2/2 #JacquesRoumain. Charcoal was the main fuel in #Haiti when the book was written, 80 years ago. It still is today. Malcom Ferdinand: 'Taken as an example of environmental crisis and collapse, Haiti is still portrayed as a monstrous figure of modernity and confined somewhere offside to the world. However, it also reveals the hidden face of the modern world that has been abusively covered up by environmentalism.' Ferdinand proposes replacing Gaia with Ayiti, the modern world's Mother-Earth.

I wouldn't know about #JacquesRoumain 's Masters of the Dew (Gouveneurs de la Rosée,1944, tr #LangstonHughes & Mercer Cook, 1947, without having read #MalcomFerdinand's Decolonial Ecology. It's a moving fable of symbolic realism about the return of a native son to his village in Haiti, drought, the finding of water and the overcoming of a feud. The translation was republished in the Caribbean Writers Series in 1978 -- Roumain was a friend of Langston Hughes. #CaribbeanLiterature