John Hearne
John Hearne (1926-1994) was a significant figure in postcolonial Caribbean literature, known for his exploration of complex social and political issues in Jamaica. Born in Montreal to Jamaican parents, he spent his formative years in Jamaica before serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. After the war, he pursued higher education in history in the UK, where he began to establish himself as a writer. Hearne’s literary reputation largely stems from his first novel, *Voices Under the Window* (1955), which delves into themes of racial identity and personal failure through the lens of a mixed-blood protagonist. His subsequent works, primarily set on the fictional Caribbean island of Cayuna, reflect a deep engagement with the political and cultural changes in Jamaica during its transition to self-government.
Throughout his career, Hearne’s writings conveyed a growing sense of pessimism about societal changes, focusing on moral dilemmas faced by his characters amid the challenges of materialism and corruption. In addition to his novels, he also collaborated on political thrillers under a pseudonym, revealing his interest in contemporary political issues. His later work, *The Sure Salvation* (1987), offers a critical perspective on the legacy of slavery. Hearne’s body of work captures the struggles of individuals navigating a rapidly evolving cultural landscape, solidifying his status as an important voice in Caribbean literature. He spent much of his later life as a professor at the University of the West Indies, where he continued to influence students and writers until his death.
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Subject Terms
John Hearne
Writer
- Born: February 4, 1926
- Birthplace: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Died: December 12, 1994
- Place of death: Stony Hill, Jamaica
Biography
John Hearne’s first twenty years reflect a distinctly multicultural experience. Although born on February 4, 1926, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to Jamaican parents, Hearne, a white man, grew up in Jamaica. He briefly attended Jamaica College before returning to Canada to join the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II; he was deployed in the European theater as a gunner from 1943 until 1946. After his discharge, Hearne completed his M.A. in history at Edinburgh University in Scotland, and then studied briefly at the University of London. For most of the 1950’s, when he would do his most notable writing, Hearne lived and taught in London and Paris before returning to Jamaica in 1962. In Jamaica, he accepted an appointment at the University of West Indies in Mona, which he maintained until his death nearly thirty years later.
Hearne’s reputation rests largely on his first work, Voices Under the Window (1955), an experimental confessional novel in which a mixed-blood (or “brown”) lawyer, attacked while trying to help a black child during a street riot in Jamaica, lays dying and looks back over his life. He perceives that he has failed as a lawyer, a community leader, a lover, and ultimately as a man, largely because, despite his own life of privilege, he has struggled over his racial makeup. Over the next five years, Hearne completed four novels, each set in the fictional Caribbean island of Cayuna, in which he explored a variety of specifically political and cultural issues that were shaping the emerging nation of Jamaica even as it negotiated the difficult movement into self-government. Although his interests maintained a distinctly political and cultural perspective, Hearne used characters, often of mixed-blood ancestry, who are caught in moral and ethical dilemmas and come to suffer a sense of deep personal betrayal caused by the island’s tectonic social, economic, and political changes. Hearne’s view of Jamaica’s prospects grew dimmer; his novels are marked by a growing pessimism over the preservation of individual moral integrity and the fragile worth of personal commitment amid massive social changes and a steadily growing embrace of materialism and corruption. He offered only the redemption of love and family as solace.
For nearly twenty years from the mid-1960’s, Hearne devoted his attention to his university work and to increasingly conservative political commentaries. However, beginning in 1969, he and Jamaican journalist and entrepreneur Morris Cargill published three modestly successful island political spy thrillers under the joint pseudonym John Morris. In 1987, Hearne published The Sure Salvation, a novel he had first drafted but set aside in the early 1960’s. Set aboard a slave ship en route to a fictitious British South American possession in 1860, The Sure Salvation is an often disturbing look into the psychology and motivations of the slave traffickers who, long after slave trading is illegal, pursue the inhumane endeavor, victims themselves of larger economic inequities.
Hearne would not publish again; he died on December 12, 1994, in Stony Hill, Jamaica. In a body of political and social fiction that grew increasingly dark, Hearne, a major voice in postcolonial Caribbean literature, tested the difficult moral negotiations inevitable as his characters confront rapidly changing cultural environments.