POSTSCRIPT

he archive on Eric Walrond is riddled with gaps and silences. Much of what enables us to reconstruct his career is absent and perhaps beyond recovery. And yet a narrative emerges from the fragments, tracing a jagged path through the Caribbean diaspora, illustrating the boldness of Walrond’s work and its polyphony. He was not as prolific as some of his peers, but he was far more prolific after all than many realized. Despite his limitations, there is something poignant about the path he followed and something significant about the stories he told, the disquieting impression his work leaves on readers. For he lived as he wrote, without a safety net. He published just one book, but it burst with Caribbean sounds—the speech of peasants, folk songs, and work songs—a jarring counterpastoral lyric that was distinctive right down to its orthography. As uncompromising as its author, the book was a translation of the Caribbean that refused to fully translate, valuing narrative performance above accessibility.

But Tropic Death did not represent the totality of Walrond’s career, the full range of which included denunciations of white supremacy and colonialist ideology, prescient reflections on migration, portraits of artists, stylized vernaculars, and clever cross-cultural masquerades. He was not the first West Indian in Panama, the first Caribbean arrival to New York, the first “Negro” in Paris, nor the first of London’s “coloured” colonials. But he managed to compress these paradigmatic lines of flight into a single, extraordinary career, and the unusual perspective he acquired was necessarily comparative and transnational. To put it this way, however, may imply an advantage when this study demonstrates the persistent challenges attending Walrond’s relocations, a caution against idealizing the cosmopolitan “Negro” intellectual. Despite his versatility, ambition, and occasional good fortune, Walrond enjoyed only a year or two in which his writing sustained him financially, and he endured long stretches of publishing very little. This is the sense in which his failures are symptomatic, for they were only partly a result of his limitations as an artist and his debilitating bouts of depression; they reflect the attenuated conditions of possibility for “New World Negro” writers.

One can see the ways in which Walrond’s world—the struggles and communities in which he participated—was a precursor to our own; it is more difficult to grasp its difference, its inscrutability, the possibilities that sprang into being but have since been foreclosed. The historian Carlo Ginzburg observed in The Cheese and the Worms, his magisterial study of a sixteenth-century Italian miller, “That culture has been destroyed. To respect its residue of unintelligibility that resists any attempt at analysis [is to] take note of a historical mutilation of which, in a certain sense, we ourselves are the victims.”¹ Even as we recognize in Eric Walrond incipient forms of familiar contemporary identities and communities, we should also consider the “historical mutilation” of the anticolonial struggles, transnational periodical formations, aesthetic movements, and political solidarities that animated Walrond’s work. We are ourselves the victims of their truncation. It may defy comprehension that a celebrated Harlem author would leave the United States, sabotaging his career at the height of the New Negro movement. It may seem unintelligible for a cosmopolitan Caribbean intellectual to spend twelve years as the only “Negro” in an English village. It may be difficult to understand why, as Ethel Ray Nance told an interviewer in 1970, “It’s been so hard to trace some of his things.”² Her confusion might be answered by calling him a renegade, a picaresque figure, or an exile, but it would really require a different sort of archive than those we have to render a career like Walrond’s fully intelligible.

The current owner of 9 Ivy Terrace, Walrond’s house in Bradford-on-Avon, happens to direct the local historical society; yet out of no fault of his own, he was unaware of the former resident of his house and his significance to literary history. During a visit to Colón, Panama, my cab driver was a young man whose grandfather moved from Barbados to help dig the canal, but when I showed him my copy of Tropic Death and read some passages about Colón’s West Indian community at that time, he was indifferent. Not only had he never heard of the book, he could not read it because although his parents spoke English at home, he had grown up speaking, reading, and writing Spanish. Eric Walrond is much less remote from us than Ginzburg’s sixteenth century, but comparable efforts are required to overcome the erasures inherent in Caribbean diaspora history. “The archive dictates what can be said about the past,” Saidiya Hartman insists, “and the kind of stories that can be told about the persons catalogued, embalmed, and sealed away in box files and folios.”³ If this study helps restore Eric Walrond to a status he once held alongside Jean Toomer, Countée Cullen, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and other peers whose work and reputations have only been recovered through painstaking investigation, I hope it also suggests the incompleteness and fragility of the archive where transnational black writers are concerned, even when they are established intellectuals.

Walrond forged a precarious career by crossing borders, none of which he crossed completely. From the “West Indian Circles” column of Panama’s Star & Herald, to his work on Garvey’s journals in New York and London, to his Caribbean efforts at Opportunity and his Wiltshire essays about colonialism and the “colour bar,” his journalism was, like his fiction, an exercise in cultural translation. But borders are rarely neutral. They often presuppose or enforce privilege, and Walrond’s translations challenged the privileges attending the borders he crossed. Even within New York, the unofficial border he straddled between white and black Manhattan occasioned a Caribbean challenge to monolithic notions of Harlem’s blackness and a “Cabaret School” challenge to the prevailing discourse of respectability and “Negro” uplift. He benefited from his mobility and suffered for it, too. The Caribbean youth underwent the brutal alchemy that made him a “Negro” in New York, and the loss that process required was the source of both his intolerable grief and his most penetrating and impressive writing. The Harlem Renaissance celebrity, newly anointed in the cafés of Montparnasse, found that crossing borders failed to protect him from the caprice of his New York publisher and the vagaries of American capitalism. The black Briton, dozens of tropical tales in his valise, published some of the first Caribbean stories in England but arrived a generation too soon, a cautionary tale to the postwar authors who met him, as George Lamming did, nursing palliative drinks at the bar. Many observers have wondered what went wrong with Eric Walrond, why he did not produce more. We might wonder instead at his persistence, and at the countless peripatetic West Indians whose voice, insight, and artistry are far more resistant to recovery.