October 2009


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Graduation 2009 Honoree: On Art and Imagination

Acclaimed writer, Arnold Rampersad, talks about US President Barack Obama,his return home and being honoured by UWI in an interview with Anna Walcott-Hardy.

Having read his books, I felt I knew Arnold Rampersad long before meeting him on that breezy afternoon at the home of artist, Jackie Hinkson in 2006. His biographies, “Days of Grace” and “The Life of Langston Hughes,” were sandwiched between the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and a novel by Coetzee in our small Petit Valley library. An unusual placing, perhaps, but then again, perhaps not, since his works have often been praised for rejuvenating the genre of the literary biography. Unassuming, discerning and somewhat reserved, with a very dry wit, he often uses humour to make one feel at ease.

The Professor of English and the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, he was Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities from January 2004-August 2006. As Senior Associate Dean, he was responsible for the full array of departments in the Humanities, including Art and Art History, Asian Languages, Classics, Comparative Literature, Drama, French and Italian, German Studies and Linguistics.

From 1991 to 1996, he held a MacArthur “genius grant” fellowship. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. He is the brother of Roger Toussaint, the president of Transport Workers Union Local 100, and John Mendes of Arima, editor of “Cote ci Cote la,” a popular dictionary of Trinidad expressions.

As a teenager, he would lime with a group of friends including artists Donald ‘Jackie’ Hinkson, Peter Minshall and writer, Kevin Arthur. The Hinkson home was a popular meeting place for the group, where they discussed art, music and writing. Hinkson remembers him as “very soft spoken, gentle...he expressed himself beautifully and his English was always impeccable.”

The friends also shared a passion for cricket and often went to the Queen’s Park Oval to watch the regional team.

Born in 1941 in Trinidad, he received a BA and MA from Bowling Green State University and an MA and PhD from Harvard University. He has taught at The University of Virginia, of Virginia and at Rutgers, Columbia and Princeton Universities. This year he will be honoured by The University of the West Indies and some may say it’s been a long time coming. Hinkson says it well: “obviously it is most well deserved, the man has excelled.”

In your presentation on the Tenth Annual Eric E. Williams Memorial Lecture in October 2008 on “The Challenge of Leadership in America: Race, History and the Emergence of Barack Obama,” at Florida International University, you spoke of President Barack Obama as an enigma—a master orator with the capacity to be a great leader, but who could also, perhaps by the very nature of his “contemplative reserve,” be at risk of being a “passive and ineffectual president.” What grade would you give the President thus far?

I think that his opponents on the right have tried to capitalize on what is a genuine tendency in his character, toward contemplation and reserve. They also harp on his lack of previous executive experience, which could indeed have been a major handicap. Nevertheless, I think that he has performed superbly on the whole. My fears that he would do little have been proven completely unjustified. He is surrounded by a team, including his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, both also from Chicago, that has worked aggressively with him on a daunting set of problems. Even during the low point of August, when he was hammered steadily by his opponents over health care issues mainly, but also trivially and often spitefully, I thought that he was performing very well, and I was sure then, as I’m sure now, that he will win (a partial but major victory) on the health care issues, and generations of Americans will be glad that he fought and won. He has been attacked for making compromises, but I support his prag matism. He definitely gets a grade A from me—although the head of the Republican Party, Michael Steele had failed him. That’s wishful thinking.

You’ve been away from Trinidad for over thirty years and you returned home last year for an extended period. Looking back, what were some of your expectations?

I had dipped into Trinidad a few times after a long time away, prior to my more extended return. I had been impressed that the nation was doing so well, not only economically, but also in terms of preserving its astonishing vitality and creativity. I was very pleased to see people who had been poor doing much better than when I left them in the early 1960s. The whole country had become much more sophisticated and skilled. Of course, I was inundated by local voices that emphasized the problems of living in Trinidad. Some of these people were and are extremely pessimistic. I returned in order to try to get closer to the truth, as well as to benefit from the vitality and creativity of which I spoke just now.

How did they measure up to the reality of being in Trinidad?

I was sad to leave Trinidad after four or five months here; but then, to be honest, after a few days I was contented to be back in a much blander but more organized culture. For one thing, I could take a drive in my car without making sure my will was in order and my next-of-kin could be notified quickly.

One has to be strong to be a Trinidadian. Crime is a reality that undermines the foundations of the nation; crime and the impunity associated with it. The failure to solve crimes of murder, especially high-profile crimes, tends to mock all the genuine achievement of the country.

And then there is the matter of “race” relations. Even if one sets aside the matter of the relationship between the peoples of African and Indian descent, there is a sometimes disturbing lack of progress, as I experienced it, among the non-Indian peoples. Skin colour continues to matter far too much, I think. And yet in the final analysis Trinidad is not a blind society. It is intensely self-critical. People are smart and knowing, alert and alive and creative, and they understand the need to hang together, even if it is sometimes very hard to do so.

How were you able to move so seamlessly and successfully from broadcast journalism in the Caribbean to academia in the USA?

My education at Belmont Boys’ Intermediate and at CIC [St Mary’s College] stood me in very good stead. CIC and QRC [Queen’s Royal College] and schools of that quality were old-fashioned in some ways but also superb in preparing us as students. As for attending college, I was simply lucky. I certainly had neither the money nor the sage advice about how to get scholarships and the like. Then I became a freshman at 24 through the graces of the US State Department, a partial scholarship, and the local embassy, especially in the person of the wonderful Nina Squires of Trinidad, an artist in her own right employed at the embassy. I was sent, fearing that I couldn’t compete after five years out of CIC, to a university that was pretty low on the achievement scale of universities in the US—one of the lesser state universities of Ohio—and discovered that I loved being in the classroom, that after CIC and taking the advanced Cambridge University overseas exams I was more than ready to do well, especially in the humanities. Incidentally, I had loved being a broadcaster, especially in journalism. It extended my education about the world. Perhaps I should have stayed in the field. Who knows?

The key matter, in some respects, was my early discovery of the links between earlier, foundational, American literature and some of the very issues consuming the younger artists in the Caribbean as I was growing up. I mean the questions surrounding colonialism and nationhood, the problems and challenges of being dominated by a foreign literary and cultural tradition, mainly English, that was attractive but needed to be rivalled and even displaced. Once I discovered American literature of the American Renaissance of the 1840s and 1850s that produced writers such as Melville and Walt Whitman, and saw how similar it was, in key ways, to the Caribbean Renaissance that had already produced Walcott, Naipaul, and other transformative writers and artists, I had found my career. The arrival of the Black Power movement refined my goals further. In the struggle of blacks and sympathetic whites for the achievement of social justice for all, and in the rich but largely ignored literature of blacks that spanned two centuries, I found my scholarly and teaching focus. That focus sharpened further when I became dedicated to filling the gap of black biography within American culture.

Did you have many mentors along the way?

Absolutely. I received no mentoring from my father or mother, but in my childhood Edith Callender Cole, a school teacher who became head mistress of Sacred Heart Girls’, literally taught me to read and write after my education had been badly neglected. In fact, the first school I ever attended was Belmont Boys’ Intermediate. I owe her everything. Fortunately she is still alive. At CIC, Fr. Roland Quesnel, who taught me English and French for many years, was a powerful influence because of his intelligence and learning and also because of his stylish self-confidence and self-possession. He was no one’s pal, but he was shrewd and humane about our characters and shortcomings. I was, for a while, a member of Derek Walcott’s Trinidad Theatre Workshop. Derek wasn’t a mentor, but he embodied literary genius, even if at times in a forbidding way, and it was a rivilege to be near him and learn from him.

As for the US, mentors abounded, especially in the university. In Trinidad, there seems to have existed virtually no culture or tradition of helping others, especially students in need or wishing to get ahead. No one ever advised me about applying to universities and seeking scholarship aid, whether UWI or abroad. Perhaps they simply didn’t know enough, but I think it was mainly this lack of a culture of helping and nurturing younger people. In the US, many people, professors mainly, wanted to help younger people. The idea of an almost intrinsic American generosity is no myth, although not every American is generous, needless to say.

It’s been said by writers and literary critics that through your books, “Days of Grace” (1993), tennis star Arthur Ashe’s autobiography, which you co-authored, and in the biography, “Jackie Robinson” (1997), you’ve brought the craft of the scholar to the popular biography. Do you think you’ve rejuvenated the literary biography genre?

I don’t know what I’ve accomplished on a grander scale, so I leave it to others to judge. My goal was to help paint a new portrait of black America through biography. The old portrait showed no face, or didn’t exist. I lived long enough to see how my two-volume biography of Langston Hughes, for example, although criticized at times by gays (perhaps with justification), provided the foundation for an entirely new level of respect for Hughes and, by implication, the black American writers.

Well-done biographies can have that effect. The main thing about the Ashe and Robinson popular biographies, especially the latter, which is a formal biography, is that I insisted on breaking the mould and treating every part of their lives as important—not simply the sports but their entire lives, their boyhood, their parents, their religion and politics, their race, their attitude to women, their negotiation of life after the glory years of sports ended. If that approach changed things, I’m happy.

The black sportsman or sportswoman is not simply a body (this is true of all players, of course), he or she has a mind and a past that shaped that mind; he or she has hopes and fears, and weaknesses and strengths. I always want to show a full human being—even if almost all sports biographies act as though there was no life before or after the glory years. And the problem of reliable and persistent portraiture is far worse for blacks than for whites, as one can imagine.

How do you feel about this honorary degree from The University of the West Indies?

I try not to take honours and awards too seriously. In fact, I try not to take them seriously. They can drag one down into complacency and arrogance. There is not a single diploma or certificate or award framed and hanging anywhere in my home or office. I won’t hang this one either. Still, it’s probably the greatest honour of my life.