Accolades have poured in for Professor Emeritus Gordon Rohlehr, the Guyanese-born UWI, St Augustine academic, early poet, critic and thinker who died just as the season of calypso starts, when it was he who made that popular genre his own critical and theoretical territory. He was the man who argued that calypso was on a continuum with “high” art.
Rohlehr has left us a large body of work from his career-long endeavour to describe and understand what a local Caribbean aesthetic could be. He broke new ground analysing calypso and the work of Sparrow, addressing the relationship between the language used by our poets and novelists and the language used in our speech and song and how that has developed into our uniquely local creative aesthetic. I remember the heated 1970s debates about the rightness and wrongness of literature in the Queen’s English as we had been taught it when we actually spoke Creole. Rohlehr, with some of his contemporaries, made calypso and other emerging forms of cultural expression, such as dub poetry and rapso, into subjects worthy of academic study, which was essential as part of our decolonisation process. Seeing Louise Bennett speaking and performing in Jamaican patois on BBC TV in the UK back then was a revelation. The 1970s Black Power revolt in Trinidad proved that we are a multi-faceted and complex society and that we needed new tools to forge a veritable post-colonial society. Other countries in our region faced the same realisation. One could say that language and literature became another area of activism in the years after independence and Rohlehr was one of the leaders. His theorising was an important step in establishing a post-colonial literature, and he vigorously defended Kamau Brathwaite who had dedicated himself to it.
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The UWI reports that he started the study of literature at the St Augustine campus in the 1980s and by all accounts Rohlehr was a phenomenally good teacher. Not only was his thinking and theorising stimulating, his teaching methods were anything but boring. He brought personal recordings to the lectures, and old journals and cuttings. Commenting on his career as a teacher, he said in an Anthurium interview, “My teaching has been a kind of conversation – a dialogue as opposed to a monologue in which students would have their own voices which I have been careful to affirm so that they would learn to take their voices seriously. We must not shun critical discourses which come from outside which could be very relevant and helpful in terms of understanding ourselves and our situation.” He came many times to the annual literary festival, the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, and he was known to start his tiny recording machine as the sessions started. We knew it was to advance whatever new book he was working on or possibly as a teaching tool.
Making literature accessible, as calypso is, to all was a strong motivating force. It is why he published many of his own dozen or so books and shied away f
