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

Interview with Derek Walcott on VS Naipaul, Carnival, West Indian Culture & Politics
[Published in the Trinidad & Tobago Review, April 2003. [Redacted]]


RR: You’ve repeatedly said that West Indian governments are indifferent, or apathetic to, art and artists, but could you talk a little bit about the connection of West Indian art to West Indian life. Does it, can it affect the life of the everyday man?

DW: This may sound like a contradiction, but yesterday I went to the [St Lucian] Cultural Foundation here and spoke to the guy in charge and his staff, all of them artists, and it was terrific, they help that they’re going to give—I’m going to try to do Ti Jean—and each one of them...is an individual artist employed with the government, and doing work that is relevant to the government. It isn’t that you don’t find that kind of endeavour, even in a place like Trinidad, although Trinidad is very, very bad. I don’t know why yet. But you can’t get what is generalized as support—you don’t support the arts…the conception is that you support the arts because they’ve fallen down. So the concept is that art is sick, and it needs help.

That’s how you talk about art in the Caribbean. This person needs help or this particular thing needs help, like a hospital, right, a certain section, what is wrong, and I don’t know how you get it inside the minds of Caribbean generations unless you do it in the schools, maybe, is this simultaneity of saying, it is obvious that you need to help, it should be synonymous. It is not synonymous. It is either desperate or it’s a complaint, it’s negative. Even the help, the attitude of the help is negative. Now my experience was not negative, but by contrast…I thought, ‘I’m going to be wasting my time, if I go talk to these people’—complete opposite.

Rapso, Romanticism and the Realpolitik

I went to the first ever Rapso conference at the National Museum last Friday (May 11, 2007) out of a multifarious curiosity: what could they have to say about Rapso, which is among the most esoteric niches of popular culture? UWI was involved, and so was the Ministry of Culture: had Rapso’s time come to be formally conscripted/drafted into the culture / elections wars?

I was interested in hearing from Bro Resistance, and seeing who had emerged as authorities, and been placed on the panels. Apparently, no local academics have gotten on board the Rapso train as yet, but you can be sure they’re not far off. Earl Lovelace was listed to give a feature address, and Prof Carol Boyce Davies was listed to close the show. I avoided both these august personages but managed to catch both the advertised practitioners’ panels.