Looking for a Hero: Masters of the Dew, La Source, and the Quest for Water in Haiti

Abstract

This article focuses in part on Patrick Shen’s 2012 documentary La Source, which recounts the return of Josue Lajeunesse from the United States to Haiti, his country of origin. His mission is to help his hometown find a dependable supply of clean water following the January 2010 earthquake. I compare this documentary to Jacques Roumain’s 1943 novel Gouverneurs de la rosée, (Masters of the Dew). Taken by itself, Shen’s documentary is an uplifting snapshot of a valiant man’s heroic efforts to help his homeland; in light of Haitian literary history, however, La Source assumes a different tenor: Masters of the Dew depicts a similar, heroic journey by a Haitian to find a dependable supply of clean water for his hometown, albeit decades prior to the events in Shen’s documentary. This article compares these two texts and examines how they signal evolving visions of heroism within a Haitian cultural context. I argue that—when viewed jointly—the type of heroism in one text casts doubt on the heroism of the other.

Keywords:

• Haiti
• La Source
• Jacques Roumain
• Masters of the Dew
• water
• heroism

Notes

1 See Richard Watts, “Contested Sources: Water as Commodity/Sign in French Caribbean Literature.” Atlantic Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2007, pp. 87–101, for an analysis of water’s symbolic qualities within a Haitian context.

2 From DVD “Bonus feature”

3 Mark Schuller, Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs. Rutgers UP, 2012.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rudyard J. Alcocer

Rudyard J. Alcocer is the Shumway Chair of Excellence in Romance Languages in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas through Cinema (co-edited), Time Travel in the Latin American & Caribbean Imagination: Re-reading History, and Narrative Mutations: Discourses of Heredity and Caribbean Literature.