The Hills Were Joyful Together
First edition cover
AuthorRoger Mais
Cover artistRoger Mais
CountryUnited Kingdom[1]
LanguageEnglish
Subjectpoverty, colonialism, crime, racism
GenreNovel, realism, social realism[2]
Set inJamaica, early 1940s
PublisherJonathan Cape
Publication date
1953
Media typePrint: hardback
Pages288
ISBN978-0435985868 (1981 Pearson Education reprint)
819.8
LC ClassPR9265.9 .M3 H5
Preceded byFace and Other Stories 
Followed byBrother Man 

The Hills Were Joyful Together is a 1953 novel by Jamaican author Roger Mais.[3][4][5][6]

Plot

In Jamaica during the Second World War, Surjue is persuaded to take part in a robbery and is imprisoned.[7]

Reception

Mais said that the intention of his novel was "to give the world a true picture of the real Jamaica and the dreadful condition of the working classes."[8]

In Imagination, Emblems, and Expressions: Essays on Latin American, Caribbean, and Continental Culture and Identity (1993), Margaret K. Bass writes that Mais notes the depiction of violence, pain and suffering in the book, but says "Mais does not intend to portray the baseness of the lower class. Mais shows us, rather, that the people in the lower class are victims, and that poverty can reduce the human to the inhuman. Violence [...] gives an otherwise powerless people a temporary feeling of control over the particular life or a particular situation."[9]

In 2022, The Hills Were Joyful Together was included on the Big Jubilee Read, a list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors produced to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee.[10][11]

References

  1. ^ Sewell, Sharon C. (16 April 2010). Decolonization and the Other: The Case of the British West Indies. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 9781443821735 – via Google Books.
  2. ^ "Roger Mais – The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953) | Soul Jazz Records". soundsoftheuniverse.com.
  3. ^ Brown, Lloyd W. (2016). "Mais, Roger". In Walsh, William (ed.). Commonwealth Literature. Macmillan. p. 151. ISBN 978-0333283578 – via Google Books.
  4. ^ Brown, J. Dillon (20 April 2013). Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel. University of Virginia Press. ISBN 9780813933948 – via Google Books.
  5. ^ Moga, Shadrack A. (20 April 1991). The vision of Roger Mais: An investigation into the hills were joyful together and brother man (MA). University of Nairobi – via erepository.uonbi.ac.ke.
  6. ^ Howard, David (20 April 2005). Kingston: A Cultural and Literary History. Signal Books. ISBN 9781902669373 – via Google Books.
  7. ^ "The Hills Were Joyful Together | Peepal Tree Press". www.peepaltreepress.com.
  8. ^ RAMCHAND, KENNETH (1969). "Literature & Society: The Case of Roger Mais". Caribbean Quarterly. 15 (4): 23–30. doi:10.1080/00086495.1969.11829027. JSTOR 40653093 – via JSTOR.
  9. ^ Bass, Margaret K. (1993). "Race, class and gender in four West Indian novels: Pitch Lake, Corentyne thunder, The Hills Were Joyful Together, Wide Sargasso Sea". In Ryan-Ranson, Helen (ed.). Imagination, Emblems, and Expressions: Essays on Latin American, Caribbean, and Continental Culture and Identity. Popular Press. pp. 127–137. ISBN 9780879725815 – via Google Books.
  10. ^ "The God of Small Things to Shuggie Bain: the Queen's jubilee book list". the Guardian. 18 April 2022.
  11. ^ "BBC Arts - BBC Arts - The Big Jubilee Read: Books from 1952 to 1961". BBC.


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