Guyanese Writers of African Descent (Part III)
Eric Waldrond
IN KEEPING with UNESCO’s proclamation designating 2011 as ‘International Year of People of African Descent’, we now embark on a series of articles highlighting Guyanese Writers of African Descent who have made significant contribution to our literature.

There are many pitfalls and shortcomings associated with listing, grouping and categorising; straightway, I apologise for omissions or any other deficiencies.  Of course, I may stumble here, and, of course, I would depend on your support in supplying necessary information so we are all the wiser in the end.

In part one of this series, we focused on Ivan Van Sertima and the book, ‘The Came Before Columbus’ – how the Africans came out from a glorious civilisation with the inherent characteristics of great thinkers, creators  and innovators. They came and continued in the same vein, working, however, in a different age, within different constraints – they adapted, they evolved, leading to the book, ‘The Evolution of the Negro’ and N. E. Cameron.

In this Part Three, we now take a look at a writer who could be labelled ‘champion of the African’s cause’, bearing in mind the sojourn of the enslaved and freed Africans was fraught with many challenges. Many of those challenges led to violent solution-seeking efforts, but some were reconciled by the pen, as in the pen is mightier than the sword.

Eric Walrond
Eric Walrond was expected to write ‘The Great Negro Book’ — a grave responsibility. How come a black person in the early 20th Century from a little-known country (and still little-known in this www.period of the 21st Century) was strapped with such a responsibility?
Walrond entered the USA on June 30, 1918, as part of a mass migration movement that was attracting thousands of West Indians. There he lived for ten years; studied at Columbia University and The City College of New York; played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance, encountering the vilest forms of class and racial prejudice, triggering his most productive literary years.
Due to unfair employment practices, it took a long while to get his pen moving, but when it fell into the rut, Walrond was able to influence schools of thought and bodies of movement against the inhumanity to Man. He wrote numerous stories and essays for periodicals like the ‘Opportunity’, ‘Smart Set’, ‘Vanity’, ‘Independent’ and ‘Messenger’.
His short-stories like ‘On Being Black’, ‘On Being Domestic’ and ‘The Stone Rebounds’ were like fodder to Black consciousness at the time.
Later, he was entrusted with the greater role of fashioning and changing public attitude when he was made editor of Marcus Garvey’s ‘Negro World’. Walrond also edited Charles S. Johnson’s ‘Opportunity’ and ‘The Brooklyn and Long Island Informer’.
Walrond’s life was one of paradoxes engendered by his writings. He gravitated to the editorship of ‘New World’ after he won a fiction contest sponsored by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) for his piece, ‘A Senator’s Memoirs’. Later he fell from grace when he penned ‘Imperator Africanus, Marcus Garvey: Menace or Promise?’
But it was the publication, in 1926, of his short-story collection, ‘Tropic Death’, which brought him to prominence.  ‘Tropic Death’ was valued alongside ‘The Quest of the Silver Fleece’ by WEB Du Bois ‘The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man’ by James W. Johnson, and ‘Harlem Shadow’ by Claude McKay. The other notable writers supporting the Harlem Resistance at that time included Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, and WEB Du Bois.
Eric Derwent Walrond was born on December 18, 1898 in Georgetown, capital city of Guyana, where he spent his first eight years. His father was Guyanese, and his mother, Ruth, Barbadian.
A year after the devastating 1905 fire of Georgetown, and with his father gone to work on the Panama Canal, the remainder of the family moved to Barbados. Here, young Walrond attended the St. Stephen’s Boy’s School in Black Rock, “a dinky backward village” outside Bridgetown. But the island was just an oasis to this family in an economically troubled Caribbean.
After no contact from the father, and with employment opportunities aplenty digging the canal, the family moved to Panama in 1911. Failing to find the head of the family, they settled in Colon, where Eric Walrond completed his public schooling, and went on to be trained as a secretary and stenographer. His first job was as a clerk at the Health Department of the Canal Commission. From 1916 to 1918, he pursued a career in journalism, working as a general reporter, court reporter and sport journalist on the prestigious Panama Star and Herald. Around this time, stories of a better life in America fascinated him, influencing yet another migration.
All of these movements and experiences came out in his first and only published book, ‘Tropic Death’. Notable about this landmark collection was the themes of migration, discrimination and prejudices, alienation and identity, poverty and suffering, which are still current in Guyanese and Caribbean literature.
Walrond was a one-book wonder. Although he gained a Guggenheim fellowship to produce certain work, although the expectation was high for him to write ‘The Great Negro Book’, it is still a mystery why he failed to deliver any substantial body of work in the remainder of his days, which amounted to some forty years.
And it was not from lack of trying. Marvel Cooke, a female admirer of Walrond’s, disclosed how their friendship suffered when he went to Jamaica for six months to concentrate on his book; she said he extended his stay for another six months, within which time he disappeared from the public’s eye, ending up in Britain.
More of a mystery was that though in that final period of his life, he was reconciled with Marcus Garvey, he was in contact with Paul Robeson, he re-established ties with his British roots (novel writing tradition), and dwelled in the capital of books, yet nothing came from his pen.
And Walrond’s death on August 8, 1966 on a London street from a heart attack attracted little attention in the USA, Barbados, Panama or in Guyana.

WHAT’S HAPPENING:
•    In 2011, my two television programmes on literature will be produced,  with assistance from UNESCO. Both programmes, Oral Tradition and Between the Lines, are aired on the National Communications Network, Channel 11.
•    A UNESCO-sponsored, five-day creative writing workshop is set for August 2011. Limited places available; apply early. Please contact me for more information.

(To respond to this author, either call him on (592) 226-0065 or send him an email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com)