Gordon Rohlehr 20 February 1942 – 29 January 2023
We are shocked and saddened to hear of Gordon’s sudden and unexpected death. With all his achievements and importance as a pioneering scholar of Caribbean writing and Caribbean popular culture, in particular, Calypso, Gordon was simply a lovely man whom anyone who spent time with him came away feeling better and inspired to be their best self. The deep chuckle and punning humour that many will remember from conversations with him will be sorely missed. We send our heartfelt sympathies to his wife, Betty, his intellectual partner over many years, and to his wider family.
We will post a more extended appreciation of Gordon’s outstanding contribution to articulating ways of understanding the complexities and contradictions of creativity in the Caribbean region, suffice to say at this point that his work in making connections between the aesthetics of post-independence Caribbean writing and its social and political context stands as a body of criticism that no serious student of Caribbean writing can, or should, ignore. There are major statements on the work of Brathwaite, Walcott and V.S. Naipaul that are models of perceptive balance, but also a recognition of the importance of many writers whose work was never published outside the region. His work on the aesthetics of calypso in a series of important titles has rightly been described as ‘monumental’, not just in scope of coverage but in the depth and judiciousness of his analysis. He was deeply critical of petty Caribbean nationalisms but in an utterly principled way never published outside of Trinidad until he published with Peepal Tree. We always felt honoured that he regarded us as a kind of surrogate Caribbean press. Any serious and attentive reader of Gordon’s books will have deduced a complex and rich personality behind the selfless attentiveness to the work of others. That person is revealed in his most recent book, Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins: a Memoir (2020), a book that ranges over a variety of forms – diary, recorded dreams, poems, a kind of flash fiction, polemics, prophecies, and philosophical reflections – that records the dialogue between the triumvirate that contained the public persona, Gordon, the reticent Frederick and the visionary dreamer, Daniel Lyonnes-Denne. Our only slight consolation to offer is that despite Gordon telling me that Perfected Fables Now (2018) was going to be his last book, there are two more ‘in press’, his memoir of A Literary Friendship: Selected Notes on the Kamau Brathwaite, Gordon Rohlehr Correspondence (a record of a friendship going back fifty years), and his study of African-Indian relationships in Who Owns the Stage, through his analysis of recent Soca, Calypso and Chutney. Both will appear in the next couple of years.
Farewell, Gordon, dear friend.
Jeremy Poynting, 30 January 2023
