March On, Gord Brudder! In Solidarity!
March On, Gord Brudder! In Solidarity!
I am a firm believer in the vision of Caribbean integration, and this essay is a shout out in honor of Gordon Rohlehr.
Gordon embodied the spirit of an authentic Caribbean person. I felt at home in his presence. I appreciated his humble though confident countenance that made you feel important, established a lasting sense of community and mutual respect that you did not wish to dishonor. He was one of those rare figures of great learning marked by profound simplicity, charm, and grace. This stemmed from his radical grounding in the cultures of his fellow Caribbean sisters and brothers. As such, he spoke a language to which I felt deeply connected. This language was rooted in a world that I was familiar with from childhood and take wherever I go. Gordon was the custodian of a space in which you could sit down and talk about culture and be revitalized.
His seminal work on Caribbean forms refracted the soul of our Caribbean world, how it is structured and maintained and its historical capacity to imagine diverse ways of being in the world and an alternative vision of community. I will always recall his capacity to see the inherent ethics of resistance in everyday popular Caribbean aphorisms and wisdom sayings. This sensibility of self-respect is foundational in the genesis and development of Caribbean cultures in the modern world and beyond. To continue the process of creating an alternative future to the present we know, to survive and be healed from the wounds and absurdities of history, we need to remember Gordon Rohlehr and others like him who have passed over. In solidarity with them we shall be able to “sort out” things. In the light of all I have said, the following words are written in honor of Gordon, who taught us the importance and complexities of our Mother Tongue.
Gordon Rohlehr, as scholar, academic, social historian, literary critic, and essayist, made a lasting and significant contribution to understanding the relationship between history and literature as a process of meaning making in the Caribbean. His critical works on form and Caribbean arts, especially calypso, are classic investigations of Caribbean existence. Form and Caribbean arts were manifestations of the “revolution in self-perception” that he argued took place in the Caribbean, especially since the 1970s.1 He bore witness to this revolution in consciousness. The question of form is central in his work. Rohlehr’s journey began in Essequibo, in the then colonial Guiana; continued to Kingston, Jamaica; to Sussex, England, and participation in the Caribbean Artists Movement; then to Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. There he developed a deep engagement with Trinidadian society and culture.
This essay elaborates on Rohlehr’s contribution to the study of forms in the Caribbean context. It is impossible to speak of form apart from context. The question of form, integral to Rohlehr’s intellectual project, is pivotal in his contribution to Caribbean literature and history. Appropriately, he defined this goal to outline “some of the directions in which we have moved in our various attempts to structure certain aspects of our experience.”2 In relation to a distinctive Caribbean discourse, forms represent interrogations of existence and the subsequent construction of a regional narrative to combat the threat of anomie, the decay of social cohesion. Rohlehr became like Morpheus, the Greek deity of dreams, able to assume different forms and shapes and demonstrating how they affect one another.
Rohlehr wrote his doctoral thesis on Joseph Conrad, and his portrayal thereafter of the heart of darkness at the center of empire was formative in his work. He witnessed a revolution in Caribbean self-perception in a number of important ways. Firstly, he saw social and political dynamics as part of the emancipatory thrust in Caribbean history. Secondly, a radical shift in the geography of consciousness led to an epistemological revolution and the genesis of forms which expressed distinctive regional frames of it. Thirdly, this focus on form posed the question of the relationship between the sacred and the secular. Rohlehr argued that “any absolute distinction between religious and secular is unreal when one is dealing with the oral tradition. There are several points of intersection, areas of interplay between the two modes” (35).
Rohlehr was part of the beginning of a regional conversation through which Caribbean peoples journeyed into the interior of their consciousness in search of renewal. In his work, Caribbean peoples sought to represent themselves on their own terms rather than through the gaze of others. They reflected on themselves, breaking alienation, developing emancipatory strategies, and ultimately naming their world. He paid much attention to orality, whereby Caribbean peoples entered their voice and expressed their negotiation of pathways into new realities.
Rohlehr distinguished the oral tradition from modernist aesthetics. He argued that if the oral tradition directs our attention to assemblies of people—“the lime, the calypso tent, church, groundation, cult, drum, dance, performance, narrative, song, and sermon”—modernist aesthetics highlights “the separateness or the alienation of the individual, who is placed or lost in the universe of open possibilities, where he must create self, style, and form.”3 He further argued that modernist aesthetics “may raise problems of void or vortex, chaos or silence, the irrelevance of the individual, the dehumanization of art and the emergence in an incomprehensible universe of the art object as its own circular self-contained world, exploring itself, echoing itself, and sometimes with enviable, wormlike flexibility, even copulating itself.” What this meant for many Caribbean writers was that they were “simultaneously attracted to both sets of possibilities, so that the same works may contain the tension between the two poles of shaping, as well as two modes of being.” He asserted that in some writers “the poles are complementary, and curious continuities exist between them” (15). Symbolically, forms represent ways of being in the world. They emerged from out of a womb of space that had suffered the ravages of conquest, slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism.4
Rohlehr’s archive of Caribbean-produced forms included literature, poetry, calypso, music, and jazz. He divided these forms into oral and literary, secular and sacred. Language and literature became major areas of interrogation and activism in the postindependent Caribbean. They offered frames to effect a revolution in self-perception and to define an authentic sense of Caribbean identity. As one of the leaders at the forefront in the construction of this historical transformation in Caribbean self-consciousness, Rohlehr saw it was important to study the genesis of distinctive Caribbean forms.
Literature has played a complicated role in Caribbean history as a mirror through which Caribbean peoples could see themselves and their possibilities. Indeed, it has represented the passionate struggle to breathe life into the Caribbean experience—the passion to create narratives of decolonization and the quest for authenticity. Rohlehr also focused on extracting from the oral tradition two interrelated paradigms: the religious and the secular. He argued that “when one speaks of a religious paradigm, one is speaking not of religion itself, but of a shape or trope accessible for aesthetic extension into form” (17).
He recognized the wide diversity of religions in the Caribbean that spanned different positions along a continuum that stretched between non-European, African or Asian, and those with the greatest European content (17). When dealing with oral tradition, any absolute distinction between the religious and the secular is only fictive. There are several points of intersection and areas of interplay between the two modes. An inventory of forms predominantly employed in secular contexts includes folktales, proverbs, work songs, calypsos, reggae songs, and the steel band; the drum that, like reggae, inhabits both religious and secular domains; riddles, which have surfaced in quite different ways in Martin Carter and Shake Keane; forms of rhetorical performance such as Tobago Speech Mas, Robber Talk, carnival word games of all kinds, children’s ring games, jokes, and speech-making. Rohlehr concluded that for the writer such tropes collectively represented an almost inexhaustible resource since generally each had a distinctive shape (35).
The art of storytelling occupied a major place in Rohlehr’s inventory of forms. He recognized that “folktales and storytelling remain alive only in remote villages and rural areas throughout the Antilles. The living storytelling tradition which Daniel Crowley found in the Bahamas during the sixties, today faces extreme pressure from television, video and ‘the milk of transistors’ which feed the Antilles the plastic instamatic culture of America.” Rohlehr connected storytelling to the Caribbean novel when he argued that, while the lineaments of the original tradition of storytelling are being erased in the novel, the oral tale still exercises a certain power and force: “It may be possible to discuss the evolution of the West Indian novel by considering the linkages between street style, storytelling, the short story, and the formal and extended shaping of these things in the novel.” While this approach might not tell “the full story, it should provide interesting insights into novelists such as C. L. R. James, Alfred Mendes, [Sam] Selvon, Vidia Naipaul” (35). He concluded that “each phase represents a movement along the continuum, from a detached but still participatory of the secular/oral paradigm, towards an increasingly abstract, literary and Modernist model” (35–36). Thus said, the so-called secular and the sacred are entangled in the Caribbean. They are juxtaposed by a sense of energy that underwrites cultural vitality and its capacity for adaptation. Calypso and reggae are two living secular oral forms capable of self-adaptation to the extreme pressures of contemporary life. In twenty years, from the late 1960s, reggae internationalized itself, largely through the work of Bob Marley, in a way that attests to the creative life-force of ordinary Jamaican people. The calypso, an older form, had evolved through several identifiable stages: Rohlehr explored calypso history and formal identities closely.5
He broke ground analyzing calypso in general and the work of the Mighty Sparrow in particular. With some of his contemporaries, he made calypso and other emerging forms of cultural expression, such as dub poetry and rapso, understood as serious art forms, essential as part of the decolonization process in the Caribbean, moving away from colonial forms of culture as the only ones accorded respect. As a calypso chronicler and theorist, he argued that “the political calypso keeps open one area of freedom—freedom of expression—by the vigorous exercise of this freedom. Between 1970 and 1984, freedom has been a consistent theme in the political calypso, and the indivisibility of the various freedoms has been recognized.”6 Inevitably, the calypso trope lay at the intersections between the conflicts of artistic creativity in the Caribbean. The notion correlated with his argument that “Caribbean literature since the 1930s, but more particularly since the 1950s has been a deepening and prolonged exploration of Caribbean society, politics, and the inexhaustible psyche of the Caribbean peoples.”7 In this regard, literature and calypso and other popular forms were aligned to history. As frames of reference, both functioned as forms of criticism in the process of decolonization, self-reinvention, and rehumanization.
In bearing witness to various Caribbean figures, Rohlehr identified the ways in which they confronted the threat of anomie in Caribbean existence. The extensive list covers a range of forms. It includes Don Drummond, the jazz artist. Referring to him, Rohlehr writes, “Something in his work—a blend of militancy, despair, austere melancholy and tenderness and a profound loneliness.”8 Edward Kamau Brathwaite (subsequently Kamau Brathwaite) turned history into poetry. Rohlehr is the most prominent scholar of Kamau’s work: he talked of Kamau’s ceaseless experimentations with form, and his ability to use models drawn from the basic folk, folk-urban, and proletarian forms of Black people. Rohlehr recognized Derek Walcott’s attempt to forge a pathway between Europe and Africa in the Caribbean as evidenced in his patterns of code-switching between the classic tradition and popular culture and offered framings of other major writers. Wilson Harris expressed the necessity for a journey into the interior of the psyche for individual and collective rebirth. Louise Bennett demonstrated the power of Jamaica’s vernacular labrish. To the Mighty Sparrow, calypso was political in its radical engagement with the Caribbean public space. V. S. Naipaul was Brahminic and colonial in his assessment of Caribbean and other cultures he defined as areas of darkness. Eric Williams’s contribution to the shift in historical consciousness was seminal. George Lamming explored the intersection between literature and ritual in the process of subjectivation. In the process of decolonization, Rohlehr reminded his fellow Caribbean citizens that the artist was seen as rebel, as refashioner of word and world, lonely descender into private hell, and illuminator of social and political reality. In a nutshell, artists fashion forms of social protest that contribute to the democratization of society.
Caribbean peoples need new imaginaries and forms to continue the revolution in self-perception in the face of the contemporary crises they face. It is critical that they dialogue with one another in a complex, multicultural society shaped by the legacies of slavery, indentureship, and neocolonialism. In Rohlehr’s own words,
The revolution in self-perception has always been taking place; and it continues, grows increasingly more complex and multi-faceted. It embraces now both the notion of ethnic heritages and their competition and confrontation in the contemporary post-independence Caribbean. It involves the relentless class struggle, and the survival of the structures and instruments of exploitation and repression. It hovers between the alternatives of adamic renewal or return, and the existentialist sense of the void. It challenges conventional notions of history and is part of a vast-worldwide movement to relocate the submerged cultures of the devastated in the kingdom of human and humane achievement.9
Rohlehr recognized the critical function of Indigenous forms in the movement of Caribbean peoples beyond the boundaries of the colonial binaries into which they were forcibly inserted. He recognized that Caribbean peoples invented new forms to represent individual and collective capacities for critical self-reflection and self-invention—ways in which they saw themselves in relation to their history, society, and the world. These forms were and are classic expressions of the relationship between the spirit of creativity and renewal. In the face of the contemporary crisis of the imagination, Rohlehr’s work is a reminder of the adaptive nature of forms. Édouard Glissant is in accord with Rohlehr’s ideas when he says, “The account or frame of reference, of the collective relationships of men with their environment, in a space that keeps changing and in a time that is constantly being altered.”10 New Caribbean forms signify the intent to reroute history.
Rohlehr should have the last word as to how he saw himself against that historical backdrop:
I just see myself as being very much at the surface, very superficial really, very much at the beginning, in sense a pathfinder; our writers are pathfinders; I see myself as a pathfinder too, pointing to the various trails where people who are wiser than I have walked down and theorized. I’m hoping that the next generation goes much farther than I could have gone. I’m really hoping for that. I can’t say whether that has happened yet. I’m sure it will.11
While Rohlehr is undeniably a seminal figure in the study of Caribbean literature, history, and culture, he clearly did not wish to be canonized. On the contrary, the birth of the new Caribbean person, deployed in various forms, energized his critical consciousness. He celebrated the literature that represented this historical turning point. Like his fellow Guyanese Wilson Harris, he was conscious of “the unfinished genesis of the imagination.”12 Ultimately, he believed in Caribbean possibilities and the capacity of the people to renew the potentialities that lay within themselves. Rohlehr’s presence mediated his passion for the forms through which Caribbean people recognized themselves and their understanding of how their societies worked. Orality, the foundation of community, subverted existing frameworks of meaning through the interaction of forms. It formalized the everyday lives and perception of ordinary Caribbean folk whose stories are often excluded from historical narratives. Rohlehr understood the significance of their logic in the form of a common aphorism like “Massa is like cow dung.” He understood the signifying power of forms. In the process of ordering and rearranging Caribbean society, they signified an openness to a revolutionary Caribbean future that is diffuse and plural in its transcendence of binaries. In one of his later books, Rohlehr called himself Bookman, one of his consciousnesses, defined by him as a recorder, reminder, outsider, spaceman hovering over Trinidad and Tobago—his work always dedicated to the country and region he loved.13
Thank you, Gordon. One book closes, another opens!
Leslie R. James is the chair and former Walter E. Bundy Professor of Religious Studies, DePauw University, Indiana. He works on the history and comparative study of religions as well as Caribbean history, religion, and literature. His publications include Towards an Ecumenical Liberation Theology: A Critical Exploration of Common Dimensions in the Theologies of Juan L Segundo and Ruben A Alves (Peter Lang, 2001), and “Gordon Rohlehr: Celebrating the Life of a Bookman,” (C. L. R. James Journal 29, 2023). He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
[1] See Gordon Rohlehr, “Articulating a Caribbean Aesthetic: The Revolution in Self-Perception,” in My Strangled City and Other Essays (1992; repr., Peepal Tree, 2019), 1–16.
[2] Gordon Rohlehr, “The Problem of the Problem of Form: The Idea of an Aesthetic Continuum and Aesthetic Code-Switching in West Indian Literature,” in The Shape of That Hurt, and Other Essays (1992; repr., Peepal Tree, 2021), 14; hereafter cited in the text.
[3] Gordon Rohlehr, “Some Problems of Assessment: A Look at New Expressions in the Arts of the Contemporary Caribbean,” in Caribbean Quarterly 17, nos. 3–4 (September–December 1971): 94.
[4] This is a major concept in the work of Wilson Harris. For example, see Wilson Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination (Greenwood, 1983). The concept points to the distinctive nature of the Caribbean space as multicultural. As the ground of the imagination, it inaugurates a new species of humanity. See also Harris, Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. Andrew Bundy (Routledge, 1990), and Harris, Tradition, the Writer, and Society (New Beacon Books, 1967).
[5] See Gordon Rohlehr, Calypso and Society in Pre-independence Trinidad (Gordon Rohlehr, 1990); A Scuffling of Islands: Essays on Calypso (Lexicon, 2004); and My Whole Life Is Calypso: Essays on Sparrow (Gordon Rohlehr, 2015).
[6] Gordon Rohlehr, “‘Man Talking to Man’: Calypso and Social Confrontation in Trinidad 1970 to 1984,” in “Carnival, Calypso, and the Music of Confrontation,” special issue, Caribbean Quarterly 31, no. 2 (1985): 13.
[7] Gordon Rohlehr, “Man’s Spiritual Search in the Caribbean Through Literature,” in Idris Hamid, ed., Troubling of the Waters (Rahaman, 1973), 187.
[8] Gordon Rohlehr, “Sounds and Pressure,” in My Strangled City, 80.
[9] Rohlehr, “Articulating a Caribbean Aesthetic,” 21.
[10] Édouard Glissant, “History and Literature,” in Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (University Press of Virginia, 1999), 69–70.
[11] Gordon Rohlehr, quoted in Paula Morgan, “From Apocalypse to Awakenings—Conversations with Gordon Rohlehr,” Tout Moun Caribbean Journal of Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2013): 16, https://journals.sta.uwi.edu/ojs/index.php/toutmoun/article/view/8696.
[12] See Wilson Harris, Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. Andrew Bundy (Routledge, 1990). “May I say at the outset that such genesis for me is ceaselessly unfinished and that this sensation of unfinished genesis—in worlds of space and nature and psyche—has its roots as much in the Old Worlds as in New, in the crossroads of civilization upon which we may have arrived in subtle and complex and involuntary ways that are altering conventional linearity and conventional frameworks” (237; italics in the original).
[13] See Gordon Rohlehr, Perfected Fables Now: A Bookman Signs Off on Seven Decades (Peepal Tree, 2019).