Brother Man "Homework"

Roger Mais Biography

          Born on the 11th August, 1905 in Kingston, Jamaica into a "brown" comfortable, respectable, educated middle-class Jamaican family was a boy by the name of Roger Mais.  He spent most of his boyhood in the Blue Mountains region where his father took up farming.  For the earliest part of his childhood he was taught at home and received a thorough grounding in the Bible, whose language and cadences are heard in his work. He entered Calabar High School in Kingston, but made little use of the Cambride certificate he obtained. From the age of 17 to his 30s he earned his living in a variety of jobs, office work, selling insurance, overseer on a banana plantation and as a reporter-photographer and a variety of other journalistic occupations.
          In the early 1930s Mais began writing verse and short stories, and later a number of plays. He was swept up in the riots and workers rebellion of 1938, and thereafter was a wholly committed supporter and activist involved with the PNP and Jamaican nationalism. His essays and short stories, mostly published in Public Opinion, were the literary adjunct to Edna Manley's discovery of an upsurgent anti-colonial Jamaican spirit in sculpture. He published two collections of stories, Face and Other Stories, and And Most of All Man in 1942. He began painting around this time. His critique of Churchill's imperialist ideology, "Now We Know" brought Mais to court and he was sentenced to six months in prison for sedition. His experience fed into his first published novel. He wrote further unpublished novels and plays before finding a publisher for, "The Hills Were Joyful Together" in 1951, followed by Brother Man in 1954 and Back Lightning in 1955.He left Jamaica for the UK in 1952, but whilst in France in 1954 discovered that he had terminal cancer.  He returned to Jamaica, attempted to finish a fourth novel, but died before its completion in 1955.


          Edward Brathwaite states in his introduction that Brother Man is Roger Mais' best novel because it reflects all of the author's varied talents.  Here, good and evil in the Jamaican slums are brought to life.  Others believed that he was interested in symbols stemming almost exclusively from the stories about biblical characters and from Greek mythology.


          Jamaica is the home of "Rastafarianism", a religious movement spurred by the beliefs of famous Jamaican Marcus Gravey and inspired by an Ethopianist reading of the King James Bible.  Rastafarian beliefs are Christian, with a twist.  This movement is a monotheisic, new religious movement that arose in a Christian culture in a culture in Jamaica in the 1930's.
          Ethiopian Prince (Ras) Tafari is at the center of the religion; Rastafarians believed him to be the messiah.  In 1932 Tafari was crowned emperor Haile Selassie.  Selassie himself claimed lineage from the biblical Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
          The members of this religion are known as Rastafarians, or Rastas.  The movement is sometimes referred to as "Rastafarianism", but this term is considered derogatory and offensive by some Rastas who dislike being labelled as an "ism".  Rastafari is not a highly organized religion; it is a movement and an ideology.  Many Rastas say that it is not a "religion" at all, but a "Way of Life".  Today, awareness of the Rastafari movement has spread throughout much of the world, largely through interest generated by reggae music. The most notable example is Jamaican singer/songwriter Bob Marley (died 1981). By 1997, there were around one million Rastafari faithful worldwide.  About five to ten percent of Jamaicans identify themselves as Rastafari.
          Rastafari are monotheists, worshipping a singular God whom they call "Jah". Rastas see "Jah" as being in the form of the Holy Trinity, that is, God being, "God the Father", "God the Son", and the Holy Spirit.. Rastas say that Jah, in the form of the Holy Spirit (incarnate), lives within the human, and for this reason they often refer to themselves as "I and I". Furthermore, "I and I" is used instead of "We", and is used in this way to emphasize the equality between all people, in the recognition that the Holy Spirit within us all makes us essentially one and the same.

Literay Terms

Forms Of Prose Fiction
1. Novel - this is a long work of prose fiction, especially one that is relatively realistic.

2. Novella - this is a work of prose fiction, longer than a short story but shorter than a novel.

3. Short Story - this is a fictional narrative, usually a prose, rarely longer than 30 pages and often much briefer.

Elements Of Prose Fiction
1. Narrative Technique - The style of telling the "story". Concentrate on the order of events and on their detail in evaluating a writer's technique.

2.  Point Of View - this refers to the method of narrating a short story, novel, narrative poem or work of non- fiction.

3. Characterization - this is the presentation of a character whether by direct description, by showing the character in action, or by the presentation of other characters who help to define each other.

4. Setting - the time and place of a story, place, or poem.

5. Theme - the central idea or message of a work, the insight it offers into life. Usually, theme is unstated in fictional works, but in nonfiction, the theme may be directly stated, especially in expository or argumentative writing.

6. Plot - the episodes in a narrative or dramatic work, that is, what happens.

7. Style - the manner of expression, evident not only in the choices of certain words but also in the choice of certain kinds of sentence structure, characters, settings and themes.

Literary Devices
1. Imagery - words and phrases that create vivid sensory experiences for the reader.

2. Symbols - a symbol is a person, place, object or activity that stands for something beyond itself.

3. Irony - the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning/the contrast between what is said and what is meant.

4. Satire - literary technique in which ideas, customs, behaviours or institutions are ridicule for the purpose of improving society.

5. Allusion - reference to a historical or fictional person, place or event with the reader is assumed to be familiar.

Structural Devices
1. Stream Of Consciousness - techniques where the author writes down their thoughtts as fast as they come, typically to create an interior monologue characterized by leaps in syntax and punctuation that trace a character's fragmentary thoughts.

2. Interior Monologue - a passage of writing presenting a character's inner thoughts and emotions in direct, sometimes disjointed or fragmentary manner.

3. Flashback - an account of a conversation, an episode or an event that happened before the beginning of a story.

4. Fore Shadowing - a writer's use of hints or clues that suggest what events will occur later in a narrative.

5. Time Frame - a period during which something takes place or is projected to occur.

6. Motif - a recurring word, phrase, image, object, idea or action in a work of literature.

7. Juxtapostition - using two themes, characters phrase, words, or situations together for comparison, contrast or rhetorical.

Types Of Fiction
Eight Types:

1. Science.
2. Realistic.
3. Mystery.
4. Animal.
5. Folktales.
6. Autobiography.
7. Fantasy.
8. Humorous.

Literary Context
1. Social - the environment of people that surrounds something's creation or intended audience. Social contexts reflects how the people around use and interpret it. The social context influences how something is viewed.

2. Political - political context reflects the environment in which something is produced indicating its purpose or agenda.

3. Historical - this reflects the time in which something takes place or was created and how that influences how you interpret it. In other words, it is the events that took place around something through which you understand that thing.