Jacques Roumain: The Marxist Counterpoint

Abstract

In the ideological ferment of the post-Occupation period it is tempting to see Jacques Roumain as simply an earnest doctrinaire Marxist whose beliefs provided an antidote to the excesses of Africanist ideology. Naturally there is much evidence to support such a view of Roumain’s role in the thirties. Ever since he founded the Haitian Communist Party in 1934 and published the first Marxist critique of Haitian society L’Analyse Schématique in the same year, his life was marked by an unswerving commitment to this ideology — a commitment that would influence almost every decision made by Roumain until his untimely death in 1944. It explains his imprisonment and later exile in 1936, his passionate denunciation of Fascism during the Spanish Civil War, his friendship with Langston Hughes and Nicolas Guillen and ironically enough his decision to return to Haiti under Lescot’s reactionary régime in 1941 (because of the latter’s strong anti-Fascist stand during the Second World War).

… il y a deux hommes en chacun de nous. Auprès du sportsman que je vous ai montré, exubérant de vie, il y a en moi un côté mélancolique. Ces deux hommes, dans mes actes, je les sens se heurter.

Jacques Roumain