Mais Oui Stories … How did Mais Oui Villa get its name? What does Mais Oui mean? And Other Such Questions.

The villa opened in 2000 and over all these years, we often get asked some version of the questions, “How do you pronounce the name?” and then, “Why did you name the villa Mais Oui?”

As with nearly everything with the Mais Oui Villa project, there is a story, the extent to which it is humorous depends on the passage of time.

Jamaicans love good stories so here’s ours.

Rewind 20 years before we built the villa. I’m in the 10th grade doing a 4-year French course in 2 years.

Spanish was easy for me so my teachers in their wisdom thought it was a wonderful opportunity for me to study French. Back then, you couldn’t choose to do French. You had to be chosen to do French. So we “French” girls were special, or so we felt anyway.

Except for me, it was torture, pure unadulterated torture.

I was in love with the idea of speaking more languages but French was “licking me for six”, as we say in Jamaica. My butt was getting whipped and handed to me raw!

And during that era, there was no such thing as dropping out of a class, especially when everyone branded you as “gifted”. So the gauntlet was down.

I could read and write French well but not for all the ackee trees in Jamaica could I speak it to that level. It was the accent I could not master.

Realizing my deficiency and my lack of confidence in the language, my French teacher would often call on me to read aloud in class.

One week she called on me three mornings in a row. The fourth morning, I thought for sure that she wouldn’t call on me again.

Well, you guessed it.

I had three options – read, pee, or faint.

I read.

I had what can best be described as an out of body experience as I heard myself mispronouncing, “Comme ci comme ça”, an expression known by even the average Joe on the street. (I voiced it as “Come see come ka.”)

I remember very little of what transpired next and from what they tell me, it was a good thing. God was merciful.

Eventually, the course ended. I didn’t do stellar but I survived and put those two years of French language misery behind me.

Fast forward to 1999, the villa is being built. We need a name.

All villas in Jamaica have names. It’s not considered pretentious, actually more cultural. How else would you know one villa from the next?

We knew we wanted a memorable name, ideally something cute and catchy.

Many of the names that we came up with were already taken. Thank goodness for the then-fledgling internet. Through that mechanism and the contributions of many others around the globe, we could eliminate several names since we found villas which already had the same ones.

We had brainstorming sessions where we threw around Jamaican patois names and Spanish names. Then we added in some French names to the mix.