UG to stage reading of Dr Rupert Roopnaraine’s literary works

Last Updated on Sunday, 1 March 2026, 22:48 by Writer

The University of Guyana (UG) will be staging a Reading of Literary Works of Dr Rupert Roopnaraine upon his passing while noting and celebrating the substantial legacy of an outstanding intellectual member of its community, that tertiary institution which he served said on Sunday.

Dr Rupert Roopnaraine (January 31, 1943 – February 23, 2026) will be universally celebrated as a man of thought and action, a man of the Renaissance, a man of academia and of the people, who could walk with kings but never lost the common touch. It is in memory of that intellectual quality that the University of Guyana celebrates his life and academic legacy.

Dr Rupert Roopnaraine was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English in the Faculty of Arts. He was a member of the UG Council prior to becoming Minister of Education which was his last substantial public role in Guyana. As an international intellectual he did even further towards the betterment of humanity.

Rupert was a scholar, a statesman, a poet, a critic of art and of literature, a lecturer and film maker who served the University as an expert on literature and philosophical thought, the nation as Minister of Education and Member of Parliament. He went trom Queen’s College on a Guyana Scholarship to Cambridge University where he read comparative literature and returned to Guyana from a position at Cornell University to join the University of Guyana in 1977. Yet he combined scholarship with activism, driven by a proletarian philosophy that called a deep knowledge of Marxism and modern political thought to the service of mankind.

Dr Roopnaraine was fabled for oratorical eloquence as he articulated Continental and Romance Literature and Franz Kafka in equal measure with Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman and the leftist teachings of Terry Eagleton. Yet he was a serious student of Martin Carter and of a Creole sensibility. The University marks his impact as a post-colonialist intellectual reminiscent of the Jacobin cry for “liberte, egalite, fraternite” when he struggled alongside Walter Rodney against totalitarianism in the 1970s.

Roopnaraine reflects the Renaissance spirit in the balance of elements in his life as a scholar, a sportsman and an artist. He was a cricketer – a spin bowler for Queen’s College and afterwards for Cambridge University (1964 -1966) where he was awarded a Blue for his performance in sports.

He was a poet, publishing The Web of October: Rereading Martin Carter (Peepal Tree, 1988) and later Suite for Supriya (Peepal Tree, 1993) enlarging the corpus of original national creative output. His further contribution to Guyanese literature includes his study of Martin Carter to whom he pays tribute consistently in his artistic work. The profound concept of working class struggle is at the core of the artistic documentary film by the Victor Jara Collective The Terror And The Time (1979) written and directed by Roopnaraine, who took the film’s introductory motif and its title from Carter’s poem “Cartman of Dayclean” (1954)

“They come treading in the hoofmarks of the mule
Passing the ancient bridge
The grave of pride
The sudden flight
The terror and the time.”

Similarly, Carter’s poem “For Walter Rodney” (1981) inspired a title for Roopnaraine’s book of essays The Sky’s Wild Noise (Peepal Tree, 2012), taken from Carter’s tribute to a martyr, which won the OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction 2013.

“I sit in the presence of rain
in the sky’s wild noise
of the feet of some who
not only, but also, kill
the origin of rain.”

Roopnaraine engaged the literature as he interrogated Guyanese art in his insightful readings of the social world as represented through the ocular spectrum of a painter and sculptor Stanley Greaves. This produced Primacy of the Eye: The Art of Stanley Greaves (Peepal Tree, 2005).

The University of Guyana recognises the rare critical attention to the visual arts and the advancement of a Guyanese body of criticism and the crafting of a Guyanese aesthetic perspective. The University celebrates Rupert Roopnaraine’s value as a scholar for his contributions to a continuing discourse on the arts, and the application of literature in the social context. His was an effective role in the refinement and elevation of a national consciousness informed by the scope and depth of the work of artists he studied inter alia Carter and Greaves.