Review: <i>The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men</i>, by Catherine Lord

Catherine Lord’s monumental book The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men uses as its structure the commonplace books of Dr. Henry Alfred Alford Nicholls who emigrated to the island of Dominica when it was one of the fifty-nine colonies of the British Empire. From 1875 until his death in 1926 Nicholls was the island’s chief medical officer. He had a mountain named for him, was a plantation owner with servants, and fathered ten children (though it’s implied there could have been more). Lord was born in Dominica in 1949 and lived there until her father sunk his island lumber business and relocated the family to Iowa. She went on to become a notable critic, artist, curator, professor, administrator (and former editor of Afterimage) who has authored several image-text narrative experiments like this one.In 2001 Lord traveled to Dominica while recovering from breast cancer treatments. During her time there, her childhood playmate, now a distinguished anthropologist and local historian, loaned her the three leatherbound ledgers in which Nicholls filed quotations and his thoughts from reading and research. Commonplace books were more significant pre-Renaissance through the nineteenth century as private collections of knowledge gathered on one or a variety of subjects. Partitioning Nicholls’s volumes are over two hundred headings including Abuse; Birds of Dominica; Colour Prejudice; Disinfection in the Living Body; Embalming; Insanity; Longevity; Prose, Noble; Silence; Truth, Love of Truth; Yaws; and Zami. Lord appropriates Nichols’s headings but not the quotations he collected or his commentary—those are her own and, aside from falling under his epistemological framework, they only occasionally directly dialog with what Nichols had written. Nichols’s ledgers were the type used in bookkeeping, which makes his theory of memory and knowledge into capital to be accounted for, transacted, kept, and grown. Under his heading Doing and Done, Lord writes, “The commonplace book exists in the space between memory and the belief that memory can be replaced by a book” (160).Replacement is key in that Lord exchanges the colonialist Nicholls’s transcribed excerpts and his thoughts on subjects (and those subject to him) with her own writings, passages from her reading, and photographs she made and drew from research. “The white man who made the pencil also made the eraser” is a Yoruba proverb she includes beneath the heading India Rubber. Lord’s form of erasure masks the white man’s knowledge crop but not the system of its gleaning, which seems exactly right. The colonial legacy in Dominica (and everywhere else) is not so finite that its borders have been reached. Lord tries to expunge the ground imperialism covers by inserting herself into it as a queer, antiracist, anticolonialist white woman, now in her seventies, with plenty of privilege and complicity to explore in the process. “Encyclopedia and memoir are genres I aim to corrupt,” she asserts under the entry for Candour, while compelled to not “rise above the blood-soaked soil that formed her” or be subsumed by the filing system she appropriates, only displaying Nicholls’s patronization to rub it away through contemptuous erasure (99).Like an insect consuming a library’s worth of paper, Lord revels in, yet recoils from, the table she set herself. At times she indulges, critically tearing into the colonial patronage with her own wide research and willingness to devour it. Other times she pulls back from the grotesquerie of a feast laid out for too long and spoiling. She calls her book’s design a colander: she pours herself through and acknowledges that her friends ask why she must create within the framework of this boring, white colonialist man. They suggest that through her own painstaking acknowledgment of race and class she is at risk of being “canceled.” Lord makes numerous trips to research and photograph in Dominica, obsessively reads every book that mentions the place, and purchases every postcard and snapshot of it found on eBay. After well over a decade, she is insecure about the project’s endurance and in the book’s latter half self-consciously writes about how and why it continues, chiding herself by including her friends’ surprise when they realize it isn’t yet completed. As critical of herself as she is of Nicholls and his ilk, she wavers between the strength of impetus to write herself and Dominica into being and the perseverance required to go through the process. Magnitude of evidence is its own kind of erasure. Think of Terms and Conditions passively agreed to as a right of access. Under Labour, Lord reads the massive, flaking Registries of Slaves held in archives in Roseau, Dominica’s capital. Rightly she condemns their banal recordings of crimes against humanity while also denouncing her own skills as a scholar to scale this precipitous data.Yet she perseveres through self-doubt and exhaustion, understanding that no glory awaits at the summit. The mountainous Dominica was “discovered” in 1493 by Christopher Columbus who, when asked to describe the island by his European backers, wadded up a sheet of then precious paper into a ball to show its topography. Lord uncrumples the ball of paper but doesn’t smooth out its jagged folds and crags with over-historicizing or distancing herself or us from its condition. Each irregular plane formed from its creasing requires description. It’s Lord’s scrupulousness and self-effacement by her own methodology that breaks through the book’s structural design to find a pathway for acknowledging the need for, while representing the process of grief.As conditions and processes, grief and loss are better gone through than evaded. The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men poignantly compels both approaches. Elusion and avoidance come from Lord’s researched specifics: fascinating creatures and geographical events; comprehensive lists of earthquakes and hurricanes on the island; meticulous bibliographies of papers on the natural history of Dominica; and so on. Every image is consummately captioned with stimulating details. Under the heading Carborundum, Lord’s photographs of several Dominican waterfalls cascade beautifully alongside a poem in ten scenes written for that entry by Dominican-British author Celia Sorhaindo. Toward the end of the poem Sorhaindo echoes the grief-evading parts of the book when she writes, “i sieve us all through these glitterin illuminatin fun-facts” (104). The book’s physicality is also sumptuous fun as a queered ledger book, bound in navy velour with the visual texture of fur shining through in royal blue. Its fore edges are dyed pink as are its two bookmark ribbons and the gleaming foil stamp of the title on the cover and spine. Not since Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s image-bank appropriations used to mask page portions of the Holy Bible (MACK, 2013) or the prayer book harmony text for intermedia juxtapositions by Dick Higgins in Foew & Ombwhnw (Something Else Press, 1969) has the conceptual container metaphor been done as radically and with such elegance. But occasionally pulling out the book to pet its lush extravagance and browse some “fun-facts” won’t deny its sorrows for long. If fully read, Lord’s book is about cultural and personal grief as an event denied by imperialism.Colonial imperialism brings with it much death and yet denial of death is its unconscious justification. Think of expansion as continuance, life anew in fresh locales, cultural burial sites dug up and studied, people and places subjected to exploration, documentation, registries, credentialization. Plenty of photographers and writers could have dropped onto the island of Dominica to snap up bodies and scenes through what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls “imperial shutters” or a form of collecting she names “archival acceptability” that justifies cultural destruction.1 Azoulay makes convincing claims that such approaches limit the represented people and places to identities of victimhood; archives, museums, and their photographer agents persist in caretaking the paper and objects from imperially destroyed worlds rather than caring for the people and places depicted. Such a violent tension can’t help but be present in The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men, its own form of archive as book. Like the name of its publisher, no place press, a lavishly produced volume as island utopia, free from further imperial destruction of its subjects, doesn’t exist. Though from the start, Lord acknowledges her privilege as part of her biographical connection to Dominica and doesn’t perpetuate victim status through her photographs (or writing, going so far in one text as incorporating her editor’s critical interrogation of Lord’s inclusion of a fault-finding quote that uses a racial epithet for a third time in the book). Instead, Lord photographs the objects of her research: details of papers in barely air-conditioned archives she fears will be lost due to lack of institutional support or organization, bugs, and humidity. Elements of landscapes she makes plain, often presented as thumbnails, and repeated with slight variations to never bestow iconicity. Vernacular displays of objects, postcards, some family artifacts, the social landscape, and architectural details also regularly appear. Her imagery is more notational and matter of fact than poetic or insincerely empathetic, the way other photographers might attempt to have us feel with them and their subjects.To stop destroying cultures through photography’s imperial lens, Azoulay calls for photographers to strike, creating a work stoppage to remake the system. Once started, Lord acknowledges she couldn’t quit. But her approach enacts more of a feminist ethics of care as someone within Dominica’s family, if revenant for a time, who returns periodically to caretake where and how she can. She weathers a trip to Dominica during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. Maybe it is the last trip needed for the book’s completion. Her mother, who is in her nineties, is in a nursing home in Florida and the family opts for no intervention in her care, should she contract the virus or another illness. Maybe when her mother dies the book’s writing and research will naturally conclude? Despite the project being finished and published in a gorgeous edition, it doesn’t feign closure. Commonplace books already extract from wide sources and, through an associational pneumonic network, convert them into new meanings that change over time and resist any one type of narrative resolution. The last of Nichols’s headings that Lord uses is Zenith, a peak, where she includes a quote about queerness being less an end reached than a means of seeking potential. By the end of The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men, the reader’s ideas about its island subject, imperialism and its recorders, and the author herself seem changed at a metabolic level. As a photo-bookwork that takes a place and its people as its subject, this is probably as good as it gets.