Roger Mais - Biography

Biography

Roger Mais was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and was educated at Calabar High School.

He worked at various times as a photographer, insurance salesman, and journalist, launching his journalistic career as a contributor to the weekly newspaper Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952, which was associated with the People's National Party. He also wrote several plays, reviews, and short stories for the newspaper Focus and the Jamaica Daily Gleaner, concerning his articles with social injustice and inequality. He used this approach to reach his local audience and to primarily push for a national identity and anti-colonialism.

Mais published over a hundred short stories, most being found in Public Opinion and Focus. Other stories are also collected in Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man, published in the 1940’s. Mais's play, George William Gordon, was also published in the 1940s, focusing on the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. It played an important role in the rehabilitation of the eponymous character, who was in conventional colonial history described as a rebel and traitor, but who would be proclaimed, on the centenary of the rebellion, a national hero.

In 1944, Mais wrote the anti-British satirical tirade "Now We Know," criticizing British colonial rule. It resulted in his incarceration of six months in the Spanish Town Penitentiary. This period of imprisonment was instrumental in the development of his first novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), a work about working-class life in the Kingston of the 1940s. "Why I Love and Leave Jamaica", an article written in 1950, also stirred many emotions. It labeled the bourgeoisie and the "philistines" as shallow and criticized their impacting role on art and culture. In addition, Mais's wrote over thirty stage and radio plays. The plays Masks and Paper Hats and Hurricane were performed in 1943, Atlanta in Calydon in 1950; The Potter's Field was published in Public Opinion (1950) and The First Sacrifice in Focus (1956.

Mais left for England in 1952. He lived in London, then in Paris, and for a time in the south of France. He took an alias, Kingsley Croft, and showcased an art exhibition in Paris. His artwork also appeared on the covers of his novels. In 1953, his novel The Hills Were Joyful Together was published by Jonathan Cape in London. Soon afterwards, Brother Man (1954) was published, a sympathetic exploration of the emergent Rastafari movement. Then the following year, Black Lightning was published. While Mais's first two novels had urban settings, Black Lightning (1955) centred on an artist living in the countryside.

In 1955 Mais was forced to return to Jamaica after falling ill with cancer; he died that same year in Kingston at the age of 50.

His short stories were collected in a volume entitled Listen, The Wind, thirty-two years after his death. Mais's novels have been republished posthumously several times, an indication of his continuing importance to Caribbean literary history. He also had an influence on younger writers of the pre-independence period, notably John Hearne. Many of Mais's manuscripts have been deposited in the library of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica.