Search results for ""Author Gordon Rohlehr""

There is nothing quite like Gordon Rohlehr’s Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins in Caribbean writing; probably its nearest neighbours are Kamau Brathwaite’s The Zea Mexican Diary and Trenchtown Rock. Over a period of more than forty years, Rohlehr, supreme public critic of the post-colonial Caribbean, its creative writing and the historian and deep analyser of calypso, has been paying quiet attention to his inner consciousness, a fictive journeying that has much to say about outer personal and wider Caribbean realities. It is a book that ranges over a variety of forms – diary, recorded dreams, poems, a kind of flash fiction, polemics, prophecies, and philosophical reflections -- all enriched by a lifetime of reading, thinking and articulate writing. As befits the slippery connections between inner and outer worlds, Rohlehr’s writing is distinguished by an infectious humour and a delight in puns.In the act of questioning what the years of “wuk” have achieved, Rohlehr asks himself and us the most profound questions – not the unanswerable metaphysics of “What are we here for?” but the material, ethical question of “To what end do we exist?” In the context of a Caribbean of disappointed post-colonial hopes, Rohlehr both confronts an existential void and records the increments of creativity and achievement that offer future hope.The book begins with the Guyanese child, born with a caul over his face, gifted with a prophetic vision deeply immersed in the African being that is part of his inheritance. He records how he was told – beyond his memory – how family members “steamed” his eyes to destroy something embarrassing to a colonial, lower-middle class family. The visions and intuitive knowledge disappeared, but if the family elders believed that they were cauterising something to destruction, they failed utterly to kill the visionary dreamer, the Daniel Lyonnes-Denne, who is one part of the triumvirate that also includes the public Gordon and the reticent Frederick.In his previous books, Gordon Rohlehr confronted the Caribbean world head-on. Here, he approaches from the margins, and who is to say his dream-work doesn’t tell just as powerful truths about Caribbean reality?

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Since the mid-1960s, Gordon Rohlehr has been an incomparable recorder and analyser of Caribbean literature and culture and their intersection with history and politics. His work on the emergence of Caribbean writing from its colonial shell and his analysis of calypso as the voice of Trinidadian consciousness establishes him as essential to our time as William Hazlitt was to the early 19th century in documenting and characterising the turbulent spirit of his age. Radical, but never willing to compromise his sense of what was fraudulent or power-seeking amongst his fellow travellers, Rohlehr is the best touchstone we have for both what the Caribbean has achieved and of its struggling, neo-colonial fragility in the face of the new imperialism of economic and cultural globalism.Now – though who knows? – in putting together what he says is his last book, Gordon Rohlehr doffs the costume of the carnival figure of the “Bookman”, the recording Satan of the devil band, who walks with his book in which he writes down the names of the damned. And here we have the clue to the fact that along with the serious analysis of calypso, his summing up of what is essential in the work of Derek Walcott, Earl Lovelace and V.S. Naipaul, and the essays of remembrance for those like Walcott, Lloyd Best, Pat Bishop, Tony Martin and others who have made their earthly exits, there is a devilish humour at work. This comes out particularly in an essay that joyfully demolishes an attempt to characterise the Caribbean in any other than its own terms – as a new Mediterranean, for instance – and the subservience of Trinidad’s rulers to the neo-colonialisms of tourism, visiting American ships and the U.S. embassy. What is often salutary, if uncomfortable, is to be reminded by the long span of Rohlehr’s observations that problems seen as contemporary were being identified by the nation’s calypsonians sixty years ago. Rohlehr’s voice is always distinctively personal, though the Bookman has rarely revealed much of himself, but in one of the concluding essays he writes about his Guyanese upbringing from the 1940s to the 1960s in a way that is both very funny and sad and gives an understanding of what has shaped his vision.

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Gordon Rohlehr’s critical work is outstanding in the balance it achieves between its particularity and its breadth – from the detailed unpacking of a poem’s inner workings, to locating Caribbean writing in the sweep of political and cultural history – and the equal respect he pays to literary and to popular cultural forms. His “Articulating a Caribbean Aesthetic” remains a stunningly pertinent and concise account of the historical formation of the cultural shifts that framed Caribbean writing as a distinctive body of work. Indeed, along with Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter and Kenneth Ramchand, no critic has done more to establish the subject of Caribbean writing and its distinctive aesthetics. These essays, written between 1969 to 1986, first published in radical campaigning newspapers such as Tapia and Moko, and first collected in 1992, were the work of a young academic who was both changing the university curriculum, and deeply engaged with the less privileged world outside the campus. Rohlehr catches Caribbean writing at the point when it leaves behind its nationalist hopes and begins to challenge the complex realities of independence. Few critics have written as clearly about how deeply the colonial has remained embedded in the postcolonial.What shines in Rohlehr’s work is not merely its depth, acuity and humanity, but its courage. He writes when his subject is still emergent, without waiting for the credibility of metropolitan endorsements as a guide to the canon. “My Strangled City”, a record of how Trinidad’s poets responded to the upsurge of revolutionary hopes, radical shams, repressions and disappointed dreams of 1964-1975 is an indispensable account of those times and the diversity of literary response that continues to speak to the present. And if in these essays Trinidad is Rohlehr’s primary focus, his perspective is genuinely regional. His native Guyana is always present in his thoughts and several essays show his deep interest in the cultural productions of a “dread” Jamaica, and in making insightful comparisons between, for instance, reggae and calypso.

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Continuing on from his outstanding collection of literary criticism, My Strangled City and other essays, literary critic and Professor Gordon Rohlehr delves further, examining the work of Sam Selvon, Louise Bennett, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott and many other luminaries of the Caribbean. Originally published by Longman in 1992, this is a marvellous addition to the Caribbean Modern Classics series.

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