The University of Guyana to Stage Reading of Literary Works of Dr Rupert Roopnarine

Dr Rupert Roopnarine (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 Roopnarine was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English in the Faculty of Arts.  He was a member of the University of Guyana’s Council prior to becoming Minister of Education  which was his last substantial public role in Guyana. As an international intellectual he worked towards the betterment of humanity.

Dr. Roopnarine was a scholar, a statesman, a poet, a critic of the arts 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 from Queens College on a  Guyana Scholarship to Cambridge where he read Comparative Literature and returned to Guyana  after serving at Cornell University to join the University of Guyana in 1977. 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 Roopnarine was fabled for oratorical eloquence as he articulated Continental and Romance  Literature and 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. 

Dr. Roopnarine 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 Queens 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: On Re-Reading Martin Carter (Peepal Tree, 1989)  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 Dr. Roopnarine, 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 Dr. Roopnarine’s book  of essays The Sky’s Wild Noise (Peepal Tree, 2013), 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,

Dr. Roopnarine 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, 2003). 

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 Dr. Rupert Roopnarine’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 played 

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. 

For those reasons the University of Guyana joins the nation in mourning the loss of a scholar,  critic, poet and film maker who has left us with a documentary film of international note, a body  of critical discourse, and above all, an invitation to a consciousness of humanism and universal  enlightenment. 

The University extends respectful condolences to his family and close friends and comrades who  will feel his loss most profoundly. A memorial reading of Dr. Roopnarine’s work is currently being  curated for later in March in tribute to his academic and literary contributions to the University of  Guyana and internationally.