religious life of Jacques Roumain embody the inevitable strife and tension between religion and secular humanism or secular intellectualism. We have detected seven main historical events or moments that have fashioned Roumain’s attitude toward religion. Roumain was raised in a Christian family (Catholic Christianity) and attended a predominantly Roman Catholic primary and secondary school, the prestigious Institution Saint-Louis de Gonzague in Port-au-Prince, until the age of 15 in 1921 when he left Haiti to attend boarding school in Brussels, Belgium. First of all, Roumain began to drift progressively from faith as early as in High School in Europe. Secondly, as a University student in Europe in the 1920s, he was exposed to the most liberal mind and best luminaries in Western modern intellectual history and Western literary canon. In particular, his encounter with the writings of the German atheist philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche had radicalized his religious experience.

Thirdly, as a student in anthropology at the Musée de l’Homme and the Institut d’ethnologie of the University of Paris (Sorbonne) in the 1930s, Roumain was exposed to the most rigorous components of French secularism, European non-theistic humanism, and Western enlightenment modernity which championed the God of reason and rejected the God of Abraham and his active participation in human history. Fourthly, Roumain’s embrace of Marxism as the best mode of modern political analysis and the Russian Revolution as the best example of the practical union of political theory and practice,⁶⁵ and communism as the most promising political system or governance in the modern world had revolutionized his religious sensibility. We must bear in mind that traditional Marxism or communism is atheistic and therefore a form of non-theistic humanism (we are not suggesting however that Roumain subscribed to atheistic humanism; by contrast, we are proposing that the Haitian thinker was a humanist who embraced the principles and promise of religious agnosticism.); both ideological traditions and systems promote an anthropocentric worldview to explain the course of human history and the meaning of life.

Fifthly, Roumain’s contention that instrumental Christianity in Western societies has supported or reinforced mass human suffering in the form of slavery, colonization, human genocides, Hitlerism, and countless religious wars sanctioned by the Christian West had a tremendous import on his religious life, leading to his discontent with the political church and imperial Christianity. Sixthly, the historic anti-superstition campaign of 1942 that aimed at eradicating Vodou and its cognate practices from the Haitian society had a terrific impression on Roumain’s religious ideal. Finally, Roumain’s fundamental skepticism about religion and his reasoning that science supersedes religion had radicalized his perspective on faith. Scientific reasoning is an important ingredient of Roumain’s concept of development. He gives more weight to scientific knowledge and experiment than religious reasoning and experience in the process of social development and human flourishing.

In a nutshell, for Roumain, the Afro-Haitian Vodou was a legitimate religion comparable to any of the so-called World Religions and Revealed Religions of the Abramaic tradition. He subscribed to the common narrative that Vodou had empowered the enslaved Africans to destroy the institution of slavery and dispel Western colonization during the period of the Haitian Revolution, leading to the genesis of postcolonial Haiti in 1804. Roumain emphasized the cultural, aesthetic, ritual, and ancestral aspects of the Haitian Religion. Yet, he gave greater emphasis on the sociological study of Vodou as religion. Next, Roumain championed the peaceful and tolerant nature of Eastern religions coupled with the universal principles of Eastern philosophical systems. He postulated that Buddhism was a religion of peace that had sustained China for many years. He praised the liberative and progressive character of Hinduism, and projected that as aliberative force, Hinduism has inspired Mahatma Gandhi in his struggle against British imperialism and Western colonization in India.

The attitude of Jacques Roumain toward institutionalized Christianity can be said very hostile and aggressive. Roumain’s seemingly anticlericalism during the period of the American occupation was an inevitable response to the cooperative Church with the American Occupants to subdue the Haitian people to the imperial force, and to demonize Vodou practitioners to renounce the religion of their ancestors in favor of imperial Christianity. The Church of the American occupation contributed substantially to the criminalization of Vodou and its associated practices. For many Haitian intellectuals and humanists who reacted belligerently to the antagonistic Church deduced that the imported Christianity was a fear-based religion that spread a Vodouphobic discourse and fragmented the Haitian people on the basis of religious affiliation or devotion. Roumain rejected the proselytizing mission and strategy of the Church whose goal was to pacify the Haitian soul; he construed the whole agenda of the Catholic Church and its religious education in Haiti summarized as such: the aggressive inculcation of aneocolonial and slave mentality in the Haitian culture.

Overview of the Book

Thinking in Public is divided into three parts. Part One, Haiti’s Hope and Dilemma: Development Crisis and the Role of Religion, contains five chapters and examines the political worlds and intellectual milieu of Jacques Roumain, with a special attention given to the Haitian public sphere, North American landscape, and the European public sphere. This division of the book establishes the intersection of religion and development in dealing with the human condition in Haiti and other places in the modern world.

While chapter 1 reframes the work of Roumain within a transnational context and public sphere and argues that his contributions outreach the regional border of the American continent, chapter 2 revisits the political Sitz im Leben in which Roumain emerged in Haiti as a public intellectual and cultural critic, and the activist for the country’s underclass and peasant population. Thus, the objective of the first two chapters is to situate Roumain’s ideas and writings in their proper regional and global context of his time. Chapter 5 reconceptualizes the intellectual ideas of Jacques Roumain within the framework of French-Western intellectual tradition and history of ideas. This chapter documents Roumain’s first public defense of Vodou as a legitimate religion to a Western audience in France. In chapters 3 and 4, through a careful inventory of Roumain’s political and social writings, we study both the internal and external forces and agents contributing to the crisis of development in Haiti.

For Jacques Roumain, capitalism leading to global economic inequality was the mother of all evil and human oppression in the modern world. Roumain infers that capitalism contributed enormously to the wealth of North American and European countries, whose economic foundation and hence material prosperity or success is rooted in the shed blood, mass suffering, and the sacrifice of indigenous people and the imported enslaved Africans in the so-called New World. Capitalism gave birth to Western industrialization and added significantly to the widespread poverty in the modern world. (The so-called successful nations continue to live off of the labor, exploitation, and the wealth of the so-called Third World nations and underclass workers.) From the historical materialism approach, Roumain establishes connections between colonial Saint-Domingue society and contemporary Haitian society, as well as the division of the classes in both worlds.

Roumain highlights historical links of the plantation economy and the class hierarchy of Saint-Domingue, based on class domination and economic inequality, to the economic inequality and class oppression in modern Haitian society. Roumain argues that the American invasion of Haiti, from 1915 to 1934, created uneasy dynamics between Haitian capitalism and American economic imperialism in the country, and the worst class stratum in the Caribbean nation. While the hegemony of the American economic imperialism brought about foreign investments and businesses in Haiti, it led to the progressive decline of the country’s small businesses and entrepreneurships, as well as agricultural productions and national exports; overall, the economic aspect of the American occupation had alienated the Haitian proletariat and workers resulting in massive unemployment and hunger in Haiti. According to Roumain, the American occupation and economic capitalism had generated a new cadre of Haitian elites and Haitian proletariat in the first half of the twentieth century. Roumain accentuates the wide and unhealthy breach between the Haitian intellectuals, the ruling class, and the Haitian people, resulted in a relationship of domination and dehumanization. He laments over the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Haitian elite and dominant class. We should understand the dilemma between the Haitian ruling class and the underclass population from a global perspective, framed within the logic of democratic capitalism. As Kishore Mahbubani detectably explains the historical transition and splitting from European feudalism to capitalism and now democracy in Western societies:

When capitalism destroyed feudalism in Europe in the nineteenth century, it moved away from aristocracy toward meritocracy. Capitalism, with its essential ingredient of creative destruction, generated new elites. Democracy provided another institutional process for flushing out old elites and churching out new ones. Both capitalism and democracy were therefore not purely ends in themselves. (even though they are ideologically worshiped in many Western minds). They were also functional instruments that enabled—most times—new talent to emerge while simultaneously preventing the encrustation of old elites.⁶⁶

Part Two, Frontiers of Development: Fraternal Unity, the Role of Faith, and the Future of Haiti and the Human Race, examines possible routes to development and potential avenues to human flourishing in Haiti. It contains five chapters whose underlying objective aims at answering this basic question: Can Haitians think effectively and guarantee a more-promising and productive future for themselves and their country? Toward this goal, in chapter 6, we contend that Roumain gives primacy to the instrumental role of science and Marxist communitarianism—not religion or theology—in the process of development. This chapter also explores the intersections of religion, social transformation, and Marxist social theory in the thought of Jacques Roumain. It argues that Roumain’s radical perspective on religion, social development, and his critiques of religion in general and of institutionalized Christianity in particular was substantially influenced by a Marxist conception of world history, human development, and a secular humanist approach to faith and human progress.

Interestingly, in chapter 7, we demonstrate the paradoxical nature of Roumain’s religious ideas and his deployment of atonement theology in the Christian religion to urge the imperative of development and collective solidarity in Haiti. Hence, this chapter reads Roumain’s peasant novel, Masters of the Dew, as a project for development and social transformation. It emphasizes the importance of relational anthropology, sacrificial service and love, and the collaboration of the community in attaining the goal of communal transformation. This chapter offers special attention to the rhetorical force of the narrative. This story articulates what we might call a threefold rhetorical visions: the rhetoric of suffering, the rhetoric of hope, and the rhetoric of redemption.

The objective of this chapter is twofold. First, it examines the intersections of the rhetoric of suffering, hope, and redemption in the novel. Second, it analyses Roumain’s articulation of what might be phrased a constructive atonement theology of redemption and hope, as he presents the novel’s protagonist Manuel Jean-Joseph as the Christ-figure and peasant-redeemer. In this way, Roumain could practice simultaneously a hermeneutics of expectation and a theology of liberation. We advance the notion that the telos of the story was to present the death of Manuel as a vicarious atonement for the salvation and reconciliation of the peasant people at Fonds Rouge in the same manner New Testament writers had envisioned the death of Christ as a vicarious substitution for the sins of his people. It should be noted that Roumain’s employment of biblical allusions, echoes, and parallelisms, and his borrowings of the religious language should be construed in the context of political theology, in which religious language and vocabulary are deployed and crafted politically and instrumentally in order that the author might achieve greater rhetorical force as well as arrive at the intended results.

The final chapters of the book (Chapters eight and nine) focus on the idea of practical development. We have addressed three critical national issues in Chapters two, three, and four: the labor question, the social question, and the political conundrum in Haiti; Roumain provided an effective diagnosis to the predicament of Haitian political and civil society. Chapters eight and nine trace different routes to development and more promising and emancipating future possibilities in Haiti—with an emphasis on an interdisciplinary and heterogeneous-product approach to development toward the common good.

In a nutshell, both chapters argue that Roumain’s concept of development should be understood as freedom and human flourishing. It is based on four philosophical principles and political models: the theory of distributive justice, the ethics of communitarianism, the philosophical model of relational anthropology, and the political model of democratic socialism. Roumain’s idea of development is both anticolonial and antiimperial. It conjures up a different type of humanism and universalism that rejects (or is not based on the logic of) colonialism and imperialism or any form of human domination. His concept of development also anticipates what is now called postcolonial economic independence and decolonial autonomy. Further, Roumain’s theory of development also implies an attitude of domination, of conquest, and the willingness to change: domination of nature by human agents and the techniques of modern science—rather than discovering the resort of the religious or the magico-religious route.⁶⁷

This book embraces the broad definition of development to connote a multifaceted process that comprises social, cultural, gender, political, environmental as well as economic dimensions.⁶⁸ We also emphasize the community participation approach to social development, which

contends that meaningful social change can only be achieved when the social structures that perpetuate poverty, inequality and oppression are challenged by ordinary people and ultimately dismantled. This definition prioritizes activism, especially at the local level, and concepts such as conscientization, empowerment, and transformative social change are widely used to challenge those who use their wealth and power to oppress women, ethnic minorities and the poor. Grassroots community activism is augmented by social action at the national level and large organization.⁶⁹

Toward the road to development, Roumain advocated free access to public education in Haiti and the implementation of the Creole language in the country’s public institutions. In the same line of thought, he campaigned for the socialization of the healthcare system and distributive medicine in the Caribbean nation, which will entail the construction of new medical facilities and clinics and the increase of health care professionals in the rural regions of the country. In order for the small businesses and new initiative entrepreneurism in Haiti to thrive against global capitalism and foreign investment in the country, Roumain recommended that the Haitian government should pass new laws to protect and secure the rights of the nationally-owned businesses and companies. In addition, Roumain advocated new legislations to ensure that the rights of workers will not be violated in the workplace, and their wage or labor exploited.

Finally, Part Three, Historical Documents, Correspondences, and Photographs, provides a chronological narrative of the major events in Roumain’s life including his major publications. We also document the most important works published on Jacques Roumain and the most useful publications in Haitian modern thought, covering the first half the twentieth century (1900–1969). Finally, this section of the project provides substantial historical documents, letters, and photographs, some of which are already analyzed in the book. We hope the information provided in the appendix will be useful to future scholarship on Haiti and Jacques Roumain. In particular, the book will inspire new studies on Jacques Roumain in the Anglophone world.

1. Roumain, Mon Carnet V: La Vie Conjugale, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

544

.

2. Roumain, Mon Carnet XIV: Gide et le marriage de raison, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

567

.

3. Roumain, Mon Carnet XXII: Amitie et Homosexualite, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

570

.

4. Ibid.

5. Roumain, Mon Carnet IX: Le Conformisme, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

551

–

52

.

6. Roumain, Mon Carnet X: La Conversion, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

553

–

54

.

7. Roumain, Mon Carnet XII: La Medecine, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

556

–

57

.

8. Roumain, Mon Carnet XIV: Les Fausses Reputations, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

559

.

9. Roumain, Mon Carnet XV: Ameliorer La Race, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

559

.

10. Roumain, Mon Cartet XLII: Africains ou Francais, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

593

,

588

.

11. Roumain, Mon Carnet XVII: La Vengeance des colonies, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

562indent

–

63

.

12. Roumain, Mon Carnet XXIII: L’ennui, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes, 571

.

13. Roumain, Mon Carnet XXIV: Intolerance et Desespoir, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

570

.

14. Ibid.,

572

.

15. Roumain, Mon Carnet XXVL Telegueule, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

573

.

16. Roumain, Mon Carnet XXIX: Decouragement, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

579

.

17. Roumain, Chronique litteraire, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

596

.

18. Roumain, Mon Carnet XI: Peiture et Litterature, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

545

,

585

.

19. Roumain, Remarques sur la beaute et lart, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

604

.

20. Ibid.

21. Roumain, Mon Carnet XXXII: Sur la Musique, in Roumain. Œuvres complètes,

582

.

22. Roumain, Mon Carnet XXXIX: Le Dansant, in Roumain. Œuvres complètes, 590

.

23. Roumain, Mon Carnet XXXIII: Assurance sur la vie, in Roumain. Œuvres complètes,

583

.

24 Roumain, Mon Carnet XXXV: Vanite du progres, in Roumain. Œuvres complètes,

586

.

25. Roumain, Mon Carnet XLIV: La Mort et L’Esprit, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

595

.

26. Roumain, Mon Carnet XL: A La Maniere de Saadi, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

591

.

27. Roumain, Sur le bonheur, in Roumain, Œuvres complètes,

580

,

610

.

28. Young-Bruehl, For the Love of the World,

440

.

29. Ibid.,

452

.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.,

449

.

32. Ibid.,

445

.

33. Arendt, Life of the Mind,

6

.

34. Ibid.

35. Quoted in Wilder, Freedom Time,

10

.

36. Ibid.,

12

.

37. Ibid. I am indebted to Wilder’s remark here. About Senghor and Cesaire, Wilder writes the following: "This book attempts to think with Cesaire and Senghor to regard their world and moment from their perspective, to appreciate their constraints and the possibilities they discerned, in order to understand their political and intellectuals goals. But thinking with is not just an exercise in contextualization; it also means listening carefully to what their analysis of that world might teach us about ours, treating them not only as native informants symptomatic of their era but as critical thinkers whose formulations about politics, aesthetics, and epistemology might help us fashion frameworks with which to reflect upon related phenomena."

38. Cited in ibid.,

13

.

39. Banner-Haley, From Du Bois to Obama,

2

.

40. Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life,

35

.

41. Kelley, Freedom Dreams,

191

.

42. Quoted in ibid.,

192

.

43. Ibid.,

192–93

.

44. Wright, Bluepoint for Negro Writing, 270

–

71

.

45. Cited in James, Transcending the Talented Tenth,

188

.

46. Ibid.

47. Dash, Haiti and the United States,

70

. According to Dash, this particular essay "examines the phenomenon of lynching as the product of a system that divides and exploits the poor of America, both white and Black. His main idea is that ‘un égoisme de classe rapace et sans scruple’ (a rapacious and unscrupulous selfishness based on class interest) is the heart of racial conflict in the United States. His essay is a piece of orthodox Marxist analysis in thrust and expression which exposes racism as a sentimental offshoot of the class struggle. Racial division was simply the means whereby the economic ‘status’ quo could be maintained.

Le préjugé de couleur est un instrument de division des masses laborieuses du sud, blanches et noires, dont les revendications, si elles étaient communes ébranleraient l’ordre établi.

(Color prejudice is an instrument that divides the working class of the South, white as well as black, whose demands, if they were unanimous, would shake the established order.)

Consistently in Roumain, the racial question is subservient to that of economic circumstance."

48. This rigorous ethnographic research is based on Roumain’s scientific investigation of the assotor, the tallest drum in Vodou, and the accompanied ritual. Roumain’s anthropological research should be understood within the historical context and trajectories, and more particularly, the

1942

anti-supertition campaign in Haiti and Roumain’s debates with the Priest-Theologian Joseph Foisset. Foisset reduces Vodou to non-religion; to the contray, Roumain defends the religiosity of Vodou as a legitimate faith. In this piece, using the comparative method, Roumain provides a critical analysis of the constituents of Vodou including the issues of sacrifice, ritual, music, possession, and Vodou mysticism. He establishes similarities and parallel links between Vodou, the Abrahamaic faith, the pagan religions of the Greco-Roman world, and those of the ancient Mediterranean civilizations.

49. Toussaint, Jacques Roumain et la Theologie de la Libération,

259

.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Maximilien, Jacques Roumain et le Vodou,

258

.

54. Ibid.,

262

.

55. Fleischmann, Jacques Roumain dans la literature d’Haiti,

1253

.

56. Thoby-Marcelin, Introduction, in Beast of the Haitian Hills, xv.

57. Ibid.

58. Price-Mars, Une étape de l’evolution haitienne,

109–33

.

59. Ibid.,

109

.

60. Ibid.,

124

.

61. Ibid.,

132

. Price-Mars is referring to his book Ainsi Parla L’Oncle (Thus Spoke the Uncle).

62. Makouta-Mboukou, Jacques Roumain,

10

.

63. Ibid.

64. Kahn, Divine Discontent,

6

.

65. Pearson, Harold Laski on the State,

302

.

66. Mahbubani, Can Asians Think?,

36

.

67. Souffrant, Une Negritude Socialiste,

55

.

68. Mingley, Social Development,

4

.

69. Ibid.,

7

.

Part I

Haiti’s Hope and Dilemma

Development Crisis and the Role of Religion

1

Global Thinking and Thinking Globally

Jacques Roumain within a Transnational Public Sphere and Context

On Friday, February 9, 2007, a group of distinguished Haitian writers, intellectuals, and professionals gathered in a memorable conference to celebrate the centennial birth of the Haitian intellectual, social critic, and the author of the classic novel in Francophone literature Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew), Jacques Roumain, who would have turned one hundred years old in June 4, 2007. Among the invited guests and the only survivals of Roumain’s generation were Max Vieux—the brother of the famous Haitian woman novelist Marie Vieux Chauvet who died in New York in June 19, 1973—and Max Sam; both were contemporaries, former friends and classmates of Jacques Roumain. Alongside the founder of the Haitian Communist Party, which Roumain established in 1934 at the culmination of the American occupation of Haiti (1915–34), Vieux and Sam remembered their collective struggle to create a democratic order and just society in their native land wherein all Haitians of all social classes and different backgrounds could live in peace and harmony as compatriots.

Vieux and Sam affirmed that Jacques Roumain was an exceptional leader, who, unfortunately, has not been replaced. He was a friend, a leader for us; upon his return to the country in 1920, finding all of us dismayed under the heel of foreign occupation, it was he who was the first to show us how to fight against the Occupation.⁷⁰ The meeting was held in the conference room of the Haitian Ministre de la culture et de la communication. Presenters at the Conference delivered impressive speeches about the life, ideas, and legacy of Jacques Roumain. Max, Sam, and Carine Roumain, the only daughter born to Jacques Roumain and his wife Nicole Roumain, sat in the front row. Nicole Hibbert—her maiden name—is the daughter of the famous Haitian novelist Fernand Hibbert who was a member of the Génération de la Ronde and ancient secretary of l’Instruction publique under the presidential administration of Philippe Dartiguenave. Roumain and Nicole were married in December 29, 1929 in Port-au-Prince. The couple had two children: Daniel, his son was born in September 24, 1930 in Port-au-Prince, and his daughter Carine, was born in Brussell in April 4, 1937, during Roumain’s exilic years in Europe (1936–41).

Max Vieux and Max Sam acknowledged in public that Jacques Roumain was a model for the youth of his generation and Haitians in general who dreamed of a prosperous Haiti.⁷¹ In particular, for Sam, "Jacques Roumain is an irreplaceable model, and through his novel Masters of the Dew, which is a political program, Haiti is known around the world (Jacques Roumain est un modèle irremplaçable et, grâce à son roman Gouverneurs de la Rosée qui est un programme politique, Haïti est connu à travers le monde⁷²). On one hand, in a lamenting tone, both Vieux and Sam indicated that as living testimonies of Jacques Roumain, they could avow that their mentor had failed to form a government and manage to gather a great political party ("Jacques Roumain qui n’a pas réussi à former un gouvernement, qui n’a pas réussi à réunir un grand parti politique"). On the other hand, Sam is convinced that if the Haitian people would have followed the program of Roumain’s novel Masters of the Dew, Haiti would not have been in its current state of misery. Sam hoped that the Haitian youth today would follow the footsteps of Jacques Roumain, who sought to show to the Haitian people the path of honor and dignity.⁷³ Sam also indicated that we, his [Roumain’s] heirs, attempt to extend his memories and his vision of collective liberation and program of social development for the Haitian people, articulated in Masters of the New, by founding Le Parti socialiste populaire (The People’s Socialist Party). Daniel Élie, the Haitian minister of culture, who was also present in the conference, confessed the paramount importance and tremendous influence of Jacques Roumain on the country: "L’œuvre de Jacques Roumain est d’une importance capitale pour le pays." Jean Julien complements that

En depit de toutes les difficultés et de tous les déboires de sa vie d’adulte, Jacques Roumain, ce nationaliste farouche, ce défenseur intraitable de la cause des pauvres et des opprimés, arme seulement de son intelligence, de son courage