Located or dislocated between the two times and places.
—Gordon Rohlehr, Perfected Fables Now
When Gordon Rohlehr retired in 2007, I decided to dramatize some of his work for his farewell function. I needed, however, something new, more personal, different from the celebrated critic we all knew. So I approached him about the poetry I was hoping he had written and secretly filed away. “I don’t write poetry,” he claimed, “but I write dreams.” Even better, I thought, digging into the foolscap pages and notebooks he had brought out—better because among the meanderings and monologues, the diversions and dialogues there was already a sort of drama taking place. And poetry, too, the odd bit of verse, carefully constructed, among the wanderings of his trisected selves—Gordon, Frederick, and Daniel; the slogger, the skeptic, and the dreamer—all Rohlehr and in many ways revealing more than even I had expected.1 Nothing really explains a person’s giftedness that one brings to the world or that brings one into the world, but here at least was a glimpse of how a writer was writing himself to himself (not unlike the Magistrate in Mighty Spoiler’s calypso “Magistrate Try Himself”), at play with paradoxes of being and the dissolution of definition that is the energy of the Yoruba divinity Eshu-Elegbara. What then does Eshu show in this Rohlehr play?2
GORDON
The person I knew as “Gordon” “shovels spadefuls of dense and at times putrid mud, to dig canals that go nowhere and will, in time, become clogged once more with mud, garbage, rusty pipes, old tin cans and incongruously delicate and beautiful pink water-lilies.”3 This was the brilliant, grounded, hard-working Caribbean intellectual and scholar we all knew. It was he whom I had met in 1985 when working as a junior something at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), the University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine. We were both involved in a calypso research project led by Sydney Hill, brother of Errol and himself an actor and broadcaster. I always had an interest in Calypso but had not yet produced any public work on the subject; Gordon was already the towering authority. His “From Atilla to the Seventies” had been broadcast on the Government Broadcasting Unit and published in Lloyd Best’s Tapia newspaper; he was lecturing on calypso on campus and elsewhere. It was he who had designed the questionnaire we used to interview calypsonians. I was privileged to share a couple of those interviews, from which I had also learned a lot.
Gordon’s stature in the field of calypso studies was itself the result of one of those “accidents” that changed the course of his life, what I call an Eshu-moment: a crossroads of instinctive choices where confusion unseats certainty or through disruption one discovers destiny. He had applied for jobs at both the Mona and St. Augustine campuses of UWI, but “much to [his] disappointment,” it was St. Augustine that made the offer.4 He joined the faculty there in 1968. What would have been the result, we wonder, had he gotten his first choice? As it turned out, when he tried to introduce a full course in West Indian literature in his new post, he found himself, ironically, up against the colonial-minded overlords of his preferred Mona campus.5 In the course of his career both campuses would throw obstacles in his path that helped shape the reputation he would make for himself.
In the ISER project, Neville Marcano, the Growling Tiger was my individual assignment. His story contained a great deal of material in which I was interested, and I was privileged to earn his trust and goodwill for the work I later produced. His interviews informed my writing of No Surrender: A Biography of the Growling Tiger and, more significantly, the first play in my calypso trilogy, Sing De Chorus.6 It was at a performance of this play at Queen’s Hall in Port of Spain in February 1991 that Gordon launched his magnum opus, Calypso and Society in Pre-independence Trinidad.7 I found it a strange request that he would launch his book during the intermission of a show, but I reasoned a large audience meant good book sales. Luckily, Eintou Springer, then director of the Heritage Library, was present and offered him a “proper launch,” which she organized a month or two later.
The background to this idea of his own book launch was the St. Augustine campus’s refusal to support publication of his earlier book Pathfinder: Black Awakening in “The Arrivants” of Edward Kamau Brathwaite.8 That rejection, as well as UWI’s ideological surrender to the country’s political directorate following suppression of the Black Power movement, showed him that, within the institution, he was essentially on his own:
It’s almost as if there was a deliberate desire that there should be no understanding of or no illumination of what all this ferment of literary activity meant. It was almost as if once the thing was black as in Black Power or African as in Kamau’s notion of an aesthetic, it had to be kept out. It was almost as if there was deliberate censorship of discourse on, let’s call it, the African presence in the Caribbean in whatever form that presence expressed itself . . . . Now as for Calypso and Society, I told myself that if a relatively hard sell book like Pathfinder had to be done by me, I was not going to give one that was much easier to sell to any publisher to end up with ten or twelve percent after twenty years of work. I might as well be independent, do it myself, do everything myself, sell it myself and bear whatever profits or loss I might sustain.9
This pushback against obstacles, a determined defiance not by declamation but by consistent, high quality, productive work, defined his path. He would publish in independent newspapers like Tapia and the Trinidad and Tobago Review. Further, he invested financially in and edited several issues of James Millette’s newspaper Moko, another organ of free expression, cultural creativity, and resistance in the 1970s.
Calypso would continue to be our common bond. When I was asked by Christopher Laird of Banyan TV to interview Sparrow, I had completed the final play in my trilogy, Ten to One, based on Sparrow’s era, and had formed a personal relationship with him. In preparing the interview, however, I consulted with Gordon. No one else had written more or with greater insight on Sparrow. He had been the subject of Gordon’s scholarly entrance to the field of calypso and over the years the focus of some ten or so essays, even though, as Sparrow remarked, Gordon had never interviewed him. Gordon’s approach was through the work itself, its context and location within a social ethos. As he told Funso Aiyejina, “One had to adopt a two-way approach—the society through the creations, the creations through the society and to somehow try to keep the balance.”10
Gordon would launch his other collection of calypso essays, A Scuffling of Islands, at UWI’s Department of Creative and Festival Arts, itself an entity peripheral to the university’s primary interests. Contributing to that program were the calypsonians Lady Africa, Shortpants, and Black Prince. Gordon the academic was completely at home with and committed to creative community spaces that have shaped an intellectual tradition deriving from, expressing and informing the Caribbean imagination:
But I always felt I needed to maintain some discourse with the public—the radio programmes and the Renegades panyard and my desire to teach West Indian literature whether Mona agreed or not, and my involvement in Moko and publishing were all forms of academic outreach, where the lecturer was trying to share the little he knew with the public; in a sense to give back to the public what I had derived from the public because I was dealing with the people’s culture. So that is what happened and that’s what I did.11
Much of the impact or endurance of Caribbean thought cannot be measured analytically, in the sense that its survival depends (unfortunately?) less on books and institutions of learning than on an oral permutation of ideas that might find some affinity and finally settle into public consciousness. Gordon was such an intellectual, the sage to whom we turned to help us make sense of our times through his own creative analysis of our works and deeds, whether in literature, public media, publications, politics, or calypso.
In October 2013 news of Sparrow’s serious illness hit Trinidad and Tobago, and suddenly we were confronted with the vision of a Sparrow-less world. Canboulay Productions responded with our “If Sparrow Say So . . .” initiative, a series of lecture-performances staged to examine his work, show public appreciation, and raise funds (unsolicited by Sparrow) to support his medical expenses. All these objectives were achieved. The first of our five lecturers was Rohlehr, whose talk, “My Whole Life Is Calypso,” would become the title of his collection of Sparrow essays, self-published in 2015. His conclusions in that collection offer us insights into Sparrow the artist: “Sparrow seems to be continually at war against the confining structures of the basic beat. It is this which makes his contribution to the rhythm of calypso no less than revolutionary.”12 He further illuminates Sparrow’s connection to the society he represents: “Sparrow[,] . . . a multifaceted, contradictory, role-playing chameleon of the street, caught like his nation in the constant process and challenge of self-invention.”13
Like Gordon himself, Sparrow too is an outside-insider, an “in-zile,” as Gordon puts it, quoting poet James Aboud. He describes Sparrow as “a transitional figure caught between two worlds.”14 Sparrow’s worlds, of course, are not the same as Gordon’s—“located or dislocated between two times and places.”15 His divided nationality/residence was different from Sparrow’s class tensions. Gordon’s time dichotomy might refer to the fragile federal dream of Caribbean unity of the 1950s and its shattering into insular independence. His dislocation in place more directly references his relationship with both Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago.
Gordon spoke of and conceptualized his notion of Guyana as “Guyagony”—race riots, the brutal Burnham years culminating in Walter Rodney’s assassination, the Jim Jones horror. His “Trinidad self,” however, I think he presented in performative ways—in literary and conversational word play, kaiso snippets, the personae of stick fighter, and, ultimately, one of his strongest alter egos, Bookman, who appears to write Gordon’s 2019 “conclusive” book, Perfected Fables Now: A Bookman Signs Off on Seven Decades. Viewing life from behind these masks, witnessing Gordon’s labors and performances from their psychic margins, is the cold, questioning eye of another self, “Frederick.”
FREDERICK
“Frederick rules peacefully in some remote, impoverished kingdom of mind and spirit,” Rohlehr said, “avoiding the mess of things, looking on . . . and making no sound.”16 He exists within the void, the voice of silence, questioning the usefulness of effort or utterance, feeling the futility of things.
At times Gordon speaks of the shout of Frederick’s silence. In a speech to graduates of Trinity Hall, St. Augustine, in May 1984, he recounts one such occasion:
The last time I was invited to speak at a valedictory dinner was in March or April 1970 when the warden and students of Canada Hall asked me. That dinner, unfortunately, coincided with a Black Power march in which the marchers, among whom were a number of students, were teargassed on Prince Street and a man was shot. On that occasion I knew what I was going to say . . . . But after I heard of the teargassing, I left the Campus filled with rage and despair and anguish and a sense of ominous foreboding and I abandoned the idea of attending a formal dinner, leaving the prospective candidates to say farewell to themselves in whatever way they chose.17
What was his message to these graduates in 1984? After chronicling the failures and atrocities in the Caribbean between those dates, he confesses: “I am far less certain of the validity or usefulness of any sort of utterance whatsoever . . . . Fumbling for a message then, in the face of the reality which I have described, what on earth can I tell you?” Frederick answers his own question: “You’ll enter a world whose greatest threat to your being will not be its endemic corruption, but its terrible tawdriness, its soul-destroying tedium and its neuter indifference to creative effort. I say that that world will stagnate in its own ennui, and that you will need all of your creative imagination to counter its powerful deadness. It really doesn’t matter which career chooses you; the challenge is the same.”18
One month later, in a guest editorial to New Voices, Frederick is heard ruminating on Gordon’s relationship with poetry. Admitting that he once wrote “poem-letters” as a student in England, he says, “Today . . . I find both the writing of poetry and self-exploratory prose impossible . . . as I transmit countless essays from my void to other vacancies.” He then asks, “What does poetry mean in the face of the new silences which I now inhabit? . . . Poems of all kinds people my ridden head, jostling for space with hundreds of kaiso-fragments, hymn splinters, the marvel of string quartets, Bessie’s power, Billie’s hurt, Nina’s tragic waste, Aretha’s electricity and Coltrane’s desolate calm at the equinox.” He then poses the same question to his audience of poets that he did to graduates earlier: “What message then, for our poets? No fat, bland, unlived affirmations from this dusty head. No easy formulae.”19
Frederick in his own way recognizes that in the face of Eshu, rationality is impossible. Eshu overturns all that effort; the muscle of ego builds. Eshu is the consciousness of chaos inherent in every choice, every breathing moment, along with the expectation of continuity as well as the potential for transformation. Frederick observes and is perhaps paralyzed within these possibilities.
I perceive in Frederick’s remoteness his choice of marginality, a defensive distance that I too adopted long ago in my own wariness about this place and my refusal to be sucked into the insidious mamaguism of Trinidad society, “avoiding the mess of things.” Maybe this was another way in which Gordon and I connected.
I am not even certain whose view predominated on the establishment of St. Augustine’s Creative Arts Centre, of which I became the founding director, Gordon’s or Frederick’s?20 Undeniably, the project was badly, even cynically, underresourced, as he often stated. I saw it as the kind of pioneering venture for which my experience had prepared me. Gordon did participate fully in our semilimes, seminars, and symposia, but I can’t recall comments from him about our creative work. This is an afterthought, as I now reflect on Frederick. It never bothered or even occurred to me at the time. I knew Gordon’s support was there and that was enough. In later years we would see more of Frederick in the shrug of resignation at the failure of others to appreciate his work, to even read his books or any book that might provide answers to the very questions they were then asking of him.
Whereas Frederick inhabits a soundless space or a space cluttered with sound, “Daniel” the dreamer is a wanderer—prophetic, playful, frankly funny, ancestral, often lost but never at a loss for dreams. While I imagine everyone dreams, how many of us diarize our dreams in detail, down to the day, the hour, the place they occurred? Here is a man making literature of his dreams, a literary critic presenting himself to himself (Spoiler) in what might well have been a painful, if playful, form of self-dissection. Eshu again appears, this time from within: “The most straightforward of dreams may be the work of a Trickster embedded in the dreaming consciousness, who disguises or conceals both the origins and the meaning of the dream.”
DANIEL
What I had found most fascinating in Gordon’s dream diaries was his account of being born with a caul, the gift and curse of spiritual sight. As he would later write,
I Daniel Lyons-Denne . . . was born with a caul and used as a child to see “things.” . . . No one paid attention to this tendency of mine until I started naming and identifying herbs and plants that I said were to be used for healing. My instructions were precise . . . . So what were they to do with this obeah child of caul and precocious calling? What did they do? I asked my mother . . . . “They must have done something because I have not seen anything extraordinary for six decades.” She was ninety-five at the time . . . . “They put out your eye,” she replied. “Who are ‘they’?” I asked. “The elders, the older women in your father’s obeah family. They said there were already too many mad men on parade. So they put out your eye.” “But how did they put it out?” “They used steam,” my mother said, adding she didn’t think it was a good thing to interfere with a person’s gift of vision.21
The dream diaries themselves testify that the “eye” steamed shut to netherworld wanderings in fact turned inward, unwavering in its survey of self. This is the terrain of Daniel, seer-man, who provides insight beyond the ordinary, the surface of things, and might have well discerned his own separateness from Frederick and Gordon. Daniel the dreamer becomes the protagonist in Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins: A Memoir, wandering through dream, reflection and presence at will. Like Eshu-Elegbara who transits realms, bearing messages to and from man to orisha and vice versa, he in one piquant, humorous episode converses with “the Schemer of Things.”22 This and other pieces of “self-exploratory prose” dramatize interior relationships and symbolize some exterior ones. The dream diaries are a surreal read—a cast of characters and core narratives afloat in a stream of disjointed consciousness, a dreamscape. We meet a melee of memory, vision, and imagination, a self-exteriorizing exercise or expressionistic performance of the three-in-one, trinity of the I/Eye. Under the episodes, we might catch snatches of the Rohlehr we know humming to himself those fragments of music, poems, kaisos, hymns, and blues, all in his “ridden head.”
“All Ah We Is One”: BOOKMAN
Gordon, Frederick, and Daniel, the identities of Gordon Rohlehr, finally dance into the perfect mas metaphor—“Bookman,” himself at once an instrument of and witness to time’s erasure, which Rohlehr/Bookman yet seeks to defy: “A dreadfully tired Bookman I, instead of doing the sensible thing and closing the book, continue with these scribbled notes to fulfill a self-assumed mission of witness and vindication of my years. One reads as one has been trained to read. One sees what one has been gifted to see, and one writes as one is compelled to write.”23
Here we arrive at Bookman’s epitaph in the face of “nothing” as he states in the preface to Perfected Fables Now: “So I write, exhausted, this closure of cycles, this steady perfection of all our fables. I write the end of yesterday and watch the omen of tomorrow unfold in this strange shattering of today. Is I, Bookman and All-Three-I, keeping the fate, trodding still the broken path toward nothing.”24
Bookman arrives at the crossroads between worlds, the junction for his final injunction. It is a junction not of physical death that can take place at any point with or without, maybe, one’s consciousness of it, but of the complete dissolution of self—“this strange shattering of today”—that allows the oncoming of spirit, offering its own sardonic glimpse into the world left behind that is to come. The only preparation for this moment is the wisdom of humility, as Gordon notes in his acceptance of an honorary doctorate from Sheffield University in 2009:
The Voice invites and warns us to question the meaning, trajectory and ultimate target of all our past and current striving. It also cautions us not to make too much of what we seem in our eyes and in the eyes of others to have achieved. It cautions us not to “much up” ourselves . . . as inbred recognition of the capricious nature of both the Anglo-Saxon Wyrd and the Diasporan-African Eshu-Elegbara, the forces that circumscribe, and some believe, determine our destiny beyond our wisest choosing or deepest and most disciplined striving.25
In the preface to Perfected Fables Now, Bookman exits the stage with a certain finality: “Have fun. Man gone.”26
Earl Lovelace, in a class with my UWI students some years ago, posed the question that challenges our own sense of responsibility and offers us a way to measure ourselves as a civilization: “What have we done with what we have done?” If Frederick doubts the possibility of creative transformation and Daniel dreams but does not create action, it is Gordon who takes the risks, transposing even Daniel’s wanderings to writing, building an intellectual legacy for generations to come. What now?
I began making recordings with Gordon after my retirement, a belated attempt to catch up with all the half-read manuscripts he had passed my way over years of friendship. One listened and learned; reading was almost a distraction. He simply knew much more about many things than most of us. Like other “insider-outsiders,” his compatriots Slade Hopkinson and Derek Walcott, he also saw both the creative vibrancy of Trinidad as well as its cyclical, cynical conversion into nothingness. This dissolution is aptly captured in an image he often invoked from Victor Questel’s poem “Ash Wednesday”:
But that’s what this country is about:
the burning of flesh and cane:
the ash
of effort.27
What will we do with what Rohlehr has done? The question will be answered ultimately insofar as we make it possible to hold in respect and utilize, in all fields, the products of our creative imagination, back, in other words, to the case he argued against the odds, for serious research, proper documentation, archiving, the production of cultural history and Caribbean education as levers for self-knowledge and social transformation. We could start at the University of the West Indies for reasons that should be obvious. His is a legacy that stands tall; only a chair in his name is missing.
Rawle Gibbons, born in Belmont, Trinidad and Tobago, is a playwright, a director, and an educator (he taught at the School of Drama, Jamaica, with Dennis Scott, and is the founding coordinator of the Creative Arts Centre, later the Department of Creative and Festival Arts, UWI, St. Augustine). His directing/devising credits include C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1976) and Derek Walcott’s Drums and Colours (1998); and the student productions Temple in the Sea (1995); Shango, Tales of the Orisha (1996); and Nation Dance—the Pilgrimage (2012). He cofounded the Caribbean Yard Campus in 2014 (a development network for Indigenous Caribbean education) and presently leads it at the Lloyd Best Institute of the Caribbean in Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago.
[1] Rohlehr explored these selves, especially Daniel, in Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins: A Memoir (Peepal Tree, 2020).
[2] Eshu-Elegbara is a Yoruba trickster god (orisha), and as such the principle of innate uncertainty in human affairs, permanence of paradox, and “messenger” between the material and spiritual worlds.
[3] Rohlehr, Musings, 14.
[4] Gordon Rohlehr, quoted in Funso Ayejina, “Gordon Rohlehr: Critic, Guyana,” in Self-Portraits: Interviews with Ten West Indian Writers and Two Critics (University of the West Indies School of Continuing Studies, 2003), 254.
[5] The University of the West Indies was founded with one campus in Mona, Jamaica, which has remained the administrative center of the institution, though now it has two more campuses, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, and Cave Hill, Barbados, as well as newer expansion to other Caribbean territories.
[6] See Rawle Gibbons, No Surrender: A Biography of the Growling Tiger (Canboulay, 1994); and A Calypso Trilogy: Sing De Chorus, Ah Wanna Fall, Ten to One (Ian Randle; Canboulay, 1999).
[7] Gordon Rohlehr, Calypso and Society in Pre-independence Trinidad (Gordon Rohlehr, 1990).
[8] Gordon Rohlehr, Pathfinder: Black Awakening in “The Arrivants” of Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Gordon Rohlehr, 1981).
[9] Rohlehr, quoted in Ayejina, “Gordon Rohlehr: Critic, Guyana,” 264.
[10] Rohlehr, quoted in Ayejina, “Gordon Rohlehr: Critic, Guyana,” 250.
[11] Rohlehr, quoted in Ayejina, “Gordon Rohlehr: Critic, Guyana,” 258.
[12] Gordon Rohlehr, My Whole Life Is Calypso: Essays on Sparrow (Gordon Rohlehr, 2015), 235.
[13] Rohlehr, My Whole Life Is Calypso, 126.
[14] Rohlehr, My Whole Life Is Calypso, 5, 8.
[15] Gordon Rohlehr, Perfected Fables Now: A Bookman Signs Off on Seven Decades (Peepal Tree, 2019), 236.
[16] Rohlehr, Musings, 14.
[17] Gordon Rohlehr, “Valedictory Address Delivered to Graduates of Trinity Hall on Saturday, 5th May 1984,” unpublished, n.p. Trinity Hall is on the St. Augustine campus of UWI.
[18] Gordon Rohlehr, “Valedictory Address,” n.p.
[19] Gordon Rohlehr, “This Fragile Music,” guest editorial, New Voices, June 1984, 6–7.
[20] This later became the Centre for Creative and Festival Arts, and later still, the Department of Creative and Festival Arts.
[21] Rohlehr, Musings, 11.
[22] See Rohlehr, Musings, 77–81.
[23] Rohlehr, Musings, 180.
[24] Rohlehr, preface to Perfected Fables Now, n.p.
[25] Rohlehr, Musings, 140.
[26] Rohlehr, preface to Perfected Fables Now, n.p.
[27] Gordon Rohlehr, “Author’s Preface: A Requiem for Two Decades,” in My Strangled City, and Other Essays (Longman Trinidad, 1992), n.p.