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’.