Roger Mais

Roger Mais was born on the eleventh of August 1905 at Kingston, Jamaica, the second of eight children of Eustace Mais — a chemist and pharmacist — and Anna Mais, a Wesleyan Methodist Sunday-school teacher. The Mais household was Black middle-class; his father owned a pharmacy on East Queen Street. He was educated at the Calabar High School at Kingston through 1921 and worked across his twenties in the family pharmacy, in the Jamaican civil service as a magistrate's clerk, and on a series of failed agricultural ventures in the Saint Andrew foothills.

He turned to journalism around 1932 and joined the Public Opinion weekly newspaper of the early Jamaican left under O. T. Fairclough. He published in the Public Opinion of the eleventh of July 1944 the polemic essay Now We Know — a sustained critique of Winston Churchill's recently published statements that the Atlantic Charter did not apply to Britain's colonial possessions. The Jamaican colonial authorities prosecuted him under the sedition provisions of the Defence Regulations. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to six months' hard labour at the Spanish Town penitentiary. The imprisonment — and the prison conditions he witnessed at Spanish Town — produced the documentary basis of the novel he would publish a decade later.

He produced three novels in the four years before his death: The Hills Were Joyful Together of 1953, Brother Man of 1954, and Black Lightning of 1955. The Hills Were Joyful Together — set in the tenement yards of West Kingston and structured to follow a single yard across one extended summer — is now regarded as one of the founding works of the post-war Anglo-Caribbean urban-realist tradition. Brother Man — set in the same West Kingston tenements and centred on the figure of a Rastafarian carpenter named John Power — was the first novel in any language to take a Rastafarian protagonist seriously as a literary subject.

He was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1954 while at work on Black Lightning. He died at Kingston on the twenty-first of June 1955, at forty-nine.

He is honored here as the chronicler of the Kingston tenement yard.