Ray­mond Ram­char­i­tar

Over the last few months, many trea­cly sto­ries about the won­drous emer­gence of our Car­ni­val state have been told and sung. But I'm pret­ty sure none of those sto­ries in­clud­ed the one that end­ed on April 17, 1974, when a man born in To­ba­go in 1915, made his way to Quinam beach, drank a bot­tle of weed­i­cide, and swam out to sea. The man was Er­ic Roach; he was a po­et. The sto­ry is im­por­tant for two rea­sons: first, if there were any acad­e­my or in­sti­tu­tion ca­pa­ble of con­fer­ring the ti­tle, Roach would be the na­tion­al po­et of Trinidad and To­ba­go.

The sec­ond rea­son is that it was an elab­o­rate, elo­quent sui­cide, and the omis­sion of its mes­sage and moral is a grave, but un­sur­pris­ing, fail­ure of those who have craft­ed the ideative back­drop of what in­de­pen­dence means. Roach killed him­self out of frus­tra­tion and dis­il­lu­sion­ment-the elo­quence in the sui­cide is that he did it at the beach where Colum­bus land­ed. This was his way of ad­dress­ing his­to­ry, say­ing, as he would in one of his last po­ems (Hard Drought):

...count me among the num­ber­less dead

this gris­ly cen­tu­ry.

I've eat­en so much his­to­ry that I belch

boloms of years to come.

Drunk each day's car­ni­val

I leer and squint at time tele­scoped

In Je­sus's spear-cleft side.

We shall not build

A king­dom of this world that is not ours.

It's a gris­ly sto­ry-of his death, and his vi­sion of his pres­ence-but, as any­one look­ing at the news to­day would re­alise, it was and re­mains a prophet­ic one. This sig­nals to us that among the many oth­er things he was, Roach was al­so (as Pound fa­mous­ly said) one of the an­ten­nae of the race: the artist whose gifts al­lowed him or her to sense the fu­ture. And what Roach saw, like what oth­er great Trinida­di­an artists of the time saw (Vidia Naipaul and Derek Wal­cott, who lived here from the late 50s to the ear­ly 1980s), was not com­fort­ing.

But these vi­sions of doom are not valu­able in them­selves. When in­ti­ma­tions of pain and ru­in are giv­en artis­tic shape and dis­ci­pline, they're known as "tragedy" and the trag­ic mode is an in­dis­pens­able el­e­ment of a na­tion's per­son­al­i­ty and self-im­age. With­out that dis­ci­pline and skill to trans­form mis­for­tune in­to tragedy, all you have is vi­o­lence and noise, which per­fect­ly de­scribes what passed for our 50th an­niver­sary. (If Roach was even men­tioned in the list of he­roes pro­vid­ed by the gov­ern­ment, it es­caped my no­tice, but read on.)

Be­cause so lit­tle is known about Roach to­day, and at this mo­ment where the na­tion­al imag­i­na­tion is as open as it's go­ing to be for some time to fig­ures of epic scale, Roach's work de­serves to be at least ac­knowl­edged-if on­ly as an an­tin­o­my to the dis­tress­ing pa­rade of un­for­tu­nates who are pa­rad­ed as he­roes.

Roach's po­et­ic out­put from 1938 to 1974 is col­lect­ed in the book, The Flow­er­ing Rock. An ex­cel­lent bi­og­ra­phy by Lau­rence Brein­er, Black Yeats, was pub­lished in 2008. Both books were pub­lished by Peepal Tree. Roach was al­so a play­wright and jour­nal­ist.

A jour­ney through Roach's po­ems is like a jour­ney through the evolv­ing con­scious­ness of Trinidad and To­ba­go. The po­ems be­gin in the pas­toral, and move through the grav­el­ly road of strug­gle for self-re­al­i­sa­tion, ro­man­tic yearn­ings for the ide­al, frus­trat­ed love, and fi­nal­ly they record the dis­il­lu­sion­ment of sham in­de­pen­dence. His pas­toral ex­u­ber­ance bursts from the ear­ly po­ems, like For Free­dom (1944):

Look broth­er, the day dawns!

Look how the edges of the vast dun clouds

Are tipped with sil­ver!

Look how one shaft climbs the sky!

Not many po­ets could bring off this plain-spo­ken awe so con­vinc­ing­ly. But the awestruck pas­toral­ist evolves, by 1950 (The Flow­er­ing Rock), in­to the Ro­man­tic:

Oh, from gaunt rock

As white as sanc­ti­ty

The lily blooms;

Essence of dark­ness is

Too pure for fra­grance

The dis­tilled stone

The still voice of the skele­ton.

And by In­de­pen­dence (1962), the Ro­man­tic has be­come a dis­il­lu­sioned vi­sion­ary (The World of Is­lands):

A dif­fi­cult coun­try to in­her­it;

guilt is hu­mid in the glit­ter­ing air;

Graft­ed at every branch the hu­man wood;

Blooms a be­wil­der­ing scent, fruits bit­ter­sweet.

Small sam­ples of po­ems do no jus­tice to the tal­ent, the sub­tleties of per­cep­tion, and the ter­ri­ble sense that what is hap­pen­ing to us now was vis­i­ble from as ear­ly as the 1960s. But the sam­ples force­ful­ly sug­gest that there's much to learn here.

Roach is one of those rare artists whose life and work mir­rored each oth­er, and achieved a grand scale. Roach died in pain, but re­fused to suc­cumb to an in­signif­i­cant death, and mere anger.

He chose in­stead to die with an in­tri­cate emo­tion­al ges­ture, which, like his work, has the abil­i­ty to al­low us to feel feel­ings we haven't felt, see things we haven't seen, and con­sid­er life and death in terms of more than in­evitabil­i­ty and loss. I don't know how this will play in the tri­umphal­ist na­tion­al­ism many peo­ple seem to need. But for those in­ter­est­ed in the val­ue of art, and are ma­ture enough for the un­palat­able con­clu­sion that de­feat is in­evitable even for the most no­ble of souls and caus­es, the fact that Trinidad and To­ba­go pro­duced a mind like this is some­thing to cel­e­brate.