 ‘Love
is everything,’ he said, simply. ‘It is what created the world.
It is what made you an’ me, child, brought us into this world.’
And
somehow the words didn’t sound banal, coming from him. He spoke
with such simple directness that it seemed to give a new import to everything
he said. It was as though the common words of everyday usage meant something
more, coming from his lips, than they did in the casual giving and taking
of change in conversation, the way it was with other folks.
— Roger
Mais, Brother Man (27)
Among the many highlights of
Calabash Literary Festval 2004 was the launch of the 50th anniversary
edition of Roger Mais’ Brother Man, the first novel to
depict a Rastafarian sympathetically. Calabash spearheaded the reissue
in association with Macmillan-Caribbean, and the 184-page novel was read
in its entirety Saturday evening by journalist-broadcaster Barbara Blake
Hannah, actress Leonie Forbes, journalist-lecturer John Maxwell and Jamaica’s
Minister of National Security Peter Phillips.
Brother Man is the memorable depiction of a Rasta protagonist
named John Power, a shoemaker, healer and a visionary, and his story was
set during a time when Rastas were pariahs of Jamaican life. It would
not be, for instance, until several years later, in 1960, that the University
of West Indies-Mona dispatched a team of professors to study the “sect,”
which was feared and accused of being anti-Jamaican. Their “University
Report” on the movement suggested things which took great time for
the society to absorb, including the fact that Rastafarians were a complex
and heterogeneous community, not just the stereotypes of ghetto thugs
the bourgeoisie feared them to be. Mais already knew this, and he shows
Power, better known as Brother Man (or, because the novel is sensitively
attuned to speech, “Bra’ Man”), circulating peaceably
in the community, amid the “chorus of people in the lane.”
The novel wears a bold new cover, designed by artist Marcos Leme Lopes,
who depicts a black Christ-like Rasta wearing a crown of thorns set against
a lurid red backdrop.
“That’s something we want to do more of in the future, which
is restore to publication classic books of Jamaica and the Caribbean,”
said Channer. “Largely through the efforts of Kwame Dawes, we developed
a relationship with Macmillan-Caribbean.”
The novel was received by the Calabash audience warmly, even though the
reading of it stretched well beyond the average length of time for a literary
reading or conference. Fifty years after the original publication, despite
the romanticized characterization and the predictability of its New Testament
typology, Mais’ prose still has the power to move, and the audience
applauded at moments of tension in the text – at the conclusion
of a sexually charged scene with Brother Man and his lover and, later,
at a moment of his betrayal, when “Brother Man stood looking on
like a man in a trance.”
Kwame Dawes’ energies as a writer have been set into motion from
many sources, one of them unquestionably being Roger Mais. Not only was
Dawes’ play One Love (2001) inspired by Brother Man,
Mais’ example as a literary critic is complementary to Dawes’
own criticism, which is most comprehensively expressed in Natural
Mysticism: Toward a New Reggae Aesthetic in Caribbean Literature.
In it, Dawes describes how the language and concepts of reggae illustrate
(and indeed interact with) the lives of Jamaicans socially, intellectually
and linguistically; a ghetto song may illustrate the complexities of the
artist in the community more candidly than a piece of literature from
the same period. Thus it is with ease and coherence that in a single chapter
Dawes can, for instance, penetrate the complexities of the music of Don
Drummond, the poetry of Mervyn Morris and the fiction of Roger Mais. Until
the advent of reggae, he explains, the writers with nationalism in their
hearts and manuscripts used the literary forms of colonial tradition,
which left little room for the voice of the working class and peasant
majority population, many of whom don’t speak or think in the Queen’s
English.
Mais, who died in 1955, prefigures Dawes’ critical stance. In an
essay of pith and passion, Mais issues a call for a “hell-broth
of revolt in Jamaican letters” to destabilize the prevailing and
stodgy adherence to tradition. He says his peers are over-respectful of
their literary masters. “If you would only wake up for long enough
[…] you would realize that these men in their day were the last
syllable in modernity! Chaucer broke new ground and a lot of traditions,
so did Milton, so did Shakespeare,” he writes, and the challenge
becomes a rebuke. “You are disciples in the letter only, not the
spirit. Chaucer would have laughed in his beard to watch you mimicking
him, if he lived today” (183).
In the late 1960s, Barbadian man of letters Kamau Brathwaite took part
in a critical debate about Caribbean aesthetics, out of which he produced
the enduring essays about “Jazz and the West Indian novel”
in which he argued that jazz invokes a way of seeing which perfectly befits
the Caribbean community. Brathwaite called Brother Man an imperfect
yet the most successful example of the jazz novels he had read. In it,
“the violence is a kind of communal purgation. It involves the entire
community of the novel, finally moving beyond the apparent chaos it brings,
to that revelation of wholeness that one is aware of at the end of a successful
jazz improvisation” (342).
It was with this spirit that Calabash invited Roger Mais and reintroduced
Brother Man.
Dawes writes in the introduction to the anniversary edition, “[Mais]
became a visionary who was in fact predicting the arrival of reggae, of
Bob Marley, of Peter Tosh, of Don Drummond, of The Twelve Tribes of Israel,
of Ites Green and Gold and of the current marketing of Jamaican society
on Jamaica Tourist Board ads that sing in canned melodious notes the music
of Bob Marley. But what Mais has preserved for us is the purer version
of Rasta—Rasta as devotional force, Rasta as the voice of peace
and love, Rasta as the force that makes Jamaicans see Africa with hope,
Rasta as Christ-like, Rasta as something deeply rooted in the Jamaican
capacity for survival” (9-10).
See www.macmillan-caribbean.com.
Works Cited
Brathwaite, Kamau. “Jazz
and the West Indian Novel, I, II and III.” The Routledge Reader
in Caribbean Literature. Edited by Allison Donnell and Sarah Lewis Welsh.
New York: Routledge, 1996. 336-343.
Dawes, Kwame. Natural Mysticism: Toward
a New Reggae Aesthetic in Caribbean Literature. Leeds, England: Peepal
Tree, 1999.
Mais, Roger. “Where the
Roots Lie.” The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. Edited
by Allison Donnell and Sarah Lewis Welsh. New York: Routledge, 1996. 182-184.
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