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HHow does the author end? This year is sixty years since the death of Eric Walrond, a writer born in Guyana who cut his teeth in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance, collaborated with Countee Cullen and WEB Du Bois, wrote a book that was called “The greatest story in all West Indian literature”, and then left the cultural map completely.
The work is Tropic Death, a well-known portrait of the Caribbean shepherd of his youth. Four of the 10 stories in the book are set in the Panama Canal Zone controlled by the US, where his father once worked: a passive economy based on a strong class system that promotes white leadership in the international mix of migrant workers and immigrants. This year marks 100 years since Tropic Death was published.
Walrond was “a foreigner twice removed”. The hardships of his childhood – moving from Guyana to Barbados to Colón – established a nomadic life. At the age of 20, after studying journalism at the Panama Star and Herald, he moved back to New York, where he got a job at Negro World, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. However, Walrond did not like what he saw as false encouragement of art. He did not want to join other ideological groups that he met in Harlem, finding himself, as a West Indian, different from what he considered to be different African-American debates about “ethnological oneness”.
Walrond saw his artistic role as writing a “mental history” of the places and peoples who came from them. This means rejecting monolithic ideas about race, celebrating instead islands and regional differences. Therefore, the characters of Tropic Death – farmers, prostitutes, sailors, single women – come from the Caribbean, and their conversations are recorded over the phone, in different languages. This was a bold decision that had not been reported in English-language Caribbean fiction at the time.
As the title suggests, Tropic Death they go macabre and gothic. The scenery is vivid – imbued with spiritual energy, tainted by industrial revolution, plagued by the mass killings of natural disasters and disasters. And his appearance is often met with danger. A scholar named Robert Bone has said that gothic literature “makes one come out from within”: it unearths the horrors that were buried beneath the shepherds. The idyll that Walrond inverts is the prejudiced myth of the “hot spot” as a fertile paradise inhabited by lazy primitives: a traditional view created by tourist books dictated by corporate interests to end their destruction of the region and its people.
Walrond’s stories undermine this illusion by revealing the violence that underpins it. A worker is shot without permission by a drunken US Army officer; A young man, diving to find coins thrown by tourists on board a German ocean liner, is horrifyingly eaten by a shark. The most gruesome death in the book, however, is reserved for Bellon, a British plantation owner who, on a stormy night in rural Barbados, discovers a baby abandoned on a railroad track. Cursing the “bad” people of the area for neglecting one of them, he reluctantly bundled up the child and hid it in a nearby hut. The next morning, his body is found “absolutely clean and bloodless”. Bellon’s prejudice blinded him to the obvious truth: the baby he wanted to save was not a human child, but a vampire bat.
Hot Death he gave Walrond a Guggenheim prize and received many honors, but not all of his contemporaries accepted his publication. Garvey also included Walrond in a list of “author whores” who he believed wrote to endorse the white establishment. Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay thought he was a “traitor” whose “future words” were shallow in racial prejudices. At this time, Walrond’s white guardian, Edna Worthley Underwood, disappointed his next book – a history of the construction of the Panama Canal – saying that he should “go back” to “his people” in the tropics.
Instead, Walrond crossed the Atlantic. First in Paris, then London, where he published several articles in popular magazines, some of the first short stories published by a Caribbean writer in Britain. After the war, he moved to the Wiltshire town of Bradford-on-Avon, to work in a rubber factory. This was the beginning of a strange departure from the writing life. Although Walrond wrote some journalistic articles while in Wiltshire – he covered race and the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush – he lived anonymously, the only black man in an all-white town. His creativity ended.
Walrond began to feel like a failure. His inability to find “home” was closely related to his inability to create. He wrote: “My desire to settle down in a world where there is no stability, has led me astray. In 1952, calling himself a “depressive patient”, Walrond committed himself to the Roundway Hospital, which helped the mentally ill, for five years. There, an unexpected atmosphere of “fraternity” filled his creative shops for a while, and he began to publish fiction in the hospital’s monthly magazine. But after he left, he returned London, efforts to revive his work were unsuccessful. His death from a heart attack at the age of 67 was never reported, and he was buried in an unmarked grave.
A small but important body of scholarship has also discovered Walrond’s legacy. But his work and life history should have the knowledge of many people. Not only is Tropic Death an artistic masterpiece, but Walrond’s collected essays hold a wonderful mirror to our unstable world, offering a critical critique of the negative consequences—in families, communities, and forms—of the human race.
