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.’
