Ghetto poverty, gangland shootings, police brutality. Jamaica’s newspapers serve up a daily menu of atrocities and tragedies. Rival gangs and police settle turf disputes and vendettas without ceremony. Almost all of this takes place in a narrowly defined area of the capital city, the notorious “downtown” areas of West Kingston. Outside such places as Jones Town or Tivoli Gardens, Jamaica’s crime rate is unremarkable and unlikely to affect the law-abiding citizen or visitor, but inside these inner-city hot spots a culture of casual violence holds sway.
It was, it seems, ever thus. Almost half a century ago, a novel entitled The Hills Were Joyful Together by the Jamaican writer Roger Mais shocked its readership with a frank and uncompromising depiction of life – and death – in the slums of West Kingston. The author intended, he said, “to give the world a true picture of the real Jamaica and the dreadful conditions of the working class.” This reality took the form of a “yard” or slum tenement and the poverty-stricken and brutal daily existence of those condemned to live there.
It was not the first attempt by a Caribbean writer to represent the inner -city deprivation which rapid and uncontrolled urbanization had created in the slums of Kingston and other island capitals from the beginning of the twentieth century. Rural poverty, improved communications, the mirage of well-paid work and bright lights, had drawn hundreds of thousands of country dwellers into already overcrowded tenements and shanty towns, putting intolerable pressures on local services.
The wave of unrest that swept through the region in the 1930s was a warning of things to come. Writers such as Alfred Mendes (Black Fauns, 1935) and C. L. R. James (Minty Alley, 1936) had documented the phenomenon of urban discontent, bur neither with the tragic intensity of Mais. His work, in the words of Kamau Braithwaite, was the English-speaking Caribbean’s first “ghetto-novel”.
Roger Mais was to become an unashamedly political observer of the social tensions unleashed by rampant urbanization and poverty. Born in 1905 into a middle-class light-skinned Jamaican family, he had come to politics relatively late, having spent his early post-school years moving restlessly from job to job as if in search of a raison d’ etre. His initial attempts at writing and journalism took place while he worked as an education officer, an insurance salesman, a banana plantation overseer and a horticulturist.
It was the riots of 1938 which seemed to galvanize Mais and give him a fresh direction. That same year the nationalist People’s National Party was formed, and he immediately gave it his support in its criticism of British colonial policy and its quest for self-government. A diatribe against the British colonial authorities, entitled Now We Know, earned Mais a six month prison term in 1944, an experience that was to feature large in his fiction.
The Hills Were Joyful Together (The title is taken from the words of a psalm) is, on one level, an explicit critique of the neglect and repression that Mais ascribes to the colonial authorities. In the “yard”, a collection of tin and wood- shacks perched above a gully, government and social services are conspicuous purely by the absence. Disease and ignorance are rife Law and order takes the form of a vengeful and sadistic police force, a harsh prison regime and the sinister presence of the gallows. The community which Mais describes is largely cut adrift from mainstream society and forced to live by its own rough justice. Violence is thus a way of life, ranging from the knife-fighting of delinquent adolescents to the gruesome murders of several central characters.
On another level, however, Mais’s fiction goes beyond straightforward social criticism and seems to suggest a fundamentally tragic view of the human condition. The characters who inhabit his slum are somehow the victims of forces beyond their control, plagued by self-destructive impulses or external curses. With all the dreadful predictability of classical tragedy, they are cast down by a malign destiny that seems determined to punish the virtuous as much as the guilty.
Amidst the filth and promiscuity of the community, one loyal and loving couple seem to symbolize a tenuous hope, but they are struck down as remorselessly as the villains who surround them. Neither God nor any other redeeming agent intercedes on behalf of Mais’s fragile characters; his is a world of arbitrary and unforgiving fate.
If all the above makes reading the novel an unattractive prospect, this would be to overlook the technical mastery and sheer poetry of much of Mais’s writing. To be sure, his vision is a tragic one, but the prose he uses to convey it contains a sort of lyrical alchemy that creates a certain beauty out of squalor:
The sun had rolled up high and hot in the cloudless metallic sky that was the colour of new corrugated iron roofing; the light seemed to split up into a thousand flaky fragments as it flowed over the oily leaves of the lime tree; past that, and the shadow of the shacks, it lay like a starched white sheet across the rectangular yard.
The wind made a shushing sound going through the mango tree, lifted the loose dust that covered the worn bricks and scattered sharp grit on the iron roofs of the shacks like dropping rain.
Mais’s lyricism is accompanied by an almost cinematic technique of shifting perspectives and parallel plot lines, which allows him to deal with a number of separate characters and stories at the same time. At the same time, the “yard” is the central space within which several unfolding dramas are played out, counterposed against the other main locale in the novel – the Kingston penitentiary. The result is a satisfying symmetry of structure in which Mais is able to draw contrasts or bring subplots together as the novel progresses.
The Hills Were Joyful Together appeared in 1953, two years before Mais’s premature death from cancer. Mais’s work is important and compelling – and contributed significantly to the formation of a distinctive and truthful Caribbean voice.
James Ferguson is the author of The Traveller’s Literary Companion to the Caribbean (In Print/Passport Books/lan Randle Publishers)
