Editorial
Throughout his long and distinguished career, Gordon Rohlehr, who died on Sunday aged 80, occupied a rare space as a Caribbean academic.
He traversed two worlds: the world of calypso and the world of academia.
But if there was a single argument he embodied, it was the idea that there really is no difference between the two worlds.
Calypso, he showed us again and again, is, at its peak, a wonderful intellectual construct, a barometer to measure the pulse of our society as we transition from a colonial state.
Of course, the breadth of Prof Rohlehr’s work was so broad that the issues he examined were complex.
He wrote important tracts for such figures as Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, VS Naipaul, Earl Lovelace, Lloyd Best, Pat Bishop and Jeffrey Chock, among others. Themes such as soca parang were often rocked alongside things like moko jumbies and J’Ouvert.
This is because, in his vision, cultural studies went hand in hand with political analysis.
In a late essay, he called for the preservation of Caribbean cultural identity amid an increasingly vocal onslaught of counterforces.
“If we are to truly preserve Caribbean cultural identity in the face of so many ambiguous pressures and tensions, we will need courage, faith, awareness and care,” he wrote in 2006.
Prof Rohlehr’s numerous publications include: Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (1990), My Strangled City and Other Essays (1992), The Shape of That Hurt and Other Essays (1992), A Scuffling of Islands: Essays on Calypso (2004). ), Perfect Fables Now: A Bookman Signs Off on Seven Decades (2019) and the spectacular Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins (2020).
But it is his foray into calypso, particularly the work of Sparrow and the late Black Stalin, that has come to define his legacy.
Perhaps more than any other Caribbean academic, he has exposed generations to the nuances and intricacies of works that we have often taken for granted, missing their subversive qualities.
It is a legacy that stands alongside some of our greatest literary critics, including Kenneth Ramchand and Merle Hodge.
We sincerely hope that scholarship of this caliber continues.
It is ironic that Prof Rohlehr has died at a time when a debate is reviving about the importance of calypso in our carnival traditions.
Some calypsonians have recently claimed censorship, while a casual review of calypsonian tent shows raises troubling questions about whether modern calypsonians are able to hold those in positions of real power accountable.
At the very least, there should be a preservation and dissemination, especially at the tertiary level, of Prof Rohlehr’s criticism.
Perhaps some calypsonians, too, can learn a thing or two about their old art form by reading the professor today.
