Perfected Fables Now: A Bookman Signs Off on Seven Decades-Gordon Rohlehr

Since the mid 1960s, Gordon Rohlehr has been an incomparable recorder and analyser of Caribbean literature and culture and their intersection with 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 Romantics in documenting and characterising the turbulent spirit of his early 19th century 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 the 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, Walcott, Lovelace and V.S. Naipaul, and the essays of remembrance for those like Derek Walcott, Lloyd Best, Pat Bishop, Tony Martin and others who have made their exits, there is a devilish humour at work. It comes out particularly in an essay that joyfully takes apart the attempts to characterise the Caribbean in any other than its own terms as a new Mediterranean, for instance and the subservience of Trinidads rulers to the neo-colonialisms of tourism, visiting American seamen and the U.S. embassy. What is often uncomfortable but salutary is to be reminded by the long span of Rohlehrs observations that problems seen as contemporary were being identified by the nations calypsonians sixty years ago.