Bright yellow legal pads covered in blue ink. Sentences written so closely together I wondered how anyone, even the writer, could make out the words. But day after day, class after class, here he was, entering the room either whistling or singing and carrying folders bursting with yellow pages. Literatures in English—that was the name of my degree. Gordon Rohlehr elevated this prosaic title by constantly challenging what everyone else thought qualified as “literature.” He went beyond “in English” by drawing in oral traditions from languages far from our everyday comprehension: Old English (written or not) can be as alien as Yoruba and Bhojpuri. But coloring inside the lines was not Rohlehr’s strength. No great inventors live in that space that’s good and safe enough for others. To beget the new, the unmapped, you must travel farther.
Rohlehr’s Calypso and Society in Pre-independence Trinidad was not required reading in the classroom, but for students interested in the way our music permeated our nuanced worlds and then proclaimed its findings in the town square, it is the fundamental text.1 His research and analysis of calypso up to the 1960s fix the ground on which we stand. I may question many aspects of the recorded history of Trinidad and Tobago; I do not question my calypso history. Calypso is our voice, and Gordon Rohlehr is calypso’s record keeper.
Someone once told me that the story of my life as I experienced it with Rohlehr as a guru is everyone’s story about their favorite teacher. I’m sure in some ways that is true. But in other ways it is not.
He inspired. Good teachers everywhere do that. You felt braver with him because you knew he would give you room to explore. Good teachers do that. He always seemed to give more of himself than you thought he could. But what was categorically different was his mind and the way he expressed what he was thinking. When I meet people, I (far too quickly) form an image in my head of how they process information: linearly, laterally, in Venn diagrams, flow charts, lists. Gordon was different. He was a weaver. Here is a thread from Joseph Conrad. Here is one from the Bible. Over here: Kamau Brathwaite, jazz, Shakespeare, the orishas, a traditional Guyanese folk song. And the point he was making might be something to do with schadenfreude or—just as likely—the way dancing on the road for Carnival has changed over the years. Like a skilled loom worker, he pulled those very different kinds of threads together, and the pattern on the cloth emerged as clearly and organically as if there had not been a blank space before. It was not possible to learn only one thing from him but to see the whole. What else did that endless source of knowledge hold? I didn’t want to look through the window and see all the skeins of thread. I wanted to walk into the room and ask for a magic loom. In The Odyssey, Penelope buys time to ward off unwanted suitors by unpicking her design every night.2 Gordon had so much, he didn’t need to reuse old material; he just kept weaving new designs every day to the amazement of those looking on.
Imagine a small tutorial, maybe five or six of us smooshed into an office with more manila folders than air. Gordon says, “I’m going to tell you something that will blow your minds.” He then tells us about recent studies tracking the movement of Saharan dust. Not quite what we thought we were in for, but, OK, we’re still with him and his increasing delight. After assorted meteorological descriptions, he reveals the great discovery: “And the man doing all this research is Joseph Prospero! Prospero is still controlling the weather!”3 I cheered and laughed. This—I thought—this is what it means to truly be a creature of the mind. It’s not all plodding through old texts and reviewing the work of your peers. It’s hearing something on the news and connecting it to something both similar and familiar and showing a new connection.
I took my time deciding where I would go to university. Every time I thought I found the right place, the same question repeated itself: Who will teach you about the Caribbean? Who will show you how you arrived at where you are now and what “now” means? The University of the West Indies had Gordon Rohlehr and, to give due credit, Ken Ramchand and Pat Ismond. It was the right education.
I wanted to understand two things: first, all of West Indian literature, and second, everything else. As a student of Rohlehr’s I found that my “everything” was a small, incubated world. By which I mean I had no notion of how big the worlds of thinking and philosophy and cross-cultural studies really were. I had yet to understand the meaning of the threadwork. To wit: each thread was a whole universe of knowledge, and some scholars spend their entire careers on one thread. Gordon’s wife, Dr. Betty Ann Rohlehr, says he was constantly writing. Not on a keyboard while parked at his desk but on bits of paper that he left all over the house. If a thought struck him, he’d start writing it down wherever he was. That’s how the great work happens, I think, via relentlessness. He was a teacher without borders and a fascinating scholar. And I wanted all of it to miraculously osmosize into me.
Rohlehr was not only a teacher but an intellectual—or spirit-guide. Not for everyone: there are none so blind as those who gave in to the soporific atmosphere on those hot afternoons of a three-hour class in a distinctly uncomfortable classroom. And yet there were students not registered for his class who stood in the wide skirting corridor of the third floor of the humanities building to listen to him.
Rohlehr also opened the door to understanding our music and the importance of analyzing it as you would any literature. People listen to opera without understanding a word of what is said, and yet they know the experience of the voice and orchestra has changed them. Calypso and soca can be like that. What is calypso and is it poetry? Does it hold the texts that lay out the evolution of the Caribbean being? What is a text and does someone have to write it down, or can you learn from reading a personality? How do we, people of many influences, come to terms with all the layers that lead to who we are now? And where does the confluence of many rivers end and we, in innovation and interpretation, become something unlike anything that came before? When do we start to become simply ourselves?
From his seminal work on the Trinidad calypso to his analyses of both the Western and West Indian canons, Rohlehr’s precise and marrow-deep insight helped shape how I situate the Caribbean voice within the global one. His understanding of the sociopolitical jigsaw puzzles of our islands and demystifying of our cultural products offer unrivaled clarity in the way I apprehend our world today. A rough sketch of what this means in a broader way: As a growing and learning writer, I was often faced with the bewildering response that my work was not “Caribbean” or “Caribbean enough.” How could it not be? Who or what was more Caribbean than I was? What publishers wanted was what they were accustomed to getting. Get the sea in there. Make sure your characters are properly poor. Even in the 1990s and early 2000s there should be no talk of cell phones or the way we’re influenced by international media. I used to refer to it as the “coconut trees and buckets of water” model. But that is not the Caribbean I knew. To write about the Caribbean experience while being a Caribbean person, it is useful to not see yourself as exotic. You must remove the layers and lenses of writers-past who saw only the ocean, the barefoot children, the old women selling fruit by the roadside. We are not inauthentic if we acknowledge middle-classness, good education, extensive travel, washing machines, or a preference for Verdi. Take the flowers out of your heroine’s hair. Give the kids K-pop and gaming consoles.
When Gordon spoke about the orishas I did not feel transported back hundreds of years to an unfamiliar landscape. They were here, right now, in the music and poetry of the present. The Trinidadian musician David Rudder often calls on both Legba and Shango, in different guises, to help us in the now. Gordon spoke about the deities. He spoke about music. Nothing stands in isolation. I grew more confident in my ability to make connections because I knew Gordon saw them too.
It is no secret that Gordon was supposed to be a seer-man. He was born with a caul over his face—the mark of someone destined to see what others could not. In interviews and his own writing he described childhood instances in which his gift of prophesy was proven.4 His mother was having none of it, and through means mysterious to him (and therefore to us) she prayed or magicked it away. I think of the richness and profundity of his research, and I wonder if that second sight was always calling to him. Always telling him there was more to see and know and one plane of existence was not nearly enough for him.
So in talking about Rohlehr it is difficult to ignore the gods of crossroads and doorways. Crossroads are about decisions. Doorways are about permission. As a teacher and a professor of West Indian literature, Rohlehr did not present himself as either the person who would navigate your decision-making with you nor as one who was empowered to grant or deny the right of entry to anyone. But of all the deities in all the pantheons of any religion, the Dahomey loa Legba (or Yoruba’s Eshu), deity of crossroads and doorways, was the one he found everywhere. Wily and provocative, different from the benevolence of the Hindu Ganesh. Or the caprice of Loki of Norse tales.
He found Legba in Kamau Brathwaite’s increasingly hieroglyphic poems and in the music of David Rudder. As a student I found myself daunted by the scale and scope of Rudder’s work, but I very much wanted to write about it. Gordon was my supervisor for my undergraduate thesis. I looked at the great body of ballads, praise-songs, warnings, and dirges. And I trembled. What I needed, I sussed from listening to the way Gordon built his lessons, was a very small but solid thought. And then I could add in every direction. Or remove. But I would always be able to find my way back to the center. I wrote about the way Rudder used words that have musical relevance as metaphors for just about every individual and societal condition. An absurdly tiny element. But I found worlds within worlds, and worlds beyond words, in that study. That was prime Rohlehr teaching. Dive deep and somehow you’ll end up seeing how wide the ripples are.
Like Gordon, Rudder is always looking for crossroads and doorways and the ways we access them to allow us to engage with the ancestors or gods. In “Permission to Mash Up the Place” Rudder explicitly uses the music (in the form, partly, of the DJ) as that entrance. “Take a journey to the other side, the rhythm is the door,” he says. The name and chorus are equally significant. He is asking permission, which is what you do when you invoke deities of doorways. You’re saying, “Please may I come in?” In this context, we “mash up the place” not through physical destruction but through the euphoria of the Carnival fete, through dance and song. No one in the song is damaging expensive speakers or the scaffolding for the stage, but we do wrest ourselves away from false narratives about who we are and undermine the mental structures that hold us back. “Permission” became the central text to which my early research always returned.5
In 2026 it is still possible to talk to people who have a reputation for knowing about calypso and soca and to find yourself listening to so many details you drown in history until they suddenly stop. They will tell you about where it came from and begin to list all the legendary musicians from the start of the twentieth century and give you a good fifty or sixty years before their interest flags. Around 1962. I wonder if Rohlehr’s Calypso and Society is to blame. His work does not suggest that calypso stopped in 1962, but the academic arm of calypso study seems to be stuck there. We disregard the importance of evolution and metamorphosis and say that everything begins to feel meaningless and noisy.
Whatever his personal feelings may have been about the trajectory of the genre, Rohlehr kept pace with the contemporary. That was his job. Where others saw vacuity, he understood change. He was able to talk about the most popular songs of any given year and offer critique, genuine musical analysis, on its own merit. He was not always looking back to history. Change, transition, and terminality are recurring themes across his dozen books and his papers and presentations beyond count. Rohlehr lived in the space of always-asking. In the always-asking lies the challenge and the pursuit, as well as the uncertainty and the room to let new ideas grow. The beauty of his teaching was the open invitation to join him in that space. Or, even more magnificently, to find your own space.
Those who were taught by him and those who read his books will always draw on his knowledge and, yes, wisdom. It was definitely wisdom. For many years now I have been trying to pull his work out of the realm of reference and into public discourse on Gordon as a writer, philosopher, and teacher. We need to study the body of work and the man. It is happening now, after his death. We are slow and seldom able to discern the lessons there for the learning or the guidance there for the taking. But we are doing it now. The important thing is that we are doing it now.
Perhaps this is open to debate, but not by me. For me Gordon Rohlehr invented the study of calypso and soca. He paid attention to it in a methodical and serious way when his peers saw it as something frivolous. He followed it, recorded it, studied the musicians. And in doing so he taught us how to listen and to read our way into the music.
Anu Lakhan is a writer and an editor from Trinidad. Her works include Trinidad: Caribbean Street Food (Macmillan, 2010), the chapbook Letters to K (Argotiers, 2018), and The Proper Care of Knives (Argotiers, 2025). She writes a weekly column, Head Space, for the Trinidad and Tobago Newsday. Apart from being a lifelong student of calypso and soca, she is an advocate for the teaching of the works and thinking of Gordon Rohlehr.
[1] Gordon Rohlehr, Calypso and Society in Pre-independence Trinidad (Gordon Rohlehr, 1992).
[2] Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics, 1999).
[3] On Prospero, see William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, revised ed. (Folger Shakespeare Library, 2015).
[4] See Gordon Rohlehr, Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins: A Memoir (Peepal Tree, 2020).
[5] David Rudder, “Permission to Mash Up the Place,” from The Gilded Collection, 1986–1989, Lypsoland, 1993.