BIOGRAPHY OF ROGER MAIS

Roger Mais was on August 11, 1905 in Kingston, Jamaica and died on June 21, 1955in his birth land. He was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. By 1951, Mais had won ten first prizes in West Indian literary competitions. His integral role in the development of political and cultural nationalism is evidenced in his being awarded the high honor of the Order of Jamaica in 1978.

Mais launched his career as a journalist and contributor for 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, focusing his articles on 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 has published over a hundred short stories, where most can be 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. His short stories were collected in a volume entitled Listen and The Wind, thirty-two years after his death. Mais 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.

The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953) is written in the style of a narrative. It takes place in a "yard" consisting of individuals and families living in a confinement of shacks shaped squarely, leaving a yard in the center. In this yard, daily and public life of the tenement unfolds. Mais took inspiration from Trinidadian C.L.R James's novels Minty Alley and Triumph, which illustrated "yard" life. The Hills Were Joyful Together is basically a depiction of slum life, portraying the upset of poverty in these yards. Mais claimed that he was "concerned with setting down objectively the hopes, fears, and frustrations of these people". He wanted the novel to be "essentially realistic, even to the point of seeming violent, rude, expletive, functional, primitive and raw".