Famous quotes containing the word peasants:
“The sacrifice to Legba was completed; the Master of the Crossroads had taken the loas’ mysterious routes back to his native Guinea.
Meanwhile, the feast continued. The peasants were forgetting their misery: dance and alcohol numbed them, carrying away their shipwrecked conscience in the unreal and shady regions where the savage madness of the African gods lay waiting.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)
““Maman”, said Annaïse, her voice strangely weak. “Here is the water.”
A thin blade of silver came forward in the plain and the peasants ran alongside it, crying and singing.
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“Oh, Manuel, Manuel, why are you dead?” moaned Délira.
“No”, said Annaïse, and she smiled through her tears, “no, he is not dead”.
She took the old woman’s hand and pressed gently against her belly where new life stirred.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)
“We sing the funeral, as goes the custom, with the hymn of the Dead. But Manuel, he chose a hymn for the living: the song of the coumbite, the song of the earth, of the water, the plants, of fellowship between peasants because he wanted, as I now understand it, that his death for you be the renewal of life.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)