Roger Mais Biography

Roger Mais was born on 11 August 1905 in Kingston, Jamaica, into a "brown," respectable, middle-range-landowning, middle-class family and came to maturity in the 1930s, when these inherited categories were coming under pressure due to the sociopolitical changes of the time. That Mais had not only the artistic gift but made the decision to develop that gift into a life of letters was, at the time he began writing, still unusual for a West Indian, let alone a brown, middle-class man. It involved him in learning about the black underclass with the kind of innocent but informed creative attention that made it possible to report back accurately in the three novels that were published toward the sudden end of his short life (he died of cancer at age forty-nine). It also involved him in the kind of political commitment and cultural reorientation that not only inform the novels but caused him literally to change sides during the workers' antihardship and anticolonial uprisings of 1938, when, in the middle of his going to enlist as an antiriot special constable, he joined the freedom fighters instead. This commitment brought him to write the anti-British satirical tirade "Now We Know"(1944), which resulted in his suffering six months of imprisonment in the Spanish Town Penitentiary. Above all, this conversion/commitment to the black, underprivileged majority of his country hooked Mais, especially as a creative writer, into a search for a nativist aesthetic, which he pursued until the day he died.

Mais began as a journalist and contributor of short stories, plays, reviews, and "think pieces" for the left-wing political/cultural journal Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952, when he left Jamaica soon after he learned that The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), his first published novel, had been accepted by Jonathan Cape in London. In quick succession there followed Brother Man (1954) and Black Lightning (1955), the three novels forming a kind of trilogy. They were collected in one volume in 1966.

Mais had gone to Europe--London, Paris, and the south of France--not to "find" but to fulfill himself. He hired a literary agent, assumed a nom de plume (Kingsley Croft), and presented an art exhibition in Paris under the patronage of Richard Wright and André Breton (there had been earlier exhibitions of Mais's work in Jamaica); his publishers used his illustrations in and on the covers of the first editions of his three novels.

Mais's lasting contribution to Caribbean literature lies in those novels and, from an aesthetic point of view, in some of the large quantity of unpublished material that now forms the Roger Mais Special Collection at the University of the West Indies Library at Mona, Jamaica.

The Hills Were Joyful Together is the first Jamaican "yard" novel: several families and individuals rent rooms in a collection of ramshackle houses (shacks) enclosed in a characteristic African compoundlike space, the houses forming a square with a yard in the middle, a kind of theater where the public life of the tenement takes place. The Trinidadian writers C. L. R. James and Alfred Mendes had already written about such yards a generation before but not with Mais's sense of duality and drama.

In Brother Man Mais makes a dramatic change from his earlier style of narrative reportage with chorus effects into a remarkably structured "jazz novel" (as Edward Kamau Brathwaite calls it in his introduction to the 1974 Heinemann edition of Brother Man), where words are "notes" that develop into riffs, themes, and "choruses," themselves part of a call/response design based on the aesthetic principle of solo/duo/trio improvisations, with a return, at the end of each "chorus," to the basic group/ensemble/community.

In addition Mais was the first Jamaican writer to bring into the novel the powerful subterranean influence of Rastafarianism, the Jamaican religious and cultural phenomenon that first appeared in the 1930s, part of the anticolonial push for a new Jamaica--a new African Jamaica. The Rastas claimed descent from the "Lion of Judah" and marked their "birth" as being simultaneous with Prince Ras Tafari's ascension to the Ethiopian throne, when he was renamed Emperor Haile Selassie I. Brother Man, the protagonist of the novel, is not the "dread" figure that some Rastafarians would soon become (as in Orlando Patterson's The Children of Sisyphus, 1964) but rather a benign Christ figure, in keeping with Mais's own aesthetic iconography--the quest for transcendent "mythopoets" in whom individualism would be eventually subsumed.

In Mais's last published novel, Black Lightning, the mythopoetic idea is larger than ever, represented by Jake, the blacksmith and secret sculptor, and even more so by the "Samson" he is carving out of a huge block of mahogany. But the Gnostic nature of his enterprise is signaled by the relative lack of detail about the act of carving and its inevitable collapse; he chops it up for firewood.

Most critics and commentators believe Mais was interested in symbols stemming almost exclusively from the stories about biblical characters (Samson, David and Bathsheba, Joshua, Judas, and Lazarus) and from Greek mythology (Zeus, Apollo, and Aulis). But the reinterpretation of the iconography of Brother Man as "jazz" and Rastafarian--involving the search for a New World aesthetic and form of expression--is fruitful. It has in turn led to a reinterpretation of Black Lightning as a search for ancestral (African) symbolism, which (because of his class and education) Mais might not have know much about but which (because of his nativity commitment) he felt he ought to explore. And this exploration, surely, must have been influenced by the long tradition of Jamaican black consciousness, mediated through the Bible and Greek mythology and the affinity of these with African/ancestral beliefs.

In Black Lightning the title term, though widely used among contemporary Rastas to mean "black transcendence," is not used by Mais in the Rastafarian sense but in the traditional African sense of the "negative--or visual imprint--of the (blinding face of god." The god in this case is Shango, orisha (god) of thunder and lightning, who, in Yoruba tradition, is a blacksmith and brother of Ogun (also a blacksmith and sculptor). According to legend, sometimes Shango is mistaken for Jakuta, the stone thrower.

Mais's choice of a blacksmith and carver deeply involved with thunder and lightning and called Jake thus seems meaningful. One can add to this matrix the continuing Shango legend that his wife, Oya, goddess of the Niger, was said to have had such an influence over him that he could do nothing without her--which is apparently the case with Jake's wife, Estella, or so she says. Shango was a mortal king who dared to become a god. Like Jake and the legendary Prometheus, Shango wanted the "lightning," in other words to see God's face, this desire being evidence of what Wole Soyinka has called Shango's "destructive egotism." Who in Black Lightning is more destructively egotistical than Jake"

The novel fails, though, because Mais, like Jake, abandoned an enterprise (Africanism) that he was not fundamentally happy with, that he did not or could not at that time properly understand. But the attempt helps readers recognize that, though it failed, it was part of a theme, judging from the Mais archives, with which he was deeply involved (the combination of biblical, Greek, Gnostic, agnostic, and African symbols in Jamaican culture).

All Mais's published novels had been written before he left Jamaica for Europe, and they represent the mature and optimistic phase of his career. He began his ancestral research with the European roots of Jamaican culture but developed an increasing awareness that Africa had to be included to make sense of his country's plural society. Black Lightning was the result.

As well as the ancestral, he was interested in the creole, the political reconstructionism of the 1930s, and the sociocultural problems of the "yards." There was a need for a nativist aesthetic. Many at that time were asking and writing about West Indian culture, and by 1948 there was the University of the West Indies; there was also renewed talk of self-government and the new, exciting prospect of a West Indian federation; and writers, artists, and intellectuals from the region were beginning to reflect this optimistic future and to search for forms to give it a local face. The Hills Were Joyful Together and Brother Man are Mais's contribution to this movement. Brother Man, certainly, is a major contribution to a nativist aesthetic.

When he left for London, Roger Mais was probably hoping to consolidate his achievements. Like the other West Indian novelists then gathering in London, he must have been hoping to extend his concerns into the cosmopolitan and the international. His untimely death from cancer (in Jamaica in 1955) ended those aspirations.