Senior Reporter
soyini.grey@guardian.co.tt
An emotional Dr Hollis Liverpool choked back tears as he was honoured during the University of T&T’s (UTT) inaugural Master of Arts in Carnival Studies Founders Day event on Wednesday.
Senior lecturer Dr Kela Francis described the occasion as “our opportunity to give him his flowers now”.
The veteran academic and calypsonian, who performs under the sobriquet Chalkdust but is more popularly known as Chalkie, said it was the happiest night of his life.
“I only sorry that my wife was not here,” he said.
Ruth Liverpool died in January following a long illness. Her husband told the audience at the National Academy of the Performing Arts (NAPA) that when he consulted the Trinidadian Bishop of Grenada, Father Clyde Harvey, he asked him why he was grieving if he knew that she was in heaven, to which Chalkie replied: “Father, you ever sleep with a woman yet?”
February 28, 2005, was the official start of the university’s post-graduate degree programme in Carnival Studies. Chalkie said he first thought of it while lecturing at the University of the Virgin Islands but a call from then university president Prof Ken Julien got the ball rolling and the course is now based at the university’s Academy of Arts, Letters, Culture and Public where Chalkie serves as the course leader.
Also speaking last evening was the 2024 Calypso Monarch Machel Montano, a student in the programme.
“This calypso that I wrote, everything in that calypso came from Dr Liverpool’s notes in my first semester,” Montano explained, speaking about his winning song, Soul of Calypso.
He said not only did Chalkie push for him to be awarded an honourary doctorate by the university in 2019, but he also insisted that Montano enrol in the masters degree programme as a full-time student while he was still leading the course.