Author: Eric Walrond
Year: 1926
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Genres/categories:
Short Stories
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ISBNs:
9780871406859
0871406853 |
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Tropic Death (1926) is a collection of short stories by Eric Walrond. It was published eight years after Walrond arrived in New York from the West Indies, and it contributed to a sense of pan-Africanism among foreign-born blacks in the United States.
Tropic Death, often regarded as a literary counterpart and rival to Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), contains ten short stories, many of which are broken into various parts as well a s being written in varieties of speech. The stories-set in the West Indies, particularly Barbados, Panama, and British Guiana-contain autobiographical elements. They offer insight into black life and the harsh realities associated with these colonized islands and the people who inhabit them, including family struggles and poverty.
Tropic Death was highly influential throughout the Harlem Renaissance. Walrond was especially interested in encouraging and supporting blacks without using the propaganda that was so common at the time. As a black author, he believed it was important for him to write works that did not focus on the "race problem." Rather, he felt that social protest could be ingrained in objective fiction; therefore, his work presented social and cultural dimensions of black life from a black perspective, in order to preserve the richness of that life.
Walrond uses imagery in Tropic Death to paint pictures of all aspects of black life, including unfavorable aspects. The themes and ideas in Tropic Death are conveyed through the beauty and evil of the earth, through folk traditions and hymns, and through the presence of obeah as revealed in the many lives and stories introduced in each narrative. Some of the themes in Walrond's work were considered controversial during the Harlem Renaissance, and some blacks were outraged that he exposed the harsh conditions of life in the West Indies. His themes include the desire of blacks to rise in society, the desire of blacks and mulattoes for "whiteness," the oppression inflicted by white racism, and the class conflict and adjustments entailed by colonialism and industrialization introduced from the West. In Tropic Death, Walrond used private lives to make specific statements about society; the stories provide an outlook on cultural diversity and the ability or inability of diverse cultures to coexist.
The story "The Yellow One," which focuses on racial discord and racial and gender anxiety, takes place aboard a migrant ship filled with passengers of varied cultures and races. "The Palm Porch" is about a mulatto mother who seeks wealth and power and ultimately is upset when her light-skinned daughters marry black men. "Subjection" comes closest to being protest literature: In this story, a white marine searches for and brutally kills a black worker who has spoken out against the marine's violence toward a fellow worker.
Tropic Death was not Walrond's initial connection to the Harlem Renaissance; he was a member of the editorial staff of Marcus Garvey's Negro World in the early 1920s. It was Tropic Death that bolstered his reputation as a significant author of Caribbean fiction, however, because of his skill in presenting the vivid reality of peasant life in the West Indies and the ability of his work to speak to all humanity
LISA A. CZERNIECKI
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