Masters of the Dew

"This is the story of a peasant family whose son has been in Cuba working in the sugar cane, and he comes back and tries to reunite his whole village. It is almost a fable – I think of it as being like a Greek myth because he sacrifices himself to unite these warring families. He is in love with the daughter of the family his relatives are in opposition with. Eventually he dies but the woman he loves is pregnant and that son, we hope, will unite their families. Jacques Roumain wrote one of the first novels to be set in a rural setting and it was a huge success, I think because it is very rare that you have a novel that comes out of that milieu because of the limited opportunities that those people have to write about themselves. Still, he does his best and the novel portrays these people, people like my grandfather and those of his children who stayed in the countryside; it portrays them in a complicated way, as people facing very important problems. These people, who are essentially the majority of the population, are often marginalised. They are said to belong to the peyi andeyò, the outside country. They are often treated badly and neglected and never really part of the decision-making process, but here they are at the centre of the novel. The really amazing thing about this novel is that at some point it became almost like an oral story for this section of society. It was done as a radio play so people who were living in the countryside, even though they couldn’t read the book, would hear it and hear something of themselves in it. And it was even made into a film, so it enjoyed a huge success. It really permeated the consciousness of the country so much that it went back to the people that it was about. People even call their children the name of the main characters, Anaïse and Manuel. Can there be a greater compliment offered to any writer?"