Book of the week No2


The Three Novels of Roger Mais 

(The Hills Were Joyful Together, Brother Man, Black Lightning) 
Jonathan Cape 1966 

Roger Mais is a fascinating writer to study for anyone who is interested in tracing the impact of the nationalist movement of the 1930s on the development of Caribbean arts and literature. Born in 1905 into a middle class ‘brown’ family, well educated (although fellow writer John Hearne complained that ‘Roger Mais simply did not know enough and what he knew was not digested’) and hugely talented as both a writer and an artist, he came to his maturity when many of the assumptions that underpinned his position in colonial society were coming under intense scrutiny.
As Norman Manley writes in the introduction to this volume: ‘It was a strange world they (artists and writers) discovered: strange, most of all, in the fact that it was not a world where different cultures had blended into any single significant pattern, but a world divided and split in a manner as peculiar as it was deep-seated. It was not just a question of colour, nor yet of rich and poor; it was a matter of differences that involved widely different acceptances and rejections of values, different interpretations of reality, the use of identical words to express different concepts and values . . . ‘
This concept of the light-skinned elite as explorers, venturing out into the ghettos and bringing back reports and then having a kind of epiphany about the cultural and political significance of being surrounded by a majority black underclass that they knew nothing about - and for whose culture, beliefs and aspirations they had previously cared even less about - is expressed with almost disarming candour. Mais’s own Road to Damascus moment occurred on his way to enlist as a special constable during the riots and strikes of 1938. He never recorded why, but he changed his mind and joined the strikers instead. His conversion to the anti-colonial cause led to a six-month sentence for sedition a few years later in 1944 when he famously denounced one of Churchill’s more offensively imperialistic war speeches.
His novels reflect the conscious attempt he and many of his generation made to re-connect with their island’s African roots (or, in some cases, simply to connect) whilst at the same time attempting a synthesis with the European cultural traditions that they had been schooled in. Just as Rex Nettleford proposed equilibrium between the rhythm of Africa and the melody of Europe, so Mias, too, was searching for a nativist or creole aesthetic that could encompass both worlds.
Of the three novels collected in this edition, the most famous and influential is undoubtedly Brother Man, which was first published in 1954. A great deal of its fame rests on the fact that this was the first positive portrayal of a Rasta protagonist – and this nearly two decades before reggae music had evolved to the point where it was starting to carry the Rasta message to a wide audience, both within Jamaica itself and later internationally.
What is startling to a reader coming to the book 50 years or more after its first publication, is how presciently Mais identified that it would be the Rastas – the most despised, the most cast out of the outcasts – who would provide Jamaica with new role models in the struggle to create a post colonial identity. Brother Man is not just a Rasta, he is everyman. We learn, as the story unfolds, that he worked as a field labourer, sideman on a truck, street preacher, longshoreman and now as a cobbler. He has spent time in prison on a set-up ganja charge but now finds that he has a strange and wonderful power to heal – which he freely places at the disposal of his community.
Ranged around him are a cast of characters who, in their various ways, seek to make a life in the harsh, slum environment of West Kingston. It’s the same world Bob Marley evoked in his song Concrete Jungle, and the plaintive refrain of that song – ‘Where is there love to be found?’ – is the underlying leitmotif of Brother Man. The doomed love of Girlie for the worthless hustler Papacita, the deranged love of Cordelia which leads to infanticide and then suicide, the fickle love of the crowd who one moment embrace Bra’ Man and the next turn against him, the innocent love of Jesmina and Shine which is cut short by a murderous ‘bearded man’ and which precipitates the bloody climax of the novel – are all pitted against the simple, sincere faith of the Rastaman.
Mais evokes the strength of public feeling about the Rastafarians (again anticipating events such as the island-wide persecution of Rastas that followed the so-called Coral Garden massacre in 1963) in this passage towards the end of the book: “The leading newspapers played up the angle that a community of bearded men in their midst, formed together into a secret cult, was a menace to public safety. People began writing letters to the press. All bearded men should be placed behind barbed wire. They should be publicly washed (?) and shaved! They should be banished to Africa. They should be sterilised. They should be publicly flogged. They became identified with a certain political party. They should be denied the vote. They were, in fact, potential rapists and murderers all.”
This, of course, was exactly the distorted stereotype that so incensed Rex Nettleford a decade later in Mirror, Mirror, and which Rastafarians have to contend with – Marley and others notwithstanding – to this day.
Mais, however, saw something quite different:
“He saw all things that lay before him in a vision of certitude, and he was alone no longer.
‘Look at me,’ he said
Her gaze met his, unfaltering.
‘You se it out here too?’
She looked up above the rooftops where that great light glowed across the sky.
She said: ‘Yes, John, I have seen it.’
‘Good,’ he said, and again, ‘Good.’

Book of the week No1

Mirror Mirror
Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica
Rex Nettleford
(William Collins and Sangster, Jamaica, 1970)

One of the unexpected pleasures of taking over the Beach House was discovering a storeroom full of books. There was a brief moment of euphoria when I thought I’d found a first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses amongst the musty stacks, but it turned out to be a rather less valuable third edition, although very pleasing all the same. There were a lot of thrillers and Hollywood biogs, but the real treasure turned out to be a select collection of books about Jamaica.
It’s my intention to make my way through this stack and blog about each one over the next few months. I’m starting with Rex Nettleford’s pioneering study of identity and race in Jamaica because this book had such a profound influence on me when I first read it back in the late 1970s. In fact, it was with undisguised joy that I picked it up and carefully tried to peel away another volume that had stuck to the front cover. This is the original hardback edition: long ago I possessed a paperback edition and this was much nicer.
Rex Nettleford has become one of the pre-eminent intellectual and cultural voices from the Caribbean since this book was first published, and I was fascinated to see how well it had aged. Nettleford, who was a Rhodes scholar, returned to Jamaica in 1961 to take up a position of the University of the West Indies. He was a co-author of the first study into the Rastafarian movement in 1961, and two years later he founded the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica - which toured extensively in the 70s and 80s. As an academic, social historian and cultural practitioner, he has been at the forefront of the debate about race and identity for nearly half a century. This book collects together various essays he wrote in the 1960s when the issue of Jamaican national identity became a major focus for the newly-independent island.
It was a tumultuous decade: it witnessed a flowering of popular culture in music and the arts that was to have a lasting international impact; the Rastafarians were on the march, and Jamaicans everywhere were faced by the
question: Who are we?
As Nettleford observes: “Notions of national identity centred for a long time on the fight for self-government . . . But once this phase of the ‘struggle’ was won, the question of national identity shifted to definitions about who comprised this ‘native population’ and, by implication, what constituted the ‘nativeness’ of the society.”
Central to these questions, of course, is the position of black Jamaicans in a society “still enslaved in the social structure born of the plantation system in which things African, including African traits, have been devalued and primacy still given to European values …” As a black-skinned Jamaican himself, this concern with the redemption of black people, their culture, self-belief and history in the remaking of post colonial Jamaica made Nettleford remarkably sensitive to the crucial debates that emerged in the 60s.
At a time when they were vilified openly by most middle class Jamaicans, Nettleford wrote sympathetically about Rastafarians - those who had been (and what a haunting phrase this is) ‘liberated from the obscurity of themselves’. He saw quite clearly how the many questions the movement raised about notions of European superiority over all things African would be appropriated by the wider society in the years ahead if Jamaica was to mature as a viable, democratic country. One only has to look at the way images of Bob Marley have been used to advertise – and symbolise - everything Jamaican in the intervening years to see how prescient his concerns were.
The final essay in this collection – The melody of Europe, the Rhythm of Africa – is where we see Nettleford’s essential humanism most fully expressed. He begins the chapter by referencing a poplar Jamaican proverb:
‘Every John Crow ‘tink him pickney white’. John Crow is the Jamaican name for a vulture, so if someone is described as a John Crow it means they are a scavenger, a low-bred and unlovely person. So the proverb translates as “Even the blackest, lowest scavenging beast thinks his child is white’.
Nettleford’s answer to this devastating ‘psychological downpression’ (as Rastafarians call it) is to propose that society moves towards an equilibrium, where “the dynamic interplay of attraction and repulsion
(creates) a third dimension of beauty that can be textured, rich and life-giving.”
“One thing is certain,” he concludes, “There must be the liberation of the Jamaican black … from the chains of self-contempt, self-doubt and cynicism. Correspondingly, there will have to be the liberation of Jamaican whites, real and functional, from the bondage of a lop-sided creole culture which tends to maintain for them an untenable position of privilege. .. Melody and rhythm will no longer be regarded as mutually exclusive phenomena and best of all, no john crow living will feel the need to ‘tink him pickney white’.

Smooth runnings 5

This is the final episode of our trip round the mineral baths of Jamaica (which I last blogged about on December 17). After a super-long early morning session in the water at Milk River (well, I reasoned, I've built up some immunity now) we set off for Bath. The downside of driving from Milk River to Bath is that you have to go through Kingston: we ended up in the market district downtown surrounded by traders pushing carts and shouting at everyone and everything. The girls were a bit alarmed after the tranquility of Milk River, but we quickly made our escape and re-entered the gentler world of rural Jamaica.
Bath Fountain is a similar building to Milk River, although the setting is far more luxuriant. A left turn out of the town takes you on a twisting, climbing three-kilometre drive in one of the lushest parts of St Thomas. This is real market-garden territory, tucked away in the foothills where the John Crow and Blue Mountain ranges collide. The road leads directly to the hotel, which sits on one side of a gorge where hot and cold springs mingle. Nearby is the second oldest botanical garden in the world. Everywhere things are growing, greening, ripening. The contrast with the parched landscape we had just left could not have been stronger.
And, unlike Milk River, there were many 'guides' at Bath, all anxious to help us 'find' the real fountain (as distinct from the one pumped into the hotel). We decided to live dangerously and go with them. Merrise conducted a series of interviews and selected Anthony, Delroy and David to lead the expedition, which involved crossing a small stone bridge in front of the hotel, walking along the opposite bank and then wading upstream.
The spring is impossible to miss: steam rises from the river where the hot water pours out of cracks in a rock face and a strong smell of sulphur permeates. Delroy and his crew maintain an elaborate arrangement of bamboo pipes that have been suspended from overhanging branches and wedged into the rock face to create showers. Nearby the sulphurous outpourings have worn a natural basin in the rock. Huge boulders with convenient flat surfaces surround the basin. This is Delroy's massage parlour.
I dipped my feet in the water. It is scalding hot - 132 degrees (that's 55C in new money), Delroy assures me. Grabbing my towel he plunges it into the water. Tossing it gingerly from hand to hand he wrings it out, then slaps it around my back. The heat is almost unbearable. "This is the original spring found by a runaway slave in 1609 (the land was sold to the government for development as a spa in 1699, according to Phillippo) He found this place when he was trying to bathe following a severe beating. His sores were cured after a few days," continued Delroy, slapping the towel on again. "Rita Marley was here last week," he added by way of royal seal of approval.
I moved off to inspect the bamboo shower arrangement, leaving the boys to concentrate on chatting up my wife and daughters. An elderly dreadlocks was jigging around under the stream of water. "Yea mon. This water good for rheumatism, gout, every likkle ting. Give thanks." Another, younger rastaman joined us, introduced himself as a dub poet and invited everyone to a dance he is appearing at the following night. Shelley meanwhile has surfaced from Delroy's hot towel routine. "Wow. I can touch my toes now," she says approvingly.
The historian Long writing about Bath Fountain in the 18th-century reports that "some notorious topers have quitted their claret for a while and come here merely for the sake of a little variety in their practice of debauch and enjoy the singular felicity of getting drunk with water." Bath water owes its reputation to the fact that it is thermal, sulphurous, and contains traces of both sodium and calcium. This last point is most important since most sulphur springs contain either calcium or sodium, but rarely both. The old dread is cupping his hands and drinking the scalding water. "It good fe the insides as well," he assured us.
After an hour or so of dancing around under the bamboo pipes and being beaten by hot towels - and a lot of good-natured banter - we decided to head back. The girls, having been paid an inordinate amount of attention by our guides, were positively glowing. I considered the final fee, negotiated by Delroy, of $JA1500 (approx £23 when we vistited) a bargain. "You're a soldier," he said, as the posse jumped into the back of a beat-up pick-up and headed back into town.
I had a quick look around the hotel, courtesy of one of the staff I'd just met under the bamboo pipes. The baths are tiled in the approved manner but more like conventional individual bathrooms. Each bath is run to order. Upstairs there is the obligatory dining room with sombre dark-wood furniture. The bedrooms are big, with high wooden ceilings. Most have balconies, one of which spectacularly overlooks the river.
But staying there would mean coming prepared with mosquito nets and a pioneer spirit. There is no air conditioning and there didn't appear to be any ceiling fans. Instead we spent the night in a small hotel a few miles away on the coast at Whispering Bamboo Cove. It is all the things the hotels in Milk River and Bath are not. It's modern but with a traditional Jamaican feel, light and airy with high wooden ceilings in the bedrooms and air con units that work silently. Outside, the gardens are a delight. Great care goes into arranging flowers every morning in the reception and dining areas. The staff are well trained and helpful, even rustling up a super fish supper late in the evening. "If only this place was just up the road . . ." I found myself saying to Merrise. In the early morning, Shelley and I went for a walk along the adjoining beach and watched some fishermen pulling in their nets.
On the short drive around the east coast to our final destination, Reach Falls, we took stock of the effect of the waters so far. Milk River made our skin feel smoother, we all agreed. Bath Fountain felt more cleansing, probably because of the powerful combination of sulphur and heat. And we looked very healthy. Spots and skin blemishes had miraculously vanished.
"In fact, with a lick of paint and a bit of investment Jamaica would have the most attractive spas in the world," concluded Shelley. Her words echoed Dr Phillippo's from more than a century ago: "It but requires the hand of man and a comparatively small expenditure to make the mountains of Port Royal the goal of the sick and debilitated from all parts of the western hemisphere." Given that Jamaica is seeking to diversify away from the sun-and-sea package stereotype, it's about time they heeded the good doctor's advice.
Reach Falls (http://reachfalls.com/) is one of many waterfalls that cascade through the virgin rainforest in the interior of Jamaica. Dunn's River Falls is probably the best-known but is impossibly crowded most of the time. The YS Falls near Black River (which we could have visited on the way to Milk River if not so pressed for time) is equally stunning, but I had always harboured a desire to see Reach after I learned that it was the location for the steamy love scene in the film Cocktail.
We arrived mid morning when few other tourists were around. After paying the JA$140 entrance fee (£1.00) an official guide gave us a brief introduction to the falls, pointing out where it was safe to dive and what depth the water was. If we wanted to explore further upstream, he would be glad to help us. He would be on duty as a lifeguard when we were ready to get in the water, he added. After the hustle of Bath, this was a much more relaxed experience.
Viewed from above as you descend into the basin below the falls, the water has an almost surreal jade colour. We splashed about happily for an hour or so, virtually on our own, gasping as the icy water cascaded around our heads. Although idyllic, it's hardly the right temperature for a sexy romp. And anyway, the children were watching. Finally we plucked up the courage to jump in off one of the banks. As midday approached and the tour buses from Oche Rios began to pile up in the car park, we reluctantly decided to leave.
As we stood by the car, narcissistically inspecting our super-cleansed, velvet-smooth skin a young man pushing a cart of fresh coconuts called out: "Smooth runnings, mon, smooth runnings!"