Guest Editor
Gordon Rohlehr photographed at his home by Jean Antoine Dunne;
used by permission of photographer and Betty Ann Rohlehr
Since Gordon Rohlehr left this earth unexpectedly in early 2023, there have been important recollections and responses to his enormously important, substantial body of work, completed over many decades. Perhaps it has taken losing his physical presence to discover in detail the nature of that achievement. There will be overviews and explorations that attempt to map all of it. The essays included here do not do that but rather offer selective responses, grounded in a collective sense of the importance of Rohlehr’s groundbreaking work and mapping it in a way unique to each author. This not only allows for discussion of aspects of his work perhaps less known but also permits the expression of what inspired us to write these essays—a profound grief but an equally profound desire to express what we each particularly wish to share about Rohlehr’s work so our readers may be inspired by what speaks most to them.
Rohlehr’s passing compounded the loss of Kamau Brathwaite in 2020. The two were closely connected both in work and friendship, each creating major contributions to Caribbean arts and letters. Rohlehr’s 1981 Pathfinder: Black Awakening in “The Arrivants” of Edward Kamau Brathwaite was a pathfinder in itself, an event that marked the recognition of Kamau (as he asked to be known) as a major writer.1 Rohlehr created new pathways of ideas, major or minor, intersecting or keeping to one track, definitely unpaved and never constricted by borders—indeed, magic carpets of the mind and the imagination.
To enter a Rohlehr essay or book is to walk through rooms of ideas whose walls dissolve and reconstitute. The ideas are clear and grounded in reality. There is no abstruse theory: he wrote to be read and not only by the learned. He encompassed worlds in his work, whether it was in essays or books on Caribbean culture such as calypso or literature or any topic that seized his imagination, asking his readers to stop trying to categorize everything. Though he was known as a scholar of popular culture and a literary critic at the end of his life, he published an inventively written memoir in which he seemed to be pursuing a new direction in his writing style and his ideas.
In the 1974 essay “A Carrion Time,” Rohlehr says something about Caribbean groups and movements created to value literature and forms of culture: “Our work has been to integrate not separate.”2 This is at the heart of Rohlehr’s own intellectual and cultural project. He wanted to bring into conjunction and conversation orality and scribal forms, music and literature, cultural forms from diverse ethnicities and nations. He loved to equalize cultural forms, especially when associated with different class and race divisions, in bringing his capacious mind and sharp insights to liberate us from divisive thinking derived from colonialism and a laziness about the value of popular forms—most importantly calypso.
Unlike many who find they are gifted with high intelligence and understanding, he did not overestimate the extent of his knowledge. In an interview with Selwyn Cudjoe, Rohlehr remarked that he had “inexpertness” as to the meaning of “Hinduism or East Indianness”: his lack of arrogance, despite the immense breadth of his learning, is a hugely important contributor not only to his work but to the way many who knew him feel profound and respectful affection. He was not imprisoned in anticolonial resentment, and he saw clearly the damage colonialism did to the colonizer. About mid-twentieth-century European modernism, he asked, “Can the sense of wasteland, the sense of meaninglessness, the sense of absurdity, the sense of void, which is so much a part of the Western world-view be attributed in some way to the performance of that civilisation abroad?”3
In effect, he was always an integrationist of thought—someone who deeply recognized the traumas and separatisms history delivered but who never seemed to see a barrier he couldn’t challenge, knowledge he didn’t want to explore and evaluate. Beginning a conversation with him about a writer or an idea that interested him required being willing to let it happen, no matter how much time it took. I remember calling him to see what he thought of an idea I had for an essay on Kamau Brathwaite and the English poet William Blake.4 He heard my opening gambit, and then we were off into a vast world of associations, several hours long. Having an intellectual conversation with Gordon made a mockery of the ways we are taught to constrain and construct an academic essay. Or thought itself. He thought in self-directed curvature, not straight lines—expanding ideas, not nailing them into finalities.
Rohlehr’s approach to intellectual and creative writing was to discover their various inventive engines, their ways of seeing differently—so he could embrace their occupying the same space. He knew that whereas all creative work has its flaws, as do those who make it, even the weaknesses, the blind spots, the failures can be exciting to contemplate. He did a doctoral dissertation on Joseph Conrad, in mid-1960s Britain, investigating alienation and commitment. He saw Conrad’s 1899 Heart of Darkness as exploring how the practice of racist imperialism destroyed White people.5 He took empire apart not with anger but with the skill of an archaeologist, looking for bones and artifacts that might speak to us. Like an archeologist he meticulously understood cultural frameworks, such as colonialism or the class structure in Britain. He was generous—and because his energies were given to expansion and not confinement, he never allowed the strictures of resentment and refusal to erect barricades within his thinking. He could hear the voice of Blake sing to him on its own terms, and then he would assess what that meant to him.
His critical lens was sharp and had noticeable courage, born of his quiet confidence in the duty of the smart to bring about the good. His 1970 essay “History as Absurdity” is tonally brilliant, at core a review of Eric Williams’s From Columbus to Castro, published the same year.6 Williams was an acclaimed anticolonial historian who taught at Howard University but was also the first prime minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago and remained so for a long time, dying in office (1962–81). His 1944 Capitalism and Slavery had made the radical but now accepted economic argument that profit from Caribbean plantation slavery financed the British Industrial Revolution, which in turn sounded the death-knell of plantation slavery.7 Rohlehr took the opportunity to critique both the recent book and its politician author, remarking that Williams’s approach to writing history had not evolved since his Capitalism and Slavery: “He still conceives of history-writing as the gathering together of a stockpile of facts to be hurled like bricks against dead and living imperialists.” Or, though praising Dr. Williams for his mention of important Caribbean creative writers in his last chapter, suggesting “the identity of his quest with theirs,” Rohlehr adds, “It is by no means evident from some of his past and most of his present political activities, that he has applied to himself their severe critique and rejection of our sterile politics and Afro-Saxon attitudes.”8 To Williams’s and Trinidad and Tobago’s credit, Rohlehr had not put himself in danger by writing so frankly. Of course he might have said that was because his views were not registered as powerful. But he could have been nervous. He wasn’t.
Rohlehr’s freedom also could not be constrained by the limits of academic publishing. His voice would not obey the confines of academic disciplines. He wrote about scribal literature and orality as if they were close relatives (they are), especially calypso, which he rightly thought is poetry. He self-published (a scandal in academe) and let the chips fall where they may—to its credit the University of the West Indies did not penalize him, and the work spoke so much for itself it didn’t matter how it came to be. The only downside was distribution, but eventually he had publishers who could market the books. In his last years, he set free his creative spirit and riffed from the personal to the public in an essay collection, Perfected Fables Now: A Bookman Signs Off on Seven Decades, and a memoir, Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins.9 Meticulous and innovative scholarly work is very important but inevitably dates fast as more scholarship overtakes it (which has to happen because knowledge needs to evolve). But Rohlehr’s work is not going to be lost in libraries. He was a fine scholar, and he wanted to relate to an entire society; his books are treasured and are now gradually being republished.
In his adoption of the persona Bookman in Perfected Fables Rohlehr embraced one of the old figures in traditional Trinidad Carnival: the carnival Bookman who pretends to write in an enormous book what names he determines are damned. There is a benevolent and subversive mischief in this carnival character—a reminder that actions have consequences but also that the judgement might be arbitrary. Rohlehr always had a carnival spirit. One afternoon, probably twenty years ago, I headed with my husband to a Rohlehr seminar on Kamau Brathwaite at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies in Barbados. We arrived close to the start, partly because I had hurt my knee a couple of days before and was walking more slowly than usual, with a cane. The idea was to quietly settle in a back row if we could find seats. The room was almost full when we arrived, and as we crossed the aisle between phalanxes of chairs, I nodded to greet Rohlehr. But he raised a finger and beckoned me to come, persistently. So, embarrassed, I awkwardly managed the aisle and stood in front of him. “Well,” he said, the rich timbre of his voice easily filling the room, “I see you belong in my band for Carnival this year.” I looked questioningly at him. “Because my band is for the halt and the lame. See, you fit right in.” As a Gordon welcome to a colleague and friend, it was a delightful joke (he wasn’t cruel, and he could see my knee wasn’t badly hurt). Yet his words were not just a greeting—they set the playful but serious tone for his speech and the discussion to follow. He understood that as with African festival, so with carnival, the serious and the comical, the sacred and profane found a place in conversation with one another. After he retired in Trinidad and Tobago, he greeted me at the opening of a phone call with a borrowing from W. B. Yeats: “This is no country for old men.”10
He had his weaknesses, as all of us do. Pathfinder, his explanatory volume on Kamau’s 1981 The Arrivants, often falls into the trap of explaining the poems.11 Poetry is kinetic and multilayered and reducing it to prose statement kills its magical word games at which Kamau excelled. But I, like everybody else, was extremely grateful for the chance to have my first entry into reading Kamau’s trilogy guided by Gordon Rohlehr: the body of contextual knowledge gives a vital gift to new readers of this learned and complex poet. Though I know how poetry works and how ambiguous meaning is often what poetry works to achieve, the extent of Kamau’s references were mostly unknown to me and many others. Rohlehr explains the cultural and historical contexts of the poems as well, offering biographical material about Kamau. But he can sound reductive, as when talking of “Wake”: “The poem has circled back to its original state of void, while at the same time moving outwards from the psyche towards the withering sun of politics.”12 A beautifully crafted sentence, as are so many of Rohlehr’s, but in the end it makes the poem’s dramatic turns and verbal ingenuities disappear because it sums up. When writing on Kamau’s later work he moved a tad toward letting the poems speak: in his 1983 “Megalleons of Light: Kamau Brathwaite’s Sun Poem,” he quotes more, pays attention to the music of lines, summarizes with a lighter hand.13 We can see Rohlehr evolving through his work, as we all hope to do; because he was committed to growing as a thinker and writer, he did it naturally.
He could see widely and deeply at the same time—for example, writing of Kamau’s DreamStories, seeing both the particular book and a larger vista of constituents of Kamau’s poetic voice (DreamStories is densely poetic prose). He sees that in “Brathwaite’s poetry the authority of the poet’s ego is submerged in a multiplicity of voices, as the poetic word is democratized.” Also, in DreamStories Rohlehr sees a particular isolation, which Brathwaite terms “isolence,” that counterpoints that brave loss of ego authority. Rohlehr seems to be suggesting that the Westernized authoritative artist ego is unmoored in returning to a communal space which does not privilege one voice. He celebrates the pun in this work “(mathemagical, mystery, eyevil, slipshape, hellucination, supermarkets and mauls, robber plantations)” and says that Kamau “cuts the word loose from its moorings in secure meanings.”14 The Caribbean’s push against the oppression of the plantation and colonial rule manifested in the creation of Creoles, languages expressing a people’s truths to themselves, in which language unmoored itself from dictionary by necessity (the enslaved lost their ancestral languages) and choice (keep the words moving and the planter won’t catch up).
In his own last books, Rohlehr gave himself creative license to play with language and with identity. Dreamstories are at the core of his memoir, Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins. His description of New York City is fantastical realism, as dreams can certainly seem: “Its choir of angels is the counterpoint of horns and sirens, the blast of McDonald’s trumpet, the quack of Scrooge McDuck, the whisper of funeral limousines bearing Sicilian godfathers, Corleone, Ravioli, Spagettioni.”15 Dreams are the play-space of the imagination and the road to discovering other dimensions of existence beyond the here and now, the human, the physical, the known. That Gordon was born in a caul marked him as special, even when that was refuted or denied—my own father had the same experience, and it stays for life as a mark of the exceptional, the one who has access to more dimensions of understanding than are thought usual. Rohlehr embraced his unusualness as a sign that he should follow his own path. It is no wonder he and Kamau often walked a road together, with Rohlehr admiring and seeming to follow slightly, but in his mind a creative power was waiting to tell its own stories when it got the chance.
Other than Kamau, two names come to mind when thinking of Gordon’s particular way of inhabiting the university without being contained by its adherence to its monastic origins emphasizing following tradition, subduing the personal and keeping things in order (university curricula often organized into “divisions” and “departments” as if curiosity is able to be fenced around). The Nigerian Abiola Irele, a stellar intellect of the African diaspora who worked on anglophone and francophone literatures, like Rohlehr wrote more essays than books and did foundational, generous work as an editor and independent publisher.16 And the Jamaican British Stuart Hall, who contributed greatly to the nonconformist Open University and was a major founder of cultural studies, also found the essay a favorite form and edited a great deal of other people’s work.17 Those of us who write know what a difference it makes to have an editor or publisher who is gifted as reader and writer, who can think flexibly about their writer’s text and enjoy being surprised by it. None of these four—Brathwaite, Irele, Hall, and Rohlehr—has as yet fully received the level of recognition they each deserve. Most academic work has its fullest appreciation in the moment it appears: by the very fact that it contributes to an evolution of knowledge, it cannot become classic the way a few creative works do. But thinkers and writers like Rohlehr weave the creative into the academic so their work can be read even after its moment—because they write about big issues and big ideas, pay attention to voice in their work, and enjoy provoking their readers into taking up the mantle of innovative thinking beyond their own work. As postcolonial thinkers and writers, they had the job of upending a colonial inheritance that ignored the realities of colonialized peoples. Generations of Caribbean schoolchildren learned basic literacy from textbooks that assumed they knew daffodils and snow. As postcolonial writers, even in academic work they needed to make space for innovative thinking by the way they fashioned sentences. Rohlehr’s throwaway lines from decades ago often reverberate as if written for now. The sound patterns of his prose make his important insights not only impactful but memorable. Referring to Kamau’s employment of Michaelangelo in X/Self, Rohlehr writes, “Michaelangelo, then, embodies the central paradox of History; that of phenomenal creativity growing out of equally phenomenal destructiveness, grace juxtaposed to or issuing from the heart of atrocity.”18 This sentence demands slow reading, pausing over long words, registering repetition. In his work on Kamau’s DreamStories, Rohlehr saw how an acutely rational mind could employ dreams as layered metaphors in tale-telling—he would do the same thing in his own Musings.
Finally, when I came to write a long essay on the breadfruit, for a collection of plant humanities essays, it was Gordon who offered me the perfect opening—Mighty Growler’s 1943 calypso that appears in Gordon’s Calypso and Society in Pre-independence Trinidad—and he enjoyed my trying a new pathway into plant humanities.19 In the calypso, the breadfruit tree airs its grievance about prewar insults from people who preferred other food. Now wartime privation means breadfruit is wanted again, but it refuses to bear. What better opening for an essay that tries to get humans to see things from a plant’s perspective?
I have had the distinct honor of editing what follows: five outstanding explorations of the importance of Gordon Rohlehr’s work and life by writers who have also made very significant contributions to Caribbean cultural and intellectual life.20 The Trinidadian Rawle Gibbons, theater practitioner and writer, worked with Rohlehr for many years and has a large collection of his work. Anu Lakhan is a Trinidadian poet, writer, and editor who chose to study with Rohlehr at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, finding his teaching has inspired her writing life. John Robert Lee is a St. Lucian poet and an editor who finds a generational connection through the moment of building a new Caribbean creative energy after colonialism ended. Leslie R. James is a professor of religious studies in the United States who works in interdisciplinary space (literature and history) and deeply values the importance of Rohlehr’s work to the Caribbean. And Ken Ramchand, also Trinidadian, was, with Rohlehr, a cofounder of the Department of Literature at UWI, St. Augustine—each of them celebrated for their seminal texts foundational to the study of Caribbean literature and culture as well as for their teaching and outreach to their society. Rohlehr was Guyanese and became a naturalized Trinidadian, very much aware of the region and its diasporas. This gathering of voices is fitting to bring alive not just the importance and nature of his work but how it was rooted in his Caribbean life—an appropriate community of witnesses to the work of this extraordinary thinker and writer.
Gordon Rohlehr, whose intellectual breadth and depth were always creatively employed, was a maestro of words who defied the boundaries between high and low culture and simply erased cultural borders in his search for making meaning. It is important to make sure his work is read and understood widely—for he had as much humility as he did brilliance.
Elaine Savory is Emeritus Professor of Literary and Environmental Studies at the New School, New York City, and was a colleague of Gordon Rohlehr’s at the University of the West Indies for many years. She is the author of Jean Rhys (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and the coeditor of, with Carole Boyce Davies, Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (Africa World, 1990); with Erica L. Johnson, Wide Sargasso Sea at Fifty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); and, with Carole Boyce Davies, Beyond the Kumbla: Sylvia Wynter and New Conversations (Africa World, 2026). She is a poet (flame tree time [Sandberry Press, 1994]), a playwright (e.g. American Artist, 2025), and has been a theater director.
[1] Gordon Rohlehr, Pathfinder: Black Awakening in “The Arrivants” of Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Gordon Rohlehr, 1981).
[2] Gordon Rohlehr, “A Carrion Time,” in My Strangled City, and Other Essays (Longman Trinidad, 1992), 161.
[3] Gordon Rohlehr, quoted in Selwyn Cudjoe, “The Space Between Negations: Gordon Rohlehr Interviewed by
Selwyn Cudjoe, 6 May 1980,” in Gordon Rohlehr, The Shape of That Hurt, and Other Essays (Longman Trinidad, 1992), 100, 117. Much of the interview explores parallels and differences between Joseph Conrad and V. S. Naipaul.
[4] See Elaine Savory, “The Word Walking Among Us: Reading Kamau Brathwaite with William Blake,” in Timothy J. Reiss, ed., For the Geography of a Soul: Emerging Perspectives on Kamau Brathwaite (Africa World, 2001), 111–28.
[5] Gordon Rohlehr, “Alienation and Commitment in the Works of Joseph Conrad” (PhD diss., Birmingham University, 1967); Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness,” and Other Tales, ed. Cedric Watts (Oxford World Classics, 2008).
[6] Gordon Rohlehr, “History as Absurdity” (1970), in My Strangled City, 17–51; Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492–1969 (1970; repr., Vintage, 1984). “History as Absurdity” first appeared in Tapia, nos. 11–12 (November–December 1970) and was reprinted in Orde Coombs, ed., Is Massa Day Dead (Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1974), 69–108. Citations are to My Strangled City.
[7] See Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944; repr., University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
[8] Rohlehr, “History as Absurdity,” 21.
[9] Gordon Rohlehr, Perfected Fables Now: A Bookman Signs Off on Seven Decades (Peepal Tree, 2019); Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins: A Memoir (Peepal Tree, 2020).
[10] W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” Poetryfoundation.org. The exact quote is “That is no country for old men.”
[11] Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (Oxford University Press, 1973).
[12] Rohlehr, Pathfinder, 249. See Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, “Wake,” in The Arrivants, 208–13.
[13] Gordon Rohlehr, “Megallions of Light: Edward Brathwaite’s Sun Poem,” in The Shape of That Hurt, 191–208.
[14] Gordon Rohlehr, “Dream Journeys,” World Literature Today 68, no. 4 (1994): 774. This essay on Brathwaite’s DreamStories appeared in the issue of World Literature Today celebrating Kamau’s award of the Neustadt Prize. It also appeared, slightly revised, as the introduction to the Longman edition of the stories, where it sought to guide the reader through the densely symbolic and surreal narratives; see Gordon Rohlehr, “Dream Journeys,” in Kamau Brathwaite, DreamStories (Longman, 1994), iii–xv.
[15] Rohlehr, Musings, 86.
[16] Though he is known as a leading scholar of negritude, Irele also wrote many essays on diasporic African literatures. See Abiola Irele, The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2001). Kamau made Irele one of the dedicatees for his Black and Blues (1976; repr., New Directions, 1995).
[17] See Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (Harvard University Press, 2017).
[18] Gordon Rohlehr, “The Rehumanisation of History,” in The Shape of That Hurt, 287.
[19] Gordon Rohlehr, Calypso and Society in Pre-independence Trinidad (Gordon Rohlehr, 1990), 221; Elaine Savory, “A Good Thing Spring Up: The Breadfruit Story in the Caribbean,” in Lesley Wylie, ed., Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics (Liverpool University Press, 2023), 41–62.
[20] I owe many thanks to Dr. Betty Ann Rohlehr for her prompt help whenever I have had a query about a citation and needed affirmation. Gordon’s companion in life and active helper in the production of his work, despite her own career, she is now a generous resource for scholars.