Postlude
I want to begin with what came out of me as soon as I heard of the death of Gordon Rohlehr. After that, I propose to do the following: describe how we worked alongside each other under the revolutionary banner “Literatures in English”; touch on some of the spontaneous and unscheduled open-air conversations in which we indulged for many years; highlight the “topics” to which we were always adding new instalments; and finally, make a selective declaration of the works of his that have meant the most to me personally and that have shaped my lasting affection for him.
Song for Gordon
More than any of us, Gordon Rohlehr made our society realize that folk art is art and that artistic and cultural expression have meaning only when they come naturally out of a people in their place and in their landscape.
He had the magic and magnetic capacity to pick up all the things that matter in the incessant flow of the life around us and to pull from the hidden recesses of our society all the inputs (the sounds and sights, dead or alive) that go into the making of creative expression.
Many of our epic conversations about life, literature, calypso, politics, Joseph Conrad, Humbert Humbert and anancy Ralph Singh, cricket, and this crazy crazy island took place in the JFK corridor at the University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine, as we oversaw student life flitting in the spaces between library, engineering building, guild office, and bar. I never saw him dance, but we balanced ourselves securely on humor, an amused irony, and a despair that was logical but never a deterrent to effort, enjoyment, and dedication to the work.
His scholarly contribution to documenting and interpreting popular culture and the popular arts stands by itself. It was also an essential part of his brand of literariness. As a literary man he was responsive to the energy released into our island-born language by the fission and fusion of orality and writing, dialect and standard, and by the selective admittance of new foreign elements.
He wrote pertinently and brilliantly the prime handbook about Kamau Brathwaite, Pathfinder.1 He was also a brave cultural historian: his spicy “History as Absurdity” is an incisive Fanonian analysis of the psyche of Dr. Eric Williams, a dispassionate analysis of an acquiescent Trinidad society, and a learned and philosophical disquisition on how to begin to find ways to write what Kamau would call the alterNative history of these islands.2
The authors of Calypso and Society in Pre-independence Trinidad and The West Indian Novel and Its Background had a serendipitous, and historic working relationship that established the UWI English Department as a Department of Literatures in English, with West Indian literature at the core.3
Our unambiguous respect for each other as persons and the complementarity of our different skills unified generations of students of all ethnicities and persuasions. He served the cause and the students without any holding back. He was incapable of jealousy, anger, envy, malice, or mauvaise langue toward his colleagues: he lived the fact that there was enough work for everybody to have a share.
Above all, he was cool.
You could play your strokes knowing he was always there, a pillar ready to hold up the side.
I never thought he would die, and I never imagined I would be so affected by his going.
Memories can console.
But not enough.
I arrived at the UWI, Mona campus in 1969, a year after Gordon went to St. Augustine. By the time we met at the Conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) in 1971, the first full course in West Indian literature at the Mona campus had just been taught. By 1971 “West Indian literature” had caught on, and the idea that the Department of English should become the Department of Literatures in English, with West Indian literature at the core, had taken root. At St. Augustine, Gordon had been working outside the English curriculum, mentoring young Trinidadian poets and beginning his life-long engagement with the calypso and oral traditions. By the time I joined the St. Augustine campus in 1975, Gordon’s work had gone beyond the old academic definition that divided oral literature from written literature. I took him to be thinking that in a society like ours, oral and written literatures had always been acting on and reacting with one another and that each was all the more vibrant and native because there was a continuum in which they passed and repassed each other. I preferred to describe this as a language continuum that carried the interaction and fusion between ear and eye, soloist and ensemble, oral and written, “dialect” and “standard.” We were in agreement that the phenomenon existed. It was always a myth that Gordon believed in orality and the folk while I believed only in the words on the page.
At St. Augustine we drifted into a habit of old-talking on unscheduled days near to his book-and-paper-laden office on the third-floor corridor. A book or two would rest on the flat top of the concrete banister that ringed the building, leaving his hands free to gesture and point. Now and then we would notice someone or something among the students down below as they flitted between auditorium, library and the humanities building, bar, guild office, and cafeteria. Sometimes we would watch them playing wind-ball cricket. Sometimes we would see Brother Resistance ringing the bell for culture with his drum.4
I had brought my Don Drummond recordings from Jamaica and a small gathering of 45s from individual reggae artists. As founding editors of Savacou, Kamau and I had just published Reel from “The Life Movie,” a collection of poems by Tony McNeill.5 From Gordon’s many monologues in that busy corridor, I learned the words to talk about what it was in these artists that had magically reached me. He was deep into their rhythm and knew the sounds on the surface and, what was more, their inner music. I was less speechless when he talked about the virtuosity of Sparrow, whose “Drunk and Disorderly” fed my strangled fantasies of breaking free and whose “Robbery with V” taught me that doing the work was its own reward.6
Gordon was more literary than me when he analyzed the language of Sparrow’s poems, and more socially and politically acute in his explicating and his half-acting-out of what I felt to be this calypsonian’s greatest strength, his engaging “impersonations” of contradictory Trinidadians. I was not certain that the irony and satire of the poems came out of a consistent moral stance. I enjoyed the whole oeuvre as a gallery of drinkards and drummers innocently startling unprepared “decent” folk. The irony and satire were inherent in the material. We brought Spoiler back from hell and picked his feverish brain.7 I took from Gordon’s articulations that the stunning individual genius of Shadow and David Rudder came from the depths of unknown generations of Black souls whose sensibilities had escaped being split into secular and religious. These were fun conversations that thickened the idea of literature for me. What I remember most are the mood and the spell he cast. These were slivers of material for essays in the making and time-release capsules that would work for me when I was ready. His analyses and penetrations of calypso chimed with my explorations of short fictions from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries as I sought in my own way to own the subtleties of shape and form and the sleeping content in West Indian literature. He never said he was amazed, but I was amazed to find so many correspondences between the short stories and calypsos of preindependence Trinidad.
I would go to his house to collect tapes of calypsos I wanted to use for my West Indian literature class as a regular visiting professor at Colgate University. Once or twice I drank a draught of his pomerac brew. He would put on a weary smiling face to complain of the daily chore of cleaning up after the dogs. We made one or two serious jokes about the jokers in charge of the country. We would update each other about that unyielding student we all indulged: like Earl Lovelace’s stubborn believer George, replacing his bicycle pump every time “they” stole it, she came back year after year for more than twelve years to pass the elusive one course she needed to complete her degree.8
It didn’t feel strange, but it is strange now as I say it, that we never had dinner at his house or mine; we never went as families to the beach or a cricket match. He and I never went to a panyard practice session to take in the music raw. We never had drinks in my yard or his before the sandflies came. But we were physically present to each other. Sometimes when he was going on too long as if he were in a trance I would slip behind him. When he realized I wasn’t there he would stop, and I would get in a sentence or two. In essence we had a concrete and abstract relationship at the same time.
We worked together but we never wrote a paper jointly; we never worked as partners on any finite project. We never asked each other for comments on drafts of articles or published ones. Most of the time we were two separate rails, but we formed one railway track carrying the department to its destination. The truth about our success in making the department grow is that it was not us but our work that collaborated with and supplemented each other.
Our working together was never ethnically problematic. There had been bloodshed in Guyana over race, and there was tension in Trinidad. But a Guyanese of African origin could work with a Trinidadian of Indian origin without the slightest trace of racial thinking or feeling. Within the enclave of Literatures in English there was no tension between our African and Indian students. There were more Indians in the newly introduced African Literatures in English course, and the numbers were even higher in Indian Literature in English. The students knew that ethnicity wasn’t on our minds and that we were focused on the pleasures and the values of the prose and poetry to which we were introducing them. Generations passed though our hands in this state of grace. Whatever the pressures in the island at the time, the students we taught seemed to have no racial bias toward either of us. They liked or disliked our classes strictly on how our different teaching methods worked for them. He gave them more help with what the texts meant than I did because the purpose of my lectures was to prepare them to read and respond to the texts for themselves. One day in the corridor I complimented him on Pathfinder and got a broad, understanding grin when I added that of course once students read it they would feel they could wait to read Brathwaite after the exams. We put graduate studies on solid footing by introducing the MA by Coursework and Short Dissertation to top up the students’ literature degrees; to introduce them to methods of research and scholarship; and to push them to think of a more engaged and properly oriented criticism by exposing them to essays on writing, culture, and society by West Indian and Latin American practitioners. He was a stalwart in this program. While we were there, criticism and theory emanating from Euro-American academies were not ignored, but they were made to know their place.
For a cross-campus departmental conference in the early 1980s, the theme proposed was “The Problem of Form,” and the idea was to encourage members to look at how our writers had taken possession of inherited forms, reshaping them to their purposes and discovering surprising shapes in our subsoil. Of course he and I talked about this in the corridor before the conference. He produced a sixty-page meditation provocatively titled “The Problem of the Problem of Form.” He said that the piece was provisional and that it was a description of possibilities, not a prescription. The subtitle was “The Idea of an Aesthetic Continuum and Aesthetic Code-Switching in West Indian Literature.” This essay went way beyond any of the minor sparring we did about the problem of form in the corridor. In the corridor we talked briefly about tradition, oral tradition, and folk tradition. We wondered where form came from. I wanted to have an understanding of who “the folk” were and where they were now. If they were rural folk, had they perished in the long march to the coin in the sky in Martin Carter’s “University of Hunger,” or were they now ghosts lurking in urban ground?
The implications of this exploratory essay on “the emerging notion of an aesthetics based on the oral traditions of the Caribbean” have not been discussed much in the Caribbean.9 I myself have not made the time to work out the differences between Gordon’s idea and my preference for an aesthetic embedded in our linguistic continuum and in our linguistic code-switching. As for “the folk,” I feel I owe it to him to write something about them, if only because when I said at the ACLALS Conference in Jamaica that I had no intention to folk up my criticism, no reference was intended to his constructions of “the folk” that I knew about, or to his paper at the conference, which I had missed. In the corridor I did not raise a question that had come to me in my own attempts to theorize the “folk”: If the “folk” were part of the collective unconscious, did they exist a-historically and free of racial identity?
In our corridor chats we went through the motions of wrestling, but we never went for blood. His V. S. Naipaul essay, “The Ironic Approach,” was the best essay to me in Louis James’s The Islands in Between. I found Gordon’s comments on Naipaul’s early fictions stimulating, and I admired the analysis through which he spelled out Naipaul’s achievement in A House for Mr. Biswas. I had put an asterisk in the margin where I saw certain descriptive errors and where I thought a concern with the man might distract him from analysis of the works themselves: “Naipaul is a Trinidad Indian who has not come to terms with the Negro-Creole world in Trinidad. Or with the East Indian world in Trinidad, or with the greyness of English life or with life in India itself where he went in search of his roots.”10 I never discussed that sentence with him (just as I never spoke with Walcott about “The Mongoose,” his contemptuous poem about Naipaul).11 We did talk about the complicated relationship between the writer and the man that Naipaul himself addressed many times. And we noticed Naipaul’s use of the mock biographer in his early writing, especially in The Mystic Masseur, where a mock biographer is used to satirize and deflate Ganesh Ramsumair.12
We both felt affinities with Naipaul’s versions of the vanity of human wishes and human endeavor, and we more or less settled on him as a spasmodically escapist prophet of despair. We eventually followed Naipaul by having fun not simply with Mr. Biswas but enjoying Ralph Singh of The Mimic Men as the ambivalent and iconic Naipaul character.13
If I spotted him first, I would say “Hey, Ralphie,” though sometimes as he stood next to the concrete banister I would say, “Don’t jump, Jim.” Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, and primarily Nostromo were great Caribbean works for me, and Nostromo’s obsession with hidden gold and Giselle’s little feet and the novel’s unsparing depiction of a multinational’s greedy, corrupt, and inhuman exploitation of the resources of a Latin American country were topics on which our talk often settled in the corridor.14 We evoked the agony of the Company’s Nostromo (“our man”) when he takes the decision to become his own man and not the Company’s neutral factotum. And we mused on the anticlimax of chance ending Nostromo’s grab at freedom. Somehow, the Conradian and Naipaulian themes always brought us back to Kamau’s New World mariners.
To me the great Kamau was the Kamau of the socially, culturally, and politically passionate The Arrivants; the self-contained, wise, and bemused voice of Sappho Sakyi’s Meditations; the poet of “Clock” in Other Exiles, whose pounding in his dark haunts me still; the poet of the metaphysical intuitions of “The Dust.”15 I presented him more and more as the poet who was exploring the consequences of returning home to find Jack Kennedy invading Cuba, Black riots in Aruba, the cutting down of the cane fields of Caymanas, and the plight of the supporting poor who were
denuded into silence like the stones
where their shacks sit, which
their picks hit,
where beaten spirits,
trapped in flesh,
litter the landscape with their broken homes.16
I often had reason to go into Gordon’s Pathfinder: a careful, painstaking, devoted, comprehensive, and insightful shaping of the inputs that went into Brathwaite’s work. He knew that I had included The Arrivants among the ten major books in my Introduction to the Study of West Indian Literature, and he acknowledged that my notorious “Pit is pot” invention, taken by some as parody, was an attempt to encourage open discussion of what Brathwaite was doing to the relationship between sound and “sense” in his poetry.17 But we couldn’t get over it: we respected our fundamental differences over the puzzle and enigma of Kamau as well as Kamau’s opinions on what language West Indians speak and on the peculiarities of the meeting of cultures and races in Trinidad. I knew I was an argumentative Indian and never saw myself as a contradictory omen. We met in our care for our students, and though we recognized the culture wars of the time we never warred against each other or made them part of our teaching.
Some of the students, unknown to us, stayed quiet on the staircase and listened to us now and then, enjoying the spirit of what they heard, and I imagine they liked our frequent returns to Naipaul, Eric Williams, Conrad, Sam Selvon, Sparrow and calypso, Walcott, Spoiler, and more and more Stalin, Shadow, and David Rudder. And cricket. I suspect that like me he had fantasies of being a cricketer. He could describe a batsman’s stroke as if he were looking at a slow-motion replay, pinpointing the exact moment when the Caribbean genius of Richards would depart gloriously from the coaching manuals. We identified with the cricketing figures and all the other artists who were holding up the nation and giving us pride. We played imaginary innings. When he was Lloyd, I was Kanhai; when he was Sobers, I would be Headley. Did he dream of being Holding as I dreamed of being Ambrose?18 I knew only that we did not separate our work from the work of the giants of arts and culture whose heads reached the sky and whose feet were passing through fire to our core. Gordon wrote down or tape-recorded everything, but my attitude was that the earth has bubbles and we are of them. It was not a time when you could have a cellphone in your pocket recording your conversations. Perhaps he made notes about one or two things we talked about, but I doubt it. I think these conversations were meaningful to me because anything worthwhile in them just passed into my nervous system. Perhaps that is how it went for him too.
His Calypso and Society in Pre-independence Trinidad ran parallel to my early life and helped me see how much I had absorbed without thinking. I still go to it as to a newspaper archive to contextualize a memory or a feeling or an idea that wanders into my head. It is always to hand, and tucked inside it is a hard copy of “Apocalypso and the Soca Fires of 1990,” his wonderful, discomfiting, and prophetic history of modern Trinidad, his immortalization of the calypsos and calypsonians who were singing the end of the calypso and society of the turn of the twentieth century.19
As soon as I read that essay I saw his brave wry smile and thought of some lines in one of my favorite Brathwaite poems, Sappho Sakyi’s Meditations: “Sappho Sakyi / had a weary / way of saying / what was true.”20
Kenneth Ramchand was the first professor of West Indian literature of the University of the West Indies. He served for twelve years as an independent senator in the Trinidad and Tobago Parliament and did a weekly column in the Trinidad Guardian at the same time as “a journalist of the Professor class.” He is the editor of the influential school anthology West Indian Narrative (Thomas Nelson, 1964), and the author of The West Indian Novel and Its Background (Ian Randle, 1970); An Introduction to the Study of West Indian Literature (Nelson, 1976); Matters Arising (Royards, 2021); and Selected Essays (forthcoming).
[1] Gordon Rohlehr, Pathfinder: Black Awakening in “The Arrivants” of Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Gordon Rohlehr, 1981).
[2] See Gordon Rohlehr, “History as Absurdity,” in Orde Coombs, ed., Is Massa Day Dead (Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1974), 69–108. The essay first appeared in Tapia, nos. 11–12 (November–December 1970), and is included in Gordon Rohlehr, My Strangled City, and Other Essays (Longman Trinidad, 1992), 17–51.
[3] Gordon Rohlehr, Calypso and Society in Pre-independence Trinidad (Gordon Rohlehr, 1990); Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (1970; repr., Heineman Educational Books, 1983).
[4] Brother Resistance (1954–2021) was the pioneer of “rapso” music and poetry in Trinidad and Tobago. He was born Roy Lewis in Laventille. He attended Queen’s Royal College without losing his identity and graduated from UWI with an honors degree in 1980. His growing feel for and consciousness of his Africanity led him to change his name to Lutalo Makossa Masimba in 1982. His rhythmic grounding in the language of the folk, and his roots in the social and cultural practices of the people around him, came out in his poetry, singing, acting, and music. He is remembered for his songs “Ring the Bell” and “Mother Earth,” his empathy, and his ardent practice as a popular artist.
[5] Anthony McNeill, Reel from “The Life-Movie” (Savacou, 1975).
[6] See Gordon Rohlehr, My Whole Life Is Calypso: Essays on Sparrow (Gordon Rohlehr, 2015).
[7] I refer to the Mighty Spoiler (Theophilus Prince, 1926–60), the popular calypsonian who won the Calypso King competition three times and a witty bard famous for the songs “Bedbug” and “Magistrate Trying Himself.” Derek Walcott’s 1981 poem “The Spoiler’s Return” describes his encounter with the deceased Calypso King, who begins by assuring the poet, “I decompose but I composing still.” Derek Walcott, “The Spoiler’s Return,” in The Fortunate Traveller (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 53–60.
[8] See Earl Lovelace, “George and the Bicycle Pump,” in A Brief Conversion, and Other Stories (Persea, 2003), 86–95.
[9] 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 (Longman Trinidad, 1992), 5.
[10] Gordon Rohlehr, “The Ironic Approach: The Novels of V. S. Naipaul,” in Louis James, ed., The Islands In Between: Essays on West Indian Literature (Oxford University Press, 1968), 121–39; V. S. Naipaul, The House for Mr. Biswas (André Deutsch, 1961).
[11] Derek Walcott read “The Mongoose” at the 2008 Calabash Festival in Jamaica.
[12] V. S. Naipaul, The Mystic Masseur (André Deutsch, 1957).
[13] V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (André Deutsch, 1967).
[14] Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Heinemann, 1899); Lord Jim (1900; repr., Norton, 1996); Nostromo (Heineman, 1904); The Secret Agent (1907; repr., Norton, 2016).
[15] Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (Oxford University Press, 1973); Sappho Sakyi’s Meditations (Savacou, 1989); “The Clock,” in Other Exiles (Oxford University Press, 1975), 21–22; “The Dust,” in The Arrivants, 62–69.
[16] Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, “O Dreams O Destinations,” in The Arrivants, 60–61.
[17] Kenneth Ramchand, Introduction to the Study of West Indian Literature (Nelson, 1976).
[18] I speak here of the great West Indian cricketers Viv Richards, Clive Lloyd, Rohan Kanhai, Garry Sobers, George Headley, Michael Holding, and Curtley Ambrose.
[19] Gordon Rohlehr, “Apocalypso and the Soca Fires of 1990,” in The Shape of That Hurt, 305–71.
[20] Brathwaite, Sappho Sakyi’s Meditations, 51.