By Kimberly Ramkhalawan
January 31, 2023
The Caribbean has lost another great son, Professor Emeritus Gordon Rohlehr, who died at the age of 80.
His profound grasp and explanation of the Caribbean language as sung in its calypsos, particular Trinidad and Tobago’s Mighty Sparrow exemplifies how our music in the region unites us and tells our stories, for Rohlehr he enjoyed the ones that brought his two loves together, cricket and calypso.
His marvel with calypso was the ability to tell the place and time of the region, by “analysing the changes of attitude” as heard in the songs sung. To him, simply following calypso as it was a form of documentation, “could tell us from inside what people were thinking about”. And this was something the Professor recognized, as Raymond Ramcharitar explains, where academia for once took it upon itself to pay rightful attention to the social commentary emanating from culture and its artform.
Rohlehr comes from a group of Caribbean intellectuals who had migrated on scholarship for study and often gathered at the flat belonging to Orlando Patterson in London, where the Caribbean Artists Movement was formed, bringing together the likes of Barbadian poet, Kamau Braithwaite, George Lamming, Douglas Hall, Kenneth Ramchand, Christopher Laird, to name a few, including Trinidadian John La Rose, whom Rohlehr credits for the invitation to CAM.
He also rubbed shoulders with political activist Walter Rodney, who had gone to school with him in Guyana, crossing paths with him on campus in Mona, and even staying with him during his time in London. However, with CAM’s Savacou publications taking up the writings of Rodney, Rohlehr saw it fit to keep his name distant from such associations. Nevertheless, in his recent reflections, Rohlehr admitted to a lack of political grooming, only having attained a better understanding of Rodney’s work in latter years.
Following his time in England, Rohlehr was offered a position at its St. Augustine Campus, where he spent forty years in its Department of English Trinidad, establishing an international reputation for his ground-breaking work on Caribbean literature, calypso and culture.
The professor Emeritus has been credited with establishing the first West Indian Literature course at The UWI, having been The 80 year old Emeritus Professor at Trinidad’s St Augustine Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), is renowned for his landmark work entitled “Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad” (1989), is considered the world’s leading authority on its development, with his most recent publication in 2014, “My whole life is calypso: Essays on Sparrow”, a dedication to the Mighty Sparrow”.
His body of work is reputed to be the world’s leading authority on calypso, tracing its development over the last two hundred years from its West African origins and studying the vast amount of recorded material produced by generations of West Indians, particularly in Trinidad and Tobago. Also, being a devotee of the game of cricket, Professor Rohlehr was been able to combine his love of the game with his professional interest in the Caribbean oral tradition of song, with a focus on the sport which was often featured in calypsos.
Rohlehr’s last publication, Perfected Fables Now: A Bookman Signs Off on Seven Decades, encapsulated a mapped trajectory of calypso, education and the impact on community during the period 1940s to 2011, like no other academic could seek to do in Trinidad.
In 2022, Rohlehr was awarded Trinidad’s Chaconia Silver medal for contributions to literature, culture, history and education having been credited for having designed and taught the first course in West Indian Literature at the UWI.
Rohlehr’s publications include: Pathfinder: Black Awakening in “The Arrivants” of Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Tunapuna: College Press, 1981); Cultural Resistance and the Guyana State (Casa de las Américas, 1984); Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (Port of Spain, 1990); My Strangled City and Other Essays (Longman Trinidad, 1992); The Shape of That Hurt and Other Essays (Longman Trinidad, 1992); A Scuffling of Islands: Essays on Calypso (Lexicon Trinidad Ltd, 2004); Transgression, Transition, Transformation: Essays in Caribbean Culture (Lexicon, 2007); and Ancestories: Readings of Kamau Brathwaite’s “Ancestors” (Trinidad: Lexicon, 2010) and My Whole Life is Calypso: Essays on Sparrow (2015).