La montagne ensorcelée

Jacques Roumain's first peasant novel, La montagne ensorcelée, was published in 1931. Several years separate this from his most famous work, translated in English as Masters of the Dew. While this is certainly not as successful of a literary work or as entertaining (possibly due to the very stark and desperate conditions of life for this peasant community in the Nord or Plateau Central region of the country), it provides a fascinating example of the evolution of the peasant novel in the Haitian literary corpus. It also features an interesting example of the "Francocreolophone" nature of Haitian literary works as it combines French narration with character dialogues in French and Creole, sometimes leaving untranslated the Creole dialogue. For example, t'en prie, or tanpri in standardized Haitian Creole, means please, but Roumain leaves untranslated some Creole words, presumably due to this novel originally being published in serial forms in a Haitian newspaper. Consequently, most of his readers were Haitians who knew Creole.

However, despite crafting a hauntingly real peasant community during the US Occupation, the tragic love story of Aurel and Grace is less successful because the reader does not receive enough information about Placinette and her daughter. Perhaps if those characters were developed a little more, at least Grace, one could see the utter depravity of the chef de section's actions as more tragic. Grace, described as beautiful and clearly in love with Aurel, meets him for nightly trysts and they plan to marry, with Aurel even giving her a proposal letter his uncle and godfather wrote for him. It's endearing and Roumain has a poetic way with words to describe their love, but I couldn't help but wonder about the relationship between Placinette and her daughter. Surely, Grace was less isolated from the community than her mother, and would have heard the rumors of sorcery against her family.

And Baptiste, the grand don who represents greed, or Balletroy, the chef de section who abuses his authority, they provide the bases for a critique of social inequality in the novel, but mostly remain character sketches. There is undeniably a hint of Roumain's nascent Marxism, but here the social bonds are torn apart by superstition and misery without a hint of class struggle or solidarity. Dorneval, driven by a lust for vengeance, as is Dorilas, lose themselves in the mob while Desilus, an elder, ends up ginning bloodlust by feeding the magico-religious worldview of the community. Through these character sketches we see the breakdown of the family, social trust, and concerted efforts to escape their shared destruction. There is no konbit here to bring together the village, nor does Vodou seem capable of acting as a unifying force. 

Yet, within the Haitian novel tradition, one can easily see the innovative prose and descriptive language of La montagne ensorcelée. Reading this after Antoine Innocent's Mimola demonstrates a sympathetic yet critical approach to the religion of Vodou, although Innocent's novel is far more detailed of the actual process of Vodou spirit possession and beliefs. In the case of Roumain, this early novel seems to suggest both Vodou and Catholicism are part of the superstitious worldview of the peasant masses, which cause them to leap to mystical conclusions about the decaying rural world around them and its natural calamities of droughts, storms, sickness, and death. However, if Albert in Mimola represents the thoughts of Innocent, one can see a trajectory in Haitian social thought on the religion as being part of Haitian culture and identity but not necessarily something that is permanent or necessary in the future. The nonfiction of Roumain seems to encapsulate that perspective by calling for an anti-misery campaign instead of anti-superstitious campaigns during the 1940s. Regardless of the influence of Mimola on this particular novel, Roumain subsequently developed a more complex approach to the question of superstition and religious fatalism versus human agency.