Abdhur Rahman Slade Hopkinson – The forgotten poet

Abdhur Rahman Slade Hopkinson was a Guyanese poet and actor who was born in New Amsterdam, Berbice, British Guiana in 1934. His mother was a nurse and his father a lawyer. He lived a middle-class life in New Amsterdam until his father died and his mother later moved the family, comprising Slade and his sister, to Barbados.
In Barbados, Slade attended Harrison College, at the time an all-boys school, considered among the most prestigious in the West Indies. In 1952 he received a scholarship to attend the University College of the West Indies where he would meet future famed Caribbean literary figures Derek Walcott and Mervyn Morris, also students then. A year later, Hopkinson received his BA, and a Dip. Ed in 1956.
During his time at university he was very active in theatre: acting in and directing Caribbean and Shakespeare plays and other western classics like “King Lear” and “Oedipus”.
Hopkinson published his first book in 1954 at age 20, “The Four and Other Poems”; followed by plays entitled, “The Blood of a Family” (1957) “Fall of a Chief” (1965), “The Onliest Fisherman” (1967), “Spawning of Eel” (1968), rewritten as “Sala” and “The Long Vacation”.
He went to work in Jamaica after university, first as a teacher then weekly newspaper editor, and government information officer. In Jamaica he married and had several children. One, Nalo Hopkinson, is now a respected novelist in her own right, noted for her first novel, “Brown Girl in the Ring” (1998); another, Keita Hopkinson is an established artist in Jamaica.
In 1962 Hopkinson moved to Trinidad with his family where he joined Derek Walcott’s Trinidad Theatre Workshop. He became a Muslim in 1964 and changed his name to Muhammed Abdhur-Rahman Slade Hopkinson. After receiving a Rockefeller Scholarship, he attended Yale Drama School from 1965 – 66 then returned to Guyana to lecture at the University of Guyana from 1966 – 1968.
He returned to Trinidad after his stint at UG, but by 1970, differences between himself and Walcott led to Hopkinson forming the Caribbean Theatre Guild that same year. His own acting career was cut short by kidney failure in 1970, which by 1973 saw him taking regular dialysis treatments.
Then in 1976 the Guyana government published two of his collections of poetry, “The Madwoman of Papine”, which is described as containing his “secular poems ranging over his Caribbean experiences”, and “The Friend”, considered “his religious and philosophical poems, written in the process of discovering the teachings of the Sufis.”
In Guyana he was said to be active in a local literary group called “Anira” comprising famed Guyanese poet Martin Carter, Sydney Singh and Jan Carew, among others.
Illness did not stop him from working in the Caribbean, and beyond: he worked for a while with the Jamaica Tourist Board then became Guyanese Vice-Consul to Canada before returning to the classroom as teacher in Toronto, Canada, and classroom assistant at the end of his working career.
Despite taking long-term disability leave after suffering from cancer of the kidneys, he continued writing for journals and anthologies, and completed what would become his final collection, “Snowscape with Signature”, a selection of poems written between 1952-1992.
Sadly, Abdhur Rahman Slade Hopkinson died just before the 1993 publication of “Snowscape with Signature”, and has since seemed to have faded from the memories of Guyanese literature.
Despite his lack of recognition – there is little of his biography to be found – Hopkinson’s poetry has been praised by many critics and reviewers over the years. As one reviewer notes of his final collection:  “Hopkinson’s poems are tightly disciplined…his imagination also ranges at will, and his capacity to surprise makes every one of his poems worth reading.”