Tout Moun

Caribbean Journal of Cultural Studies

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© The University of the West Indies, Department of Literary Cultural & Communication Studies
 “Ah Never Get Weary Yet”: Gordon Rohlehr’s Forty Years in Calypso 1

“Ah Never Get Weary Yet”:

Gordon Rohlehr’s Forty Years in Calypso

LOUIS REGIS

This paper, co-opting Gordon Rohlehr’s approach to Eric Williams (1998), sketches in the context of
Rohlehr’s critical intervention in the business of calypso research, evaluates his performance and
discusses his legacy.

Gordon Rohlehr remembers clearly how he became involved in the business of calypso research in
1967:
I had already been in England for two years when I went to the second meeting
of CAM [Caribbean Artists Movement]…at Orlando Patterson’s place in London.
They were talking about the Caribbean aesthetic, everybody was pronouncing
what they thought this aesthetic was or wasn’t. I think George Lamming would
have been there, Kamau would have been there, Orlando certainly–I can’t
remember who else–Aubrey Williams maybe. I kept silent, listening to the talk. It
might have been Kamau who said, “You’re not saying anything”. I didn’t know
what I was supposed to be saying. These were big guns; when George starts
talking you listen. You don’t put in your little mouth; you listen. I said, “Well, I
think you are going about this thing the wrong way. My basic assumption is that

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2 Louis Regis

any people would have an aesthetic, a style, a way of doing things and the
Caribbean people, like any other people, would have some way of dong things
that is characteristically Caribbean. The way to determine what this aesthetic
might be is to look at what Caribbean people have done and to create, through a
close dialogue with the material, some way of talking about their achievement
and of distinguishing what is peculiarly Caribbean about it, if you employ that
method, beginning with the work–Walcott’s poetry, Sparrow’s calypsoes,
Selvon’s novels–you might then be able to recognise recurring features. If for
example, you read Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and short stories alongside
Sparrow’s calypsoes you might discover something that was peculiarly
Trinidadian in both of these people…..those were not my exact words, of course;
only a paraphrase of the sense of what I said. Then someone, one of the big
voices, said, “If this is the way you feel, why don’t you do it?” (in Aiyejina 2003,
247).

The backstory to this is that the 25-year old Rohlehr had already secured a reputation as an
undergraduate at Mona and was already known to Lamming and other men-of-words then based
at or associated with the Mona campus of The UWI (Rohlehr 2007, 392-93). Rohlehr, then a
doctoral candidate at Birmingham researching Joseph Conrad, accepted the CAM’s challenge and
set about the task which would prove to be his life’s work.

Although he concedes that “[w]hatever I perceived during the one year of my attending CAM
meetings was a matter of pure instinctual improvisation” (in Aiyejina 251), reading his account of
the originary moment and of the steps he took to concretise his vision, I suspect the ideas may been
already there floating in his head and CAM’s challenge simply catalysed the career-long labour of
love.

In a letter to Kamau he declared his proposed method of procedure for his inaugural address:
I will try to comment on the use of Creole in Sparrow’s calypsos and Louise
Bennett’s dialect verse, and suggest that the medium of Creole is in fact
amenable to some of the subtlest effects of mind and irony…Selvon’s
achievement in The Lonely Londoners and some of his short stories will form the
final part of my paper (Walmsley 68).

Having no critical precedent to rely upon, Rohlehr needed to be guided by his own instincts. Even
at that preliminary stage when he confesses that “I was just floundering, really, and inventing the
thing on the basis of what was in front of me” (in Aiyejina 251), his instincts led him to the
theoretical approach which he would elaborate in future work:
I began to recognize the importance of using the music to understand the
society. So two things were necessary. One needed to have some broad concept
of the society and at the same time, one needed to bring a particular focus to
bear on what the society produces artistically before one could begin the
discourse: one had to adopt a two-way approach–the society through the
creations, the creations through the society and to somehow try to keep the
balance (in Aiyejina 251).

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 “Ah Never Get Weary Yet”: Gordon Rohlehr’s Forty Years in Calypso 3

On Friday 7 April 1967 at CAM’s second public meeting at the Students Centre in London, Rohlehr
stood forth to deliver not the anticipated “Selvon, the Calypso and the Creolisation of Experience”, a
title suggested by Kamau, but “Sparrow and the Language of Calypso”. His then-stated explanation
for the change was simple and to my mind eminently understandable: “I found that when I got
down to Sparrow’s calypsoes, the range was so wide and the subject so vast that I had to limit it to
Sparrow alone” (Walmsley 68). In his later recall of the incident, Rohlehr remembers the difficulties
he had in accessing Selvon’s work and Sparrow’s records, a few of which he did get eventually. By a
chance which he doesn’t dwell upon, he happened to own a copy of Sparrow’s One Hundred and
Twenty Calypsos to Remember and reading the lyrics of the songs, it struck him right away that he
“didn’t need to do the Sparrow and the Selvon since there was so much taking place in the
Sparrow calypsoes” (in Aiyejina 249).

“Sparrow and the Language of Calypso” is an awesome introduction to the study of the Calypso as
poetic and dramatic artistry of calypso, as well as the use of calypso as literary artefact with
tremendous potential for understanding Trinidad’s complex and complicated sociology. Sparrow is
the catalysing and unifying figure in all of this through his calypsoes, the natives of his personality.

Rohlehr begins by establishing the context for his examination of Sparrow’s calypsoes. He cites VS
Naipaul’s celebrated affirmation of the calypso as a uniquely Trinidadian artefact and notes that
Naipaul’s use of the calypso in his novels indicates his awareness of the ironies of which
calypsonians were unaware. He however faults Naipaul for treating the Calypso as “as a sign of the
pathological insensitivity of the Trinidad people” (1). This is in dramatic contrast to Rohlehr’s view
that the spirit and gaiety of the calypso were a sign of “a new and strange positive which the
masses of Trinidad have constructed out of the debris of their lives” (1). Against the background of
this, he arrives at the conclusion: “Again and again the paradox appears in Sparrow of brilliant and
sophisticated organisation of narrative, without any directing ethical sense; what emerges is an
essential directionless irony, the gift of a normless world” (5).

Rohlehr introduces the psycho-sociological dimension when he identifies Sparrow’s calypso as a

reflection of the thinking and actions of members of Trinidadian society:
Sparrow’s calypsos grow out of the uneasy competitive world of urban Trinidad,
but in their gay machiavellianism reflect the mistrust and intimacy which
permeate the society at all levels. They reflect both the mistrust of the small back-
yard society where everyone tries to conceal his action from a gossiping
neighbor who either knows about it already know will know about it next day,
and the paranoiac mistrust of certain middle-class element who are prepared to
exploit superiors, equals, friends and juniors in order to ascend one inch on the
social greasy pole (3).

He then factors in Lloyd Brathwaite’s observations about the exploitative self-centredness of

members of Trinidadian society and then draws the startling conclusion, “If Brathwaite’s assessment
is true then he is their spokesman though he may not know this and they will not admit it” (3).

Middle class society may have welcomed Sparrow’s naughty but sometimes bitter derogation of his
working-class peers and especially prostitutes, spinster teachers, naïve teenagers, lecherous
adulterous wives and the like. Middle-class endorsement of calypsonian derogation of lower class

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4 Louis Regis

morals dates to the founding of the calypso tent in the 1920s when Railway Douglas developed the
ballad form and used lower class people as the subjects of his satire and censure. As Naipaul
observed, the irony of reveling in calypso degradation was lost on the lower class. By the 1930s,
however, members of both classes flocked to the calypso tents to relish the bacchanal or comesse
emanating equally from the Country Club as from the barrack-yard/back-yard. In this way Sparrow
can be seen as a spokesman for the society, but he, like other calypsonians, is a victim of society’s
ambivalence towards those bring Trinidadians and Tobagonians in touch with their private reality.
When Rohlehr considers Sparrow’s ‘phallic’ songs, the sometimes salacious songs for which he was
equally beloved and chastised throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he makes a long statement about
“Congo Man” (1964/65) which he describes as “[b]y far the most disturbing and complex example
of the ‘phallic’ calypso” (7). Noting that in “Congo Man” “the Congo is apprehended as another
exotic setting for yet another sexual calypso, with its lurid mixture of fantasy and tongue-in-cheek
laughter” (7), he remarks that the lyrics are good and the imagination is admirable in its way but he
deplores its insensitivity: “one has to be a pretty insensitive West Indian to hear it without misgivings
of some sort”. He believes that
of all calypsos, nothing is so characteristically West Indian, and nothing so
mercilessly and unconsciously reveals the cultural limbo in which the West Indian
moves, naked and defenceless save for a sensitive awareness of his own
unbelonging which he cannot afford to relinquish (7).

This comment reflects the divide between the few thoughtful and the numerous thoughtless in
Trinidadian society because “Congo Man” was tremendously popular in 1965 and has remained
one of Sparrow’s favourites. Many years after, soca star Machel Montano, born 1975, did something
of a cover version to great acclaim. Where Rohlehr may have felt uncomfortable many others felt
nothing.

Ruminating upon Sparrow’s political calypsos, and in particular on “Get to Hell Outa Here”
(1964/65), Rohlehr essays an explanation of what he calls “the peculiar nature of calypso irony”,
and with this mind he concludes that
[t]hese calypsoes which I have been considering are the record the slow birth
and maturity of an ironist. The [political] calypsoes considered show the genesis
of satire in abuse and in the demands which intelligent abuse makes for the right
word and the right simile. When this capacity for abuse was blended with a taste
for the fantastic, a strange irony emerged. And when politics and national pride
created a world that dared to take itself seriously, then this irony grew to fruition
(11).

This is an example of the critic collecting the separate bones of the skeleton and making sense of a
phenomenon which requires sympathetic understanding.

By locating and anchoring the Calypso within its socio-historical contexts, the paper establishes a
way of reading the Calypso but it insists upon hierarchising the reading tasks. Rohlehr discerns “the
necessity not merely for an enumeration of the several sociological tendencies which the calypso
either uncovers or betrays, but for a critical examination of the intelligence behind calypso – the
worth of the mind, the nature of the insight and the quality of the awareness” (3). “Sparrow and
the Language of Calypso” marries the artistic/technical concerns of literature to

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 “Ah Never Get Weary Yet”: Gordon Rohlehr’s Forty Years in Calypso 5

social/anthropological interests but stresses the importance of irony, organisation of narrative and
so on. Literature rather than anthropology was Rohlehr’s early focus.
Anne Walmsley does us an invaluable service in evaluating the presentation:
Rohlehr’s paper was a landmark in West Indian literary criticism. By applying the
same criteria to the sung lyrics of a popular calypsonian as to the poems of
literary writers, he attempted for the first time to break down the separation
between the oral and written traditions. By looking at Sparrow’s attitudes to
society, he drew attention to expression of the experience of the ‘masses’ by their
own spokesman (70).

Many years later with characteristic understatement dramatically opposed to the exuberant
signifying practices of both Sparrow and the Calypso, Rohlehr described the audience as being
“fairly appreciative” (in Aiyejina 250). Fortunately for those of us who were not there, Walmsley
records the following response from Andrew Salkey:
That was sparkling, that was head-wrenching. We never heard that kind of
conspectus on our culture. If the culture had been derided by alien
commentators, been ignored by our teachers, had been vilified by officialdom,
there was Gordon telling us, convincing us that we mattered. Our drawings at
school mattered. The songs in the streets mattered. There was Gordon telling us
that there was tremendous vitality in the festivals that we put on. In our ordinary
everyday utterances, there was poetry (70).

The lively post presentation discussion which followed was a dramatic and welcome difference
from the first public session whose urbanity was the source of a private Rohlehr complaint to
Kamau (Walmsley 55).

Subsequent to this there was an exchange of letters between Kamau and Rohlehr when the former
questioned Rohlehr’s closing observation that “there is in the spoken language of Trinidad a
potential of rhythmic organisation which our poets have not yet discovered–or if they have, have
not yet exploited” (1968, 91). Rohlehr first apologised because his point was “so sloppily made and
so hurriedly sketched in”, then he went on to explain that
Calypso provides us with living examples of a very complex metric organisation of
language. It is not simply a matter of using WI speech rhythms and idioms, but of
being conscious of the syncopated drum-rhythms in the background of a 4/4
time signature broken down into semi-quavers so that one has a maximum of 16
syllables per bar…of the extreme freedom which this creates not only in the
music, but in the bending of words to match the sinuosities of rhythm (1968, 92).

Engaging the niceties of stress and other technical qualities of poetry, Rohlehr felt that the
traditional ways of scanning verse to establish metrical organisation and so on were inadequate to
when applied to the Calypso. He also likened the counterpoints of various lines of Walcott’s famous
“Tales from the Islands Chapter 6” to the strumming patterns of the double-second and guitar pans
respectively. Rohlehr also apologized to Kamau for giving the impression that he [Rohlehr]
subscribed to the prevailing notion that Sparrow was different from other poets like Kamau since
he thought that “by applying to Sparrow’s work the strictest academic standards I was really
placing him on par with any other artist” (1968, 95).

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6 Louis Regis

“Sparrow as Poet” (1970), the third in the trilogy of essays which discuss the language of
[Sparrow’s] Calypso, expands on Sparrow’s masterful use of irony, of dramaturgy and so on. Before
this, however, there appears “The Calypso” (1969), a little known essay, which represents the
beginning of a major shift in focus away from Sparrow to the Calypso in general. By this time
Rohlehr had accepted a teaching position at the St Augustine campus, and had embarked on the
library research as well as the informal ethnographic research which gave him a new orientation.
“The Calypso” is primarily important insofar as it affords us a preview of Calypso and Society in Pre-
Independence Trinidad which was completed some 21 years later.

“The Calypso” considers that the gap in recording of our social history might lend some truth to
Froude’s negative assessment of the Caribbean, which was echoed by VS Naipaul and against this
offers the following:
We will soon have to write more carefully documented social history of the West
Indies and when Trinidad’s turn comes much more detailed attention will be paid
to things like the history and development of the calypso (1).

Returning to the debate of the 1940s Rohlehr evaluated the several claims and agreed that kaiso
was the most probable parent of the art form. In his opinion, the word ‘Calypso’ was “an attempt to
provide a rendition of the earlier African term suitable to Anglo and Anglo-Saxon intelligentsia” (3).
Although agreeing with the theory of Afro-genesis he credits the development of the Calypso to
the processes of creolisation.

One intriguing statement is the elaboration of the Hispanic influence on the Calypso. Rohlehr, who
lacks formal training in music but who functioned as a part time pan arranger in his student days in
Birmingham, demonstrates an ear for music noting “[t]he creole Trinidadian form of the ‘Castilian’
where a quadruple time in the quatro strum is often superimposed on the triple time, was an
important influence” on the Calypso (3). Looking at the ways in which parang bands of the late
1960s treated the Calypso and its putative parent the kalinda, he observes:
The kalinda is an interesting dance as you hear it played in parang bands
because you can dance it in two ways. You can dance it almost as if you were
dancing a calypso, but you can dance it almost as if you were dancing a Spanish
waltz…you get an odd sense of two entirely different things happening if you
listen to some of the parang bands they have around the place still (3).

This insightful observation was made some 10 years before Crazy recorded “Parang Soca” and 34
years before Crazy’s “What is a Calypso” (2004), which records the Hispanic influence on the
Calypso. Rohlehr’s awareness of rhythm and other elements of music as well as the necessary
connection between art-form and society leads to the conclusion: “Yet it is fascinating to note that
Trinidad’s most outstanding art form resembles in its vague cosmopolitanism an richly incongruous
parentage, something of the manner in which the country was settled and became creolised into
something quasi-English” (3). In other words, the Calypso is the product of the socio-historical
processes which created modern Trinidad.

However, Sparrow still dominated his thoughts and the second part of the essay concerns itself
with the Sparrow problematic of positioning himself comfortably in two antagonistic spheres of
Trinidad social life. Examining some of the calypsoes which testify to this unbelonging, Rohlehr

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 “Ah Never Get Weary Yet”: Gordon Rohlehr’s Forty Years in Calypso 7

notes, “[i]t has been fascinating and sometimes painful to watch his struggle as he becomes more
and more successful, to preserve his identity within the group” (13). Rohlehr reads “The Governor’s
Ball” as a metaphor for Sparrow’s ambivalent social positioning. As the essay has it,
Polite society bears the same relation to Sparrow as the Governor in calypso
bears to the mad woman. Sparrow is the anarchic invader of their fete. It will be
interesting to observe the twists of this struggle, the profit and the loss. It might
tell us the truth about what social scientists term “social mobility” in a small world.
It will tell us something about the tensions which beset the man who oscillates
between two worlds, the lower one still basically intolerant of the man who
ceases to belong, the upper one still basically reluctant and probably incapable of
genuinely accepting the little man who has made it by talent alone. And of
course the situation is further complicated by the official recognition of calypso as
the culture in Trinidad (13).

The observation that Sparrow is the “anarchic invader” of the middle class space testifies to the
ambivalence of the middle class towards the lower class entertainer whom they patronise in his
familiar environment (the calypso tent) but reject in theirs (the Governor’s ballroom). It also
validates Rohlehr’s earlier observation that Sparrow is their spokesman even though he may not
know it and they do not admit it. This too is the critic’s offering a sophisticated reading which may
not have been operative in the mind of the composer/performer.

In 1983 the government declassified official documents of the 1930s, among them the lyrics of all
calypsoes which were submitted by tent managers to the censors in accordance with official
protocols governing the practice of the calypso tent; importers of calypso records also had to
submit the lyrics of their imports for official scrutiny. This made possible the writing of the magnum
opus Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (1990), a fine testament to Rohlehr’s talents
as literary archaeologist whose sources are the calypso artefacts themselves as well as the social
history which provides the context for understanding their content.

Calypso and Society is the fulfillment of several starts dating back to “The Calypso” (1969) “The
Development of the Calypso 1900-1940” (1972) and the 26-half hour radio series From Atilla to the
Seventies (1973). Like “The Development”, it begins with the bold affirmation, “The history of the
Calypso is that of urbanisation, immigration and Black reconstruction in post-emancipation
Trinidad” (1) but the sentences which followed reveal how far the research had progressed.
Rohlehr acknowledges that identifying West African roots is the first step in a journey of exploration
which must include examination of what happened to the oral tradition in Trinidad and
examination of a similar process in the French Antilles. He then locates Elder’s pioneering work
within national and international contexts:
The best attempt so far to explore the West African roots of the Calypso is JD
Elder’s unpublished doctoral thesis: “Evolution of the Traditional Calypso of
Trinidad and Tobago”. This thesis was an outstanding contribution to the type of
research that had been pioneered by musicologists and anthropologists such as
Khrebiel, van Dam, Cuney Hare, Merriam and the Lomaxes (1).

Although Rohlehr affirms that the Calypso “is related to all Black diaspora musics, regardless of
language, and shares with them traditional African functions of affirmation, celebration, protest,

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8 Louis Regis

satire, praise, blame and conflict” (5) he makes no attempt to theorise the essences of Black Atlantic
music on a global or even regional scale. Although his reading of Elder et al lead him to accept the
West African roots of the Calypso he recognises the achievements of Maureen Warner-Lewis whose
“two pioneering works provide us with our fist bits of real evidence in support of the strong
hypothesis that the African element was a major matrix out of which the Calypso developed” (17).
He carefully points out that “it was in the process of the adaptation of the African matrix to the
wide and various elements of Creole society in the West Indies (French, Hispanic, English, Hindu,
Moslem et al) that the Calypso assumed its various shapes” (17).

While I cannot here examine comprehensively the tremendous achievements of Calypso and
Society, I note that it represents that continuous expansion of vision and dimension that
characterises Rohlehr’s approach to his work. To illustrate briefly. “Political Calypsoes”, a 1970
mimeographed handout prepared as class material, records without comment Senior Inventor’s
1900 calypso
See them climbing the hill
See them climbing Majuba hill
See them climbing the hill
See them climbing Majuba hill
See them climbing the hill to gain the victory
On Carnival day
See them climbing the hill to gain the victory
On Carnival day

In 1970 when this document was drafted, Rohlehr may have believed that this calypso was of a
piece with those others on the British-Boer war in which calypsonians took the side of the British.
By 1990, however, an examination of the Port of Spain Gazette of 7 February 1900 revealed the
truth that Majuba Hill was a renaming of Rose Hill, Laventille. Resident rebels there called
themselves Boers in defiance of the prevailing orthodoxy and renamed their enemies, peers and
police alike, the British. The refrain “On Carnival Day” refers to Rose Hill’s defiance of their rivals and
enemies rather than any reference to events in the Boer War. Recording this remarkable incident,
Rohlehr acknowledges that the song instances how “[t]he Boer War could be understood in
strange and unexpected ways by Trinidad’s urban folk” (46). To this I can add that much of
Rohlehr’s work examines the peculiar parodic spirit which informs Trinidad’s reductive, subversive–
sometimes self-destructive–humour.

To me, however, the best most concentrated and crystalline example of Rohlehr’s expanding and
refining of vision, and of this continuous rethinking and rewriting manifests in the essay “Carnival
Cannibalised Or Cannibal Carnivalised” (2005). More than any other single piece it is the fulfilment
of the Rohlehr theory and practice of Calypso research. Rohlehr discussed “Congo Man” (1964/65)
in that inaugural lecture of 1967 and I do not see any mention of it in succeeding essays until it
forms the subject of the 2005 essay. I have indicated that “The Calypso” marks a shift away from
Sparrow, something that continues in later work. I surmise that Rohlehr came to realise that most –
if not all– of the features of calypso irony and narrative construction belong to the Calypso itself;
while Sparrow did them better than any other, he had no monopoly of the poetic and dramatic
arts. Sparrow’s work also benefitted from maximum exposure thanks to his energy and his
understanding of the industry. But “Congo Man” may have remained an area of darkness which

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 “Ah Never Get Weary Yet”: Gordon Rohlehr’s Forty Years in Calypso 9

Rohlehr needed to explore and in 2005 he had mastered the strategy and the tactics for said
exploration. The persistence of “Congo Man” which Sparrow recorded an unprecedented 6 times
may have kept alive the consciousness if not the urgency of the task.

“Carnival Cannibalised” is a study in the demystification of one of the most popular calypsoes of all
time. It examines how Sparrow carnivalised the cannibal in 1964 and how “Congo Man”
cannibalised the Carnival of 1965. Rohlehr locates the “Congo Man” within several distinct though
interrelated contexts or even better clusters of contexts. First there is the context of engineered
amnesia, “the obliteration of the past along with Caucasian control, dissemination and
manipulation of stereotypical images of Africa and Africans at home and abroad, that had made
Sparrow indifferent to African sensitivity in his appropriation of the Cannibal/Monster stereotype for
the purpose of subversive laughter” (57). Allied to this is “the specific performance context of the
Trinidad Carnival which was replete with portrayals of wild, savage men, warriors, Warrahoons,
headhunters, devils of all hues and varieties, monsters of the folkloric and cinematic imagination
and Juju warriors” (55).

Sparrow’s reclaiming of kingship provides another context for interpretation. Rohlehr reads “Congo
Man as “the self-vindication and self-celebration of Sparrow as ‘king’ and this kingship must be
located in the context of Carnival and the conventions that determined the bestowal of kingship
and the acclamation of the king” (58). This vindication and celebration must also be read in the
context of Sparrow’s private life, if as public figure he can enjoy such. According to Rohlehr,
“Sparrow had opened himself to attack, first by crossing the historically inscribed racial taboo-lines
and secondly by boasting about it” (72). Sparrow’s “Everybody Washing They Mouth on Me” is his
calypso response to the many blows he received from society, from calypsonian colleagues and an
unidentified general public for what seems to be a career-motivated marriage to an American
white. Sparrow’s career-long love-hate relationship with Trinidad certainly taxed his tolerance,
endurance and resilience. Against the background of the reactions to Sparrow’s marriage, Rohlehr
thinks that “there can be little doubt that part of ‘Congo Man’s laughter was focused on the racist
absurdities of Trinidad society” (70).

This intricate reading may not have been the intention of Sparrow who in song tirelessly celebrates
the sexuality stereotypically assigned to those of African ancestory – male and female equally. In
1977, for example he was specially invited to the Festival of African and Caribbean Arts hosted in
Nigeria; his song commentary on his trip was “Du Du Yemi” an account (fictional?) of his sexual
account with Natasha, a nubile Nigerian belle. “Gu Nu Gu” (1980) replaced the Congo Man with a
less terrifying witch doctor who taught sex, the pleasurable secret of everlasting life, to a woman
who had gone to Africa in search of such and who found it much to her delighted gratification.
The point to this digression is that Sparrow who projected his phallocentricity with energy and
enthusiasm (but also credited several of his heterosexual partners with an even greater proficiency
and eagerness), may well have been one of the thoughtless insensitives who may have found
nothing offensive about “Congo Man” and may have consumed it on the delightfully simple level of
sexual double entendre.

Finally, Rohlehr locates “Congo Man” in the context of Trinidad history, and offers a reading as a
revisitation of one of the archetypal themes of the colonial encounter. Examining one song which
was generated from the aborted 1805 slave rebellion, Rohlehr reasons that “certain texts, ideas and

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10 Louis Regis

types of performance become archetypal, inscribe themselves in a society, and finally achieve
permanence via the commemorative process of masquerade” (67). All the above lead to the
conclusion that “the Congo Man is society’s ultimate Other, the anti-hero at his most offensive,
mischievous and anarchic. Yet, paradoxically, the Congo Man represents society’s suppressed
shadow side, its secretly celebrated yet publicly denied sexuality” (74-75). My position on this is that
even though Sparrow and many –if not most– others may have a simplistic take on “Congo Man”,
the literary critic who reads society in far more complex ways is empowered by his intellect,
temperament, sensibility and imagination, the very qualities which Rohlehr himself ascribes to the
creative (1992: 1). The coincidence of these produces the high quality criticism with which we have
come to associate Rohlehr. Given the general quality of discourse locally, such criticism which is
solidly rooted although sometimes subject to flights of fancy necessarily stands alone.

To summmarise, in “Carnival Cannibilised” Rohlehr provided us with a psycho-sociological analysis

of Trinidad and of the Trinidad Carnival. He also flings back the Carnival masks of respectability and
examines the psycho-sexual dimension which underlies the Carnival. All of this is achieved via an
examination of “Congo Man” which some see as the signature song of The Mighty Sparrow, the
iconic personality whose songs and actions provide the best maps of meaning into the complicated
sociology of Trinidad from the late 1950s to the late 1960s.

Legacy

So what has Rohlehr’s forty-year odyssey bequeathed to us? First, there is a corpus of invaluable
research writing on the Calypso. No one can deny that Rohlehr is the architect and builder of
literary research on the Calypso. The many essays and the monumental Calypso and Society are the
testament of his legacy. The corner stone of this edifice is “Sparrow and the Language of Calypso”
which previewed the shape and direction that Rohlehr’s future work would take. One supremely
interesting development surfaced in Rohlehr’s professorial inaugural lecture in 1985 when he
considered that the orality alive in street talk, storytelling and the short story were formally
extended and shaped in the novel. In a much more pointed comment in the same lecture he
observed, “[t]he Calypso helped preserve and formalize a certain twist of mind which I believe
helped in the emergence of Selvon, Naipaul and Lovelace (29). The relationship between the oral
and scribal conceptualised in 1967 had come full circle as it were.

Just as important as the content of the work is its theoretical orientation. Rohlehr’s own numerous
writings are the practice of a methodology which has evolved from his preoccupation as literary
critic with poetic form, structure and shaping of theme. This is informed by his lifelong interest in
history and his own sense of occupying a “liminal location between literature and history” (2007,
344). Literature and history are then married to a social scientist’s concern with the phenomenal
world of the artiste. This methodology requires researchers to familiarise themselves with the
techniques of literary criticism; the history, meaning and development of the art-form, including its
patterns of performance; the biography of the practitioners; the political and social history of the
country; and relevant information about the particular subject being dealt with in the calypsoes
under examination. Noting the continuities in calypso tradition, Rohlehr identifies ‘moments’ in time
and clusters of calypsoes generated by said moments, and he subjects selected texts to a close
reading, again in light of the documented reality as well as that of performers’ career record and
the song (sung) view of their peers. This multi-disciplinary approach originates in a perception of

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 “Ah Never Get Weary Yet”: Gordon Rohlehr’s Forty Years in Calypso 11

the Calypso as a complex multifaceted whole, the true value of which can only be apprehended
within the social and literary contexts which it seeks to elucidate and illuminate. Calypso and
Society, for best example, demonstrates that the Calypso is in effect a valid social history of pre-
Independence Trinidad.

In his 1991 essay “Researching Calypso”, Rohlehr stresses that the Calypso is a form of discourse
originating in the underclass and still representing underclass opinions. He cautions that the
Calypso is a form of poetry and song which is subject to conscious shaping, selection and edition of
information so that the ‘facts’ presented cannot be interpreted simplistically as reflections of reality.
“We may,” he advises, “be dealing with a wide range of literary and dramatic devices; and these
may be of greater importance than the actual sociological content of the song” (15). Literature
rather than anthropology is still Rohlehr’s main focus.

It is impossible to discuss Rohlehr’s work without paying tribute to what he calls in “Sparrow and
The Language of Calypso”, “the worth of the mind, the nature of the insight and the quality of the
awareness”. While these are used the to describe Sparrow’s achievements they easily and readily
describe what Rohlehr brings to the business of literary scholarship on the Calypso. Passionate
commitment and dedication to purpose constitute the base of what Lloyd Best calls “hard wuk”
which negotiates weariness as just another phenomenon which we need to work through to get
the work done. Allied to this and informing it, is a restless spirit of inquiry and investigation which
roves between canonical European and Caribbean literary texts, Calypso, reggae, newspaper
articles and so on. These qualities continue to generate a corpus of essays, based on a close
common-sense reading of calypso texts within several contexts. This reading enriched by a wide-
ranging eclectic scholarship makes for surprising, sometimes startling, conclusions. These essays are
written in an elegant delightfully readable prose, the counterpoint to the fashionably opaque
theorese of some modern scholarship. They are also “seasoned” as Black Stalin would say, with
calypso humour and a calypso sensitivity to the nuances of words.

Strangely Rohlehr has been able to inspire only a handful of dedicated literary scholars to take up
the multiple tasks of calypso research. As a disciple for the past forty years (1973- 2013) I can attest
to the tremendous pressure of keeping pace with the scholar whose imagination and erudition
have generated the corpus of which the Calypso is probably the crown jewel. But with the
expansion of Cultural Studies programmes students in the not-too-distant future might seek
inspiration in his work and some might find him a worthy subject for a dissertation.

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12 Louis Regis

Bibliography

Rohlehr, Gordon. “Between Literature and History: A Personal Encounter.” In Transgression, Transition,
Transformation: Essays in Caribbean Culture. San Juan, Trinidad and Tobago: Lexicon, 2007. 338-91.
---. “The Calypso.” Ts. UWI, St Augustine, 1969
---. Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad. Port of Spain: Gordon Rohlehr, 1990.
---. Caribbean Artists Movement. “Comments on Gordon Rohlehr’s ‘Sparrow and the Language of Calypso’.”
Caribbean Quarterly 14 1.2 (March-June 1968): 91-96.
---. “Carnival Cannibalised or Cannibal Carnivalised: Contextualizing the Cannibal Joke in Literature and
Calypso.” In Transgression, Transition, Transformation: Essays in Caribbean Culture. San Juan, Trinidad
and Tobago: Lexicon, 2007. 50-82
---. “The Culture of Williams: Context, Performance, Legacy.” Callaloo 20.4, 1998: 849-88.
---. ““The Development of the Calypso 1900-1940” (1972). Ts UWI, St Augustine.
---. From Atilla to the Seventies. Port of Spain: Government Broadcasting Union, 1973.
---. “George Lamming and Kamau Brathwaite: Nationalists, Caribbean Regionalists, Internationalists.” In
Transgression, Transition, Transformation: Essays in Caribbean Culture. San Juan, Trinidad and
Tobago: Lexicon, 2007. 392-409.
---. “Gordon Rohlehr, Interview with Funso Aiyejina.” In Self Portraits. Interview with Ten West Indian Writers and
Two Critics. Ed Funso Aiyejina. St Augustine: The School of Continuing Studies, 2003. 230-70.
---. “Political Calypsoes.” Ts UWI St Augustine, 1970.
---. “The Problem of the Problem of Form.” In The Shape of That Hurt and Other Essays. Port of Spain:
Longman, Trinidad, 1992. 1-65.
---. “Researching Calypso.” Pastoral Bulletin 7.2 Advent. St Augustine, 1991.
---. “Sparrow and the Language of Calypso.” Ts, 1967. Reproduced in Savacou 1-2 (September 1970): 87-99.
---. “Sparrow as Poet.” David Frost Introduces Trinidad and Tobago. Ed. Michael Anthony and Andrew Carr.
London: Deutsch, 1975. 84-98.
Walmsley, Anne. The History of the Caribbean Artists Movement 1966-1972: A Literary and Cultural History.
London: New Beacon, 1992.

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