Ralph Byron Campbell: a tribute
I
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.Or does it explode?
— LANGSTON HUGHES, Harlem (1951)
I wanted to write this tribute to my uncle Ralph Campbell for weeks now, but I just could not get that first sentence to start the journey. I still have not found it, but the inspiration, the catalyst for a beginning was that recurring idea of a “dream deferred.” Ralph’s dream was to build a theatre, as in a physical space to create the Caribbean, not to mimic the metropolis, but to walk and talk the West Indian brio and pride, and speak into existence the lives and stories of us Caribbean folk.
Langston Hughes tells us, in the context of his Harlem, that a dream deferred can dry up or fester or that it may explode. In Ralph’s case, it seems to have been physically reduced to the detritus of the old talk of doubters and dimwits, the cabal of con men weighing in and making his dream a shaky reality. The sad truth, however, was that the frame of this theatre building Ralph was beginning to erect before her died was made of materials that were not structurally sound and certainly would not have passed any building regulations for safety. Stone and metal monuments are being reconsidered at this very moment around the world, yet we sometimes cannot see the forest from the trees. Ralph’s unending dream was an extension of himself; unabashed, unflinching. That dream of indigenous Caribbean theatre that was envisaged by his mentor, St Lucian poet, playwright and 1992 Nobel laureate in Literature, Derek Walcott, only to be pitifully realised and abandoned by others, was unfinished.
My uncle, Ralph Campbell was born on Monday, 26 January 1942 in San Fernando, Trinidad. He died on Friday, June 13 2020 in his house, the house that his parents built in Morvant — a working-class community just outside the capital, Port of Spain — their little bungalow that was a vast mansion and a locus for beginnings for the next generations of Campbells, me included. And in those intervening 78 years, Ralph dreamed of theatre and achieved his dream of a theatre for us and by us, in spite of the obstacles that lay before him, some self-inflicted, others the circumstances of Caribbean disinterest, ennui or hawkish exploitation by others.
Ralph was among those bold pioneers forging a new reality that blossomed with Independence from the Colonial masters and manners towards a new centre: Errol Hill in theatre and Walcott in both theatre and poetry, Kamau Brathwaite and Eric Roach in poetry, Sam Selvon and George Lamming in prose, the philosophers who were re-charting the ruins. Together with LeRoy Clarke in art and Astor Johnson in dance, they all took cues from their mentors, from Beryl McBurnie to Wilfredo Lam to Edgar Mittelhölzer, defying the old guard of the new island politician who successfully and selfishly made art and creative industry a hobby, and likened vile village pantomime as the epitome of theatre for the masses. Ralph was an agent for change in this milieu.
Walcott wrote, “…so there was on the sullen ambition of the West Indian actor a fear that he lacked proper weapons, that his voice, colour, and his body were no match for the civilised concepts of theatre.” Ralph agreed, saying “the articulate actor is the quintessence of theatre.” Walcott used Ralph’s talents. Ralph acted for him in Wole Soyinka’s masterpiece The Road and developed a significant part of the catalogue of Walcott’s West Indian plays for the Trinidad Theatre Workshop: The Charlatan, Malcochon, Batai, Henri Christophe, The Sea at Dauphin, Jourmard and famously in Dream on Monkey Mountain creating the role of Corporal Lestrade.
Local critics were there to record triumph and tragedy. Bruce King in his book Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama tells us that Therese Mills “was impressed by Ralph Campbell’s portrait of the mulatto Corporal Lestrade, which she compared in style with that of Marlon Brando,” that John Melser noted how “Ralph Campbell was energetic and possessed the stage but swallowed his words,” and that Earl Lovelace opined that “Ralph Campbell as Lestrade was credible while creating a range of emotions.”
Ralph at this time was a St. George’s College alumnus, a teacher and an actor who wanted to be professional. The world was to be his oyster, because here in Trinidad, there was a stasis and a mindset that kept creativity at bay to not disturb the new “governors” in the independent Caribbean; Walcott called them “a new, brown meritocracy, who had accepted the limitation of their new society…Witchdoctors of the new left with imported totems.” Ralph said to me that the “new governors could not see new horizons beyond the tips of their brown noses.” Either one stays to acquiesce to a grim reality or one migrates to experience a new paradigm with a chance perhaps to return to rescue the needful.
II
Islands cage us
and we long to leave them;
the cities scorn us
and we long to love them.
Bite the earth’s orange
And her pips are bitter.— ERIC ROACH, Piarco (1972)
The Eric Roach epigraph above would be a poetic destiny of our island circumstance. Walcott would also write, “To be born on a small island, a colonial backwater, meant a precocious resignation to fate.” Ralph’s fate lay in “ex-isle.” Like so many writers and creative people from the Caribbean for over a century, migration was a rite of passage as much as marriage and death. Ralph travelled to learn and to live, to build a family and a legacy. Nigeria, the United States, Canada, Jamaica and back to Trinidad. A Homeric journey.
In Africa, he found himself, in America he studied (at NYU), and in Canada he published. In those North American countries he came up on the hard demarcation of Black and White. His African self grew. He gave his children, born there, strong African names “so that [they] would forever be connected to and have an understanding and appreciation of [their] ancestry,” — Rwanda Nairobi, Chamba Nkrumah and Luanda Kibasa, my cousins who I would not meet until they were adults. Ex-isle separated families.
Ralph never held back his tongue. His words were either weapons of war or gross insults to the spirit that turned heads and hearts away. A cumulation of desertions in life is succeeded by an avalanche of accolades in death. “Ralph was a good guy, but…” A wink, a sting in the tail. I and everyone close to him knew what that “but” was leading to. Now is not the time to recount recriminations, to retry old battles. Now is the time to remember the truth of an existence shaped by Caribbean philosophy — Walcott’s insistence of the validity and commerciality of Caribbean art and theatre, and Marcus Garvey’s self-determination of Black skin and ancestry.
In the 1980s, Ralph published a newspaper WITT (West Indian Theatre Toronto) News. Under his pseudonym Usuthu Baganda, he published Collections, a personal anthology of poems and prose dedicated to his children and to “the spirit of African Revolutionary struggle and African liberation.” He summarises that “the spirit of Black people in the New World cannot be free as long as that ancestral spirit they arrived with on the slavers remains in bondage. This freedom will only be accomplished when Blacks go past the limitations imposed on them by the West.” A Garveyite until the end, that spirit of going beyond limitations resonated. He unfortunately never formally published the plays he was writing and wrote up to this time, though some have been performed here and abroad.
Ralph was the cool uncle; I barely knew my younger uncle — his brother Oliver — who was a merchant sailor often at sea. Ralph was a conduit to my father’s stories and legacy beyond what my mother told me. My father died when I was two and I have no solid memories of him; I don’t hear his voice in my mind, I can’t see or remember his walk. However, I am told that I walk like my father and I look like Ralph.
A humorous side note: back in 2004 I was going to a dinner party with my cousins in the US, and serendipitously going to meet my cousin Chamba face to face for the first time. I exit my house walking towards the car, and see some agitated movement between Chamba and my cousin Rwanda’s husband. When I get into the car, Chamba stares at me for more time than I expected before the obligatory “hello, so long I ain’t see you” greeting. He admits that he thought I was his father coming into the car and his agitation was due to the “tension” at that time between father and son. Who knows what could have happened if I wasn’t introduced.
Another time, Ralph’s grand-daughter Kafela sat staring at me for minutes before summoning up the courage to say, “I can’t believe how much you look like grand dad.” The Campbell gene was evident. But sometimes, I wonder if that Campbell connection was not charged with a kind of cynical dismissal of all non-Campbells. One hears stories, cutting close to the bone about relationships gone bad, about betrayal. An artificial rage, maybe, since there seemed to be no thought to the idea that relationships are two-sided. The tribe is sacred and all others be damned.
Ralph wrote a poem in Collections, “To a Dead Brother” — Danny, my father — that reads, to me like insult to my mother and me. After lifting my father up in praise and adulation from peers and family alike, the poem ends abruptly with: “Then he got married / and died.” The tribe is sacred and all others be damned. African liberation, I guess, is an opportunity to say what on your mind, but sometimes bridges burned can never be resurrected. I read those words in the poem and I wondered what was the meaning. He never told me when I asked. The idea of the eternal fight, the inelegance of the faux pas, the ideology of martyrs all coalesce to a point of reflection on what can be achieved in “ex-isle”. The notion of return may be catalysed by lost horizons. The cold winter of the Great White North may not be for the dreamer. The diasporic clique that should have been present to offer comfort seemed to have dispersed.
Ralph’s return to the Caribbean was one sprinkled with rejection and disaffection, rivalry and disappointment. That which should have made a secure commercial engagement whether in theatre or academia, was left wanting with coup d’état after coup d’état, from cast to committee, from colleague to confidante. “Bite the Earth’s orange / And her pips are bitter.” But he was determined until the end. The desertions were to follow, but the dream was not deferred forever! Those who recognised his worth, gave him a space to create art in the local and regional theatre community: Rawle Gibbons, Alwin Bully, Jemma Redman, the late Earl Warner, the late Dennis Scott, and the late Tony Hall.
That voice that the critic once said “swallowed his words,” was a magnet for a casting director looking for a tone that suggested magisterial force all within a West Indian body. I too heard his voice before I even saw his face under a powdered wig in the television farce filmed in Jamaica, Going to Extremes on ABC television in the US. He was cast as Judge Leslie Fess on two episodes of that show back in 1992–93. He told me he was eligible for a SAG (Screen Actor’s Guild) card. That card is a ticket to a career in film and television as an actor. That, and the right passport. Ralph had three! I don’t know if he ever got the SAG card.
Ralph would write in the foreword of my 1999 book of photographs my father took of early Trinidad Theatre Workshop actors:
“In many ways then, the West Indian theatre seems to have come full circle, for although there is theatre activity throughout the region now, the quality of theatre that Derek [Walcott] dissipated is nowhere to be seen. There is no repertory company of actors. Even when one criticizes Derek’s absurd view of West Indian life, of history, of character, still we seem no further as a people now.”
There was work still to be done. Ralph had work to do.
He directed Berlin on a Donkey for the National Theatre Arts Company of Trinidad and Tobago in 2015. It was described as “a devised piece containing monologues in a theatrical representation of the Berlin Conference [of 1884–1885] that was held to discuss the division of Africa by the European colonizers.” His charges produced a moving tribute video to him after his passing.
Ralph’s dream never dried up, festered or sagged. It’s explosion was in the ability to make do with what’s barely given and make others see the vision. It’s what real Caribbean leaders do. The small island politician’s aura is rendered null by the artist’s drama and song, both which can make the emperor’s new clothes invisible. In the Caribbean context, small beginnings are magnified, small victories are victories all the same and a reckoning of those victories are our epic stories of triumph no matter how insignificant on a global stage. The dreamers in these isles are our rich currency in the wider world.
Ralph was cremated on Wednesday, June 17, 2020. The current COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions for gatherings along with the border closing did not allow his family, his children and wife, to attend or be here in Trinidad for his last days and for the aftermath. Death was solitary. Cremation was virtual. But despite that dystopian scenario, I saw in Ralph something I had not seen before, and what I had cynically dismissed. The dream deferred for decades by the realities of exile, of poverty, was not diminished, as the frame of that fragile structure to house a space for performance from his community of Morvant had finally begun. The dream he had to build a theatre in his backyard of the Campbell family home had at long last taken shape.
The dream deferred exploded with the possibilities to fill the psychological space left by colonialism, as he often noted. The con men who fed on the weakness of a dying man to erect a fragile structure, those malicious carrion-eaters picking, even on the day Ralph died, at leftover tools and scrap material, will not deter from the symbolism of what was achieved; a tangible totem to the idea that his community of Morvant will be part of the Caribbean commercial theatre ecosystem and among its own, here resides the leader. Ralph Byron Campbell, you moved beyond the limitations that were imposed on you. As you rest in peace, say hello to Danny and Leone for me and my family.
© 2020, Nigel A. Campbell. All Rights Reserved.
