Brother Man's Asceticism

Abstract

on 13 june 1951, front page of Jamaica's Daily Gleaner carried headlines about brutal murder of man on Kingston's Palisadoes Road, and stabbing and rape of his companion, who survived to describe their assailant as a bearded man. 'Rasta Man' Charged with Palisadoes Murder, blared front page on next day, 14 June, in an immediate association of bearded men, Rastafari, and criminality. Public outrage was reflected in furious letters to editor in days that followed, calling for the members of that bearded cult who style themselves Ras Tafarites and claim some kinship with Abyssinia to be stamped out and moved from their places of abode in Wareika Hills, Palisadoes, and Foreshore Road areas, to prison camps which should be established to discipline them.1 Many arrests, evictions, and other forms of persecution followed this incident. Three years later, Roger Mais published novel Brother Man.7- At critical point in novel, man and woman are attacked on Palisadoes Road, and surviving woman says that her attacker is bearded, triggering harassment of bearded men including John Powers, central character. Although Mais's novel makes clear that John Power is not Rastafarian, Mais clearly draws on nascent movement's iconography and worldview. I am interested in way that this identification of persecuted group with modesty, renunciation, and reflection raises questions about efficacy of these qualities in world of desire and temptation, decisive action, and expediency.A novelist, short story writer, playwright, and painter, Roger Mais was also an outspoken journalist who was imprisoned in Spanish Town Penitentiary for sedition in 1944 for his Public Opinion article Now We Know, in which he criticised Winston Churchill for encouraging colonial subjects to support empire during wartime, while tacitly supporting their continuing colonial domination. Brother Man is second of Mais's three novels (all published between 1953 and 1955), and it can be read as classic example of nationalist fiction of period, with its exploration of working-class life. Such fiction sometimes features central middle-class character (usually male) both drawn to and repelled by values of working-class community in which he finds himself, and vitality of this community is key to delineation of 'authentic' characteristics of an emerging nation. In Brother Man, readers are set down squarely in west or central Kingston lane, without mediating middle- or upper-class consciousness. Commentators have seen in novel's utilisation of biblical language and imagery, and its episodic sequences of trios, duets, and chorus, Mais's search for modern rhetorical and moral discourses in context of massive demographic shift from rural to urban during this period; powerful vehicle for fashioning of protest; and prescient statement of Rastafari's enduring significance to both nation that would spurn and claim it, and global market that would trivialise it.3Interestingly, in same way that, as we will see, John Powers is and is not Rastafarian, novel has been read in two potentially opposing directions. It grounds an African diasporic project of aesthetics in Americas, as jazz novel where reggae and calypso did not yet, in early 1960s, suffice as sophisticated discourses of protest, according to Kamau Brathwaite; whereas George Lamming uses Brother Man to argue that he and Mais were less interested in diasporic discourses of 1950s such as Negritude (the novel does not invoke Africa, for example), than in recognition and humanism more broadly defined.4 In retrospect we could say that even if we would conclude that Mais does not intend to place working-class Jamaican colonial subjects at service of an alternative black universalism (which is one reading of project of Negritude), fact that their humanity is taken for granted in world of novel calls into question discourses of civilisation, humanism and universalism which would dare to position them as marginal. …