Antilles: the weblog of the CRB

"I like the life"

In today's Sunday Express, B.C. Pires interviews Gordon Rohlehr, one of the indisputably major figures in Caribbean literary scholarship, who has just retired from UWI, St Augustine, after forty years.

... Purely by chance, I had begun working in the calypso before I got here. One highpoint would have been when I did the lecture "Sparrow and the Language of Calypso" for the Caribbean Artists Movement in 1967.

It forced one to engage with a people's music and all implied with that: the relationship between singer and group, between the music and social and political affairs. There could have been no better introduction into Trinidadian society than an interest in the calypso, what it was doing, its themes, why people reacted to certain things and not others, what made it popular [etc]. That made me amenable to Trinidad.