Gordon Rohlehr (1942–2023)

Abstract

Gordon Rohlehr passed away in Trinidad on January 29, 2023. With a career of writing, teaching, and community engagement spanning more than half a century, he was widely recognized as the premier authority on the calypso song form and one of the Caribbean's leading literary scholars. He published on an array of verbal art (oral and written) in the anglophone Caribbean and was unparalleled in his ability to elucidate the significance of this literature for the region and the wider world.Rohlehr was born in British Guiana (Guyana) in 1942 and spent his childhood in the Essequibo coastal area to the west of the capital city of Georgetown. His father was the superintendent of a boys’ reform school, while his mother was a teacher and administrator at an Anglican primary school. He recalled in his memoir that the family's home on the reform school grounds was surrounded by fruit trees and flowers and offered “a view of sunrises over the Atlantic and sunsets over the giant silk-cotton (cumacka, ceiba) tree at the edge of the forest” (Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins: A Memoir 2020:8). Rohlehr entered Queen's College in Georgetown on a scholarship in 1953, the same year as future historian/activist Walter Rodney. The two would remain friends until Rodney's assassination in Georgetown in 1980. Queen's College was an elite secondary school, with a rigorous curriculum based on that of English grammar schools, a strict code of discipline, and an expectation that its alumni would become leaders in Guyanese society. Rohlehr graduated in 1961, with A-Level courses in literature and history, and won a scholarship to attend the University College of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica.Rohlehr's years at Mona (1961–1964) were a tumultuous time: the breakup of the West Indies Federation, the independence of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago in 1962, and the political and ethnic violence in Guyana that preceded independence in 1966. During this period, he gained a broader sense of Caribbean consciousness through interactions with students from various parts of the region. Although he had initially planned to study history, he switched to English literature and was awarded a First Class Honours degree in this subject. He also won a scholarship that enabled him to pursue postgraduate studies in 1964 at the University of Birmingham (UK), where he wrote his dissertation on the fiction of Joseph Conrad and received a doctorate in 1967.During his time in England, Rohlehr frequently traveled to London and became involved with the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), which was founded in late 1966 by poet/historian Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados), activist/writer/publisher John La Rose (Trinidad), and writer Andrew Salkey (Jamaica). The Caribbean Artists Movement's loose network of participants included West Indian artists and intellectuals who had migrated to the UK or were students there. Among the group's topics of debate was the possibility of defining a Caribbean aesthetic. At a meeting in 1967, Rohlehr suggested that a productive approach to this question would be to first examine the characteristics of diverse expressive forms in particular Caribbean territories and then build toward regional comparisons. At a subsequent public meeting, he presented a paper on the verbal style of the Mighty Sparrow (Trinidad's best-known calypsonian) and noted the relevance of calypso's metrical rhythms for Caribbean poets. This paper, published in the journal Savacou in 1970, marked the beginning of his life-long project of calypso studies, while visits with Kamau Brathwaite led to a life-long friendship and extensive writing on Brathwaite's poetry.In reflecting on his experiences in London, Rohlehr observed: “CAM certainly confirmed what I already knew: that I was a Caribbean person and would return to do my life's work in the Caribbean” (Transgression, Transition, Transformation: Essays in Caribbean Culture 2007:394). In 1968, he began teaching at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in St. Augustine, Trinidad, and would remain at this institution until his retirement in 2007 as Professor Emeritus. Though he maintained Guyanese citizenship, he thoroughly embraced Trinidad as his adopted home, and Trinidadians fully adopted him. In 1970, he introduced the first course in West Indian literature at UWI's St. Augustine campus and later established an advanced degree program in this subject. In the course of his career, he also received appointments as a visiting professor or scholar at Harvard University (1981), Johns Hopkins University (1985), York University (1996), Tulane University (1997), Stephen F. Austin State University (2000), and Dartmouth College (2004).Rohlehr was beloved by his many students and colleagues and was legendary for the generosity with which he shared his vast knowledge, which ranged across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. As anyone who knew him would attest, he could talk for hours on a seemingly endless variety of topics, with references that might extend from contemporary calypsos to Shakespeare and Virgil. One left these conversations exhilarated and determined to explore new paths of inquiry. For Rohlehr, learning was a collective endeavor, and he gently encouraged everyone to produce their best work.Rohlehr was also firmly committed to the dissemination of knowledge in the broader public sphere. He produced radio series on calypso and West Indian literature, participated in numerous other radio and television programs, visited schools to offer talks to students, collaborated in workshops for teachers, served as a chief examiner with the Caribbean Examination Council's testing program for secondary school students, served on Trinidad and Tobago government committees on cultural policy, consulted with social-action-oriented seminarians and clergy, and delivered presentations at many conferences and arts events throughout the Caribbean. For example, he provided the inaugural address for the Guyana Prize in Literature in Georgetown in 1987; a feature address in celebration of a new home for the Folk Research Centre in Castries, St. Lucia, in 1993; and the Sir Winston Scott Memorial Lecture in Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1999. He received many awards and honors in recognition of his contributions to scholarship, education, and public service, culminating in a Chaconia Medal from the government of Trinidad and Tobago in 2022.During his lifetime, Rohlehr published 10 full-length books and over 100 articles. With a paramount goal of reaching a Caribbean audience, he chose to publish most of his work with small periodicals and presses in Trinidad and, in a few cases, self-published books. His wife, Betty Rohlehr, frequently assisted him with the preparation of manuscripts, typesetting, and book design. While his books are held by many libraries, some can be difficult to purchase outside Trinidad. Fortunately, Peepal Tree Press in Leeds, England, published his two most recent books, Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins: A Memoir (2020) and Perfected Fables Now: A Bookman Signs Off on Seven Decades (2019), and republished two collections that initially appeared in 1992: My Strangled City and Other Essays (2019) and The Shape of That Hurt and Other Essays (2021).Rohlehr's first book on calypso, Calypso & Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (1990), was republished by Lexicon Trinidad in 2004 and has remained a cornerstone of studies of the song form. Based on more than two decades of research and containing over 500 pages, the book is a deep exploration of the formation of a song tradition within the complex social and psychological dynamics of colonial Trinidad. Rohlehr begins by discussing the emergence of calypso as a distinct genre around 1900 from a variety of African-Trinidadian expressive forms, such as the boasts and songs of stickfighters and the speeches of whip-wielding Pierrots in the pre-Lenten Carnival. He observes that “calypso grew out of this milieu of confrontation and mastery, of violent self-assertiveness and rhetorical force; of a constant quest for a more splendid language, and excellence of tongue” (Calypso & Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad 1990:54). He then examines the transformation of calypso singers from leaders of Carnival street processions to performers in “tents,” indoor venues in the capital city of Port of Spain. In these new settings, calypsonians established distinct personas and, with much wit and wordplay, crafted songs of commentary on a wide range of topics, such as local social conditions, folklore, gender relations, and political affairs. One of Rohlehr's many strengths in this book is his knowledge of an immense number of calypsos and his ability to explicate them in the context of specific historical events, sociocultural trends, and stylistic changes within the calypso tradition. The result is a highly evocative account of calypsonians as verbal artists and chroniclers of Trinidadian thought and society from the early to mid-twentieth century.Rohlehr continued this story through the end of the twentieth century in a second lengthy book: A Scuffling of Islands: Essays on Calypso (2004), which includes analysis of verbal, musical, and social developments in the genre—including the rise of female calypsonians. While jazz had an impact on calypso music during the first half of the twentieth century, by the 1970s, the influences of soul, funk, and Indian-Trinidadian music contributed to the emergence of soca as a new type of calypso. During this era, there was also increasing skepticism, apprehensiveness, and bitterness in calypso commentary, in response to political disruptions, social deterioration, and widespread violence in Trinidad. Rohlehr suggests that some calypsonians were now serving as prophets who exhorted the community on its shortcomings, while also articulating visions of hope. Again, he employs a method of close reading of calypso lyrics in sociohistorical contexts and demonstrates that calypsonians offer differing perspectives and opinions on the topics they address. Indeed, one of Rohlehr's major contributions has been to elucidate the complexities of voice, metaphor, and irony in calypso, and to show the genre's multifaceted significance within public discourse.Rohlehr's research on calypso was part of a broader endeavor of studying the full spectrum of verbal creativity in the anglophone Caribbean. A sense of his goals can be obtained from three seminal essays: “The Folk in Caribbean Literature” (1972), “The Problem of the Problem of Form: The Idea of an Aesthetic Continuum and Aesthetic Code-Switching in West Indian Literature” (1985), and “The Shape of That Hurt” (1989).1 In these articles, he develops a framework for examining Caribbean verbal art along four continuums: (1) rural to urban setting, (2) creole/vernacular to standard language, (3) oral to written presentation/transmission, and (4) the shared and conventional orientation of folk tradition to the more individualistic and experimental modes of modernism. With recognition that these continuums are interrelated with issues of socioeconomic class, status, and power, he describes how writers enter a nexus of communicative possibilities at diverse points and often shift location within a work or across their larger oeuvre. Some writers embrace expression from different poles of the continuums, while others wrestle with tensions.In his literary studies, Rohlehr was especially concerned with the construction of aesthetic form—with how writers have created shape and coherent meaning out of the crises, traumas, and inequities of Caribbean history and experience. Folk genres (from narrative and proverb to ritual and festival), as well as local linguistic registers and styles, have clearly offered an inexhaustible resource for literary experimentation with perspective, voice, imagery, and plot. In exploring this creativity, Rohlehr considered the work of many Caribbean writers, such as novelist/essayist George Lamming (Barbados), novelist Samuel Selvon (Trinidad), poet/playwright/essayist Derek Walcott (St. Lucia), and poet Louise Bennett (Jamaica). Throughout these studies, he located writers within historical and literary contexts and discussed what their compositions reveal about Caribbean personhood and society at particular points in time.Rohlehr's two lengthy monographs and numerous articles on the poetry of Kamau Brathwaite constituted his most extensive scrutiny of an individual writer. Brathwaite's periods of residence in Barbados, England, Ghana, St. Lucia, Jamaica, and New York facilitated his forging of an aesthetic that integrated ideas, images, and sounds from throughout the Atlantic world, especially its African and African diasporic realms. Rohlehr's extensive knowledge of this world and its poetic, mythical, and musical traditions enabled him to suggest many paths for following Brathwaite's continually evolving body of work. At the time of his death, he was preparing a book about his more than 50 years of friendship and correspondence with Brathwaite. While this book will be published posthumously by Peepal Tree Press, some excerpts appear in a recent article “A Literary Friendship: Selected Notes on the Correspondence with Kamau Brathwaite” in the journal Small Axe (March 1, 2022). Rohlehr concludes this article with notes on a trip to Barbados in 2018 to visit Brathwaite and George Lamming and a return trip in 2020 to deliver the eulogy at Brathwaite's funeral.In 2020, Rohlehr published Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins: A Memoir, an extraordinary mix of autobiography, dream journal, and reflections on mortality and life purpose, conveyed with the wordplay and satire that he cherished in calypso. The book offers intriguing accounts of his childhood and youth in Guyana, studies in Jamaica and England, many years in Trinidad, and academic visits to other countries, along with bizarre refractions of these experiences in his dreams. One is left with the impression of an intellect that was constantly on the move, lost in labyrinths, negotiating crossroads, fleeing from nebulous forces, and heading toward uncertain destinations. There are notes of both futility and accomplishment. In an acceptance speech for an honorary doctoral degree awarded by the University of Sheffield in 2009, he pieces together a justification of his life and work: to vindicate the support received from his parents and ancestors; to vindicate the efforts of all who educated him, from primary school through his years as a professor; to repay the Caribbean people who funded his scholarships; and to thank both the members of the Caribbean Artists Movement and the singers and celebrants of kaiso (calypso). He states in his memoir: “So kaiso has claimed and rewarded me with a tangible means of connection to the public of the Caribbean to whom I belong and towards whose illumination I have offered my voice” (Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins: A Memoir 2020:142).A memorial service for Gordon Rohlehr was held on February 4, 2023, at the Daaga Auditorium on UWI's St. Augustine campus and was video-streamed live. Tributes from numerous family members, friends, and colleagues provided a sense of an immensely rich and uplifting life. Rohlehr was a towering, but humble, individual whose erudition, humor, warmth, and encouragement will be greatly missed by all who knew him. Of course, the service also had to include calypso. Calypsonians Black Sage and Short Pants teamed up to perform a witty composition in which they celebrated the professor's devotion to teaching, kindheartedness, love of cricket, and legacy of calypso studies.In his memoir, Rohlehr likens himself to the Bookman character at the rear of the traditional devil bands of the Trinidad Carnival. While the Bookman records the names and deeds of humanity for final judgment, Rohlehr saw his books as an archive of Caribbean life—an effort to memorialize what has occurred in this turbulent portion of the earth. But he was not simply a diligent recorder. Rather, he was one of the most profound interpreters of Caribbean existence and an exceptionally insightful investigator of the interrelatedness of oral and written expression in anglophone literature. One hopes that his many books will continue to reach new readers.