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In The Diaspora
# A tribute to Rupert Roopnaraine
Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine
By Stabroek News February 24, 2026
**By Nigel Westmaas** Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine passed away on Republic Day, 2026. Born on 31 January 1943, Rupert Roopnaraine belongs to that rare generation of Caribbean thinkers who refused to choose between the life of the mind and the risks of political struggle. He carried both, and he carried them fully. I vaguely recall in the 1980s when Rupert held his weekly Marxist classes at his home, we were required to read Georgi Plekhanov’s The Role of the Individual in History. It is a stern Marxist text, cautious about elevating the “subjective factor,” wary of attributing too much to any one person. In some circles of the WPA at the time, that question was ... Rupert Roopnaraine was, in many ways, a paradox. Possessed of a sharp and disciplined intellect – especially at the well of classical literature – he also knew the intricacies of Guyanese political culture and its cast of characters as few others do. He was a student at Queen’s College and one of those who grew up in a Guyana in the 1950s/1960s where there were both the despair of political divisions and the hopes for independence. He was also an ... how others saw him, or in reading the quiet calculations of those around him. It is part of what makes him human, ... Rupert’s influence was a fusion of intellectual production and movement politics. He was equally at home writing ... Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeats, and our own Martin Carter. He authored three books and a collection of poetry; his collection of essays, The Sky’s Wild Noise, won the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction. His essays on Carter’s poetry ... In 1976, Rupert resigned from a professorial position in Comparative Literature at Cornell University; returning to ... Omawale, Rupert Roopnaraine and Walter Rodney leave the Magistrate’s court after being ... power at the time. There were risks to equipment, the WPA news sheet Dayclean and leaflets. After piling the public ... In the turbulent days of the WPA, under intense pressure from the state, he showed not only bravery but formidable ... holding forth with wit, insight and principled (com)passion, more often than not without a single note in sight. The late Barbadian novelist George Lamming once described how speeches should be geared at “making the collective mind of the crowd feel,” with novels “making the feeling think.” In a region where political oratory has sometimes become ... If Roopnaraine brought anything distinctive to the political table, it is precisely the WPA values to which the party ... Hoyte. He stood inside and outside the political party and later the state, as an intrinsic cultural critic who never ... Plekhanov may have warned us about overstating the role of individuals. History has its tides, its structures, its ... over expediency. Rupert Roopnaraine is one of those figures. His life reminds us that ideas have consequences, that ... In 2009, in a letter to the press, he drew a comparison between the treatment of a citizen, Troy Small, who was held in ... expanded to include Bonita Harris, Karen DeSouza, Maurice Odle and Davo Nandlall. That morning I was taken to Eve Leary ... Rupert’s essays in his collected work The Sky’s Wild Noise contain tributes to Cheddi Jagan, Desmond Hoyte, Walter Rodney, Martin Carter and Phillip Allsopp “Soppy”. In these stories of lives lived, we find the full of the man of literature, the politician and the best examples of memorialising those who have transitioned. In his tribute on the passing of Martin Carter in 1997, he noted that Carter died amidst the electoral conflict between the two main ... to Guyana, Rupert observed a stark, even beautiful irony in Carter’s passing in the context of election unrest on the ... Our condolences to Rupert’s children, Terry (Silke)