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.