"Winds Can Wake Up the Dead": An Eric Walrond Reader (African American Life Series)

West Indian author, journalist, and essayist Eric Derwent Walrond (1898-1966) was the least-known and arguably most complex writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Guyana and raised in Barbados and Panama, Walrond had a view of upper Manhattan's city within a city as an outsider of Afro-Caribbean descent. "The white man in America strangely does not consider the West Indian a 'nigger,'" Walrond once remarked. He is to him a 'foreigner.'" But unlike most of his countrymen who tended to mythologize their differences and allegiances with the United States and Great Britain, Walrond revealed deeper nuances of the race, ethnicity, and immigrant life of West Indians. "Like many people from the Caribbean, Walrond became a permanent migrant, always having a sense of home while simultaneously feeling the loss of it. This contradiction is what often adds power and poignancy to his work," writes Professor Louis J. Parascandola of Long Island University, who edited Winds Can Wake the Dead, a pleasing potpourri of Walrond's eclectic work. It contains selections from his days as a reporter and editor for the Panama Star and Marcus Garvey's Negro World; his essays for the Urban League journal Opportunity; and his marvelous collection of short stories, Tropic Death--one of the most moving depictions of Caribbean life ever written. From his perceptive portrayal of Harlem in "The Black City" and his penetrating review of Richard Wright's "Twelve Million Black Voices" to his critique of the black condition in "The Negro Before the World," Eric Walrond's newly recovered works are a welcome addition to the Pan-African literary canon. --Eugene Holley Jr.