JACQUES ROUMAIN was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1907 and died just 37 years later in 1944. But during that brief time Roumain was a journalist, poet, politician, diplomat, professor, novelist, short story writer, ethnographer, and communist activist. Jacques Roumain is to Haitian literature what Langston Hughes is to American literature. Born into a bourgeois mulatto family, Roumain removed himself from the interests of his class to embrace the interests of the masses and the nation. In 1943, President Lescot appointed Roumain chargé d'affaires at the Haitian Embassy in Mexico. though at first reluctant to accept the post, he went to Mexico at the urging of the Communist Party, which desired to place its members in positions of influence. In Mexico, Roumain perhaps enjoyed the creative freedom he had never known before: he completed the collection of poems EBONY WOOD and his classic novel MASTERS OF THE DEW. The poems in EBONY WOOD transform racial solidarity, as advocated by Negritude, into a class solidarity of all peasants and workers regardless of color, as declared by Marxism. Here, poetry aims not only to be beautiful, but also a combat weapon: Africa I kept your memory Africa you are in me Like a splinter in the wound Like a guardian fetish in the village center make of me your catapult stone of my mouth the lips of your wound of my knees the broken columns of your abasement BUT I only want to be of your race workers peasants of all countries