WHAT ROHLEHR DIDN’T TELL US

… that calypso is now voice of the PNM

NOW that the breathless tributes to Professor Gordon Rohlehr have subsided, I feel safe to emerge with a sober view.

This is not to subtract from my appreciation of Rohlehr as possibly the definitive academic voice on calypso before ethnic politics became entrenched in Trinidad and Tobago.

I have read several of the professor’s works, including his masterful 1990 “Calypso and Society,” from which I have quoted over the years.

My three daughters have each done academic modules on calypso, citing the authoritative Rohlehr on the art-form being a popular narrative of the underclass, the downtrodden.

One of my favourite quotations from the scholar is that calypso “is a way of drawing lines and saying that a certain type of behaviour has gone beyond socially permissible bounds.”

The calypsonian is a critic of the authorities, safeguarding the interests of the small man, and lining up on behalf of social justice and morality.

That, of course, was before the rooted People’s National Movement was displaced in national office in 1995, and calypso evolved into an ethnic clarion call and a ferocious, and often nasty, enemy of all contenders.

Forgive me if I missed any of Rohlehr’s works, but I can’t recall studies citing the transformation of calypso’s role to that of defender of the tribe and attack dog on all other aspirants to national office.

Before that, he was profuse in heralding calypso as a symbol of political resistance, a soapbox for the aggrieved, a storyteller for the voiceless.

Rohlehr’s passing has taken place at a time when there is not a single calypso criticism of a seven and a half year old administration that is presiding over the socio-economic collapse of the land in which the cultural expression was born.

The banning (yes, that’s what it is) of Lady Gypsy’s anti-PNM song and Errol Fabien’s anguished cry about being gagged by a show promoter are illustrations with respect to a craft that has sold its soul in advocating for the clan.

“Calypso is of the people,” Fabien says, “I need the work but I need my manhood more.”

How does such censorship gel with Rohlehr’s depiction of calypso as a popular newspaper, an interpreter of events, freely expressing the views of the man in the street?

The descent of calypso into ethnic triumphalism began during the Basdeo Panday era in national office.

Again pardon me if Rohlehr had raised his influential voice against the bastardisation of the entrenched popular culture, which was coupled with the decline of the calypso tent industry.

Certain bigoted artistes – “a vituperative piece of doggerel,” my late, lamented media colleague Terry “Teejay” Joseph described one – were rewarded with hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars for demonising citizens of this plural society.

“Teejay” wrote: “Any anti-Panday joke, no matter of trite, purchased tremendous laughter, and… uncomplimentary remarks about his wife became equally unpopular, even among women in the audience.”

“Teejay” has since passed on and that twisted “artiste” is still gaining applause, sympathetic media reviews and citizen-funded prize money.

I searched in vain for the outcry from Rohlehr.

Not that it is any comfort, but the professor is not alone.

In my youth – influenced by the Black Power movement – I admired the take-no-prisoners Chalkdust in standing up to thin-skinned maximum leader Dr. Eric Williams, who attempted to have him banned from performing.

Williams sent the Teaching Service Commission after Chalkie, who was then a school teacher.

The fearless bard retorted in song: “If dey want to keep me down/Tell dem to cut out mih tongue.”

The era of ethnic politics has seen Chalkie lose his tongue, and, like several contemporaries, he no longer has a favourite punching bag with the death of combative Hindu leader Sat Maharaj.

More than that, Chalkie should state whether he was one of nine members of the board of governors of University of Trinidad and Tobago during a recent spate of academic firings.

A judge, ruling on a dismissal that was challenged in court, said it was a political vendetta “premised upon the ill-conceived notion that ‘it is we time now’.”

Former UTT registrar Phillip Robinson branded UTT as “gone so bad it is incapable of discerning the difference between right and wrong…”

Truth is that most of the fraternity is engaged in what Joseph termed “calypso cannibalism,” which “does nothing for the art-form or the party and cheapens the argument for freedom of speech.”

I, too, acknowledge Rohlehr’s body of work and mourn his passing.

But I equally mourn his indifference to the disfiguring of calypso into an instrument of hate.