Gordon Rohlehr’s 2024 A Literary Friendship is a moving memoir of a long friendship that encompassed intellectual and literary lives in a society marked by what Rohlehr terms a “culture of terminality” of “immense indifference” and of “traditions of discontinuity.”1 It is very honest and open-eyed as it provides a view of Kamau Brathwaite, warts and all, and in decline.
The book also says much about Gordon himself, a major Caribbean literary scholar (1942–2023). It is a unique, personal, diarist record of a long, enduring friendship, full of admiration and love. Yet not without deep, personal disappointments. One sees Kamau Brathwaite but hears the heart of Gordon Rohlehr: generous, kind, patient, self-sacrificial in so many ways, committed to this Caribbean civilization, though he knew himself embedded in “cultures of dread and terminality.”2
Rohlehr was unquestionably the foremost writer on the work of Kamau Brathwaite (1930–2020), bringing to his essays, reviews, and several book-length studies of Brathwaite a very close reading and perceptive comprehension that remains unique. In A Literary Friendship we read excerpts of letters to and from and conversations with Brathwaite, as well as selections from Gordon’s diary-like entries in his many notebooks. His observations include Kamau’s responses to literary criticism and other analysis of his work as well as to personal disasters. Gordon’s sober, frank, unsparing, uncompromising view of a major writer at the height of his powers is also a clear-eyed objective look at Brathwaite in his last years.
It is in many ways an ironic epitaph to both men. An instructive reflection of what it means to be a Caribbean writer and literary critic, and by application, an artist, in this now postcolonial, postindependence archipelago. This book, through Rohlehr and Brathwaite, clinically searches out the Caribbean island society to which these two major writers and scholars were dedicated but in which, in many fundamental ways, they were neglected. This comes out clearly in Rohlehr’s many wry comments. His scholarly work, which spoke so pointedly to Caribbean society as seen in its literature and music, was often self-published, garnered no awards; his deep pessimism about the nations he loved is not hidden.
I first discovered Gordon’s work in the late 1960s when I began my journey into the creative and critical literature of Caribbean writers. I found his essays first in the Trinidadian journals Tapia and the Trinidad and Tobago Review. I was impressed from early on how he placed his critical examination of Caribbean literature, calypso, and reggae in their historical, cultural, and social contexts. He was the first to pay close, detailed attention to the literatures of kaiso and reggae and brought his writings on all these to us who were entering the generation of the 1970s, the years of Walter Rodney, Bob Marley, Rasta, marches throughout the islands, the banning of radicals, the assassination of leaders like Rodney, the Grenada Revolution and its overthrow, all that postindependence ferment, to create a new Caribbean society that was truly postcolonial and reflected our reality. He became a major model for me in analyzing and writing on our Caribbean literatures and social development. He still remains that.
I was fortunate to know both Gordon and Kamau as I became acquainted with many other writers who were exemplars to our generation of new writers and critics. My island St. Lucia was the home of Derek and Roderick Walcott and a generation of brilliant writers, artists, musicians. At twenty, through the St. Lucian Patricia Ismond (1944–2006) who later became a respected Walcott scholar, I was introduced to the writings and personalities of the growing list of important Caribbean writers. By the time I got to the University of the West Indies (UWI), Cave Hill, to study literature in 1969, I had begun to write seriously. I was a full-fledged convert to our literature and culture. Kamau Brathwaite and Gordon Rohlehr were major figures, each a poet-historian and critic, together helping provide for my group of regional writers a fresh, original, dynamic fertile ground for our examination of ourselves as Caribbean people and artists.
Between the lines of correspondence in A Literary Friendship, Gordon says much about being a writer, artist, critic in the kind of society that our Caribbean is. For those of us who live in it, as Gordon and Kamau did, it is a place that has often promised so much, has produced excellent persons in many fields but has also disappointed enormously, and continues to do so, even for major writers like Rohlehr and Brathwaite. The book is more than an “epitaph” for both writers: it is also a very sober look at Caribbean society and at the lives, expectations, and disappointments of writers and artists who live in these islands. And continue to live there, with all the expectations of success, recognition, respect due to us for the hard work we, like Rohlehr and Brathwaite, put in.
In her introduction to I and I: Epitaphs for the Self in the Work of V. S. Naipaul, Kamau Brathwaite, and Derek Walcott, Rhonda Cobham-Sander rightly comments that “among anglophone writers in Africa and the Caribbean, Kamau Brathwaite was arguably the most influential of the three writers during the 1970s, defining the orientation and stylistic effects to which a new generation of politically committed writers aspired.”3 Sadly, Rohlehr reports that Brathwaite had added Cobham-Sander’s book “to his list of unforgivable sins,” as he had added others whom he felt had not given him fair reviews (130). Gordon defends her, saying, “We need to give her thanks, because there are relatively few persons, academics or otherwise, who have bothered to pay close attention to what our writers have been doing. I myself write out of a deafening silence, and it is tiring, as you well know” (131). This note of deep disappointment with the lack of response to the work of our writers, including Rohlehr himself, sounds like a mournful gong through much of his book. But Cobham-Sander’s delineation of “critics who aim to rewrite the meaning of the cultures that have produced them” certainly describes Rohlehr.4
In September 1986, Kamau’s wife Doris died. On 22 November of that year, Kamau wrote a letter to the Mona academic community “that was simultaneously a personal howl and scream, and magnification of ‘the poet’ (i.e. himself) as an individual whose life must be read as a metaphor of the catastrophe and anomie in which the wider society terrifyingly abides.” His letter indicts colleagues for their “brutal and frightening neglect” (37). Rohlehr notes that Kamau’s letter “moves from self-indulgence towards his real topic: the collapsing, neo-colonial Caribbean community; the absence or failure of a cultural policy driven by the necessity for collection, archiving, preservation, education and building on identifiable traditions” (40).
And Gordon sounds his own note of disappointment with Brathwaite: “He tended to take for granted positive responses and often complained, even in the face of all the words I’d written on behalf of his words, that no one had been giving him the attention or respect due to his Sisyphean efforts” (62). In a letter to Kamau in 2008, as Gordon is preparing to retire from UWI and to launch his 507-page Transgression, Transition, Transformation: Essays in Caribbean Culture, he notes, “I have . . . invested considerable cash in getting my work published. There hasn’t been (any) help, and there are no prizes or awards to be won for what I do. But say what? I know that I am in a terminal place and don’t really expect the grace of help or encouragement . . . that’s the way it has been, and will continue to be” (115).
When Kamau receives his copy of Transgression, Transition, Transformation, he asks, “Has anyone attempted to REVIEW this yet?” Gordon writes in A Literary Friendship his telling response to himself: “The answer was NO. It didn’t occur to KB that he should attempt a review. I put this down to the narcissistic blindness that had become more powerful as Kamau aged” (117).
In an earlier comment that was his personal, reactive response to a query from Brathwaite about the lack of critical reviews of Rohlehr’s monumental body of work, Gordon writes,
My question was Why hadn’t KB, who was certainly the person most acquainted over 35 years with my wordworks, attempted the Xploration? My answer was that KB was too deeply engrossed in himself and in the resonant trauma of his own journey to explore anyone else’s; except he could relate the other’s journey to, and incorporate the other’s trauma into his own . . . . KB was, or had become, too involved in his own journey to appreciate the travels and travails of another fellow-traveller . . . . The Ego was certainly the arena where his most intense battles were being fought. Kamau never attempted any serious exploration of the “itself word/world/of GR” who without either hope or faith has been floating in his own space and sailing in his own ship and on his own sea, quite unassured . . . that all things will be well. (98)
What sobering insights and analyses of one major critic on the response to his work by the writer he had done the most to study and promote.
Commenting in a 2009 diary entry on his forthcoming Ancestories, dedicated to “Kamau entering eighty,” Gordon despairingly notes, “Of what relevance really is intellect or sensibility when confronted with the neutering effect of amnesia? The sleep of all forgetting? No point his words or worse, my words about his words: Ancestors, Ancestories equally pointless . . . . They will both be submerged in the noise of events ‘politics, rain, unrest’ according to Derek Walcott” (118).5 With great insight, Gordon offers this view of our literary and arts time-scape: “It is the problem of this era, the way the ever-changing present seems to render the past irrelevant and, as a consequence, the dislocation of the reader for whom the question becomes not merely ‘where is here?’ but ‘what is now?’” (121). Kamau, he notes, “towards his last two decades, faced challenges of keeping up and making sense of both his past and the unknown imminence of his future.” In his final decade he had become paranoid about a “cultural lynching” and supposed mysterious loss of his archives, and he was prone to an obsessive over-editing of manuscripts even as they were about to be published (125). And Gordon asks the fundamental, never-changing question: “How did an individual or a generation keep pace with Time and Change and the now kaleidoscopic notions of relevance?” (121). An enduring and persistent query for generation after generation of Caribbean writers, artists, thinkers.
And the transitions of fellow writers and colleagues begin to increase: Wordsworth McAndrew, Rex Nettleford, Derek Walcott, Gabriel García Márquez, Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, and others. Health issues become chronic. In a comment to Kamau on Walcott’s passing, acknowledging old factional quarrels, Gordon notes,
There are things to acknowledge and praise beyond the deep quarrels of the past. Walcott’s death is only one of the indices of the death of our entire generation, and it confronts us with the issue of what our residence on earth has meant . . . as to whether your work has been setting the market here alight I’d say “No.” Nor has mine. It hasn’t been easy to get people to buy, read and discuss anything. One writes out of, in, and increasingly towards a void. That seems to be how it is. (132)
While this final book of Rohlehr’s was published by Peepal Tree Press, who had become his late-life publisher, the majority of the earlier substantial volumes had been self-published in Trinidad. I know from conversations with Gordon that he was very protective of his work and did not welcome the many editorial changes that overseas publishers demanded. Kamau had also, through his Savacou imprint, self-published many of his own books. Gordon reports Kamau’s unhappiness with publishers, especially those who were impatient with his stylistic Sycorax font styles. But Kamau also tended to demand text changes even as the book was entering the press.
Many of us who are home-based have published our work ourselves. This can involve raising funds from supporters to pay the printing costs. And we continue to self-publish even when we have an international publisher who works well with us. The challenges of self-publishing include quality of product, distribution within and outside the Caribbean, wide review coverage, and the rejection by many prize-awarding literary festivals of self-produced works. I have always seen my self-publishing as an effort to encourage local publishing, with as high standards of quality editing and production as possible.
In Notebook #20, in an entry dated Friday, 15 June 2018, Gordon records his last visits to George Lamming and Kamau in Barbados. He had determined to do this in March; at that time, Lamming was ninety-one and Kamau eighty-eight. “Not sure exactly how I [feel] about both encounters. Both men are lucid; both are physically unsound.” He writes that George felt that he had “done his work” (136), while he says of Kamau:
He has lost all sight in his left eye and can’t drive. He has issues, a load of them; all the issues that have preoccupied his writing over the last decade . . . Kamau has become the poet of the bruised, lacerated body, and is preoccupied with death and transition rituals . . . He is alone in his isolation/insulation that I think he has chosen, though he denies this. He’s still writing, stubbornly, doggedly; though there seems to be less and less in the fixed denuded landscape for his sensibility to gaze or graze on. Landscape bleak: mindscape bleaker, he trudges, blindly, doggedly, morosely forward . . . his words, a barrow-load of jagged, broken stones. (136–37)
I do not know of any record in our biographical Caribbean literature that describes so movingly, so honestly, without sentimentality, so clear-eyed, the closing days of a major, complex, committed writer, one of our own. Lamming seemed most at peace, less troubled about reputation, less obsessed with the writing and theoretical passions that so consumed Kamau to the very end.
In the book’s next entry, dated 4 February 2020, Gordon notes how Barbadian scholar Aaron Kamugisha called to inform him that Kamau had died that same day. “My written reaction to such sad news was that “Another part of my life and portal of my time has closed’” (137). At the funeral on 21 February, in Barbados, he gave a eulogy, the last of nine tributes at the service. There he described Kamau as “aesthetic cartographer, pathfinder, letter-writer, tireless archivist of the African diaspora.” And quoting Kamau about his essential role, “The constant, I would even say consistent fabric and praxis of my work, has been to connect broken islands, cracked broken words, worlds, friendships, ancestories” (141).
Gordon’s A Literary Friendship ends there at the funeral, with him flying back to Trinidad.
Kendel Hippolyte and I attended Kamau’s funeral from St. Lucia. I had heard about Kamau’s passing from a writer friend in Canada. As usual at these moments, I recalled our first meeting in St. Lucia. I was sixteen. Kamau was the Extra Mural Resident Tutor of the UWI there, 1963–64. He had come from Ghana to St. Lucia to work for about a year. His first Caribbean stop after Africa. My uncle Victor Archer, who worked with UWI, went to visit him and took me along. He was still Edward Brathwaite. He became involved with the historical and educational societies there and edited a valuable journal titled Iouanaloa: Recent Writing from St. Lucia, to which he and Doris contributed articles.6
In Barbados I would attend readings by Kamau. Over the years we met often, including at Mona when I studied there. He took me and my young family to visit him and Doris at their Irish Town home, and I still have a cassette tape of an interview I conducted with him in 1981. At the first Carifesta in Guyana in 1972, we sat up with many others late into the night. Kamau helped me imagine beyond St. Lucia, traditional poetry, colonized thinking.
On 29 January 2023, came the sudden and unexpected news of Gordon’s passing.
And memory recalled our earliest interactions.
I may have met Gordon in Trinidad through my friends Anson Gonzalez and Victor Questel. Questel was one of the brightest, most talented of our generation. He died early in 1982 at thirty-three; many years later Gordon wrote the afterword to Questel’s Collected Poems.7 Over the years we met in several places, including St. Lucia; I always found talking with him absorbing.
Gordon’s essays, collected in a number of books (see, for example, My Strangled City, and Other Essays and The Shape of That Hurt, and Other Essays), would range over literature, music, culture, and politics, dissected with a sharp and original intellect, often defending new developments in cultural expression. His groundbreaking long essay “West Indian Poetry: Some Problems of Assessment” was a response to Eric Roach’s scathing review of Savacou 3/4, a special issue titled “New Writing 1970” in which Kamau had represented “nation language.”8 It was all startling, exciting, stimulating, relevant, pointed reading.
Gordon Rohlehr and Kamau Brathwaite both occupy a unique sphere of influence in Caribbean arts and letters. In an obituary for the Trinidadian visual artist and musician Pat Bishop, Gordon had described himself as “a deeply exhausted archivist of the dead, the dying and the morituri.”9 His archives over several volumes, and these “correspondences and epitaphs” of his literary friendship with Kamau Brathwaite, will not be exhausted but will become permanent, valuable records of lives that were cornerstones of the foundations of our ever-expanding Caribbean civilization.
John Robert Lee is a St. Lucian writer, as well as a professional librarian (retired), teacher, theater actor and director, radio and television presenter and producer, print and online columnist, reviewer, and an editor. His reviews, essays, and poems appear in many print and online journals. His books include Saint Lucian Writers and Writing (Author Index of Poetry, Prose, and Drama; Papillote, 2019); Pierrot (Peepal Tree, 2020); Belmont Portfolio: Poems (Peepal Tree. 2023); IKONS: New and Selected Poems (Mahanaim / Folk Research Centre, St. Lucia, 2023); and After Poems, Psalms (Peepal Tree, 2025). He is a frequent contributor to sx salon.
[1] Gordon Rohlehr, A Literary Friendship: Selected Notes on the Kamau Brathwaite, Gordon Rohlehr Correspondence (Peepal Tree, 2024), 114; hereafter cited in the text.
[2] Gordon Rohlehr, Transgression, Transition, Transformation: Essays in Caribbean Culture (Lexicon Trinidad, 2007), 48.
[3] Rhonda Cobham-Sander, introduction to I and I: Epitaphs for the Self in the Work of V. S. Naipaul, Kamau Brathwaite, and Derek Walcott (University of the West Indies Press, 2016), 3.
[4] Cobham-Sander, introduction, 11.
[5] See Gordon Rohlehr, Ancestories: Readings of Kamau Brathwaite’s “Ancestors” (Lexicon Trinidad, 2010).
[6] Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, ed., Iouanaloa: Recent Writing from St. Lucia (June 1963), Department of Extra Mural Studies, UWI, St. Lucia.
[7] Gordon Rohlehr, “‘These Collapsing Times’: Remembering Q,” in Victor D. Questel, Collected Poems (Peepal Tree, 2016).
[8] Gordon Rohlehr, My Strangled City, and Other Essays (1992; repr., Peepal Tree, 2019); Rohlehr, The Shape of That Hurt, and Other Essays (1992; repr., Peepal Tree, 2021); Rohlehr, “West Indian Poetry: Some Problems of Assessment,” Tapia, no. 20 (August 1971): 11–14, reprinted in My Strangled City, 107–32; Eric Roach, “A Type Not Found in All Generations,” review of Savacou 3/4, Trinidad Guardian, 14 July 1971; “New Writing 1970: An Anthology of Poetry and Verse,” ed. Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, Kenneth Ramchand, and Andrew Saulkey, special issue, Savacou 3/4 (December 1970 / March 1971), Caribbean Artists Movement.
[9] Gordon Rohlehr, Perfected Fables Now: A Bookman Signs Off on Seven Decades (Peepal Tree, 2019), 177.