RAYMOND RAMCHARITAR

Résumé

                                               

Academic Qualifications

Poetry Fellow: Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Middlebury College, Vermont (2011)

Visiting Scholar: New College, University of Toronto, Canada (2010)

Post-Doctoral Fellow: Warwick University, UK (2008)

Ph.D., History: The University of the West Indies (St Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago). Thesis Title: “The Hidden History of Trinidad: Underground Culture in Trinidad, 1870-1970” (2008)

M.A., Literatures in English: The University of the West Indies (St Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago). Thesis Title: “Contextualizing Caribbean Critical Theory” (2002)

B. Sc., Economics: The University of the West Indies (St Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago) (1991)

Academic Interests

Cultural History

Cultural Theory

Poetry, Fiction & Drama (Creative Writing)

Post-Colonial Literary Criticism and Analysis

A sample of my novel in progress, The Republic of Noise

Lorient, 1940

He smelled the difference as he woke. It was familiar, he could taste the moisture; the fish, the salt rested lightly in his nostrils as he slowly opened his eyes, returning to consciousness from natural rather than opium-induced sleep.  It would have been drowned by the lorry’s exhaust the night before. He pulled back the heavy blinds, and unlatched the dormer windows and opened them, letting the cool, laden air rush in. He saw the sea for the first time through the window, the shoreline broken by cranes and skeletal construction scaffolding. The jetties lined with fishing boats and yachts you would expect from a coastal town were there, but the boats were draped in tarpaulins, their thin masts bare and solitary, and all seemed frozen in place from this distance. The room was smallish, a brass bed with white linen, parquet floor with a thick rug near the bed, a small bathroom with a white enamel tub and a tap resembling a sea-bass done in gold filigree, a large porcelain wash-basin with a large vanity mirror over it, and comforting thick white towels hanging from brass hooks. Next to the window sat a desk with a green-shaded reading lamp and blotter. A few art deco prints hung on the walls, a chest of drawers stood on the inside of a small closet he’d thrown his bag and coat into the night before. He chose to wear his normal civilian attire for breakfast.

A four-part article of film/cultural criticism, published in the Trinidad & Tobago Guardian, September 2014

Three Types of Naïvete, I

The remarkable American writer and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston, published an iconoclastic essay, “What White Publishers Won’t Print”, in 1950, which remains relevant to Trinidadians and West Indians today. I read this essay about 20 years ago, and  it’s stayed with me.

Hurston proposes that the Anglo-Saxon world (speaking of the US then, but the argument now applies to our relations with the metropole) was content, if not determined, to see the non-white world without complexity.  The metropole sees that, “Under a superficial layer of western culture, the jungle drums throb in our veins. This ridiculous notion makes it possible for that majority who accept it to conceive of even a man like the suave and scholarly Dr. Charles S. Johnson to hide a black cat’s bone on his person, and indulge in a midnight voodoo ceremony, complete with leopard skin and drums if threatened with the loss of the presidency of Fisk University, or the love of his wife.”

An excerpt from my 2013 book-length poem, Here

Canto II

A dream: a poem that sounds like a warning —

Seidel’s The Sickness, which ends on Eighty-Sixth

Street, near the Park, one ordinary morning:

An early soubrette, a fuming bus: a fixed

Routine. In this dream, there’s nothing to do for hours

Till the Met opens — what draws me there is always

The same: the Egypt exhibit, the Sphinx that glowers

Knowingly, Pharaoh, Anubis, the Hebrew slaves