Roger Mais

Roger Mais was born on the eleventh of August 1905 in Kingston, Jamaica, into a light-skinned, well-to-do middle-class family. His father, Eustace Mais, was a druggist — a chemist and pharmacist — and his mother, Anna Mais, was a schoolteacher. The household was devoutly Christian, and the children were raised on the English classics, Christian liturgy, and hymns. After his infancy the family moved to the Blue Mountains, where the young Mais grew up on a coffee farm and absorbed, alongside his formal education, the Creole language, songs, tales, and proverbs of the Afro-Jamaican peasantry that would later fill his fiction.

As a young man Mais turned his hand to many trades — photographer, insurance salesman, painter, and above all journalist. From the late 1930s he wrote for the Daily Gleaner and, crucially, for the weekly Public Opinion, the paper aligned with Norman Manley's People's National Party. A Fabian socialist and cultural nationalist, he poured himself into the ferment of Jamaican self-determination, producing poems, short stories, and some forty plays for stage and radio.

In 1944, at the height of the war, Mais published the essay "Now We Know," a fierce denunciation of Winston Churchill's insistence that victory would not dissolve the British Empire. For this act of conscience he was tried, convicted, and imprisoned for six months for sedition under colonial law — an ordeal that only sharpened his art. His three landmark novels followed in swift succession: The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), a searing portrait of Kingston's yards; Brother Man (1954), a compassionate early rendering of the Rastafarian movement; and Black Lightning (1955).

Having gone to Europe in 1952 to live in London, Paris, and the south of France, Mais was forced home by illness and died of cancer in Kingston in 1955, not yet fifty. In 1968 he was posthumously awarded Jamaica's Musgrave Gold Medal. We honor Roger Mais, who gave the Jamaican yard and the Jamaican soul their voice, and who paid for his people's dignity with his own liberty.