KIM ROBINSON WALCOTT


 She is a good deal looked up to by her neighbours, and indeed, from their point
 of view and her own, is a most respectable and prosperous woman. Even the
 rigid Josiah is proud of his sister's success in life, and admits that, though at
 one time he had doubts about her, she is now a credit to the family. For my
 part, I do not presume to offer an opinion on such a delicate question. (204)

 All of these (usually short-lived) efforts at portraying black protagonists
focus on female characters. One cannot help but wonder whether black
maleness is too threatening, too overwhelming, to be considered by these
white writers.
 The second novel of the Portuguese Trinidadian writer Alfred Mendes,
Black Fauns 13(1935), follows this pattern. While his first novel, Pitch Lake
(1934), is clearly semi-autobiographical and focuses on the Portuguese
Trinidadian element, Black Fauns examines in great detail the lives of the
black inhabitants all female of a barrack-yard. Mendes's desire for
verisimilitude led him to live for an extended period in a barrack-yard; and
his work is similar to Durie's in terms of its ethnographic leanings.14 However,
there is no trace of condescension here; on the contrary, one finds a humble
respect for the resilient working-class women that are featured. Black Fauns
and Mendes's short stories demonstrate an ideological commitment to
foregrounding the black experience, a realisation by Mendes that "We were
faced with the task of writing stories ... which would have to be new and to
be recognized, to some extent, as being Negro stories."15
 This conscious political decision by Mendes and his Beacon partners to
foreground blackness presages the development, some thirty years later, of
a body of thinking which privileges those works which themselves privilege
the black masses in the construction of a West Indian canon. Such a decision
was clearly made a few years later by Roger Mais who although he was not
white was nevertheless a member of the ruling class, a "gentleman," an
"aristocrat" as John Hearne terms it. 16 According to Hearne, Mais realized
during the 1938 riots in Jamaica "that his position, the position of any
contemporary man whose work might endure, was with the working class of
the world, and with their desires and with their present agony."17 Hearne
relates elsewhere that this decision was greeted with concern by his peers:
"he was a sort of renegade ... what he had already begun to write did not fit


13 Alfred Mendes, Black Fauns (1935; London/Port of Spain: New Beacon Books, 1984).
14 Alfred Mendes, Pitch Lake (1934; London/Port of Spain: New Beacon Books, 1980).
15 Alfred Mendes, quoted by Michele Levy in her introduction to Mendes' collection
of short stories Pablo's Fandango (Harlow: Longman/ Kingston: Carlong/ Port of
Spain: Lexicon, 1997) vi.
16 John Hearne, "Roger Mais: Part of a Life", unpublished, incomplete manuscript,
no date, accessed courtesy of the Hearne family.
17 John Hearne, "Roger Mais: A Personal Memoir" Bim 6. 23 (1995): 147-8.