Tropic Death – 10 blistering, astonishing stories about racist, exploitative outrages in Caribbean ‘paradises’ – won him a Guggenheim award. Why did this star of the Harlem Renaissance die such a sad and lonely death?
How does a writer disappear? This year marks six decades since the death of Eric Walrond, a Guyana-born writer who cut his literary teeth amid the Harlem Renaissance, kept company with the likes of Countee Cullen and WEB Du Bois, wrote a book once hailed as “the greatest short story work in the entire body of West Indian literature”, then dropped off the cultural map completely.
That work is Tropic Death, a truly trailblazing counter-pastoral portrait of the Caribbean locales of his youth. Four of the book’s 10 stories are set in the US-controlled Panama Canal Zone, where his father had worked: an economy of subjection structured by a rigid caste system that promoted white supremacy over its global mix of migrant and indentured labourers. This year is the centenary of Tropic Death’s publication.
