The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature (New Caribbean Studies) 3030659712, 9783030659714

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
About the Author
1 Introduction: “Cricket Is We!”
I
II
III
IV
V
Works Cited
2 Growing and Belonging
I
II
III
IV
Works Cited
3 Style as Substance
I
II
III
IV
Works Cited
4 Rites and Heroics
I
II
III
IV
V
Works Cited
5 Metaphors and Manoeuvres
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
Works Cited
6 Motherly Figures and Undomesticated Daughters
I
II
III
IV
V
Works Cited
7 Migrant Movements and Cricketing Stereotypes
I
II
III
IV
Works Cited
8 Coda: “Strike After Strike”
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

NEW CARIBBEAN STUDIES

The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature

Claire Westall

New Caribbean Studies

Series Editors Kofi Campbell, Renison University College, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada Shalini Puri, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

New Caribbean Studies series seeks to explore Caribbean selfunderstandings, to intervene in the terms of global engagement with the region, and to extend Caribbean Studies’ role in reinventing various disciplines and their methodologies well beyond the Caribbean. The series invites monographs, edited collections and Palgrave Pivots on all regions and languages of the Caribbean. It welcomes both literary criticism and more broadly humanities-informed and interdisciplinary scholarship.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14752

Claire Westall

The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature

Claire Westall Department of English and Related Literature University of York York, UK

ISSN 2691-3011 ISSN 2634-5196 (electronic) New Caribbean Studies ISBN 978-3-030-65971-4 ISBN 978-3-030-65972-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65972-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: “Cricket” © Wendy Nanan, Trinidadian Artist This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In memory of David John Westall (12.08.1981–15.04.2008)

Acknowledgements

The work for this book began during my Ph.D. years at Warwick University and its foundations were funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. My Ph.D. was supervised by Neil Lazarus and it is to him that I owe the largest debt of gratitude. Neil supported my sport and literature ideas from the outset, and his thoughtful, encouraging and scholarly guidance helped ensure that I made it to the end of the doctoral process. His continued support, across my doctoral years and long after, meant that I was also able to make the fantastically unlikely move into academia. His warmth, humour, kindness and rigour are well known and widely appreciated, and they have influenced my everyday conduct as an academic as well as the intellectual standards I hold as my horizon of ambition. I want to thank Thomas Docherty for taking over my supervision for the period in which Neil was notably ill, and for pressing home the need for actual word production during any phase of research. In addition, Pablo Mukherjee and Stewart Brown acted as my interested and thorough Ph.D. examiners. I also want to offer a note of warm remembrance for Benita Parry. I never discussed cricket with Benita—that wouldn’t have worked as a conversation—but the example she set as a dedicated scholar, able to speak her mind, hold others to account, and champion junior academics was as admirable as it was fierce. Part of the benefit of studying in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick was the dynamism and

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camaraderie of other Ph.D. students, particularly, but not only, those working with Neil and Benita. Broad networks, intellectual projects and close friendships emerged from those connections, providing inspiration, support and a fantastic sense of solidarity in what can be a tough career environment. That, now diasporic, Warwick set includes, among many others before and after, the usual suspects—Chris Campbell, Sharae Deckard, Sorcha Gunne, James Graham, Kerstin Oloff and Michael Niblett—with whom I share much and to whom I owe a great deal. It also includes Rina Kim, a close friend, to whom I couldn’t be more different, and of whom I couldn’t be more proud. She is full of care and kindness, and she continues to deepen and enrich our friendship even as our lives change and play out on different sides of the globe. Other long-lasting and supportive friendships also emerged from my postgraduate time at Warwick, particularly with Russell Boyatt, Ruth Leigh and Christoph Ungemach who, along with Rina, helped me stay sane during the most difficult of personal times. It was also with them, and Anne Hoppe, that I enjoyed the best and most fun parts of our oncampus life. And wherever Christoph goes we maintain our unexpectedly solid and special bond. When I began this project, my interest in sport, sports history and the relationship between sport and literature was quite unusual. Consequently, I was enormously relieved and bolstered by the work and staff then attached to De Montfort’s International Centre for Sports History and Culture during and after my doctoral years. Their projects, events and hospitality provided me with a hub for sporting scholarship that was unique and helped cement my intellectual interest in sporting culture. Tony Collins, Jeff Hill and Jean Williams were especially helpful. As was Anthony Bateman, whose research, writing and intellectual range were always impressive. Tony set an example for the standard of work that could come from thinking about sport, especially cricket, and literature. He invited me to contribute to his publication projects and I’m still grateful for those early invitations. After Warwick I joined the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, gaining a new set of intellectual peers and growing a new set of friendships—all of which helped to push me towards finishing this book. I would like to thank the entire department for providing high standards and a solid sense of collegiality. I’m especially grateful for the connections I was able to build with Anna Bernard, Ziad Elmarsafy, Adam Kelly, Michelle Kelly and Zoe Norridge before each of

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them moved on from York. Their sociability and that of Derek Attridge, David Atwell, Hugh Haughton and Matt Campbell helped me settle into the department, and Jason Edwards, friend and ally, ensured that I was well integrated into the Centre for Modern Studies. The good examples set by others—particularly Alison O-Byrne, Bryan Radley, Deborah Russell and Helen Smith—made me want to stay. Emilie Morin, colleague and friend, remains an example-setter too, her integrity and scholarly conduct raise the bar for those around her—myself included. At York, I also want to thank the F.R. Leavis Fund, chaired by Nicola MacDonald, as well as Cathy Moore and Helen Barrett for helping get things for this book finalised, including payments for permissions. Thanks also go to Lucy Potter for providing the eagle-eyed energy needed to get the manuscript submitted. A note of special appreciation is due to Fiona Meadows, whose positive, friendly and helpful approach to life meant that my last months on this project, while juggling a number of other things, were far smoother and more enjoyable than I could have ever expected them to be. She is a human beacon of sunshine—at work, on zoom and even in email. And beyond my department, Kate Morris has become a stellar pal, and one whose rock-solid good judgement has often helped me navigate life at York. I’d also like to thank two particular libraries and their staff. The Lord’s library was especially helpful in the earliest phase of my doctoral work and allowed me (day after day) to sit down and develop a global view of cricket history. In more recent times, staff at the British Library, Boston Spa, have been friendly and efficient. In addition, Philip Hedley CBE, Director Emeritus of the Theatre Royal Stratford East, kindly sent to me an original programme from his theatre’s production of Errol John’s Moon on a Rainbowl Shawl. Many individual scholars have informed my sense of cricket’s literary culture, the game’s history, particularly in the Caribbean, and how it might be theorised, either through their work or our conversations. In this context, thanks go to Hilary Beckles, Christian Høgsberg, Gordon Rohlehr, Clem Seecharan, Andrew Smith, and Brett St Louis. I also want to thank Chris Searle for his great generosity of spirit, not to mention the huge store of books he passed to me. And much gratitude should go to the anonymous reviewer whose blend of enthusiastic support and constructive feedback helped the project along. Beyond my research life, family and other friends—across many years and often many miles too—have provided me with the kind of continuity

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and care that allows for intellectual and personal growth. In this light, my relationships with my nan, Violet, Jen and Zoe all stand out. I also want to thank the entire Fisher family for the kindness and support they provided me all through my years of ongoing education. They showed me what it meant to appreciate and enjoy family life. Their example continues to stay with me. My parents also deserve a special mention. They have always let me do whatever I thought best, and this has worked out well—for me, at least, and hopefully for them too. My mum took me to the tiny local library when I was a small child and this paid unexpected dividends later. From a young age, my dad taught me about cricket and life in ways that kept me helpfully out of step with what was taken to be ordinary, accepted and necessary to advance. These differences in what might be described as “life management” have allowed me to feel confident and secure in ways that are all too often lacking in the world of work, and beyond. Much appreciation also goes to Michael, whose unique combination of encouragement and critique recast the need to finish the book as an obvious life necessity. In addition, I would like to thank Bloodaxe books for permission to cite in full Jean “Binta” Breeze’s poem “on cricket, sex and housework” from The Arrival of Brighteye and Other Poems (2000), and Carcanet for permission to cite in full E.A. Markham’s poem “Not Cricket” from Misapprehensions (1995). I would also like to acknowledge that some of the ideas and textual examples used in this book feature in previous publications, though all earlier materials have been revised, reshaped and sometimes reordered and/or rethought. I would like to thank specifically the following publications: Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 3.2 (2005); Music, Memory, Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination (Ian Randle, 2007); The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives (Peepal Tree, 2011); and, The Cambridge Companion to Cricket (CUP, 2011). “Cricket”, the cover image used here, is by Trinidadian artist Wendy Nanan and I warmly thank her for allowing me to use it as the basis of the book’s cover design.

Contents

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1

Introduction: “Cricket Is We!”

2

Growing and Belonging

33

3

Style as Substance

71

4

Rites and Heroics

107

5

Metaphors and Manoeuvres

155

6

Motherly Figures and Undomesticated Daughters

193

7

Migrant Movements and Cricketing Stereotypes

229

8

Coda: “Strike After Strike”

265

Index

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About the Author

Claire Westall is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. She publishes regularly on literature and sport, especially on cricket, and her chapter “Reading Brian Lara and the Traditions of Caribbean Cricket Poetry” is included in the The Cambridge Companion to Cricket (2011), edited by Jeff Hill and Anthony Bateman. She is co-author of The Public on the Public: The British Public as Trust, Reflexivity and Political Foreclosure (2015). She is also co-editor of Cross-Gendered Literary Voices: Appropriating, Resisting, Embracing (2012), Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness and English Literature (2013), and Prison Writing and the Literary World: Imprisonment, Institutionality and Questions of Literary Practice (2020).

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: “Cricket Is We!”

This chapter provides the historical, theoretical and sporting context for this book’s examination of cricket’s place in Anglophone Caribbean literature. It begins by establishing the importance of cricket for the Caribbean. It then reads quotes from Charles Dickens’ The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836) and George Lamming’s Season of Adventure (1960) to demonstrate how the plantation economy, cricketing acculturation and emerging independence are navigated across the depictions of Black Caribbean cricketers, especially bowlers, found in these texts. From there, it summarises key aspects of the game’s development and reception in the region, particularly in relation to the formation and progress of the West Indies team. The critical significance of C.L.R. James’ foundational text, Beyond a Boundary (1963), is briefly mapped, and so too is the manner in which James’ work has been taken up in recent scholarship. A case is made for the significance of cricket’s place in the Caribbean’s literary imagination, the book’s key aims are articulated, and the subsequent chapters are introduced. The central argument running through this book is that cricket is an important cultural resource for the Caribbean, mobilised in its literature—often with a close connection to Jamesian thinking, insight and aspiration—as a means of individual aesthetic expression as well as individual and collective future-making in the face of, and typically against, the current world order. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Westall, The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65972-1_1

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I faithful attendant – Quanko Samba – […] mustered up last remaining strength – bowled me out – had a bath, and went out to dinner […] Poor Quanko – never recovered it – bowled on, on my account – bowled off, on his own – died sir. (Dickens 1998, 95–96) Crim would bowl to Chiki at the same speed and with the same intention of challenging him. But, he would never pitch the faster balls in line with Chiki’s body. […] Crim had it fixed in his mind that a blow to Chiki was a deeper blow to the Reserve […] The Reserve was divided in its loyalties, perhaps; but cricket, an activity which meant much more than sport in San Cristobal, cricket had proved that the division between Chiki and Crim was real, but the roots of the Reserve remained. (Lamming 1999, 344–345)

Michael Manley, the former Prime Minister of Jamaica, prefaces his A History of West Indies Cricket (1988) by explaining that cricket is “the most completely regional activity undertaken by the people of the member states of the Caribbean Community, CARICOM”, as well as their “most successful co-operative endeavour” and, hence, “a constant reminder […] of the value of collaboration” (2002, xiii). Similarly, in his introduction to what he calls Manley’s “impressive” history, Clive Lloyd, former West Indies captain, describes cricket as the “instrument of Caribbean cohesion” to which the region owes its “consideration and dignity abroad”, and “the musical instrument” upon which the people express their emotions, “from the extremes of wild enthusiasm to the depths of despair” (2002, v). In her later “Preface to [the] Third Edition” of Manley’s work, cricket broadcaster Donna Symmonds adds that “No one would dispute that for West Indians cricket is a seminal part of life” (2002, xi). In these and many similar assertions, cricket in the Caribbean is understood as a popular and important cultural practice—one that marks the imperial history of plantation slavery and the Caribbean’s struggle for independence, and one that maintains a vision of regional enterprise, even regional nationalism. It is also the sphere in which the Caribbean has been able to come together to compete on the world stage—and win. And although winning has become much less frequent in recent decades, this should not detract from the period of “unparalleled” world dominance achieved by West Indies as the regional team (Symmonds 2002, xi). This dominant period lasted unquestionably for

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more than a decade, from 1975, but is perhaps best read as stretching across playing generations from the 1960s through to the early 1990s, given that West Indies were first proclaimed world champions in 1966 and only lost their claim to being international cricket’s leading team in the mid-1990s. Establishing the cultural import of cricket and of this period of sustained dominance, the noted historian Hilary Beckles uses the popular expression “Cricket is We!” to insist that the sport of the British Empire is intrinsic to Caribbean selfhood and community, explaining that cricket’s “ontological significance” is widely recognised in the region, and is also built into its literature (1995, 1). This coming together of Caribbean cricket and literature is the departure point for this book. The book is specifically interested in the repeated cricketing concerns and patterns that have emerged in Anglophone Caribbean literature, how such literary “rites” tackle personal, sociopolitical and economic issues, and how literary depictions of cricket draw on the game’s performative aesthetics, or sociopoetics, often echoing James’ writing and especially Beyond a Boundary. As is well known, and as James himself argued, cricket was central to the ideology of the British Empire, and the empire was itself crucial to the development of cricket and Anglophone literature in the Caribbean. Consequently, a good place to start this discussion is with a comparison that illustrates literature’s investment in Caribbean cricket’s (simultaneously) disciplinary and disruptive dynamics, as well as cricket’s links with aesthetic creativity. As indicated by the opening citations, above, the interconnections and differences between the cricketing content of one of English Literature’s imperially minded classics—Dickens’ The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club—and that of an independence-era novel by one of the Caribbean’s most well-known authors—Lamming’s Season of Adventure—should aid this effort. Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, as it is popularly known, was published in 1836—that is, between the creation of the Emancipation Act in 1833 and its legal enactment in the Caribbean in 1838—but is set around a decade earlier. During its famed English village cricket match between Dingle Dell and All-Muggleton, the ludicrously boastful spectator, Alfred Jingle, claims to have played cricket “thousands of times – not here – West Indies – exciting” (Dickens 1998, 95). Jingle specifically describes playing a single wicket game against his “friend the colonel” in which he amassed “five hundred and seventy runs” in the “red hot – scorching conditions”, while the “six natives” fielding all fainted, as did the “fresh half-dozen

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ordered”, along with the colonel himself (95). Jingle’s animated story of colonial excess and unrivalled staying power—cast here in cricketing terms, as runs scored single-handedly in adverse physical conditions— seems entirely unbelievable and makes a mockery of a supposedly leisurely sporting occasion. His tale, his cricketing “jingle”, is also undercut by his “rapid and disjointed” style of speech, and brought into question by his prompt turn to the contents of his “brown jug” (92, 96). By embedding this seemingly false cricketing claim to colonial dominance within a domestic village green, Dickens links an English cricketing idyll to Caribbean plantation culture, and uses his ironic exposure of Jingle to send up the clichéd image of the English cricketing gentleman out in empire. Yet despite Jingle’s self-presentation registering as farcical, his story also reveals Caribbean cricket’s beginnings in the plantation system and the death-by-accumulation fate of those enslaved. As Anthony Bateman says of this episode, cricket is seen to draw on the same “dispensable unit of [enslaved] labour” underpinning plantation life in its need for “fresh” fielders and bowlers—roles that are particularly demanding in the Caribbean heat (2009, 124). In the character of Quanko Samba, we see an early literary example of a Black bowler whose supposed faithfulness to cricket and his master might also or instead carry a silent, self-determined and resistive desire to upend the white batsman and cause his symbolic death (through the taking of his wicket) at any personal cost. But Quanko Samba’s death is firmly rooted in the economy of empire’s plantations. Indeed, Jingle’s story gives away the structural opposition of, on the one hand, the white colonialists whose clearance of space to play cricket stands for the luxury of physical free time and the claims to the land they enjoy, and, on the other hand, the enslaved participants whose “play” is really toil under conditions of subjugation, violence and calorie deprivation, where even the secret consumption of sugar remnants can only provide short sharp bursts of energy that never offset the deep-seated exhaustion that makes death omnipresent. This systemic, racialised and consumptive contrast is made explicit by Dickens as Jingle repeatedly prioritises his own dinner plans over his telling of Quanko Samba’s death. Published more than a century after Dickens’ textual rendering of a Caribbean cricketing episode—and just as the West Indies Federation (1958–1962) was ailing and island-focused independence came into view—Lamming’s Season of Adventure uses cricket as a binding agent for the men of its Forest Reserve. The Reserve is the location of poverty, resistance and drumming that grounds the cultural integrity of San

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Cristobal—Lamming’s fictional island. It is also a site of police brutality, standing in stark contrast to the wealthy residential spaces occupied by Fola, the deputy police chief’s light-skinned stepdaughter, and her social peers. Nevertheless, it is where Fola encounters the Ceremony of the Souls that brings forth her unacknowledged connection to the traditions upheld in the Reserve. The Reserve is also the home of the three key male figures—Powell, Crim and Chiki—who critique San Cristobal’s recent independence and articulate, in varying ways, a more ambitious view of freedom for their people. Towards the end of the story, when Powell resorts to murder to express his frustrations at the false “gift” of an empty independence, the political pertinence of Crim, Chiki and the Reserve is presented through cricket, “the one activity which cut right through every gradation of class or fortune” (Lamming 1999, 344). Lamming depicts Crim, “a bloodthirsty fast bowler”, as the “best challenge” for Chiki, “a promising wicket-keeper and opening batsman” who left the Reserve for boarding college (344). The novel presents Crim’s role in Chiki’s boarding school practice sessions (cited above), and establishes the division between the two characters, as bowler and batsman, as one based on education and socioeconomic class. Crim’s strength and speed channels the history of Black fast bowling, from slavery onwards, with his physical ferocity expressing his anger and poverty. Yet Crim is also skilful, loyal and intelligent; he is a bowler with control and insight, who knows how to help Chiki mature and develop, and who wants Chiki to learn how to respond to attack without being directly endangered. In this way, it is Crim who leads Chiki. He sees the potential Chiki embodies and understands that what links them, in coming from the same place and people, is more significant than their different trajectories. With his roots in the Reserve, Chiki is expected to carry with him the knowledge and desires of those at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale and to do something important for them in the future. However, after his international education, Chiki returns to San Cristobal to become a local artist, informed by but living away from the Reserve. Significantly, late on in the text, cricket is revealed as the backstory behind Chiki’s aesthetic and personal development. Although Gordon Rohlehr indicates that the references to cricket are “a mere detail” in the novel (1994, 72), it seems that the relatively small space they take up in the text—and the relationship between Crim/bowler and Chiki/batsman in particular—is a kind of critical key or shorthand that is only revealed as part of the novel’s denouement. Importantly, the text mobilises the idea

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of the artist batsman as a kind of communal leader or guide in a way that reinforces the overarching ambitions of Lamming’s work. Cricket’s place in the novel also nods back to James, Lamming’s long-standing friend, and particularly James’ sense of the representative, sociopolitical roles and aesthetic credentials of Caribbean cricketers. Such ideas become embedded in Anglophone Caribbean literature and we might want to remember that it was Lamming who helped James find a publisher for Beyond a Boundary and also gave the book its iconic title (Hill 2013). While much might be said of these individual episodes and their specific contexts—including how Dickens makes use of cricket for ironic revelation and Lamming references the game as part of his strident claims for national independence—there are a number of key areas in which these texts are most closely bound to the cricketing content found within Anglophone Caribbean literature. First, separated by more than one hundred and twenty years, these texts use cricket to explore how colonial codes of conduct are physically performed and also potentially undermined, disrupted or redeployed for anti-imperial and postcolonial ends. Second, they highlight the continued importance of the Black bowler, especially the fast Black bowler, and his ties to the labour patterns of slavery. And in Lamming’s work the emergence of the Black batsman signals the rise of a new local class of Black leaders and cultural creators. There is, quite obviously, an imperial idea of cricket as the training ground for character and leadership at work in both texts but, importantly, this training is orchestrated by the Black bowler. In fact, as Lamming is writing the Black batsman is only just beginning to move into the roles and spaces previously reserved for white colonialists and light-skinned locals. Hence, in Season of Adventure, a clear mid-twentieth century historical transition is established in the move from Crim’s strength and skill as a bowler to Chiki’s sophistication and intelligence as an artistic batsman, echoing what is taking place in cricket across the region in the period leading up to independence in the 1960s. Third, the economic inequalities underpinning the plantation system and its enduring logic are revealed through cricket, signalling the manner in which sporting, socioeconomic and physiological energy systems come together in individual and communal efforts at self-articulation and self-cultivation on the field of “play”. In this way, there is a recognition of cricket’s sociopoetics built into the depictions of Quanko Samba, Crim and Chiki, but we can only begin to fully appreciate the importance of this recognition if these and

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similar literary episodes are read through a historicisation and theorisation of cricket’s place in the Caribbean and its literature.

II Cricket came to the Caribbean with British imperialism, with sailors, planters, missionaries and the like. Following the mid-Victorian repurposing of the game in England, cricket became the vehicle and measure for all that was supposedly superior about Britain’s imperial Englishness—with its Three Cs (Cricket, Classics and Christianity), privileged amateurism, “it’s not cricket” shorthand for ethical conduct, and the Newboltian “play up and play the game” message of aesthetic civility, honour and sacrifice. All of which was oriented, as J.A. Mangan (1981, 1988, 1992) has repeatedly shown, towards empire building. In fact, as Brian Stoddart and Keith A.P. Sandiford explain, cricket was The Imperial Game (1998), characterised by an ongoing struggle between the coloniser’s “search for authority” and the performative stresses of allegiance and resistance in the play of those colonised (1). These stresses are variously unpacked in the foundational studies of cricket in the Caribbean to which this discussion is indebted, including: Christopher Nicole (1960); Michael Manley (1988); Frank Birbalsingh and Clem Seecharan (1988); Birbalsingh (1996); Sandiford (1998); Roy Goble and Sandiford (2004); Seecharan (2006); and, most sizably, Beckles, with his two-volume study The Development of West Indies Cricket (1998b, 1998c) and other related publications (1994, 1998a, 2003, 2006, 2017). Drawing on Rex Nettleford’s sense of “cricket culture [as] the vehicle on which West Indians journeyed deepest into modernity”, Beckles presents Caribbean cricket as “modernity in action”, a “contested terrain” within which the “Enlightenment” of empire was performed, exposed and called into question (1998b, xiv). Beckles also presents the progression of West Indies cricket as developing within three historical phases or paradigms: the plantation society paradigm during which the game emerges, running approximately from the eighteenth century up to 1928, when West Indies achieved Test status; the nationalist paradigm, when self-determination grows, political independence is achieved and the West Indies team rise to become world beaters, beginning in the 1930s, but taking hold between the mid1960s and late 1980s; and the “age of globalization”, an era beginning in the 1990s that coincides with the decline of West Indies cricket and has not yet ended (1998b, 1998c, 2017). This chronological structuring is

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useful, and maps directly onto the dominant story of the rise and decline of the West Indies team—a story that strongly influences how cricket is imagined in Anglophone Caribbean literature. However, this framework should not detract from the socioeconomic continuities across these periods, as explicated in Neil Lazarus’ critique of the globalising narrative of cricket (1999, 172–192), and as signalled in many of the literary texts discussed later in this study. While this book cannot itself provide another detailed account of Caribbean cricket’s history, a brief contoursetting digest—of its beginnings and culture, as well as the key moments informing the literary analyses to follow—should help contextualise the chapters to come and help orientate readers unfamiliar with the game’s Caribbean history, especially its earliest developments. In addition, for such readers it is worth explicitly noting here that the West Indies cricket team (as simply West Indies) is a regional team playing internationally. It is a composite, multi-national and multi-territory team, representing Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, plus the Leeward and Windward island groups. The team’s constituent membership is close to, but not the same as, the current CARICOM core group. Though pegged to the English language, the British Empire and British territorial holdings in the Caribbean, West Indies represent the Caribbean basin, including its sweep up into mainland South America, with the inclusion of Guyana pointing to the game’s historical links with empire and sugar. In the Caribbean specifically cricket has its “origins in sugar” (Cotter 1991, 7). From the early nineteenth century, the game took hold in British-held plantation locations in Barbados (as “little England”) and Demerara, and also in Trinidad and Jamaica. Initially, it was the preserve of white colonials, typically their elite, and the military. The first written records of local cricket matches, played at St Ann’s Garrison in Barbados, appeared in newspapers between 1806 and 1809 (Beckles 1998b, 5–6), though the discovery of an eighteenth-century belt buckle depicting an enslaved person batting “suggests that some slaves did play cricket as early as the 1780s” (Burton 1997, 30; cf. Seecharan 2006, 8). Those enslaved also accessed the game by preparing playing ground, watching their masters and/or their sons and visitors, and later through fielding and bowling (as in Jingle’s story above). For Richard D.E. Burton (1997), such interactions enabled the disruptive potential of mimicry, with those enslaved possibly copying and mocking the sporting actions of their masters. Cricket, though, also enabled some of those enslaved to demonstrate their physical competencies. According to Seecharan,

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because cricket was often played “in the clearings in canefields […,] it was the reoccurring task of the slave to retrieve” lost balls, and “return[ing] the ball from beyond the boundary, accurately to the wicket, was a self-imposed challenge”, becoming “an instrument for asserting [their] humanity, showing off his embryonic skills and panache” (2006, 5). Such actions laid the grounds for a particular mode of heroic and cricketing self-articulation. Beckles has repeatedly suggested that slavery meant the capture and suppression of Black men, as defeated warriors, and that, as a consequence, Black masculinity expresses an ongoing struggle to re-establish Black men as heroes. Cricket, as Beckles (1998b) rightly indicates, provides an arena for such heroism. For both Beckles (1998b) and Rohlehr (2004), the game’s growth in former enslaved communities was tied to the resurrection and advancement of the warrior-hero. Rohlehr (1994, 2004) tracks this figure through various stick fighting, calypso and sporting incarnations, and explains how the combative and aesthetic traditions shaping this heroic figure influence the performative style of West Indies cricket—often described as “calypso cricket”—and the culture of exuberant crowd support surrounding the game in the Caribbean. He also recognises how this figure and these traditions influence and feature in literary representations of Caribbean cricket. As in England, the period from the mid-to-late nineteenth century brought a flurry of new cricketing activity to the Caribbean. Collaborative efforts at self-protection across plantation families manifested in cricket and led to the formation of exclusive clubs—as with the Wanderers Club of Barbados, in 1877, then Pickwick, their close rivals, created five years later (Beckles 1998b, 10; cf. Seecharan 2006, 44–45). Increasingly, though, prominent schools advanced the game’s popularity, emulating the public school culture of Britain and relying on Oxbridge-educated masters. Sandiford (1998) describes the role of “elite schools” like Harrison College and The Lodge in Barbados as “cricket nurseries”, and Seecharan details how their mode of imperially inspired “muscular learning”, adopted across the British West Indies, “made it possible for young Black scholars to demonstrate their mental and physical equality within the ruling space” (2006, 36). This, Seecharan argues, became important for the incremental gains made by the emerging Black and “coloured” middle class from the late nineteenth century—an idea discussed by James in Beyond a Boundary, echoed in Lamming’s Season of Adventure, and often seen in other literary references. As schools fed into clubs, and clubs worked together to organise representative

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teams from specific colonies, travelling for cricket began. By 1865, the year of Jamaica’s Morant Bay Massacre, the first representative match between two colonies, Barbados and Demerara, was played, and afterwards a form of inter-territorial competition slowly emerged (Beckles 1998b, 17). An all-white eleven, functioning as a regional side, toured America and Canada in 1886 (Beckles 2006), and three English tours of the Caribbean between 1895 and 1897—during a “chronic depression in the sugar industry”—cemented ties with the “mother country” while demonstrating the cricketing talent growing in the Caribbean (Seecharan 2006, 95, 124; cf. Cotter 1991, 12). Writing of his experience as part of Lord Hawke’s 1897 touring team, Pelham (Plum) Warner—born in Trinidad to the near-dynastic Warner family and educated at Rugby and Oxford in England—described cricket in his native region as being better than people in England could expect. He saw the importance of Black players for the game’s local popularity and praised the skills of these players, particularly Black bowlers, in a manner that helped secure their inclusion in the side to tour England in 1900 under his brother, Aucher Warner (Seecharan 2006, 143–146, 153–158). This team featured Lebrun Constantine (“Old Cons”) as well as Joseph “Floats” Woods and Archie Cumberbatch, a famed pair of Trinidadian fast bowlers. These games were not granted first-class status, but this came with the second tour in 1906 (Beckles 1998b, 43). Thereafter, Marylebone Cricket Club (the famed MCC) visited the Caribbean in 1910–1911 and again in 1912–1913. West Indies toured England again in 1923, this time under the leadership of an ageing H.B.G. Austin. The 1923 team included George Francis, George John and Joe Small, as a Black, working class and predominately Trinidadian bowling attack, to whose ranks Herman Griffith of Barbados was added in 1928. Across this period, then, white batsmen and Black bowlers—mostly working class and often Trinidadian—were raising the overall standard of West Indies cricket while “consolidat[ing] an ethnic division of labour” derived from the plantation and always including a white batsman-captain as a type of paternal, cricketing overseer (Beckles 1998b, 25). This is the historical context that frames both James’ Beyond a Boundary and Errol John’s play Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1958), considered in Chapter 2, as well other later Caribbean literary works that feature cricket. Further, and as Frank Manning concisely observes, the situation led to a “succession of black goals: to get to bat, to gain places on island-wide teams and regional tours, and, as recently as the 1960s, to be named vice-captains

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and captains of Test teams” (1995, 271). This is an idea taken up across the region’s literature and is particularly pertinent to Chapters 3 and 4. After the MCC tour of 1926, the West Indies Cricket Board of Control formed, in 1927, to push for international Test status. This came with the 1928 tour of England and was cemented by England’s 1930 return visit. The failure of Wilton St Hill in 1928 meant that George Headley became the first Black batsman-hero to penetrate the public consciousness and score runs against England, beginning with his Test debut in the 1929–1930 series. And, as explored in Chapter 2, Headley’s name rings out in a number of literary works and stands as crucial in James’ writing on cricket and in Beyond a Boundary (Hill 2013). In this period, the region also developed its own literary circles and magazines, including The Beacon, with which James was involved, and a regional, politicised cricketing-literary culture began to emerge with popular calypsos and even some poems, as detailed in Chapter 4. The growing intersections between cricket, political consciousness and writing were made explicit in Learie Constantine’s first book, Cricket and I , published in 1933. Having helped with the writing, James neatly summarised the book’s primary insight as “They are no better than we” (2013, 112). Beckles links Constantine’s book to the rise of Garveyism, Black nationalism and the string of worker protests arising in Trinidad across the 1930s (1998b, 72–73). Manley describes this cricketing phase, and especially the impact of Constantine and Headley, in relation to the depression and its crippling effects in the Caribbean, bringing labour unrest, the collapse of sugar and banana markets, and widespread popular protests, including hunger marches (2002, 55–57). Such links between cricket’s development and social protests similarly inform James’ view of the importance of the game in the region, and provide the context for the early rendering of cricket and cricketing heroism seen in literature emerging in the 1950s and 1960s, as discussed in Chapter 2. While there was something of a cricketing hiatus during World War II, the foundations of a recognisable tradition of Anglophone Caribbean literature emerged around this time—enabled, in part, by the BBC’s World Service radio programme, Calling the West Indies, which began in 1939, and its mutation into Caribbean Voices , which ran from 1948 to 1958. In 1948 the MCC visited the Caribbean and across the next decade, in literature and cricket, a new sense of Caribbean self-expression developed. In 1950 West Indies won their first Test series in England,

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with the famous victory at Lord’s captured by Lord Kitchener’s “Victory Test Match” calypso. However, in the 1957 tour of England, West Indies were roundly defeated, despite the rise of their world-class batsmen: the “Three Ws” of Clyde Walcott, Frank Worrell and Everton Weekes. This was “the moment” in which James was settling into drafting Beyond a Boundary (Hill 2013). The 1950s were also the mid-century moment in which West Indies began competing with other postcolonial playing nations. In 1952–1953 India first toured the Caribbean, and this tour raised tensions between African-Caribbean and IndianCaribbean communities in Guyana and Trinidad, as Seecharan examines in From Ranji to Rohan (2009). These tensions are considered within the literary case studies explored in Chapters 2–4. In 1958 West Indies played Pakistan for the first time, with Gary Sobers hitting his (then) world record Test score of 365 at Sabina Park, in Kingston. This was the mixed mid-century position of West Indies cricket, with emerging heroes and international success cutting up against regular defeats and political uncertainty, as is captured in Kamau Brathwaite’s iconic poem “Rites”, first published, as a poem, in 1973, with its famous warning that “you cahn fine a man to hole up de side”, and discussed in detail in Chapter 4 (1973, 203). By 1960, though, a clearer trajectory for the regional cricket team was emerging as Worrell ascended to the captaincy, aided in part by James whose return to Trinidad in 1958 resulted in his campaign for Worrell. Worrell’s appointment ended the white monopoly on West Indies leadership, demonstrating to the world—just as the West Indies Federation was stalling—that a regional, collective effort could be led by the “best man for the job”, including when that man was Black (James 2013, 57). Worrell gained much praise for the “grace” of his leadership style and the exciting cricket his team played, especially on the 1960–1961 tour of Australia, and he is remembered—including in literary texts—as a model figure of sporting statesmanship. Under Worrell, West Indies defeated England in England in 1963 and again in 1966, meaning West Indies were, for the first time, widely regarded as the strongest side in the world. At this point, Worrell stood as the supreme captain and father-leader, while Sobers, the world-class all-rounder, became the first cricketer to hit six consecutive sixes in an over during a First-Class match, playing for Nottinghamshire in 1968. As Lazarus notes, these achievements, and West Indies cricket in the 1960s more generally, marked the “moment of decolonization” (1999, 168). The importance of this Caribbean moment, its cricketing protagonists and their mode of positive,

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creative play, reverberates across the literature of the region, as considered in Chapters 3–5. At this time, women’s cricket was beginning to take some formal shape and gain an organisational structure in the Caribbean. Jamaica established the first women’s cricket association in 1966, with Monica Taylor, a leading cricketer herself, as its first president and the spearhead behind Jamaica’s tour of Trinidad in 1967. In 1968 there was both a women’s league competition and a knockout competition in Jamaica, with competing teams carrying the names of “corporate sponsors” (Beckles 1998b, 123). According to Beckles, by 1970 Barbados, Grenada, Saint Vincent, Guyana and Saint Lucia were all formalising women’s cricketing activities, but Jamaica had moved ahead and organised “three two-day ‘Test’ matches” in Jamaica against an England side led by renowned cricketer Rachel Heyhoe (later Heyhoe Flint). Both Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became members of the International Women’s Cricket Council (IWCC), and played in the first women’s cricket World Cup in 1973. Regional expansion of women’s cricket was substantially aided by the first “double-wicket” competition, played in November 1973 at Kensington Oval in Barbados, with Barbados entering two teams to compete against Jamaica, Guyana, Saint Lucia and Trinidad (Beckles 1998b, 126). In the same year, it was agreed that a regional cricketing association would improve the domestic standard, regularity and international competitiveness of women’s cricket, while also helping to share the costs of tours. This meant that the West Indies Women’s Cricket Federation (WIWCF) was formed in 1975, with Taylor as its president until 1982 (Beckles 1998b, 128). The WIWCF established regional tournaments across the late 1970s and 1980s, and immediately invited Australia to tour in 1975– 1976 for the first “Test” matches of the newly combined women’s team. Thereafter, the West Indies women’s team toured India in 1976–1977 and England in 1979. The WIWCF became a member of the IWCC in 1978, effectively replacing Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. However, it was only in 1993 that the West Indies women’s team competed in the IWCC’s World Cup as a regional team. And with relatively few Test matches played in women’s cricket, there was a notably long hiatus for West Indies women, as they had to wait until 2004 for their next Test, with a match against Pakistan. In 2005, and following the International Cricket Council (ICC)’s mandate, the WIWCF merged with the West Indies Cricket Board of Control (now Cricket West Indies). That same year Saint Lucian Nadine George, the first female West Indies cricketer to

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score a century in a Test match, received an MBE for her contribution to sport. It was only in 2016, though, that the West Indies women’s team won their first international tournament, taking the ICC World Twenty20 (T20) title. Chapter 6 briefly revisits this history as it turns to literary depictions of women and cricket, and the Coda references the women’s World T20 victory. The period in which the women’s team led the way with the first World Cup is, though, better remembered for the success of the men’s team in their equivalent competition. Indeed, in 1975 Lloyd led West Indies to victory in the inaugural men’s World Cup, in England, which they then retained in 1979, also in England. As these successes indicate, the 1970s was also the decade in which the supreme dominance of the West Indies really began to be felt internationally. When West Indies toured England in 1976 they responded to the South Africanborn England captain Tony Greig’s (now infamous) “we’ll make them grovel” pre-tour predication by winning the series 3-0. Almost simultaneously, Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket in Australia, played between 1977 and 1979, quickly recruited Lloyd and other influential West Indies players. These players joined the new format against the wishes of their cricket board and began, for the first time, to earn substantial player wages. Although Packer’s initiative swiftly petered out, it set new standards for short-format cricket matches and kick-started the importance of “star power” for the game’s television and advertising revenues. It also exacerbated long-standing tensions between players and their traditional paymasters—their cricket boards—and did so by placing world-beating West Indies players at the heart of its global brand-building exercise for cricket. West Indies, though, had already established its own brand of heroic, aesthetic and triumphant cricket, and this is taken up in all of the chapters to come. As is well known, their reign of supremacy ran, after Lloyd, through the captaincy of Viv Richards and into that of Richie Richardson, across the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s. Their (then) history-making run of Test match and Test series victories, as well as individual match and player performances, inspired those watching in the Caribbean diaspora, particularly in England, as discussed in Chapters 4 and 7. Most strikingly, the iconic “Black washes” of the 1984 and 1985–1986 Test tours—played in England and the Caribbean respectively—saw West Indies gain back-to-back 5-0 wins over England for the first time. Their renowned pace attack (including Holding, Garner,

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Marshall, Patterson and Roberts) and exhilarating batsman (most obviously, Richards, Greenidge and Haynes) became iconic figures on and off the cricket field. Moreover, this team of Caribbean sportsmen, from diffuse and sometimes feuding peripheral nations, stood for racial solidarity and the advancement of decolonising peoples. They articulated themselves with stylish, professional and successful cricket and were hailed as heroes in popular discourse and repeatedly in Caribbean literature, especially poetry, as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. This period of dominance is also, unsurprisingly, marked by the racial tensions of international cricket. Indeed, race-based critiques of the West Indies bowling attack became common, eventually contributing to changes to the rules applied to bowling in order to limit the number of “bouncers” delivered in any single over (see, for example, Searle 2001). In addition, the playing persona and power of Richards, with his confidence and support for Black power and Rastafarianism, made the international cricket media, especially in England and Australia, plainly uncomfortable—and again, these tensions and the iconic importance of Richards for young Black cricket fans are reflected in poetry that depicts him (see Chapter 4). However, the most consequential racial stand-off of this period comes with the 1980s “rebel tours” to apartheid South Africa undertaken by, among others, some England, Australia and West Indies players. With the Gleneagles Agreement of 1977, commonwealth leaders had sought to isolate South Africa by preventing sporting contact with the apartheid regime, but a minority of West Indies players were recruited to play in South Africa, initially in 1982–1983 and then again the following year. Some of these “rebels” defended their decision to tour by arguing that playing in South Africa would strike against apartheid by demonstrating the skill and equality of Black cricketers. They also suggested that professional cricketers had a right to ply their trade internationally (as had been the right of those under Packer), particularly when they earned so little from the game at home—a long-standing reality for the majority of players. This was not enough to counter the firm anti-apartheid positions articulated by many West Indies players, most famously Lloyd and Richards, and the popular and governmental positions of most Caribbean territories, resulting in the “rebels” being ostracised and receiving cricket bans. The hostility felt towards the South African cricketing establishment’s links with the apartheid regime was driven home in 1992, when South Africa, having only recently returned from international isolation (1970–1991), was defeated by West Indies in all of their Caribbean tour

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games in what is typically seen as the last total victory of a dominant West Indies. Literary references to the link between the iconic figures of West Indies cricket and anti-apartheid sentiments are explicitly forceful in their political positioning, as seen in Chapters 4 and 5. By the early 1990s the cricketing fortunes of West Indies were changing dramatically despite the arrival of a new star player. In 1994 Brian Lara achieved stunning world records and became the superstar batsman of the age. He dominated and led the West Indies team, with three spells as the Test captain, and became the subject of a number of praise songs, poems and pieces of playful literary reflection, as examined in Chapter 4. He was also at the forefront of what became a disastrous period for West Indies cricket. At the start of 1995, West Indies lost the Frank Worrell Trophy (to Australia) for the first time since 1975–1976, and in 1996 they reached a new cricketing nadir by losing to Kenya, an international minnow, at the ICC World Cup—though Lara infamously expressed relief that it wasn’t against South Africa (Beckles 1998c, 8). Regular defeats followed, and across two decades of inconsistent and weak form, West Indies slumped to the second tier of Test cricket. Player disputes with the West Indies cricket board over contracts—most often touring and sponsorship contracts—became commonplace, as did tensions between star players, the wider team and team management. This situation was only exacerbated in the 2010s as some West Indies players became wealthy short-format stars with the rise of T20 cricket, and, most notably, the Indian Premier League (IPL). Beckles (2017) situates this long-term decline in the context of a fight between the spirit of West Indies cricket and the corporate sell-out that enables individual players and business interests to be advanced at the expense of the game. Beckles also lists a number of key factors, emerging during and after the 1990s, that fuelled changes to the region’s cricket culture, including: the increase in tourism, especially cricket tourism, to the Caribbean; the pressure to deregulate and further open local markets up to international competition; the impact of new agreements with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help service the structural adjustment debts incurred at and just after independence; new corporate incursions from the US; and difficulties emerging from mass price rises across the region (1998c, 36–42, 118–120). We might add to this list the failure of oil to bring sustained economic gains to places like Trinidad, an issue that briefly takes cricketing-literary shape in Chapter 3. By the time the ICC allowed the

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World Cup to land in the Caribbean for the first time, in 2007, a wholesale political evacuation of West Indies cricket and its cultural import seemed necessary for the sport’s international authorities to prosper (see, for example, Beckles 2007, 2017). The ICC’s decision was already something of a compromise, aimed at stopping the Indian subcontinent from quickly hosting the tournament again, and part of an ongoing effort to penetrate the US market with the time-zone convenience for travel and television offered by the Caribbean. However, the terms established for the event, both economic and political, ensured that “calypso cricket” and its culture of vibrant crowd support—so critical for Caribbean cricket and its literary rendering—was driven far from the games and their new or redeveloped grounds. Since then, there have been moments of success for West Indies—as with the 2012 and 2016 T20 World Cup wins, and with particular Test victories—and, in recent years, with the role-model captaincy of Jason Holder, hopes for a resurgent connection between cricket and political conscientious (see Coda). Nevertheless, at present, their cricketing clout remains some way below that of their world-beating predecessors.

III What stands behind this history and its academic rendering is an ongoing debate about cricket’s political status and efficacy for Caribbean selfexpression, past and continuing. On one side are those who see the game as intrinsically conservative—wedded to a romantic view of imperial Englishness—so that co-operation, conformity and subservience characterise or overshadow non-white participation. In this light, Dickens’ Quanko Samba, described above, is only ever able to perform the will of his master. On the other side are those insistent on the rebellious potential and transformative effects of non-white participation, especially as this is built into new ways of playing the game. In this context, Quanko Samba can be read as deliberately fighting to overturn the white batsman, for himself and perhaps for his fellow, fallen, bowlers and fielders. The first position has been most closely associated with Orlando Patterson, whose 1969 article, “The Ritual of Cricket”, declared that “Cricket is the game we love for it is the only game we can play well […] But it is also the game, deep down, which we must hate – the game of the master” (1995, 144). This position has also been linked with the work of Stoddart and his sense of the game’s acculturating force and the ameliorative effects of its

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civil codes (see, for example, Stoddart 1988, 1995; and, with Sandiford 1998). Lazarus connects Patterson’s view that cricket “could not, ultimately, be decolonized” with Sandiford and Stoddart’s argument that the “codes and standards” adopted by the cricketing masses in the Caribbean upheld the dominant codes of the elites and their schools, as derived from the imperial pattern (Lazarus 1999, 163–164). He then contends that the Patterson/Sandiford/Stoddart position is undercut by Mark Kingwell’s Jamesian contention that cricketing civility should not be taken for political or ideological conformity since, as Kingwell says, “political advantage” is gained through “selective internal application” so that “an ironic maintenance of just those values that the ruling classes profess to admire […] ultimately indicate[s] how little they in fact live up to them” (1995, 380; cf. Lazarus 1999, 164). We might also see Ashis Nandy’s and Arjun Appadurai’s views of the game as relatively close to Stoddart’s position. Nandy considers cricket a “protected” cultural domain (2000, 3), and Appadurai sees cricket as “a ‘hard’ cultural form that changes those who are socialized into it more readily than it itself changes” (1996, 90). Both Nandy and Appadurai accept that cricket has been used by formerly colonised people to express themselves, but they understand the game as essentially conservative and slow to change. The other position is derived from James’ Marxist reading of cricket and those who follow him, as with Tim Hector who describes the game “as part of a process by which West Indians overcame or sought to overcome racism, and the consequent sense of inferiority and racial selfcontempt” (1994, 113). For Hector, the game is “part of the process of the Caribbean humanizing itself” and, therefore, freeing itself through “national liberation” and “social, national and regional integration, which is not yet complete” (113–114). Woodville Marshall makes the contrast between the two positions clear when neatly explaining his subscription to “the CLR James School, not the Brian Stoddart School”: By that I mean that whatever the reason for [the] introduction of cricket in the region, […] cricket has transformed this region and in turn been transformed by the region. It has transformed the region by presenting it with a major form of social expression and public art, and by giving West Indians, wherever they might be, a living tradition of achievement and thereby a sense of national identity. (1994, 31)

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While this book’s approach retains Marshall’s Jamesian sense of cricket as “social expression and public art”, oriented towards achievement and national identity, it also looks to complicate and re-term the tension he describes by employing the insights gained from Ian Baucom’s reading of cricket and Jamesian thinking. In his analysis of James and the cricket field as an auratic and identity-inscribing locale, Baucom (1999) claims the pitch as a site of memory, invoking imperial Englishness while also displacing, disrupting and exposing such ideas when figured in empire. Baucom uses terminology from Homi Bhabha to consider cricket in empire as holding together a disciplinary pedagogic, associated with the authoritative codes of empire, and the disruptive potentialities of the performative, as expressed by local and stylistically unique non-white players. Baucom convincingly argues that James offers the “performative as dialectically bound to, and thereby perpetually reanimating, the disciplinary pedagogic” (158; emphasis added). This, much like Kingwell’s argument, relies upon a defence of James’ adherence to cricketing civility. Building on Lazarus and Baucom, Andrew Smith offers such a defence, explaining that, for James, cricket is “a field in exactly Bourdieu’s sense”, with its own “formal autonomy” (2006, 107). To Smith, “James defends the integrity of the ‘spirit’ of cricketing play for exactly the same reason that Bourdieu defends the ‘intention of autonomy’ of the field of cultural production”—namely, “that what was at stake […] was this ability to make the forces of political and economic power pause at the boundary” (107). This never creates a level playing field, but does mean that the aesthetic performances of sporting or other cultural practitioners can function in new ways from within their respective field/s, without being entirely determined or shaped by external pressures. Yet as James makes clear, this does not mean that cricket is untouched by forces beyond the boundary either—players carry with them who they are, where they come from and what they know, as well as what they wish to become, create and achieve. So, instead of cricketing civility being James’ “ideological blind-spot”—the point at which some critics have suggested his personal investment in cricket and his Marxist politics diverge—it is actually part of his appreciation of the interaction between the disciplinary pedagogic and the performative (Smith 2006, 97), an interaction repeatedly seen in the cricketing content of Caribbean literature and informing Chapters 2, 5 and 6.

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IV Cricket is proud of its literary links and aesthetic credentials, and has been the source of a large and diverse canon of writing in England and beyond (see, for example, Bateman 2009). Arguing that the Caribbean has “restored the game to its original self as an activity rooted in folk culture”, Rohlehr explains that: In the process of revitalizing the game, West Indian cricket teams have, in a manner similar to English cricket teams of the past two centuries, awakened the enthusiasm of poets, novelists, calypsonians, raconteurs, dramatists, biographers and a growing number of academics. [Caribbean cricket] has generated […] its own aesthetic. (1994, 56)

As Rohlehr indicates, the game has also been taken up in the literary and artistic culture of the Caribbean, creating, he argues, “its own aesthetic”—an aesthetic that shares its performative roots and sensibilities with stick fighting, calypso and carnival, and is worth investigating further, specifically in its literary manifestations. As two of the key cultural remnants of British imperialism, Caribbean cricket and Anglophone literature are intersecting domains, and interrogating their intersection enables closer examination of the impact and repurposing of empire’s legacies, particularly as cricket features prominently in Anglophone Caribbean literature. There is also something of a shared chronology to cricketing and literary development in the Caribbean, from the late 1920s to the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a similar sense of international significance emerging from these areas in and after the 1980s. Though less explicitly popular than cricket, literature is the only other domain in which the region has gained the same kind of global reputation and impact. In literature, as in cricket, the Caribbean has produced a sizeable number of world-leading figures and successes from its relatively small population and resource pool. So, in addition to two cricketing World Cups (1975 and 1979) and three World T20 titles (2012 and 2016, with both the senior men’s and women’s teams in 2016), the region lays claim to two Nobel prizes for literature, awarded to Derek Walcott in 1992 and V.S. Naipaul in 2001. In the same way that new and experimental ways of playing cricket fashioned in the Caribbean fundamentally altered the game, the originality and styles of post-independence Caribbean literature helped reshape literary production and educational curricula around the world. We might say, in

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fact, that cricket and literature are the two fields within which Caribbean potential is most clearly and subtly articulated, and within which expressions of self-becoming—or the still-to-be of emancipation—are popularly recognised, at home and abroad, in aesthetic as well as sociopolitical and economic terms. Moreover, cricket and literature have each, and together, maintained a regional vision of collective or “national” endeavour for the people of the Caribbean. Writing in the tradition of James, Hector declares that heroic cricketers like Constantine and Headley “came at the same time as the birth of West Indian literature” and “the beginning of the modern nationalist movement in the Caribbean”, and that it was “no accident” that this period “coincided with the great upheaval throughout the Caribbean in 1937–8”, since this was in turn “part of the tremendous movement of the working class of the West Indies, which attempted to shape a nation out of [the] archipelago” (1994, 114). The binding together of regional nationalism, a regional cricket team and regional literature (in English) is also marked by Kenneth Ramchand. Ramchand argues that the name “the West Indies” remained after the failed federation of English-speaking territories “to signal a reality stronger than any political institution” (1988, 95). He also suggests that this meant that, after individual islands and territories started gaining independence in the 1960s, it was the cultural institutions of “the University of West Indies, the allconquering West Indies cricket team, and West Indian literature” that kept “alive the federal idea” (95). These institutions maintained the idea of solidarity, collective interests and shared forward momentum arising from a shared history. Ramchand says that with the term “West Indian” there had been a consolidated effort to start “impacting on the world as a West Indian nation”, as indicated by the literature of the 1950s and 1960s (98). In his analysis, independence was actually “an anti-climax”, and literary critics addressed the “broken and complicated period […] under the happy rubric ‘the movement towards independence’, [with] the energy generated by the federal idea being confused with the energy of island nationalism” (98). This concern with the re-routing and downscaling of ambitions—from a regional nationhood, driven in no small part by working people, to island/territory independence that James saw as evidence that “West Indian politicians preferred the break-up of Federation” to the “break-up of the old colonial system” (James 1980, 155; cf.

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Evans 2014, 6)—is worth heeding because the region’s literary representations of cricket often maintain or enliven the earlier and more expansive vision. While it is agreed, then, that cricket and literature hold prominent and important places in the history, culture, politics and popular imaginary of the Caribbean, little has been done to read Caribbean literature in relation to, and through, the game. This is despite the cricket-related content of many anthologies of Caribbean literature, from Caribbean Rhythms: The Emerging Literature of the West Indies, first published in 1974, through to Give the Ball to the Poet: A New Anthology of Caribbean Poetry, published by Commonwealth Education in 2014, for school children aged 11–16. It is also despite the academic accounts of cricketing literature and its links with wider performance culture provided by Beckles and Rohlehr, and the publication of anthologies of Caribbean cricket writing, as with Shouts from the Outfield (2007), Lunchtime Medley (2008) and, most substantially, The Bowling was Superfine (2012), edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald. This study addresses this omission and fills its analytical gaps by pursuing two primary and interrelated aims. The first aim is to introduce and examine the who, where, what, why and how of cricket’s place in the Caribbean literary imagination, with individual chapters specifically tackling childhood and fathering, physical performativity and style, independence and nation creation, heroic endeavour, and the manoeuvres deployed within varying modes of cricketing metaphor, difference and dispersal as well as mother–daughter relations, and questions of migration and territory crossings. It does so by reading the cricketing content of Anglophone Caribbean literature produced from within the Caribbean and across its diaspora, especially fiction and poetry, and by unpacking the recurring motifs, interests and intricacies found across this body of writing. The book thus takes its titular prompt from Brathwaite’s seminal cricket poem “Rites”, and is likewise concerned with the “rites” of cricketing, literary and communal practice, as well as the “rights” of players, people, small nations and regional institutions. The discussion extends and updates influential, but much shorter, accounts of Caribbean cricket’s literary connections by Beckles and Rohlehr while similarly drawing on dance, film, music and theatre, thereby placing cricket and literature within a broader aesthetic and performative context. It also probes the cricketing-aesthetic investment in self-actualisation, communal unity and heroic effort through which socioeconomic and political concerns, demands and aspirations

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are repeatedly expressed in Anglophone Caribbean literature. The book might be described as providing an analytical accompaniment to The Bowling was Superfine, since it builds on Brown’s introductory essay and tackles much of the anthology’s literary content. However, the chapters here extend a good way beyond the bounds of the anthology and offer more than a mere survey of literary-cricketing moments by providing new and sustained analyses of the cricket-linked works of recognised authors, and of authors previously un- or under-studied. Additionally, this book works out from Bateman’s use of the term “literaturisation” to consider the ways in which literary-aesthetic ideas of cricketing convention move bi-directionally between the game and its vast literature, and to track the manner in which cricket in the Caribbean is interpellated into a shared discourse of regional nationalism through which other claims to individual and collective freedom are made (2009, 3–5). With this in mind, Anglophone Caribbean literature is shown to probe, preserve and advance efforts to maintain, deepen and reinvigorate the politics of possibility West Indies cricket conveyed during its most successful period. The second aim is a related but distinct one. The book uses its engagement with cricket in Anglophone Caribbean literature to revisit James’ cricket writing, especially Beyond a Boundary, at the start of each chapter in order to illustrate how his work and thinking are precursors to, and sometimes vital interlocutory sources for, many of the literary depictions of cricketing aesthetics and heroics explored. For James, Caribbean cricket is at the forefront of cultivated and rebellious self- and communal articulation, performed in a cultural language the former master(s) must understand. It is also, to James’ mind, a popularly understood art form and its embodied aesthetics prompt the people to conceive of themselves, their home, their future and even the world order differently. These sentiments, this book suggests, carry over into literary depictions of cricket—as indicated in Chapters 3–6—as does James’ methodological investment in heroic, world-historical cricketers of great, even singular, achievement. As the chapters to follow show, the construction and problematisation of the (nearly always, but not exclusively, male) cricketing hero’s relation to their community and their world-historical potential is an important concern within Anglophone Caribbean literature’s cricketing content that links it back to Jamesian thinking and hope. Consequently, it is important to appreciate that cricketers have been and remain heroic performers and role models in the Caribbean, across the diaspora and beyond. Seecharan writes that even as early as 1900, “black cricketers

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were conspicuous heroes to their disenfranchised fans” (2006, 232), and this sense of identification extends across the twentieth century into the present, and perhaps across racialised boundaries too. But the status of “star” players has always brought difficulties, and the weight of expectation remains heavy. Indeed, for Seecharan, cricketers have been “saddled with the burden of history” in an extraordinary and extra-human fashion (265). To Beckles, the nationalist sensibilities and sense of responsibility bestowed upon the most successful generations of players have been evaded or eroded in recent years. Nevertheless, his insight into the role of such heroic figures for regional cohesion still stands, and we might say that the chapters to follow are underpinned by the tension between Franz Fanon’s warning in The Wretched of the Earth (1967) that newly independent nations should “not cultivate the exceptional or to seek for a hero but uplift the people” (2001, 158), and Beckles’ insistence that: “Only the following of cricket heroes transcends national, ideological and generation boundaries. This reality provides a unique terrain for artistic and intellectuals to speak to the region as one about itself as a unified cultural space” (1998c, 105). With this tension in view, it seems appropriate to pre-emptively explain how cricket in Caribbean literature might be readily and productively linked to nostalgia because many of the literary texts discussed strike a nostalgic, and sometimes sentimentally nostalgic, note. This, though, is not the kind of nostalgia found in some English/British depictions of cricket in empire (past and continuing), which might be deemed “imperial nostalgia”. Rather, it is the kind Ramchand references in The West Indian Novel and its Background (1970) when describing the “nostalgia of the émigré” (2004, xlii), which shows itself in reflections of home, childhood, the sport of youth, personal development and success. But, as Ramchand notes, diasporic authors writing of the Caribbean from London and elsewhere “seldom depart from a concern with the shape and possible directions of their society” (xlii), and this pushes against possible accusations of soft or de-politicised nostalgic attachments to a distant home and reconstructions of a remembered (or fictive) past self. His point plays out in literary texts across the following chapters, especially Chapters 2, 6 and 7. Relatedly, with reference to Beyond a Boundary, Smith highlights James’ “pre-emptive defence” against the suggestion that he “was providing a nostalgic justification of a fundamentally conservative institution” with his assertion that he did “not wish to be liberated from the past” nor “from its future” because, as Smith explains, “one of James’

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fundamental assumptions was that previous social struggles and their outcomes are sublated into the conditions of the present and it is only by working through such structures that we can construct new conditions of possibility” (2010, 102). Here, there is a particular sense in which James’ insistence on working through the past and towards its consequent future(s) can be linked back to a nostalgic attachment to the midtwentieth century emergence of the region as newly independent, and to the possibilities this moment brought to mind in relation to the liberation of the “Third World”. This might be also linked to the nostalgic tendency Jennifer Wenzel (2006) terms “anti-imperial nostalgia”—her counter to Renato Rosaldo’s “imperialist nostalgia”—which acknowledges the past’s vision of the future, while recognising the distance and the difference between that vision and the realities of the present” (7). Wenzel is critical of the rejection of the term “Third World” as “nostalgic” (11), and claims that there “might be a kind of resistant memory that can acknowledge and reclaim the past without being seduced by it” (14–15). A similar mode of resistant memory might be found in the cricketing content of Anglophone Caribbean literature, especially its rendering of cricketing heroes, recognised as “Third World” icons, where there are repeated attempts to reclaim the future-thinking of the past as an inspirational prompt for the present’s future-making.

V Before turning to those individual chapters, some terminological clarifiers and boundary markers are useful. Throughout the book, cricketing terminology, match details and biographical information are kept to a minimum, and discussions of specific cricket tours, games or incidents are only dealt with when they pertain directly to the analysis of a specific literary text. Further cricketing information and records can be easily found elsewhere. The term “West Indies” here refers only to the regional cricket team (its players, staff and structure), except when used in quoted materials, where it refers to the (former) British West Indies, and where “West Indian” then describes those from “the West Indies”. Discussion of West Indies cricket refers to the senior men’s game—its history, culture and structure—unless otherwise stated. Cricketers names are given in the way that they ordinarily are in cricket commentary and any titles they have been awarded are respectfully omitted. So, for example, Sir Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards is identified as Viv Richards here. The texts

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chosen for analysis are literary, and a broad range of examples is used. Other types of writing, especially (auto)biographical and journalistic, are mobilised, but are rarely the focus of analysis, except in the case of James. With James’ strong presence, as well as that of Naipaul, Earl Lovelace and other Trinidadian authors, one might say that Trinidad is overrepresented. Nevertheless, the regional as well as international significance of these authors, the size and diversity of Trinidad, the reputations of James and Lara, and the island’s role as a “pathfinder” for Caribbean cricket should, together, account for Trinidad’s strong place in this study (Seecharan 2006, 146). The region is labelled “the Caribbean”, and the terms “English speaking” or “Anglophone Caribbean” identify the language-based group of territories and peoples within the Caribbean most strongly associated with cricket. Rather than the archaic terms “West Indian” and “West Indian Literature”, which appear in some cited materials, the discussion refers to Anglophone Caribbean literature, and to Caribbean literature when it means to remove this language-specific marker (as it often does). Introducing The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (1999), Brown explains that, while the region is a “multilingual space”, concentrating on its “cricket playing domains is a way of granting readers access to many Caribbean writing traditions in just one book” (2001, xiii). A similar ambition resides here, though undoubtedly there is much that falls outside a single study of cricket’s place in the Caribbean literary imagination. Now, turning to the chapters to come, Chapter 2, Growing and Belonging, begins by revisiting James’ narration of boyhood in Beyond a Boundary and connects James’ politicised autobiographical vision to the kinds of “fictional autobiographies” (McWatt 1989) and father–son relationships that stand behind and also appear within Errol John’s play Moon on a Rainbow Shawl , the cricketing content of Naipaul’s oeuvre, and the cricketing boyhoods found within the Anglophone Caribbean’s short story tradition. The central thesis of the chapter is that cricket is used within narratives of masculine development, especially father–son type relationships, as a way of redeploying the strengths and examples derived from male predecessors, and as part of an effort to hold onto youthful ambition and exuberance in more mature efforts at self-making and communal belonging. Chapter 3, Style as Substance, examines the cricketing content of Lovelace’s writing and puts his work in dialogue with James to explore their overlapping interest in the emancipatory potential and power of

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style, particularly its embodied forms. The importance of James and cricket to Lovelace is evident in Lovelace’s non-fiction as well as the (modest) biographical writings about him. More substantially, though, from his short story “Victory and the Blight” (1988), through his prizewinning novel Salt (1996), to his novel Is Just a Movie (2011), Lovelace’s effort to see cricketing “style as substance” directly mobilises James’ take on cricketing style, and reading the James-Lovelace connection helps enlarge and clarify the ramifications of Lovelace’s own aesthetic and literary-critical imaginary. Chapter 4, Rites and Heroics, charts the development of Caribbean cricketing praise poetry from the 1920s through to the present, beginning with James’ efforts in this area, and its connections to calypso. The chapter then examines the heroic uncertainties of Brathwaite’s poem “Rites”, and the ongoing poetic focus on the iconic batsman, especially Richards, that can be connected with both Brathwaite’s hurricane aesthetics and Paul Gilroy’s sense of the “slave sublime”. The discussion also interrogates poems about Lara, linking these to James’ concerns with the world-historical hero and the influence of Sobers, before briefly presenting poems about Chris Gayle. The chapter argues that such praise poetry is heavily invested in the performative aesthetics of the batsmanhero—where a batsman’s style is read through the region’s experience of violence and its climate or ecology—and that a dialectical relationship between the heroic figure and the crowd, between the one and the many, is vital to the politically enlivening effects of Caribbean cricket’s aesthetic codes and their poetic redeployment. Chapter 5, Metaphors and Manoeuvres, builds on the previous chapter to examine the ways in which cricketing metaphors, motifs and terminology feature in Anglophone Caribbean poetry more broadly— and sometimes quite unexpectedly. It does so by charting such poetry’s combining of cricket with English Literature’s canon, Christianity, the local environment and personal relationships. The discussion returns to the “Preface” of Beyond a Boundary and James’ linking of cricket and Caliban before reading John Agard’s “Prospero and Caliban Cricket” and Agard’s other cricket poems. The chapter also analyses cricketing-religious poems by Bruce St. John and Grace Nichols. It then considers poems that utilise cricketing imagery and playing positions to convey sociopolitical and economic critiques where there is, in some cases, an association with the land that is articulated through the saccharine-ecological sublime.

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Finally, the chapter unpicks how cricket is used to envision personal relationships and intimate “googlies”. What’s important, across this wide range of examples, is cricket’s enabling function as it creates a shared frame of reference through which different modes of critique, revelation and salvation can be explored. Chapter 6, Motherly Figures and Undomesticated Daughters, reassesses James’ rendering of female relatives, especially his aunt Judith, and suggests his arguments about cricket might be deployed in genderneutral ways. The discussion turns to poems by Beryl Gilroy, Paul Keens-Douglas and E.A. Markham that feature cricketing disruptions by motherly figures. Thereafter, it considers texts by Roger BonairAgard, Valerie Bloom and Sylvia Wynter that present young girls and women having to escape restrictive notions of femininity and domestic responsibilities in order to play cricket. These issues are more extensively unpacked through mother–daughter relationships in Joan Anim-Addo’s Janie Cricketing Lady with Carnival and Hurricane Poems (2006) and Roy Williams’ play “The No Boys Cricket Club” (1996). The chapter sees Caribbean cricketing women as caught between gender-specific experiences of labour, familial responsibility and memory, on one hand, and, on the other, the personal, aesthetic and sociopolitical modes of expression that come through the game. Appreciating the significance of London to cricket, the CaribbeanBritish diaspora, and the publishing of Anglophone Caribbean literature, Chapter 7, Migrant Movements and Cricketing Stereotypes, begins with the importance of living in England to James’ cricketing politics and his response to the stereotypes used to describe West Indies cricketers. The discussion then examines Samuel Selvon’s “The Cricket Match” (1957) for its management of stereotypes and with its presentation of crossing into the territory of imperial Englishness. It also considers Playing Away (1987), the film directed by Horace Ové and written by Caryl Phillips, with its similar sense of territory crossing and its unpicking of the racially coded stereotypes at work in Thatcher’s Britain. Finally, the chapter examines poems by Agard, J.D. Douglas, A.L. Hendricks and Benjamin Zephaniah that use cricket to rebel against stereotypes held about Black men in Britain during the 1980s and after. The chapter establishes the danger presented by the ways in which the relationship between cricket and Black men can be co-opted, hollowed out and used as part of an effort to minimise their roles as aesthetic, political and history-making agents.

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Chapter 8, or Coda, reflects on recent developments in West Indies cricket and the manner in which victories are still captured in calypso, song and poetry, even if Caribbean cricket is viewed as struggling to find its way back to its full political potential. In the context, then, of this introductory chapter, the argument running through the book can be articulated concisely here: cricket is an important cultural resource for the Caribbean, mobilised in its literature—often with a close connection to Jamesian thinking, insight and aspiration—as a means of individual aesthetic expression as well as individual and collective future-making in the face of, and typically against, the current world order. In pursuing this argument across the subsequent chapters, further attention is given to cricket’s historical, cultural and aesthetic ties to Caribbean energy regimes and to the energetics of literature as it depicts Caribbean cricket.

Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bateman, Anthony. 2009. Cricket, Literature and Culture: Symbolising the Nation, Destabilising Empire. London: Ashgate. Baucom, Ian. 1999. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beckles, Hilary McD., ed. 1994. An Area of Conquest: Popular Democracy and West Indies Cricket. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Beckles, Hilary McD. 1995. “Introduction”. In Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture, edited by Hilary McD. Beckles and Brian Stoddart, 1–5. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Beckles, Hilary McD., ed. 1998a. A Spirit of Dominance: Cricket and Nationalism in West Indies Cricket—Essays in Honour of “Viv” Richards on the 21st Anniversary of his First Debut. Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press. Beckles, Hilary McD. 1998b. The Development of West Indies Cricket: Volume 1. The Age of Nationalism. London: Pluto. Beckles, Hilary McD. 1998c. The Development of West Indies Cricket: Volume 2. The Age of Globalization. London: Pluto. Beckles, Hilary McD. 2003. A Nation Imagined: First West Indies Test Team. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Beckles, Hilary McD. 2006. The First West Indies Cricket Tour: Canada and the United States in 1886. Kingston, Jamaica: Canoe Press.

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Beckles, Hilary McD. 2007. “‘Slavery Was a Long, Long Time Ago’: Remembrance, Reconciliation and the Reparations Discourse in the Caribbean”. Ariel 38 (1): 9–26. Beckles, Hilary McD. 2017. Cricket Without a Cause: Fall and Rise of the Mighty West Indian Test Cricketers. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Beckles, Hilary McD., and Brian Stoddart, eds. 1995. Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Birbalsingh, Frank. 1996. The Rise of Westindian Cricket: From Colony to Nation. Antigua: Hansib. Birbalsingh, Frank, and Clem Seecharan. 1988. Indo-Westindian Cricket. Antigua: Hansib. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1973. “Rites”. In The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, by Brathwaite, 197–203. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Stewart, and Ian McDonald, eds. 2012. The Bowling was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Brown, Stewart. 2001. “Introduction”. In The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories, edited by Stewart Brown and John Wickham, xiii–xxxiii. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burton, Richard D.E. 1997. Afro-Creole Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean. New York: Cornell University Press. Cotter, Gerry. 1991. England vs West Indies: A History of Test Cricket and Other Matches. Swindon: Crowood. Deane, Linda M., and Robert Edison Sandiford, eds. 2007. Shouts from the Outfield. Bridgetown, Barbados: AE Books. Dickens, Charles. 1998 [1836]. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Edited by Malcolm Andrew. London: Everyman. Evans, Lucy. 2014. Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 2001 [1967]. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. London: Penguin Books. Goble, Roy, and Keith A.P. Sandiford. 2004. 75 Years of West Indies Cricket: 1928–2003. London: Hansib. Hector, Tim. 1994. “West Indian Nationhood, Integration, and Cricket Politics”. In An Area of Conquest: Popular Democracy and West Indies Cricket Supremacy, edited by Hilary McD. Beckles, 113–126. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Hill, Robert. 2013. “C.L.R. James and the Moment of Beyond a Boundary”. The Beyond A Boundary Conference, University of Glasgow, 9–11 May. Horrell, Georgie, Aish Spencer, and Morag Styles, eds. 2014. Give the Ball to the Poet: A New Anthology of Caribbean Poetry. London: Commonwealth Education Trust.

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James, C.L.R. 1980 [1964]. “Parties, Politics and Economics in the Caribbean”. In Spheres of Existence: Selected Writings, by James, 151–156. London: Allison and Busby. James, C.L.R. 2013 [1963]. Beyond a Boundary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kingwell, Mark. 1995. “Keeping a Straight Bat: Cricket, Civility, and Postcolonialism”. In C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacies, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William E. Cain, 359–387. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Lamming, George. 1999 [1960]. Season of Migration. London: Allison and Busby. Lazarus, Neil. 1999. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Livingston, James T., ed. 1974. Caribbean Rhythms: The Emerging Literature of the West Indies. New York: Washington Square. Lloyd, Clive. 2002. “Introduction”. In A History of West Indies Cricket, by Michael Manley. Revised edition with Donna Symmonds, v–vi. London: Andre Deutsch. Mangan, J.A. 1981. Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of the Educational Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mangan, J.A. 1988. The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal. London: Frank Cass. Mangan, J.A. 1992. The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire and Society. London: Frank Cass. Manley, Michael. 2002 [1988]. A History of West Indies Cricket. Revised edition with Donna Symmonds. London: Andre Deutsch. Manning, Frank. 1995. “Celebrating Cricket: The Symbolic Construction of Caribbean Politics”. In Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture, edited by Hilary McD. Beckles and Brian Stoddart, 269–289. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marshall, Woodville. 1994. “The Worrell-Sobers Revolution”. In An Area of Conquest: Popular Democracy and West Indies Cricket Supremacy, edited by Hilary McD. Beckles, 30–41. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. McWatt, Mark. 1989. “The West Indian Writer and the Self: Recent ‘Fictional Autobiography’ by Naipaul and Harris”. Journal of West Indian Literature 3 (1): 16–27. Morris, Mervyn, and Jimmy Carnegie, eds. 2008. Lunchtime Medley: Writings on West Indian Cricket. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Nandy, Ashis. 2000. The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press.

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Nicole, Christopher. 1960. West Indian Cricket. London: The Sportsman’s Book Club. Patterson, Orlando. 1995 [1969]. “The Ritual of Cricket”. In Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture, edited by Hilary McD. Beckles and Brian Stoddart, 141–147. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ramchand, Kenneth. 1988. “West Indian Literary History: Literariness, Orality and Periodization”. Callaloo 34 (Winter): 95–110. Ramchand, Kenneth. 2004 [1970]. The West Indian Novel and its Background. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Rohlehr, Gordon. 1994. “Music, Literature and West Indian Cricket Values”. In An Area of Conquest: Popular Democracy and West Indies Cricket, edited by Hilary McD. Beckles, 55–102. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Rohlehr, Gordon. 2004. A Scuffling of Islands: Essays on Calypso. San Juan, Trinidad: Lexicon. Sandiford, Keith A.P. 1998. Cricket Nurseries of Colonial Barbados: The Elite Schools, 1865–1966. Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press. Searle, Chris. 2001. Pitch of Life. London: Parrs Wood. Seecharan, Clem. 2006. Muscular Learning: Cricket and Education in the Making of the British West Indies at the End of the 19th Century. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Seecharan, Clem. 2009. From Ranji to Rohan: Cricket and Indian Identity in Colonial Guyana 1890s –1960s. Antigua: Hansib. Smith, Andrew. 2006. “Beyond a Boundary (of A Field of Cultural Production): Reading C.L.R. James with Bourdieu”. Theory, Culture and Society 23 (4): 95–112. Smith, Andrew. 2010. C.L.R. James and the Study of Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stoddart, Brian. 1988. “Caribbean Cricket: The Role of Sport in Emerging Small Nation Politics”. International Journal 43 (4): 618–642. Stoddart, Brian. 1995. “Cricket and Colonialism in the English-speaking Caribbean to 1914: Towards a Cultural Analysis”. In Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture, edited by Hilary McD. Beckles and Stoddart, 9–32. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stoddart, Brian, and Keith A.P. Sandiford. 1998. The Imperial Game: Cricket, Culture and Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Symmonds, Donna. 2002. “Preface to Third Edition”. In A History of West Indies Cricket by Michael Manley. Revised edition with Symmonds, xi. London: Andre Deutsch. Wenzel, Jennifer. 2006. “Remembering the Past’s Future: Anti-imperial Nostalgia and Some Version of the Third World”. Cultural Critique 62 (Winter): 1–32.

CHAPTER 2

Growing and Belonging

C.L.R. James opens Beyond a Boundary (1963) with his childhood view of Trinidad’s Tunapuna Cricket Club from the window of his grandmother’s house at the start of the twentieth century. Detailing the influences and experiences—cricketing, literary and puritanical—shaping his young self, James’ autobiographical strategy is to align his childhood and “youthful passion[s]” with his mature Marxist politics in “what appears to be a natural progression” (Pouchet Paquet 2002, 150). In this story of self-making, James’ female relatives are significant (see Chapter 7), but the driving impetus for his cricketing and political awakening comes from his father and other close male relatives. James also introduces father– son relationships from his literary and cricketing connections. Repeatedly, he is concerned with male forebears, the examples they set, the political implications of their stories and how, in father–son type relationships, the junior party follows and then exceeds his predecessor in order to gain self-understanding and help reshape the world. This chapter suggests that these Jamesian interests are also seen in much of the cricketing content of Anglophone Caribbean literature, particularly works from the 1950s and 1960s or reflecting back on this period. We see this in the cricket-linked father–son relationships that inform Errol John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1958) as well as V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street (1959), among

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others. The importance of male bonds and father–son type relationships is also evident in the kinds of “fictional autobiographies” (McWatt 1989) and other versions of cricketing boyhood found in the Anglophone Caribbean short story tradition, as in examples by Eileen Ormsby Cooper, Michael Anthony, Earl McKenzie, Ismith Khan, Paul KeensDouglas, Mark McWatt, Raywat Deonandan and Elahi Baksh. The central thesis of the chapter, then, is that cricket is used in narratives of masculine development, especially through depictions of male role models and father–son type relationships, in an effort to hold youthful ambition and exuberance alongside more mature reflections on personal growth and communal belonging.

I James’ father, Robert, is a foundational figure in Beyond a Boundary. As one of the “James clan” of teachers (James 2013, 27), he was a “selftaught polymath” and noted public speaker—just as his son would go on to be (Rosengarten 2008, 13). He was also a young cricketer of some repute before his modest teaching salary and family responsibilities pushed him away from the game (James 2013, 10). James describes developing a sceptical view of his father’s cricketing “prowess”, thanks to his mother’s reports of seeing her husband regularly “caught in the long field for very little” and his own sight of such a dismissal (9). However, while still a schoolboy, his view changed when Tunapuna spectators explained to him that Robert used to hit balls into the dam past extra cover “often”, making him “no mean stroke-player” (10). Robert passed cricket and literature to his son, gifting him his first cricket bat and ball, aged four, buying him books, and teaching him “discrimination” about “who and what are the Classics”—in contrast to his mother’s voracious appetite for fiction, which James also inherited (16). Crucially, it was thanks to his father’s “patient tutoring” that James gained entry to Queen’s Royal College (QRC), aged nine, as the (then) youngest ever scholarship winner (Rosengarten 2008, 13). This achievement brought increased renown to both father and son, but also made their relationship “difficult and at times stressful” (Worcester 1996, 8). It resulted in the “war” James waged—against the educational army headed by his father and including “the Director of Education and the Board of Education”—as a schoolboy caught between his love of cricket and extra-curricular reading, on one hand, and, on the other, the requirements of his scholarship (James

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2013, 21). When James’ scholarly failure meant he was unable to study abroad, he initially followed his father into teaching before finding his way into writing and, eventually, to England. In 1960, when Robert died, James heard praise for his father’s “work and personality” from Jeffrey Stollmeyer, the famed Trinidadian cricketer (25). Shortly afterwards James’ articles on “Trinidad Families” in The Nation newspaper extolled the dignity of his father, especially when dealing with white men, and asserted that he “never failed” on any “point of principle” (Rosengarten 2008, 128). In these and other ways, Robert opened the door for his son’s intellectual, literary and cricketing ambitions, and James’ account of his father demonstrates a growing sense of appreciation—often developed in response to observations of the family’s cricketing connections—for the way in which he was able to learn from his father’s personal integrity and its national and political ramifications In Beyond and Boundary and elsewhere, James also tells of the exceptionalism and cricketing heroism of other male relatives. His maternal grandfather, Josh Rudder, claimed that “he was the first coloured […] engine-driver on the Trinidad Government Railway”, and refused to reveal to anyone, especially the “white men” with their “big degrees”, how he fixed a sugar-estate engine (James 2013, 12, 15). Alongside their physical resemblance, James presents his grandfather’s obstinate “silence” as evidence of their “spiritual connection”, linking it to his argument in The Case for West-Indian Self Government (1933) (15). He also underscores their connection by explaining how his grandfather placated his parents about their son’s departure to England, and before that departure even grilled James on the best West Indies team for the 1933 tour by using his grandson’s own journalism. James’ family cricketing lore also includes Uncle Cuffie, someone who is not normally a player but one day makes up the numbers for his brother Robert’s team, only to knock off most of the runs needed for victory in a desire to leave early. But it is Cousin Cudjoe, the blacksmith, who the very young James visited, bat and ball in hand, and admired for his masculine strength and cricketing skills. James writes of Cudjoe as “Exciting and charming”, with “a handsome head on his splendid body”, and as the wicket keeper and “hitter” for an otherwise white cricket team, despite being no “sycophant” (8–9). The defining story James tells is of Cudjoe facing a famous fast bowler who “shook” the ball at him before bowling (8). Cudjoe’s reply is to shake his bat and then “hit [the bowler’s] first ball out of the world” (8). With Cudjoe, we see James describe a kind of surrogate

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father whose athletic body, physical strength and batting prowess establish him as an early, familial and iconic Black cricketer from whom James (and others) might learn how to act, including through cricket, with self-styled confidence in a communally significant manner. James further explains his cricketing-intellectual development via Victorian literary fathers and sons. He says that he took “for granted” the British stiff-lipped emotional quiet found in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), including how “George Osborne writes a cold, stiff letter to his estranged father” only to place “a kiss on the envelope” (James 2013, 39–40). James also reads Thomas Hughes’ wildly popular Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) by emphasising its layering of sports-linked father–son relationships, including: the reformation work of Thomas Arnold at Rugby School and the writings of his sons; the sporting priorities of Tom Brown and his Squire father; and Tom’s athletic rescue of his feeble friend, Arthur, whose own father has died. James tells of how Arnold’s desire to combine intellect and morality with character training at Rugby was corrupted by Hughes’ muscular Christianity, but also by the sports writings of his son, W.D. Arnold, from which Hughes “borrowed heavily” (James 2013, 169). It is in this context that James establishes how W.G. Grace’s father laid the ground, including an actual cricket wicket in the family orchard, for his cricketing-medical sons (175). James also uses the same idea—of a father establishing the ground for his son/s—to reanimate the link between the “games ethic” of imperial Britain and ancient Greece. He tells of Diagoras of Rhodes, a former “Olympic champion” who took to Olympia “his two sons, each of whom won a prize”, and whose sons then “crowned their father […] in triumph” (156). Here, the example-setting father comes with the doubling of his athletic achievements in a familial, intergenerational move forward—via his two sons—and he is celebrated with the hero worship of antiquity. James presents such hero worship of sporting figures as worthy of imitation because the athlete “represented his community” and so his “victory was testament to the quality of citizens” of his city (156). In addition, James reads these games as “a centre for the intellectual life of Greece” in a way that might seem absurd given the modern idea of sport’s neutrality, but is actually pivotal for a deep connection between sport and politics (156). James sees such a deep connection—and the importance of intergenerational male relations to it—in Caribbean cricket and, I suggest, it can also be seen in the region’s cricketing literature.

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Beyond a Boundary, then, examines Caribbean cricketing fathers and sons in terms of sporting heroism. Generally, James describes fathers in positive terms, even Matthew Bondman’s: “The whole Bondman family, except the father, was unsatisfactory” (2013, 4). But heroic sons often come from cricketing fathers. James presents Learie Constantine’s talent and racial consciousness as derived from his father, Lebrun, and other cricketing father figures. Lebrun toured England with the West Indies in 1900 and 1906. Employed as an overseer on a cocoa estate—another role typically held by white men—he was a cricketing hero of the people and captain of Shannon, Trinidad’s “club of the black lower-middle class” (50). James sees his friend Constantine as “the heir-apparent to his father”, and stresses that Constantine’s cricketing pedigree meant “he felt himself as good as anyone else”, both on and off the pitch, in a way that set him at odds with his sociopolitical milieu (104). According to James, Constantine was also “godfathered by the most respected and influential cricketers in the island” (104). (In contrast, James looked to Clifford Roach’s father for advice and followed his suggestion to join Maple, instead of Shannon, as this was the slightly superior “club of the brown-skinned middle-class” (50–53), which separated James from Constantine for some time.) To James’ mind, Constantine’s cricketing heroism reveals how the “national hero must have a nation” that supports them economically (108). He portrays Constantine’s decision to emigrate to England and play league cricket there as surpassing his father’s achievements, but also as “arising from national neglect” in specifically economic terms (110). Such neglect takes on tragic proportions for individual cricketers unable to capitalise on their talents, and it is in this light that a reading of John’s play, Moon on a Rainbow Shawl , is enriched by James’ view of John’s cricketing father, George.

II his cricket drew me like a magnet and in his complete dedication and disregard of all consequences I saw something of the quality which made the tragic hero, except that in [George] John there was no tragic flaw. (James 2013, 78) Cricket has always been more than a game in Trinidad. In a society which demanded no skills and offered no rewards to merit, cricket was the only

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activity which permitted a man to grow to his full stature and to be measured against international standards […]. The cricketer was our only hero-figure […]. And that was why, of those stories of failure, that of the ruined cricketer was the most terrible. In Trinidad lore he was a recurring figure: he appears in the Trinidad play, Moon on a Rainbow Shawl , by Errol John. (Naipaul 2001, 42)

John wrote Moon on a Rainbow Shawl in London in 1957 (Duff 2012), prompted partly by the dearth of substantial roles for Black actors that was restricting his own career, and partly by a desire to recreate the post-war Trinidad he left behind in 1950. The play fictionalises John’s departure for England, in the story of Ephraim (Eph), and reimagines John’s fast-bowling father, George John, through the character of Charlie Adams. In doing so, it transposes the playwright’s cricketing father and émigré son relationship onto a surrogate father–son relationship between Eph and Charlie, exploring their connected stories of opportunity, entrapment and escape. The play’s production history testifies to the centrality of the father–son dynamic as well as the significance of the play itself. Moon won the 1957 Observer play competition, but was not granted the West End production expected (Duff 2012). Instead, in May 1958, it became a BBC radio play titled Small Island Moon, and it was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in December, following the Notting Hill race riots of that summer. In 1960 it became an ITV play with John—“the living image of his father”, according to James (2013, 80)—performing as Eph. In 1962 John’s revised version was produced in New York with James Earl Jones as Eph and the actor’s father, Robert Earl Jones, as Charlie. It is this version of the play that has been repeatedly revived, in the UK and internationally, with its less lyrical dialogue, increased dramatic anger and streamlined structural progression—all offered under the softly optimistic title John refused to relinquish (Chambers 2011, 118; cf. Goddard 2018, 56). John also directed his own version of his play at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1986 and, shortly after, in 1988, Maya Angelou directed a “sentimental and nostalgic” rendering at the Almeida in London (Goddard 2018, 3). More recently, Eclipse Theatre toured the UK with its production in 2003 and, in 2012, the play was revived at the National Theatre, then toured in 2014. The play is, therefore, both a Caribbean “prototypical yard play” (Stone 1994, 34), and a “classic” of “black-British-Caribbean” theatre (Goddard 2018, 2). It is also a significant example of Caribbean literature’s cricketing content,

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recalling the struggles of Black players, especially bowlers, in the 1920s as West Indies formally entered international cricket, and doing so in the context of mid-twentieth century emigration to the cricketing “mother country”. John’s “return” to Trinidad in the play bears the hallmarks of 1930s barrack works by Alfred Mendes, James and others, with its povertystricken Port of Spain yard and its use of calypso to establish a local soundscape that stands between the competing influences of England and America. John’s decision to move the action, with his 1962 revisions, from Woodbrooke (the residential area of his childhood) to the East Dry River District, pushes the setting closer to calypso and further down the socioeconomic scale. Unsurprisingly, all of his characters dream of escaping the yard. This space is dominated by matriarch Sophia Adams, but enlightened by her daughter, Esther. It is also given its sensual depth by Eph’s pregnant girlfriend, Rosa, and its sexual comedy by prostituteturned-fiancée, Mavis. Nevertheless, even with the importance of the female figures and the moon’s feminine associations (Cole-Nimblett 2011), the play circles around Charlie, the tragic former cricketer who steals from Ole Mack’s café for his daughter’s education. It is also driven forward by Eph’s planned escape—from his life as a trolleybus driver and from Rosa’s pregnancy—to Liverpool, a former slave-trade hub of northwest England. (This is despite John and the Windrush generation already understanding the difficulties of living in England by the mid-1950s.) Moreover, the structural heart of the play, and the motivational explanation for Eph’s need to leave, is Charlie’s memory of his abbreviated career as a fast bowler. And, according to Kate Dorney and Frances Gray, Charlie’s cricketing speech, considered below, is “perhaps the theatre’s best-ever speech about the politics of sport” (2013, 48; cf. Goddard 2018, 33). Cricket is portrayed by John as a Janus-faced illusion whose dreamlike promise of success and prosperity (obtained by an exceptional few) is bound to defeat, exclusion, drinking and jail (for a wider majority). In Moon, Charlie is the “ruined cricketer” Naipaul identifies in The Middle Passage (1962) as a recurring tragic figure in “Trinidad lore” (2001, 42), cited above, and he stands for the tradition of West Indies fast bowling and Caribbean cricket’s fallen Black heroes. Hilary Beckles notes that even his name, Charlie Adams, evokes “a regular, common kind of being – if not the first man in terms of biblical text” (1998, 105). In his cricketing youth, Charlie had been “slim and handsome”, real “spit and polish”,

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but on stage he is a rum-drinking thief with a “big, bloated” body (John 1963, 41, 39). Despite his own sexual appeal and youthful strength, Eph reads Charlie and Charlie’s body as a vision of his own future if he remains trapped in the yard and by impending fatherhood (seemingly inescapable, as Ephraim derives from a Hebrew word being “being fruitful”). Moreover, when Charlie’s loosely worn mask of drunken happiness evaporates he breaks down and, in his desperate state, stands as a fatherly and cricketing warning to Eph about race-based prejudice and life limitations. In the play, Charlie had been a fast bowler of international promise in the 1920s, and he describes his experience to Eph as “something more real than a dream” (John 1963, 62). He remembers himself approaching thirty, “strong as a bull – and at the height of his power of as bowler” (61), stating: my big talent was with the ball. I used to trundle down to that wicket – an’ send them down red hot! […] in my time, John, Old Constantine, Francis, them fellas was fast! Fast! Up in England them so help put the Indies on the map […] But for the West Indian tour to England that year – I didn’t even get an invite to the trials […] In them days, boy – The Savannah Club crowd was running most everything […] They broke me. (61–62)

Speed, aggression and “red hot” bowling had anchored Charlie’s sense of masculinity and self-respect. Richard D.E. Burton claims that such bowling is bound to the reputation-based values of calypso and of the street, in contrast to the domesticity of the yard (1997, 181). Clearly, Charlie’s fast bowling enabled him to propel himself and his weapon— the ball—at those above and beyond his immediate social and economic reach. However, those same figures eventually “broke” him and are named as the exclusively white “Savannah Club crowd” of Queen’s Park West (Bereton 1979, 57). Meanwhile, Charlie’s protest against the unfair boarding conditions for Black players while on an intercolonial tour of Jamaica caused a “stink” that eventually got into the papers, and this controversy, he says, was used to end his career in “big cricket”, including his chance to represent West Indies and escape to English county cricket (John 1963, 62).

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As a fictional member of the first “generation of black men bowling fast [that] was more sure of itself” (James 2013, 79), Charlie’s confidence to speak up actually causes his downfall. In the 1958 edition of the play his protest means that he misses out on the trials for the West Indies team before its 1923 tour of England. In the 1963 edition the trials are pulled forward to 1927, meaning that Charlie misses out on touring England as part of the first official West Indies Test team and on the very moment a regional nation is “imagined”, for the first time, through official international cricket (Beckles 2003). This idea of a regional nation ripples out across the play. The 1958 edition is dedicated to “The New West Indian Nation” and Rosa’s titular “rainbow shawl” is an obvious marker of the colours and “texture” of Trinidad’s racially mixed population, as highlighted in the play’s casting note (John 1963, 10). It is also a symbol of the young federation, encoded onstage as a bedcover and security blanket upon which the light and hope of the moon shines. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the collapse of the West Indies Federation in 1962, this wider resonance is diminished in the 1963 edition, but the play’s cricketing content holds open the idea of regional action and belonging. For Charlie, though, standing on a point of principle means rejection from this regional collectivity. He is also denied the chance “to be measured against international standards”, having been denied the right to a trial (Naipaul 2001, 42). This absence of a trial implies that his later imprisonment is a foregone conclusion (and in this there may be a nod to John’s acting career, where auditions, or trials, often had their own foregone, exclusionary conclusions). Cricketing and criminal actions are also pushed together by the refrain of “caught yer” used by the children playing in the yard, and also framing Eph’s refusal to be “caught” by Rosa’s pregnancy (John 1963, 28). Charlie haunts the yard, and Eph specifically, then, as a reminder of the racial and class injustices— the traps—that structure Caribbean cricket and their own lives. Charlie’s character also points up the contrast between a sense of familial, fatherly and cricketing “team” loyalty (to Esther and Sophia, despite Esther not being his biological child, as well as to his Black cricketing teammates) and Eph’s familial abandonments—of his grandmother, and of Rosa and their unborn child. Charlie is based on John’s fast bowling father, George John, whom James describes as the “knight-errant of fast bowling”, “the fast bowlers’ bowler”, “not hostile but hostility itself” (2013, 73, 81). Bowling his “Thunderbolts”, John “incarnated the plebs of his time” and did so in his

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role for Stingo cricket club—a team that, as James explains, was “totally black and [with] no social status” (74, 79, 50). John’s career was interrupted by the First World War, but he toured England in 1923, aged at least thirty eight, when his bowling and that of Learie Constantine and George Francis (the “fellas” Charlie recalls, alongside “John”) helped put West Indies “on the map” of international cricket. In his depiction of George John and his sons, James concentrates on their shared attributes in terms of physique and personality. Echoing his description of Cudjoe’s impressive physique, James relates the speed and elegance of John the fast bowler to his physical strength: “He was just the right height […] all power and proportion […] as handsome a man as you would meet in a day’s journey” (73). He also says that John’s determination to bowl out his opposition by “sheer pace” brought a dominant, forceful on-field presence and commanding self-confidence (74). James even records that, on the 1923 tour of England, John’s assertive sense of independence was conveyed in a retort to his vice captain’s enquiry about not looking pleased when watching games from the sidelines: “My face is my own” (76). James sees much of the father in the sons and, when describing his view of George’s sons, he uses the sense of intergenerational glory he presented in the story of Diagoras. He tells of George’s eldest son (also named George) leaping from his seat during a Test match in 1960 to shout “That is ball fa’der”—meaning “the parent of all balls”—revealing the core of the man, and his familial line, despite such connections usually being hidden beneath middle-class propriety (80–81). With Errol, James says he takes seriously the younger son’s plans for drama in England and the Caribbean, seeing “Behind the graceful exterior […] the shadow of his formidable father, rolling up his sleeves” (81). James’ view is echoed in Philip Hedley’s Guardian obituary for Errol, in which he describes how the actor was said to be “difficult” to work with, but that this is “often” said of “actors who ask intelligent questions of directors, or who are prepared to stand on a point of principle” (qtd. in Goddard 2018, 59). And it is standing on points of principle that connects cricketing father with theatrical son, and both of them to John’s vision of Charlie. What we learn from James’ portrayal of John’s cricketing father is that Charlie has the gravity and success of George John stripped from him. George’s courage, physicality, self-determination and personal high standards are the backdrop to Charlie’s demise, the counter-story of what could have been. In making this move, the playwright son looks to

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account for his own emigration from home by recasting a heroic cricketing father as a tragic failure, and as an example of the dangers of principled opposition, while—through Eph—flagging the kinds of racebased problems shaping his own life and (limited) career opportunities. James presents George as an articulation of his people’s skill and inner resolve, whose “dedication and disregard for all consequences” marked him as a tragic figure without the usual tragic “flaw” (2013, 78). In contrast, John moves away from the Jamesian vision of heroic exceptionalism and makes Charlie an “everyman” of denied opportunity, a figure more in line with Naipaul’s assessment of the gravity and communal impact of the “ruined cricketer” (2001, 42). Where James sees George only through his cricket, John presents Charlie primarily through his postcricket personal relationships and weaknesses. At the same time, though, John’s play depicts the restrictive and limiting conditions within which his father’s exceptionalism shone. John also establishes a firm and ethical questioning of Eph’s desire to depart, indicating that there is more in Trinidad’s future than Charlie or even George John found in its past. While George John was “head groundsman at the [Queen’s Park] Oval”, “ruling there”, James says, “like a dictator” (2013, 75), in the play’s yard Charlie is reduced to a bat mender, and so is similarly reliant on the patronage of the wealthy cricketing elite. Charlie is working when he tells Eph of his past, and the bats onstage stand as physical references to the power of the white batsman and the colonial order. It seems that the power of the bat has not yet become available to the men of the yard. This is ironically revealed with Prince’s attempt to take up one of the bats as if to strike Mavis only to become “the patsy” again when she pre-emptively issues her verbal assault (John 1963, 55). When Eph comforts Charlie by saying he was a “class” cricketer (61), the younger man takes up a bat to play some “air shots”—which, in the 1958 edition, are described more exactly as a “late cut” and an “off drive”, suggesting a slicing back and across, and also a traditionally elegant, flowing strike forward (John 1958, 50). In doing so Eph reconnects with the game, with Charlie and with the island, while simultaneously seeking to move away from Charlie’s position as a Black bowler by handling the bat. Eph blames Trinidad for Charlie’s situation and bemoans that “It ent much different” for him (John 1963, 62). Charlie, though, adds a complication, saying that there were “other things. Little things. Big things. Altogether pushing yer out of the stream – and on to the bank – So that yer rot in the sun” (63). These “things” might be Sophia’s (seemingly illegitimate) pregnancy or

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wider, perhaps regional or global politico-economic realities. Nevertheless, Charlie and Sophia both claim that Trinidad is changing, including for men like Eph (who is set to be promoted to inspector), and their small glimmer of optimism—coinciding across the two editions with Federation in 1958 and then Independence in 1962—is carried forward by Esther. At the end of the play, Young Murray arrives to collect his repaired bats. Before Charlie’s arrest, he and Eph had discussed Young Murray’s talent, his potential to become a future international player and his father’s wealth—suggesting that the Murrays stand for the current order of light-skinned cricketing continuity. However, when Charlie observes the marks on Murray’s bat his sensitivity to the signs of skilful artistry implies that the exactness of Murray’s batting is akin to the skilful artistry of Esther’s needlework. In this way, the play briefly connects cricket and beauty in a way that repositions cricketing skill as aesthetic endeavour rather than simply part of the combative stand-off between bowler and batsman, often understood as violent attack and necessary defence. Charlie’s sense of the need for young players, like Murray, to be protected by the cricketing authorities also converts his surrogate fathering into an understanding of the need to nurture a future generation of regional representatives. When Sophia returns from visiting Charlie in jail, Murray explains that he can arrange for her husband to coach the “junior school” at QRC (76). This last, painfully ironic blow could have re-established Charlie as husband-father-provider, but it would also have resituated him in the position of Black bowler, employed by the cricketing elite and only able to perform at them if he is also working for them. Instead, he resides in jail while Eph, it seems, has left for England, leaving behind his unborn child and his surrogate cricketing father. And this pattern of a creative, surrogate son leaving behind both real and cricketing-surrogate fathers in order to find a place in the world—or in England, specifically—is a pattern that Naipaul also writes through, most notably in Miguel Street .

III Ramachandra Guha (2001) observes that cricket has a clear place in Naipaul’s life and work. Guha notes that Naipaul’s name first appeared in the British press in 1952 because he played cricket for his Oxford college. Guha also highlights the cricketing content sprinkled across Naipaul’s letters from university to family, finds four cricketing points in Naipaul’s main body of work, and identifies Naipaul’s cricketing journalism of 1963.

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Nonetheless, Guha has not managed to fully register the range of cricketing examples found across Naipaul’s oeuvre and, despite his interest in V.S. Naipaul: Letters Between a Father and Son (1999), he does not recognise that Naipaul’s engagement with cricket is often an engagement with real, fictionalised and/or surrogate father and son relationships. Letters Between a Father and Son centres on the period between 1950, when Naipaul arrived in England aged eighteen to study at Oxford University, and 1953, when his father—Seepersad, or Pa—died and Naipaul began his literary life in London. The letters evidence Naipaul’s first impressions of England, his family’s money worries, and the literary vocation of both father and son. They also point to an interest in cricket, recording that Naipaul watched an Indian team beat Oxford, that he featured in the Oxford Mail with his college’s best bowling figures, and that he top-scored and took three wickets in his last match (Naipaul 1999, 201). His father maintains the cricketing connections, describing his own effort in 1950 to sell two pictures of West Indies spin bowler, Sonny Ramadhin, to the Trinidad Guardian (18), the newspaper he had worked for as a journalist, and explaining that, like his son, he too “made the mistake of sending a Ramadhin story […] to the News Chronicle, instead of sending it to the Sunday Chronicle” (25). Naipaul responds encouragingly, saying it’s not “too late” to send the “stuff to any of the Sunday papers” because Ramadhin is known in England but not his Indian-Caribbean “background” (28). As with their other letters, these cricket-linked dialogues are warm and thoughtful exchanges, and are often linked to advice about writing and publishing. Naipaul’s suggestions to his father seem well heeded, and Seepersad only adopts a fatherly tone to nurture his son’s aspirations. In fact, Seepersad’s thought of retaining the letters for a book becomes this collection, and his idea of beginning a story with himself leads to Naipaul’s classic, A House for Mr Biswas (1961). By 1952, though, Naipaul is depressed and withdrawing from family communication, and his letter dated 2nd June offers brief cricket information interspersed with news of a “breakdown” (1999, 196). The following year Seepersad died, aged 47, without seeing his son. Naipaul later said that he regretted “not looking back” (2003b, 78). However, he did imaginatively return to Trinidad in his early fiction, especially through the memory and literary lessons of his father as well as via cricket. As Landeg White contends, “Naipaul’s earliest debt is to the short stories of […] his father” (1975, 58), including his father’s writing for the Trinidad Guardian and short story collection, Gurudeva and Other

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Indian Tales (1943). Reading A House for Mr Biswas , Judith Levy presents the killing of Mr Biswas’ father as a Lacanian move to enter into language and assume the Name-of-the-Father, to simultaneously be rid of the father and to devour him in an act of incorporation (1995, 5–7). In a similar vein, Naipaul admitted absorbing his father’s literary voice and material as part of his move into authorship (2003b, 14). Returning “home” in his early fiction allowed him to reconnect with his childhood as well as the tragi-comic writing of his father, while still pushing past his father’s literary example. This reconnection was managed, in part, through cricket. Naipaul described his experience of going back to Trinidad in 1961 as a series of images “running fast” like a “cricket flick book” (1995, 33). Patrick French reports that a boyhood friend of Naipaul’s remembers him perpetually reading newspapers as other boys played cricket (2008, 40), but Naipaul claimed that “cricket was one of the delights of [his] childhood in 1940s Trinidad” (qtd. in French 2008, 240). Indeed, evidence of this boyhood connection with the game can be found in Miguel Street . White argues that with Miguel Street specifically, Naipaul erases the father figure, and thereby his own father, in order to reexplore Trinidad on his own terms (1975, 58). But Naipaul clearly uses his father’s literary model—of episodic and domestically dramatic character studies—to help him explore the street relationships and surrogate father figures connected to his childhood, and he often does this through cricketing relationships. Naipaul wrote Miguel Street in 1955, while working for the BBC’s Caribbean Voices , and in an interview described it as the “very important” book that got him started as a writer (Tewarie 2007, 64). Like John’s play, the book is informed by earlier yard fictions (see Cudjoe 1988). The seventeen interwoven short stories have, at their core, the impressions of an anonymous and fatherless boy narrator—a fictionalised Naipaul of sorts—as he experiences 1930s creole street life in Port of Spain, following his family’s move there from the Indian-identified countryside. The humorous sketches home in on the calypso-inspired comedy of the street’s male role models and their “life lived […] on the pavement” (Walsh 1973, 11). As John Thieme suggests, Naipaul relies heavily upon the sounds, styles and ironic humour of calypso, referencing at least fourteen calypso songs from the 1930s and 1940s (1981, 19). Gordon Rohlehr contends that the employment of calypso’s ironic and satirical strategies enables Naipaul to “examine the past without sentimental self-indulgence” (1968, 139), while also mobilising calypso’s ability to

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“elevate and deflate the ideal of phallocentric masculinity” (Rohlehr 1994, 345). Additionally, Thieme views Naipaul’s imaginative return from England through calypso as expressing—perhaps for the only time—a “genuine concern for” and “degree of sympathy” with “the ordinary West Indian”, including the urban Black male (1981, 19). In this vein, Miguel Street explores how “To be a man, among we men” (Naipaul 1971a, 14), and part of how to be a man, it transpires, is involvement in cricket, most commonly through conversations and gambling. Cricket is also played by the street’s young boys whose games are tainted with poverty as the ball regularly gets wet “in the stinking gutter” (22). More importantly, and in a manner similar to Moon, cricket structures the narrator’s interactions with surrogate father figures—Man–man, Uncle Bhakcu and Hat—and helps broker his move away from each of them, and thereby away from the street and Trinidad. The young narrator’s connection with Man–man is relatively brief, but it frames his turn to colonial education as an escape route. Man–man is the madman of Miguel Street whose descent into religious fantasy results in a mock crucifixion and, thereafter, permanent incarceration. Man–man is based on a fabled Port of Spain resident depicted in The Mighty Wonder’s 1950s calypso “Follow Me Children”, and appearing in Ismith Khan’s The Crucifixion (1987). Earl Lovelace also resurrects a Man Man (no hyphen) as the martyred leader of a secret African society in Salt (1996). In all these cases the mock-heroic martyr is important to the text’s interrogation of the self-sacrificing man. The same is true of Naipaul’s Man–man, whose identity expresses a bind between “Man”, capitalised and universal, a supposedly homogenous collective, and “man”, uncapitalised and singular, a sometimes lonely and socially isolated being who insists on inscribing words into the land in an effort to represent the actions of his people. As Naipaul’s boy narrator explains: “If you told Man-man you were going to the cricket, he would write CRICK and then concentrate on the Es until he saw you again” (Naipaul 1971a, 39). Man– man’s scribal stutter at the letter E evokes England and his surprisingly English accent, and only stops when the young narrator returns from his game and Man–man then writes T. With the stick-as-pen and cricketas-absence pushed together, Man–man’s stutter is part of a wider concern with literacy and mimicry that reflects a coming into the English language and a faltering relationship with the (then) colonial master. Man–man’s ultimate refusal to become the heroic saviour (by demanding people stop the stone throwing he initiates) leaves the narrator having to forge his

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own path to salvation, or at least an escape, via a different but related mode of inscription, writing of that which is now out of sight—the past and the home he has left behind. As the stories of Miguel Street progress, there is a growing maturity to the boy narrator’s ability to identify and distance himself from the weaknesses of the men around him. And these weaknesses are often conveyed in a kind of calypso comedy, as with the depiction of Mr Bhakcu, the boy’s uncle. Initially, Naipaul establishes the boy’s pitying effort to connect with Bhakcu by mirroring his uncle’s enthusiastic yet limited understanding of cars. Yet when later presenting Bhakcu’s wife beating, Naipaul relies on an adult humour just beyond the boy’s understanding: For a long time I think Bhakcu experimented with rods for beating his wife, and I wouldn’t swear that it wasn’t Hat who suggested a cricket bat. But whosoever suggested it, a second-hand cricket bat was bought from the Queen’s Park Oval, and oiled, and used on Mrs. Bhakcu. Hat said, “Is the only thing she really could feel, I think.” The strangest thing about this was that Mrs. Bhakcu kept the bat clean and well-oiled. Boyee tried many times to borrow the bat, but Mrs. Bhakcu never lent it. […] [Bhacku] hated his wife, and he beat her regularly with the cricket bat. But she was beating him too, with her tongue, and I think Bhakcu was really the loser in these quarrels. (Naipaul 1971a, 119–123)

With wife beating common on the street, Bhakcu’s seizure of the bat— as phallic weapon—symbolises what Niels Sampath sees as an IndianCaribbean struggle against white hegemonic masculinity, via the Oval, and, simultaneously, a struggle with creolisation (as reputation) and a kind of “Indian domestic power” cast as honour-bound (Reddock 2004, xxii). In this calypso-inspired battle, Mrs Bhakcu appears problematically complicit in the violence, tending to the bat as if it is a sexual object. She thereby seems to help reinforce her husband’s masculine status, despite her verbal assaults apparently emasculating him. That the bat is “oiled” in the way that it would be for cricket (as preparation and protection for use and longevity) deepens the farce of lubricated wood. Mrs Bhacku’s situation is described as only improving when her husband becomes a pundit because his religious posturing requires a change in their relationship. It is important to note two things here. First, that there is a symbolic continuity between the pen, the stick and the cricket bat, derived from

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stick fighting (kalinda), as phallic weapons undermined by the exposure of masculine masquerades in the stories. And second, that where the traditional cricketing order was Black bowlers versus white batsman, taking up the cricket bat—like taking up the pen—is an act of disruption and opposition for all non-white men, and this disruption is pushed forward in Naipaul’s act of writing. Standing above Bhakcu and Man–man is Hat, the principal surrogate father of the street, described by Naipaul as a “Port of Spain Indian” (2003b, 54), and “dark-brown” Rex Harrison (1971a, 160). As the street’s “smartman”, a version of the hero of calypso, Hat is the man boys and other men aspire to be, but he also sets the street’s standards of behaviour by setting limits to the collective laughter because, it seems, he perceives “the pain beneath the pose” of those around him (Feder 2001, 165). Childless himself, Hat is guardian to his nephews, Errol and Boyie, and in the collection’s penultimate episode he takes twelve of the street’s children with him to the Oval as if they are all his own, in a kind of cricketing pantomime of fatherhood. His mock-fatherhood grants him attention and respect in the crowd as he “successfully combines the pose of virility with the attributes of the trickster” (Thieme 1981, 28). While watching the cricket match, Hat shouts, gesticulates and acts in accordance with the values of the street. At the same time, he conveys cricket’s traditions of gentility to the boy narrator by teaching him about cricketer’s names, the scoreboard and how a batsman can be said to have “finished batting” rather than simply being “out” (Naipaul 1971a, 155). Hat thus embodies the competing traditions of Caribbean cricket that Burton categorises as those of the white elite and its “coloured” imitators versus those of the Black masses, that is, the Anglo-creole “play up, play up, and play the game” versus the ““Afro-creole” play (1997, 179). Hat also corresponds to Burton’s suggestion that “West Indian men […] watch and play cricket with minds, hearts, values and expectations shaped by the street culture of boyhood, adolescence and early manhood”, but that, despite the “enhancing of individual and group reputation”, their “values are potentially—though rarely in fact—at odds with the values of respectability, […] and the ethos of the dominant white and coloured elites” (1995, 98). In fact, while the story depicts an exuberant Caribbean crowd at the Oval—including a woman repeatedly shouting at the Trinidadian fast bowler, Tyrell Johnson, because she knew him as a boy—it is Hat who cries out, without a hint of irony, “White people is God” when

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Gerry Gomez reaches 150 runs (Naipaul 1971a, 155). Hat’s support for Trinidad’s captain in an intercolonial game is understandable, but he does not praise Gomez (the Cambridge blue) individually, but white people collectively. Moreover, Hat’s “impossible bets” set Gomez against George Headley of Jamaica, who, in 1948, became the first Black man to lead the West Indies team on the field (156). George Lamming’s In The Castle of My Skin (1953) highlights the links between cricket and social unrest in 1930s Trinidad, as well as Headley’s importance to regional consciousness and particularly young boys, explaining that “Every boy who felt his worth as a batsman called himself George Headley” (1987, 92). James writes of Headley as a great batsman, carrying the batting of the West Indies throughout the 1930s. This earned Headley the name “Atlas”, and he was also nicknamed the “Black Bradman”—a term of supposed praise, referencing Australia’s great (white) batsman, Don Bradman. Headley is, therefore, Naipaul’s cricketing counterpart to B Wordsworth—Miguel Street’s struggling poet and calypsonian character. In counterposing Gomez and Headley, and Headley and Wordsworth, Naipaul exposes Hat’s calypsonian performance of masculine bravado and self-assurance as unsustainable when faced with the cultural supremacy of, and his admiration for, “white people”. It is in the same sketch that Hat is arrested for wife beating and, seemingly as a consequence, local cricket ends for the children: “a great hush fell on Miguel Street […]. No one played cricket” (Naipaul 1971a, 163). This story of Hat comes as the final prelude to the narrator’s departure for England after he has rejected the examples of his surrogate fathers. His move away from home, then, is a move away from calypso-bound street fathers, even the notably appealing Hat, as well as away from the vitality and male camaraderie of cricket in childhood. As with Miguel Street , Naipaul returns to his Trinidadian childhood in his first novel, The Mystic Masseur (1957), dedicating the book to his father, and again in A House for Mr Biswas , which fictionalises his father’s search for a stable home and has Mr Biswas’ son, Anand, as another fictional version of Naipaul. In A House for Mr Biswas a cricket pitch stands next to the Shorthills home of the Tulsi family and is repeatedly invaded and “violated” by unwanted locals—villagers, mules and sheep— and bouts of rain until it is destroyed (Naipaul 2003a, 422). Eventually, the pitch becomes “a grass covered overhang which collapsed in a day or two and was carried off by the next downpour” (445). A similar incident comes early in An Area of Darkness (1964), Naipaul’s Indian

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travelogue from the same period. In this text Naipaul describes a “deep hole” that should have been a well standing next to the cricket pitch by his grandmother’s home in Trinidad and becoming, in his imagination, “a nightmare peril to energetic fielders chasing a boundary hit” (2002a, 23). The hole is dug by Babu, an Indian of warrior caste who lived with Naipaul’s grandmother as a labourer and who, after hitting rock and abandoning his digging, “went away back into the void from which he had come” (23). In these two examples, the Caribbean cricket pitch is a leftover from a past that has eroded until it is a dark cavern or “void” of colonial inheritance into which mimic men may fall, and from which Babu seems to have emerged. David Omeron (1968) draws attention to Naipaul’s repeated use of derelict landscapes, and these cricket pitches are part of such colonial dereliction in Naipaul’s repeated portrayal of erosion and decay in Trinidad and for its men, including those born in India, like Babu. Pursuing a similar idea, Sue Thomas argues that the narrator of Naipaul’s In a Free State (1971b) has “repressed his anger and humiliation at discrimination because to focus on this would be ‘opening up manholes for’ him ‘to fall in’”, where the metaphor of “manholes” implies castration anxiety (2003, 231). The same might be said of the chasmal cricket pitch and cricket’s place in A House for Mr Biswas more generally. In a late chapter, entitled “The Void”, Mr Biswas is so pleased with his new government job and pay rise that, like Hat, he embarks on a trip to the Oval: It was the fashion at the time for men to appear on sporting occasions with a round tin of fifty English cigarettes […] Mr Biswas had the matches; he used half a day’s subsistence allowance to buy the cigarettes. Not wishing to derange the hang of his jacket, he cycled to the Oval with the tin in his hand […] At last he came to his seat, dusted it with a handkerchief, stooping slightly in response to a request from someone behind. While he unbuttoned his jacket a burst of applause came from all. Absently casting a glance at the cricket field, Mr Biswas applauded. He sat down, hitched up his trousers, crossed his legs, operated the cutter on the lid of the cigarette tin, extracted a cigarette and lit it. There was a tremendous burst of applause. Everyone in the stand stood up. Chairs scraped backwards, some overturned. What crowd there was had advanced on the field; the cricketers were racing away, flitting blobs of white. The stumps had disappeared; the umpires, separated by the crowd, were walking sedately to the pavilion. The match was over. Mr Biswas did not inspect the pitch. He

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went outside, unlocked his bicycle and cycled home, holding the tin of cigarettes in his hand. (Naipaul 2003a, 537–538)

Indicative of Naipaul’s humour and Mr Biswas’ farcical life, this attempt to establish a masculine image and connect with the local population quickly collapses. Mr Biswas’ cool manly pose, indicated by the cigarettes, is hollow and soon annihilated by the ironic presentation of applause and the bathos of the game’s abrupt end. His inability to participate in the celebration marks his physical and emotional distance from the victory and the crowd, as well as from the land itself. As he returns home he retreats into an emasculated self, positioned as an Indian-Caribbean beside but separate from the largely African-Caribbean cricketing masses. The incident enacts the same sense of failed initiation and subsequent isolation that Anand endures during the botched trip to the cinema in the previous chapter where, as Jacqueline Bardolph shows, the son is destined to repeat the mistakes of his father even as they grow apart (1986, 83–86). This idea of an Indian-Trinidadian father and son growing apart takes another, specifically cricketing form in Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967) as Ralph Singh gives away the bat his father brought him for Christmas and relinquishes his fantasy of a trip to the Oval in a fashion that precipitates his father’s disappearance into the hills to preach. In both of these texts, then, cricket ultimately works to separate the son from the father, despite the son’s proximity to—or replication of—the father’s shortcomings on his way to an improved life situation. Naipaul revisits a similar line of thinking in terms of cricket and father–son relationships in his Indian travelogue trilogy. Having set the game explicitly within the architectural legacy of the British Empire in India: A Wounded Civilisation (1977), he relays a series of familial narratives in India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), which repeatedly feature cricket as important in childhood, but superfluous or distracting in adulthood. The most striking example of this is in Kakusthan’s story, where his son’s love of cricket is set against his possible educational achievement and seen as inhibiting the son’s chance of exceeding the (limited) success of his father. Kakusthan wants Naipaul to instruct his son against cricket—the game he has already seen fuel tensions between the Hindus and Muslims—but Naipaul can’t oblige. He likes the boy’s “seriousness” about the game and fails to see “how, in the conditions of the colony, anyone could do any serious reading or study there” anyway (Naipaul 1991, 264–265). This abrupt and damning verdict uses cricket-linked

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father and son relationships to condemn the colony to its “darkness” in a typical Naipaulian gesture, but this is notably different from Naipaul’s early fiction and especially from his dabbling with cricket journalism in 1963. In 1963 Naipaul produced some cricketing journalism while West Indies, under Frank Worrell, were in England and won the Test series 3-1. Naipaul attended the Lord’s and Edgbaston matches as well as other tour games and, according to Guha (2001), spent time-travelling with the team. Naipaul produced two articles depicting the Lord’s match: the first for the Illustrated Weekly of India; and the second, entitled “Test”, for Harpers and Queen. Additionally, his review of Beyond a Boundary appeared in Encounter magazine that September and was, in some ways, a response to James’ positive review of The Mystic Masseur. Naipaul used his short cricket pieces to develop his writing profile in London, offering surprisingly positive depictions of the crowd with which he identified himself and through which he negotiates his proximity to James. “Test” follows a thrilling draw decided with the last ball, at Lord’s, but is primarily an “exercise in attentive listening” (Guha 2001), as Naipaul depicts the voices and personalities of the West Indies fans, including their joking, dancing and gambling, and the reunion that happens between working- and middle-class West Indies supporters. This leads Guha (2001) to argue that “Test” provides some of Naipaul’s most positive comments about his native land and people, and certainly the tone is reminiscent of the warmth seen in Miguel Street . Naipaul also satirises the “ridiculous public school heroism” that brings English batsman Colin Cowdrey to the crease with a “bandaged arm” to “save his side […] without having to face a ball”, yet still recognises this code as one that unites “dissimilar people—English and West Indian” (2012, 324). He also writes that each day he has “left Lord’s emotionally drained”, and ends on a note about individual heroism (324). French characterises this as an “exercise in nostalgia” (2008, 240), but one suspects the emerging author is simply tapping into what he thinks is necessary for popular print, especially as the sentiments expressed are close to those of Beyond a Boundary, which Naipaul reviewed around this time. In this review, Naipaul applauds James for his “originality” and the “rightness of his argument” about cricket, and adheres to James’ rendering of the English public school code as the only cultural “system” they possess (Naipaul 1963, 74). This results in them “speaking the same language”, despite their sizeable differences in terms of age, race,

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class and personal politics (75). Naipaul describes Beyond a Boundary as providing “solidity to West Indian literary endeavor”, thereby establishing James as a kind of literary forefather (75). Nevertheless, he ignores James’ insistence that cricket is art and, contrary to James, reduces the game’s emancipatory potential to its role in an already achieved nationalist cause. More (im)pertinently, Naipaul describes his difference from James in terms of their personal achievements, pointing out that—in a gesture of false modesty—he only “watched cricket […] and won the scholarship” to Oxford, something James never did (75). Clearly, despite “indications of an early regard for James” (Schwarz 2003, 23), Naipaul was already positioning himself as distinct from—and above—his predecessor. Indeed, Naipaul even builds a cheeky remark into “Test” about the “billing these cricket writers get” (2012, 316). In 1950s London, though, Naipaul and James were interlocutors. Naipaul denied there was any sparring between them but, as Bill Schwarz explains, he later exhibited an obvious “contempt” for James (2003, 22). This famously came though, as Schwarz notes, with the old, idle and failed Marxist, Lebrun (the name of Constantine’s cricketing father), in A Way in the World: A Sequence (1994)—a character who Naipaul acknowledged was based on James (1995, vii). Schwarz also suggests that, for Naipaul, James stood as “a phantom of an unappeased West Indian past” (2003, 22), and this can be recoded as a kind of intellectual surrogate father figure whose shadow Naipaul sought to escape, and whose claim to a “West Indian” group identity Naipaul repeatedly refuted or sought to evade. When James writes to Naipaul immediately before and after the review of Beyond a Boundary, though, there is a pressing warmth and interest in Naipaul, as “Vidia” (James 2006, 116–118). In a manner not dissimilar to Seepersad’s letters to his son, James describes his own work while also engaging with Naipaul’s literary commitments and progress. James is appreciative of Naipaul’s review, and repeatedly positions them as similarly “West Indian”—something he also does later in his interviews and writing (Hall 1996). For example, in an Appendix he adds to The Black Jacobins (1938), James writes: “Naipaul is an East Indian. Mr Biswas is an East Indian. But the […] East Indian has become the West Indian as all other expatriates” (2001, 325). This echoes James’ use of Mr Biswas to indicate the significance of Rohan Kanhai’s batting on the 1963 tour, writing that Kanhai was “a unique pointer of the West Indian quest for identity”, free “not only to create ‘a house for Mr Biswas’, but [to be] free as few West Indians have been” (2006, 170–171). In “Test” the

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brevity of Kanhai’s depicted innings at Lord’s means he receives warm recognition but relatively little attention from Naipaul. In later writing and commentaries, though, Naipaul clearly articulates an anti-Jamesian position in his insistence on Indian-Caribbean specificity and a consistent refusal to be subsumed into the category of “West Indian”—as with his withdrawing of Guerrillas (1975) from publisher Secker and Warburg after they described him as a “West Indian novelist” (Thomas 2003, 228). When writing about Samuel Selvon’s Turn Again Tiger (1958) in the early 1960s, Naipaul described how Selvon “would be called an East Indian” in Trinidad (1958, 826), and later suggested that to “be an Indian from Trinidad is to be […] the embodiment of an old verbal ambiguity” (2003b, 38–39). Even when watching England versus Pakistan at home, during an interview (a Jamesian gesture itself) in the 1990s, Naipaul maintained a particular interest in Mark Ramprakash— the English batsman born to an English mother and an Indian-Guyanese father—as someone who shared his own complex positioning (Meyers 1999). In another 1990s interview, Naipaul curtly retorted “I am no cricketer” when asked about the fact that cricket and literature have been two areas of international success for the Caribbean—even though he makes the same point in The Middle Passage (Jussawalla 1997, 7). His remark reads as shorthand for a refusal of the kind of Caribbean identification that comes with cricketing regionality. It also echoes the move made between “Test”, where Naipaul has a man declare that it is “only in cricket” that he “is West Indian” (2012, 317), and Half a Life (2002b), more than thirty years later, where Percy Cato stands as “the only Black man or Jamaican or West Indian you will meet in England who knows nothing about cricket” (Naipaul 2002b, 62). Naipaul clearly maintained a personal interest in the game but also, it seems, looked to move away from its association with Caribbean development—personal and regional—despite this having been part of his rendering of home in his early fiction, and that fiction’s connections to his father and other surrogate father figures.

IV With its significant short story tradition, Anglophone Caribbean literature repeatedly uses narratives of childhood to express developmental journeys that encode larger sociopolitical problems and aspirations. As Lucy Evans (2014) has made clear, ideas of community and negotiations between the

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one and many are especially important to the content and formal features of Anglophone Caribbean short stories. Where Evans is concerned with contemporary short story cycles, the concern here is with the construction of and negotiation with community that comes through cricketing stories of childhood and personal development. Such stories use cricket to link what Andrew Salkey describes as “immediately recognizable” experiences and “ordinary, everyday event[s]” to wider and seemingly adult concerns (1967, 8). Cricketing short stories are often written from, at least in part, a child’s perspective, and they make use of the three key strategies Susan Engel sees as helping writers capture a child’s point of view, namely: an “emphasis on vivid sensation”; the “dramatizing” of children’s intimacy with and distance from the “weirdness of adults”; and a “dysynchrony of time and space” (1999, 51–53). These textual strategies help to establish a critical gap between the child’s view and the controlling adult consciousness. In Caribbean cricket stories, they also work to establish cricket as a familiar and exciting form of play used by children—especially boys (the common focus of cricketing tales)—to understand themselves and make social and familial connections, and to help young protagonists work through relationship difficulties with older male role models and/or their peers. The game also stands as a shared sporting adventure, tied to patterns of initiation which Valerie Shaw sees as “more prominent in stories dealing with boys”, partly because their “transition into adulthood can be readily matched by events and settings which recall the conventions of narrative ‘adventures’” (1983, 198). Shaw’s point is particularly apt for Caribbean cricket stories because the physical challenges, group dynamics and moments of individual success portrayed are framed by England’s imperial tales of boyhood adventures as well as by local ways of adventuring into manhood. In such stories, cricket is seen to teach boys about self-control, perseverance, concentration, humility, personal success and the rewards of collective endeavour in a manner that helps them grow and belong, often by (re)connecting with those around them, including with fathers and surrogate father figures. The game is used to navigate the sociopolitical and economic restrictions structuring young lives and to examine experiences of impoverishment, alienation, marginality and community. It is also used by short story authors, as with Naipaul, to fictionally (re)imagine their younger selves and, thereby, establish their literary “voice”’ as they reflect on Caribbean childhoods, most often of the period from the 1930s through to the 1960s. Writers of cricketing

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short stories often create what McWatt (1989) terms “fictional autobiographies”, in which childhood is a “refuge”, as Mary Condé indicates (1992, 70)—a space of imaginative escape allowing writers to explore their former and current senses of self. In doing so, they build important links between childhood exploration, innocence and potential, on the one hand, and on the other, more mature, often politically informed, views of how important, close relationships—as well as the region and even the world—might be managed differently. There is typically a clear moral tale at work, but one in which the parallel established between the growing independence of a cricketing boy or adolescent and the burgeoning independence of the Caribbean is also worthy of attention. This is certainly the case with Ormsby Cooper’s “Cricket in the Blood”. Broadcast in 1951, as part of the BBC’s Caribbean Voices , Cooper’s tale is an early example of a Caribbean cricketing short story. It portrays the rise of an especially talented young player, Dan, and how he overcomes his cricketing nemesis, Benjy. In a kind of cricketing-economic pattern of development, Dan progresses from being a boy who used a “dry coconut bough” for a bat and a “round green orange for a ball” to eventually getting a “real bat” from “Mister Jonny”, and working for Jonny’s father to earn enough to purchase a real ball (Ormsby Cooper 2012, 218). However, when Dan’s youth team defeat Benjy’s, Benjy steals this hard-earned and prized ball. In anger, Dan picks up a stone to throw, but a premonitory flash reveals to him that he would certainly hit and kill Benjy. In this moment, Dan learns “that under stress his aim was faultless, his speed of delivery miraculous”, meaning “cricket was in his blood” (220). With this knowledge, and his mature self-control, Dan’s cricketing career advances until he has to face Benjy again in order to determine which of them will represent Jamaica. As we expect, it is Dan who comes out on top, initially dismissing Benjy for a duck in Benjy’s first innings and then using his amazing fielding ability to run Benjy out in his second. Dan’s rise into the Jamaican team is thus cast as recompense for his emotional investment in the game, his economic patience in working and saving, and his refraining from violence in boyhood. Moreover, his ability to manage himself and his talent offers a clear metaphorical model for the Caribbean’s self-determining future. In a similarly moral fashion, Michael Anthony’s story “Cricket in the Road” explores the emotional excesses of childhood upset, the importance of peer-group belonging and how a return to local sociality via cricket can work. It also captures Anthony’s interest in portraying

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sporting youth and the everydayness of his writing style. E.A. Markham posits that Anthony “writes with a sincerity and charm, but the stories in Cricket in the Road (1973) seem slight, the tone sometimes uncertain” (1996, xxviii). This criticism is fair, though it should be set against Paul Edwards and Kenneth Ramchand’s praise of Anthony’s work for its “open consciousness”, largely “achieved by a scrupulous adherence to the boy’s point of view, in a deceptively easy style that carries the necessary sensuous burden while sustaining the illusion of adolescent reportage” (1969, 63–64). This assessment is certainly applicable to “Cricket in the Road”, with the immediacy and intimacy of Selo’s first-person narration. The episode is set in coastal Mayaro, Trinidad, during the author’s childhood in the early 1940s. Anthony has said that although he only lived in Mayaro until he was nine, he repeatedly returns to this “home” in his writing because it is his anchoring location (James and Anthony 1967, 86). In this space of “home”, cricket is an important activity for Selo and his neighbours, siblings Vern and Amy, but one that is often interrupted during the rainy season. The weather, “always overcast”, carries a perpetual “death-like” threat and the sky, a “low-hanging” ceiling, holds everything down (Anthony 1973, 40–41). Selo is happy to be involved in a mini mixed-sex cricketing community, the “we” of “the road”, until his turn at batting is cut short by the weather and he is not allowed to continue when the friends resume play (40). In protest, Selo angrily throws Vern’s beloved bat away and retreats homeward. Following a period of depressing isolation, Selo’s return to cricket only comes when Vern and Amy invite him back and allow him “first bat”, as he had desired and thought was fair (43). That his friends look “new”, in the New Year with their new bat, suggests Selo’s reawakening and a new beginning for the group (43). Selo accepts their gesture of friendship and “crie[s] as though it were raining and [he] was afraid” (43). With his fear turned to joy, Selo’s tears signal a type of cricketing reintegration, a repatriation even. Reflecting on James’ (1972) famous assessment of Anthony as a “native and national” writer, and putting this in conjunction with Fredric Jameson’s work, Stefano Harney argues that Anthony was writing “to the Trinidadian” with a “nationalism […] in allegory” that meant “coming to terms with what already exists as a community and nation in Trinidad” (1991, 35–36). In this light, and with no sign of a father, the community of cricketing children represents not only a sentimental version of the Trinidad of Anthony’s imagined past, but also a lesson in local, ordinary modes of coming together and reconnecting.

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Where both Ormsby Cooper and Anthony tackle boyhood cricket without any fatherly reference, McKenzie’s “Cricket Season”, from his short story collection A Boy Named Ossie (1991), is a moral tale of cricketing initiation that binds childhood heroism to father–son dynamics. Set in the 1950s of McKenzie’s own youth in Mount Charles, Jamaica, the story presents Ossie as an obedient and talented boy who, having been given “a coin” by his Uncle Basil—a “hero” and soldier home on leave— earns and saves in order to buy an instructional cricket book (McKenzie 1991, 19). After his money is stolen from home, along with the Sunday dinner, Ossie’s luck is almost immediately turned around when he bowls out Vincent—a sixteen-year-old local cricketing “hero” (22)—to win a bet and begin saving again, only this time with the institutional security of the Post Office. In his rural setting, McKenzie presents a stable and caring family, supplemented by communal education and financial rewards for talent. While the theft—seemingly by someone who is known but “faceless”—presents an internal danger, this is quickly overridden by Ossie’s mother’s charitable defence of the thieves as probably “hungrier” than them (21–22). Nevertheless, it is through cricket that Ossie is able to define himself away from this protective domestic space, even as he draws on the encouragement of his father and uncle. When Ossie reveals himself as a “spin bowler” his supportive Uncle suggests he can become “another Alfred Valentine”, connecting Ossie to the West Indies team playing England at Sabina Park that year. And it is after a victory for his own village team that Ossie takes on the challenge to bowl Vincent out to win “a ten dollar bill” (22). His father proudly jokes: “you are earning money from cricket and you are not even a test player yet” (23). In essence, Ossie learns that his patience, effort and talent, when combined, are the makings of success—success he privately nurtures, finds support for through his father and uncle, and for which he is publicly appreciated, including in financial terms. In some ways, Vincent is portrayed in similar terms to James’ description of Bondman, as discussed in Chapter 3, but here it is enough to note that Ossie’s small size and young age are offset by his bowling skills, and that his moment of victory marks his entry into a cricketing community of male heroes oriented towards regional representation. Not all engagements with boyhood cricket and heroism are glorifying, though, and performance artist Keens-Douglas comedically pinpoints excessive and shallow forms of hero worship when describing his introduction to cricket at school. Keens-Douglas’ “Me an’ Cricket” is

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published in Role Call (1997) as a short story or yarn, a form described by Ian Reid as one of the short story’s “tributary forms”, standing between oral and scribal traditions (1977, 33). Cynthia James positions Keens-Douglas as a transitional force in the move from “Orature to Literature” in children’s folk traditions between the 1970s and 1990s, asserting that he played an important role in the reclamation of a local folk voice and the literaturisation of creole orality (2005, 170). As with most of Keens-Douglas’ work, “Me an’ Cricket” tells an apparently autobiographical yet humorously exaggerated tale, this time of a failed initiation into sport at school in 1950s Trinidad. A small twelve-year-old version of Keens-Douglas, the “Me” of the story’s title, realises that boys are defined by their size and sporting prowess and so attempts running, football and cricket. With no talent for the first, and no stomach for the physicality of the second, he withdraws into cricket, the “gentleman’s game”, where he initially enjoys fielding in the deep, resting under the trees and taking one big swing with the bat before returning to the shade (Keens-Douglas 1997, 42). This pattern is only upset when he accidentally takes a spectacular catch. He is then lionised as a new hero by his teammates, declared the “nex’ [Gary] Sobers” and approached for his “autograph” by locals, until everyone discovers he cannot really bat, bowl or field (45). Throughout, Keens-Douglas mocks the overinvestment in a heroic saviour after a single moment of individual glory, and undercuts the superficial criteria used to pick sports stars—“if yu look good yu get pick” (41)—all the while poking fun at the clichéd “cool pose” signified by dark “shades” being worn during batting (43). He also suggests that the stereotypical claim that West Indies cricketers are “natural players” has some merit because only those who already seem talented at a young age “get pick” (41). Finally, by asking “Yu know how hard it is to keep yu head down and yu chin up?” (43), Keens-Douglas gestures towards a wider question about how anyone in the Caribbean, but particularly young boys, can keep their heads “down” in terms of work ethic and simultaneously “up” with hope for the future. While the above short stories are all about cricketing participation, McWatt’s story “A Boy’s First Test Match” is his own “fictional autobiography” and describes his boyhood initiation into cricketing spectatorship. Living with his grandparents and uncle in Guyana, a ten-year-old Mark gains a day’s holiday from school because of the international cricket match, and is sent by his grandmother to Bourda to watch West Indies versus Pakistan in March 1958. With his grandfather ill in bed, the boy

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is taken by “Mr W”, a family friend and member of the cricket board (McWatt 2012, 201). After starting the day excited to spend his money and buy food, the young Mark is reprimanded by other spectators for getting in their way and is invited to join two men sitting behind him. When they discover the boy’s “father’s cousin” is a former West Indies wicket keeper, the older men support Mark’s grandmother’s suggestion that he is “at the age when [he] should be showing interest in important things, like school work and cricket” (203). In the crowd, his new surrogate father is a Mr Armstrong, everybody’s “Uncle”, who encourages Mark to use his grandfather’s binoculars to watch Sobers closely (203). This inspection reveals not only that Sobers has “Parrot toe”, but that he gets in line with the ball early, going forward or back, in order to minimise “risk” in his shot-selection (204). This lesson in cricketing technique sits alongside a more “frightening” lesson about “risk”, though, as Uncle heads off interest in Mark from a man in a “pink Panama” hat, insulted as “Rosie” (205–206). Nevertheless, Mark makes arrangements to return the next day, telling his school peers “some friends are looking out for [him] in the North stand” (206). An adult voice then emerges at the story’s close, as the “I” persona, to establish how “fortunate” Mark was to see Clyde Walcott and Sobers make centuries during his first international match, and how the “company of people [he] did not know” gave him a new sense of cricketing-communal belonging (206). The story, then, establishes a transition into a communal cricketing culture—a culture associated with an earlier generation, whose values provide protection in the form of social fathering and initiate a lifelong link to cricket, and the close as well as masculine and educating modes of watching it invites. Where McWatt’s story describes a kind of surrogate father as the gatekeeper to a new cricketing community, Ismith Khan’s “Red Ball”, from A Day in the Country and Other Stories (1994), offers an emotionally evocative account of a fraught father–son relationship and a boy’s desire to enter into a community of cricketing peers. It is also the first of three Indian-Caribbean short stories about cricket and coming of age with which this discussion ends. Khan’s third-person narrative depicts Bolan, a young Muslim boy in Port of Spain, whose family have moved from rural Tunapuna and are finding economic survival hard. Each day after school Bolan lingers in Woodford Square “outside the centre”, and slowly, over an entire week, creeps closer to the boys playing cricket (Khan 1994, 8). The importance of Woodford Square is repeatedly underlined, and Bolan feels that it is the “only place […] where people were not chasing him

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down” (9). Passing his time on the periphery, Bolan wades in the water of the fountain (a gift from the Scottish Governor George Turnbull in 1866), admires the strength of Triton (son of Poseidon and Greek god of the sea), and seeks comfort from the surrounding female figures. This is the space left by British and Spanish colonials seemingly just for him, a boy from the “sugarcane fields” (9). It is also the centre point of the emerging nation and Prime Minister Eric Williams’ efforts to speak to the people through a “University of the Masses” and “People’s Parliament”. Bolan repeatedly resists the diminutive calls of “Thinney Boney” from the other boys, until he is finally invited to play cricket and asked his name (7). He identifies himself, first as Bolan and then as a new and devastating fast bowler with “red hot” bolts of self-confidence, knocking the others “all down before they could see the ball” (10). Yet after such triumph his poverty means he is compelled to “disappear”, because he has no funds to buy a treat from the sausage vendor with the other boys. When Bolan returns the next day, the boys are “waiting” for him. He is now their “star bowler”, and he surprisingly reveals a “shiny red cork ball, brand new” (15). He even reinforces his claim to social entry by buying sausages for the group until the arrival of his father shatters this moment of camaraderie. Bolan has paid for the ball and food by taking his family’s savings, and he is physically punished for it at home. His father, a cutlassman, is struggling with their new life and is critical of Bolan’s education, mocking the way it has altered his son’s pronunciation. By always failing to use Bolan’s name, his father refuses to grant him the individual recognition his mother demands, and that Bolan gained through cricket. Yet his father’s verbal assaults are repeatedly unfinished, stuck in his throat as he pauses, “swallows hard” or falls asleep (13). As with Bolan, it is poverty that makes him silent. When at home in Frederick Street (Khan’s own boyhood location), Bolan is “waiting for something he couldn’t describe”, something he was “released from” when playing cricket (13), where the “something” seems to be his anonymity and lack of affection as well as his poverty. After he “thief” the family savings, his father’s physical punishment draws “red welts” on his son’s skin and only ends when Bolan’s mother intervenes (16). On seeing the cricket ball, she asks her son if he “remember[s] how to bowl” (17), understanding that this was the skill that had secured his social acceptance. His mother uses the water pipe in the yard to help heal his wounds in a fashion reminiscent of the fountain’s, and, thereby, Triton’s female followers. That night, as Bolan lies asleep in pain on the floor, he dreams that the figure of Triton is

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speaking to him, declaring his love and affection, but his dream is mixed with the smell of his father who attempts to speak, under the cover of darkness, to his sleep-filled son. The father, now combined with Triton, becomes the voice of the nation, a collective nation of the sea, of those brought across the water—as Bolan’s Indian ancestors would have been— now struggling not to drown, even as their sons find their way into their own social, cricketing and communal centres. In the wider context of the history of Indian-Caribbean players representing West Indies, as charted by Frank Birbalsingh and Clem Seecharan (1988), and what Birbalsingh (2004) describes as the tradition of IndianCaribbean short stories, two other stories depicting Indian-Caribbean, specifically Indian-Guyanese, boys emerge from the Caribbean diaspora in Canada. Tellingly, as with Naipaul’s Miguel Street , these stories depict mad cricket supporters as surrogate father figures and establish connections and emerging distances between adult figures and boy protagonists. “King Rice” by Deonandan and “The Protagonist” by Baksh also share the tone, humour and style of Naipaul’s Miguel Street as they depict Guyanese village cricket and, like Naipaul’s “Man-man” or “B Wordsworth”, their leading figures having communal identities based on their actions and the social acceptance of their behaviour. Deonandan’s Bungy, the “funny man”, becomes a kind of rice “King” (1999, 16), while Baksh’s Ramkissoon, “the godlike peasant”, develops into “The Propagandist” (2000, 71). Both men are deemed to be, to some degree, insane, but their insanity comes with insight and lessons for those around them, and even those who have moved away. In “King Rice” Deonandan describes how “the entire village was made for cricket”, with Bungy “rallying” support for the local team by attending every game, home and away, ritualising his attendance, and defending the reputation of his team to the point of “physical violence” (1999, 17–18). He is claimed a local “hero”, and presents the voice of political dissent by wearing a noose when he introduces himself as “a slave” to the new Governor, Mr Carruthers (19). He is the communal showman and performer, the people’s voice and reveller, in a way that is suggestive of the famed culture and supporters of the West Indies cricket team. The story’s pivotal action is the grand final of the Demerara Cup, “between the rice farmers of Windsor Forest and the sugar plantation workers of neighbouring Eyeflood”, which “pit[s] the imperialist sponsored sugar team against our intrepid heroes from the autonomous mudlands” (18). Deonandan contrasts the cricket grounds of the two

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teams: “the venue would be the enemy’s home fortress, the Eyeflood Cricket Ground, built and maintained splendidly with imperialist sugar money; a far cry from the dung-scattered sandtrap against the seawall back in Windsor Forest” (18). There is, here, the kind of division of land ownership and occupation that Sylvia Wynter (1971) describes as the plantation versus the plot, where systemic exploitation and profit-bound land management is cast against independent farming and a kind of selfsufficiency. When Bungy arrives late and without his bat, the travelling Windsor supporters worry over the bad omen, and this is exacerbated by their team’s “terrible start” (Deonandan 1999, 19). Yet Bungy scatters “the finest Guyanese rice” over “his audience” while bellowing “King Rice”, and shouts “Slave sugar” at those wearing “brilliant white cotton uniforms”, as if to reinforce their plantation roots and moneyed support (19–20). Although this fails to save the game, as Windsor Forest still loses, Bungy’s team plays with pride and “courage” as if their madman leader has forced them to show the resilience of their independent community on the field of imperially sponsored play (20). Seecharan has suggested that “Ingrained in the Indo-Guyanese psyche is the idea of being a victim of King Sugar” (1999/2000, 71), and the ascension of “King Rice” recognises this dominance as well as the honourable defiance and self-respect that faces it. Yet Seecharan also describes how a “strong sense of Indian identity […] emerged on the Guyanese estates’’ (72), and this aspect of the sugar-estate legacy is revealed in “The Propagandist”, Baksh’s story about Ramkissoon, and the narrator who recalls his connection to him. A self-declared “born coolie”, Ramkissoon’s body is shaped and coloured by “years of cutting and loading sugar cane”, but he still looks to build self-importance and independence by squatting on the land, and overseeing his wife and daughter’s cultivation of a small garden (Baksh 2000, 15). From this position, he becomes the “Propagandist”, dismissing the opinions of others as “propaganda” and wildly pontificating to everyone on any subject, despite most of his opinions coming from recycled newspapers brought to him by the narrator when he was a boy. “Propaganda”, the narrator says, “was a completely new word for us, and by its length and weight alone, it was somewhat mysterious” (17). And it was because of this performance of unknown knowledge that felt “mysterious” that Ramkissoon became “honoured as a reliable commentator on the current affairs of Guyana, the Caribbean and the world” (18). He uses this new power to reject the social initiatives of the new British Director of the Sugar Estate and to

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speak of India and Indian cricket, sprinkling his view with “a few words of Hindi” to gain legitimacy (18). The narrator knows of the Propagandist’s lies and embellishments, including the claim that Lala Amarnath, the Indian captain, had punched an umpire. As a boy, the narrator was nonetheless surprised to discover that the Propagandist’s greatest claim— that Vijay Hazare, India’s captain between 1951 and 1953, had scored two centuries in one game, something that at that time had only been achieved by one West Indies player, the great Headley—was actually true (Hazare did this against Australia in 1947–1948). The Propagandist wins a sizable bet with this information, but the narrator, who found the evidence, only receives “a twelve-cent coin” (23). He feels cheated and cannot, even as an adult looking back, forgive him. This bet, which pits West Indian pride (via Headley) against Indian achievement (in Hazare), brings into focus the key aspects of the story—tensions between Indian-Guyanese and African-Guyanese groups. These tensions are underlined or brought to the surface through cricket when the Indian team—as “true Indians” (Baksh 2000, 19)—tour the Caribbean in 1953. And in this moment the Propagandist is fuelling the racial divisions, pride and jealousies of the Indian-Guyanese and AfricanGuyanese communities. The narrator confesses that his community “only pretended to be shocked by the Propagandist’s partiality towards India [and] joined in instinctively with the humour of his racist jokes putting down West Indian cricketers who were mostly Afro-West Indian” (19). He also remembers feeling surprised that the Propagandist’s outbursts didn’t spark violence between the two groups. This racial division is then seen in the political groups and Guyana’s national election campaigns of 1953, though the Propagandist takes bribes from all sides to heckle political speakers. As expected, the People’s Progressive Party’s (PPP) candidate wins and the close of the story marks two moments of consequential change. The first is the election victory in 1953, that saw the Hindu-born Cheddi Jagan, of the PPP, victorious, causing Britain to promptly send over military forces before a left-aligned leadership could settle in. The second is the death of the Propagandist, about which the framing narrator, located abroad, has only recently learnt. The news of Ramkissoon’s death sparks this story of recollection and pushes the narrator to acknowledge the distance between his present and childhood self, while simultaneously making links between his life and the forces that push the Propagandist into isolation and, ultimately, death. Baksh writes: “the world that drove him to death has also driven me into exile”,

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and that their bond is a “bond that links more than the two of us” (30). Here, Baksh appreciates this “bond” as uniting the diaspora, calling together creole speakers who may face a sense of enforced expulsion. Importantly, this bond is shared with a fanatical cricket supporter whose style of dedication makes him both an exception to and a fundamental part of his community “Back Home”, in the past and in the diasporic present. This relationship between style, dedication and community will be further explored in the next chapter.

Works Cited Anthony, Michael. 1973. “Cricket in the Road”. In Cricket in the Road, by Anthony, 40–43. London: Heinemann. Baksh, Elahi. 2000. “The Propagandist”. In Jahaji: An Anthology of IndoCaribbean Fiction, edited by Frank Birbalsingh, 15–30. Toronto, Canada: TSAR. Bardolph, Jaqueline. 1986. “Son, Father, and Writing: A Commentary”. Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 9 (1): 82–90. Beckles, Hilary McD. 1998. The Development of West Indies Cricket: Volume 1. The Age of Nationalism. London: Pluto. Beckles, Hilary McD. 2003. A Nation Imagined: First West Indies Test Team, The 1928 Tour. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Bereton, Bridget. 1979. Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 1870–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Birbalsingh, Frank. 2004. “The Indo-Caribbean Short Story”. Journal of West Indian Literature 12 (1/2): 118–135. Birbalsingh, Frank, and Clem Seecharan. 1988. Indo-Westindian Cricket. London: Hansib. Burton, Richard D.E. 1995. “Cricket, Carnival and Street Culture in the Caribbean”. In Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture, edited by Hilary McD. Beckles and Brian Stoddart, 89–106. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Burton, Richard D.E. 1997. Afro-Creole Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean. London and New York: Cornell University Press. Chambers, Colin. 2011. Black and Asian Theatre in Britain: A History. London: Routledge. Cole-Nimblett, Shelley. 2011. “The Significance of ‘Moon on a Rainbow Shawl’ in Caribbean Literature”. Online. https://docplayer.net/65498794-The-sig nificance-of-moon-on-a-rainbow-shawl-in-caribbean-literature.html. Condé, Mary. 1992. “Unlikely Stories: Children’s Invented Worlds in Caribbean Women’s Fiction”. Commonwealth Essays and Studies 15 (1): 69–75.

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Cudjoe, Selwyn R. 1988. V.S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Deonandan, Raywat. 1999. “King Rice”. In Sweet Like Saltwater, by Deonandan, 16–20. Toronto, Canada: TSAR. Dorney, Kate, and Frances Gray. 2013. Played in Britain: Modern Theatre in 100 Plays. London: Bloomsbury. Duff, Charles. 2012 “Moon on a Rainbow Shawl: The Story of the First Production”. In Moon on a Rainbow Shawl National Theatre Programme. London: National Theatre. Engel, Susan, 1999. “Looking Backward: Representations of Childhood in Literary Work”. Journal of Aesthetic Education 33 (1): 50–55. Edwards, Paul, and Kenneth Ramchand. 1969. “The Art of Memory: Michael Anthony’s The Year in San Fernando”. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 4 (1): 59–72. Evans, Lucy. 2014. Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Feder, Lillian. 2001. Naipaul’s Truth: The Making of a Writer. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. French, Patrick. 2008. The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul. London: Picador. Goddard, Lynette. 2018. Errol John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl. Abingdon: Routledge. Guha, Ramachandra. 2001. “Across the Boundary of Writing”. The Hindu, October 28. Online. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “A Conversation with C.L.R. James”. In Rethinking C.L.R James, edited by Grant Farred, 15–44. Oxford: Blackwell. Harney, Stefano. 1991. “Nation Time: Earl Lovelace and Michael Anthony Nationfy Trinidad”. Commonwealth Essays and Studies 13 (2): 31–41. Hughes, Thomas. 1857. Tom Brown’s School Days. Cambridge: Macmillan. James, C.L.R. 1933. The Case for West Indian Self-Government. London: Hogarth. James, C.L.R. 1972. “Interview”. In Kas Kas: Interviews with Three Caribbean Writers in Texas, edited by Ian Munro and Reinhard Sander, 23–41. Austin: African and Afro-American Research Institute, University of Texas. James, C.L.R. 2001. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Edited by James Walvin. London: Penguin. James, C.L.R. 2006. “Kanhai: A Study in Confidence”. In A Majestic Innings: Writings on Cricket, by James, 165–171. London: Aurum. James, C.L.R. 2013 [1963]. Beyond a Boundary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. James, C.L.R., and Michael Anthony. 1967. “Discovering Literature in Trinidad: Two Experiences”. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 7: 73–87.

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James, Cynthia. 2005. “From Orature to Literature in Jamaican and Trinidadian Children’s Folk Traditions”. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 30 (2): 164–178. John, Errol. 1958. Moon on a Rainbow Shawl: A Play in Three Acts. 1st edition. London: Faber. John, Errol. 1963. Moon on a Rainbow Shawl: A Play in Three Acts. 2nd edition. London: Faber. Jussawalla, Feroza, ed. 1997. Conversations with V.S. Naipaul. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Keens-Douglas, Paul. 1997. “Me an’ Cricket”. In Role Call: Poetry and Short Stories, by Keens-Douglas, 41–45. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Keensdee Productions. Khan, Ismith. 1987. The Crucifixion. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Khan, Ismith. 1994. “The Red Ball”. In A Day in the Country and Other Stories, by Khan, 7–17. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Lamming, George. 1987 [1953]. In The Castle of My Skin. London: Longman. Levy, Judith. 1995. V.S. Naipaul: Displacement and Autobiography. London and New York: Garland. Lovelace, Earl. 1996. Salt. London: Faber. Markham, E.A., ed. 1996. The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories. London: Penguin. McKenzie, Earl. 1991. “Cricket Season”. In A Boy Names Ossie—A Jamaican Childhood, by McKenzie, 19–24. Oxford: Heinemann. McWatt, Mark. 1989. “The West Indian Writer and the Self: Recent ‘Fictional Autobiography’ by Naipaul and Harris”. Journal of West Indian Literature 3 (1): 16–27. McWatt, Mark. 2012. “A Boy’s First Test Match”. In The Bowling was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 199–207. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Meyers, Jeffrey. 1999. “V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux”. PN Review (Manchester) 26 (2): 37–47. Naipaul, Seepersed. 1943. Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales. Port of Spain, Trinidad: n.p. Naipaul, V.S. 1957. The Mystic Masseur. London: Andre Deutsch. Naipaul, V.S. 1958. “New Novels”. New Statesman, December 6, 826–827. Naipaul, V.S. 1963. “Sporting Life”. Encounter, September, 73–75. Naipaul, V.S. 1967. The Mimic Men. London: Picador. Naipaul, V.S. 1971a [1959]. Miguel Street. London: Penguin. Naipaul, V.S. 1971b. In a Free State. London: Andre Deutsch. Naipaul, V.S. 1975. Guerrillas. London: Andre Deutsch. Naipaul, V.S. 1977. India: A Wounded Civilisation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Naipaul, V.S. 1991 [1990]. India: A Million Mutinies Now. London: Minerva.

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Naipaul, V.S. 1995 [1994]. A Way in the World: A Sequence. London: Picador. Naipaul, V.S. 1999. V.S. Naipaul: Letters Between a Father and Son. London: Little, Brown and Company. Naipaul, V.S. 2001 [1962]. The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies— British, French and Dutch—In the West Indies and South America. London: Picador. Naipaul, V.S. 2002a [1964]. An Area of Darkness. London: Picador. Naipaul, V.S. 2002b [2001]. Half A Life. London: Picador. Naipaul, V.S. 2003a [1961]. A House for Mr Biswas. London: Picador Books. Naipaul, V.S. 2003b. Literary Occasions: Essays. Edited by Pankaj Mishra. London: Picador. Naipaul, V.S. 2012 [1963]. “Test”. In The Bowling was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 316–324. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Omeron, David. 1968. “In a Derelict Land: The Novels of V.S. Naipaul”. Contemporary Literature 9 (1): 74–90. Ormsby Cooper, Eileen. 2012. “Cricket in the Blood”. In The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 218–222. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Pouchet Paquet, Sandra. 2002. Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self Representation. Madison: University of Wisconsin. Reddock, Rhoda E., ed. 2004. Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. Reid, Ian. 1977. The Short Story. London: Methuen. Rohlehr, Gordon. 1968. “The Ironic Approach: The Novels of V.S. Naipaul”. In The Islands in Between: Essays on West Indian Literature, edited by Louis James, 121–139. London: Oxford University Press. Rohlehr, Gordon. 1994. “Music, Literature and West Indian Cricket Values”. In An Area of Conquest: Popular Democracy and West Indies Cricket, edited by Hilary McD. Beckles, 55–103. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Rosengarten, Frank. 2008. Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Salkey, Andrew, ed. 1967. Caribbean Prose: An Anthology for Secondary Schools. London: Evan Brothers. Schwarz, Bill. 2003. “Introduction: Crossing the Seas”. In West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, edited by Schwarz, 1–30. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Seecharan, Clem. 1999/2000. “The Shaping of the Indo-Caribbean People: Guyana and Trinidad to the 1940s”. Journal of Caribbean Studies 14 (1/2): 61–92. Selvon, Samuel. 1958. Turn Again Tiger. London: MacGibbon & Kee.

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CHAPTER 3

Style as Substance

This chapter examines the cricketing content of Earl Lovelace’s writing and puts his work in dialogue with C.L.R. James to explore their overlapping interests in the emancipatory potential and power of style, particularly its embodied forms. The importance of James and cricket to Lovelace is evident in Lovelace’s non-fiction and the modest biographical writings about him. Moreover, from his short story “Victory and the Blight” (1988), through his prize-winning novel Salt (1996), to his more recent Is Just a Movie (2011), Lovelace shows a strong Jamesian influence throughout his fiction, turning to cricket as a vehicle for heroic and aesthetic maturation, and as a means of unpacking tensions between a hero and his community, especially the developing national community. He also does this while playing with questions of creativity, self-expression and performative as well as narratorial style. Following the timeframe and Trinidadian focus of Lovelace’s fiction, this discussion is set against the movement from Trinidad’s independence efforts and the aftermaths of the 1960s, through the Black Power uprising of 1970, into the failed ambitions and neocolonial constraints of subsequent decades. The chapter argues that Lovelace’s effort to see cricketing “style as substance” directly mobilises James’ understanding of cricketing style, and this connection enables a fuller understanding of the ramifications of Lovelace’s aesthetic and literary-critical imaginary. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Westall, The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65972-1_3

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I in cricket […] significant form at its most unadulterated is permanently present. It is known, expected, recognized and enjoyed by tens of thousands of spectators. Cricketers call it style. (James 2013, 202)

In Beyond a Boundary (1963) James insists that, because of its formal structure, technical skills and bodily movements, cricket is a “full member of the community” of arts, and not just a sport with aesthetic elements (2013, 196). He positions himself against those aestheticians, including his mentor Neville Cardus, who acknowledge cricket’s aesthetic attributes but, since they maintain distinct high and low cultural categories, fail to see the game as an art and, thereby, fail to comprehend the full vitality of the category of art itself. In contrast, James contends that we can only begin to answer the question “What is Art?” when we include popular, physical artistic practices and integrate, for example, “our vision of [Clyde] Walcott on the back foot through the covers” into our understanding of art (211). James sees cricket as a physical drama that should be grouped with “theatre, ballet, opera and […] dance” (196). Like “all good drama from the days of the Greeks”, he says, cricket’s central action is structured around “two individuals […] pitted against each other in a conflict that is strictly personal but no less strictly representative of a social group” (196). For James, cricketers enact the sociopolitical dynamics and history of the Caribbean, and cricket’s dialectical bind between the individual and their social group is critical to the game’s performance and reception, as well as its status as art. James also writes of cricket as a “visual art”, performed by its players and recognised as such by cricketers and spectators alike (196–204). To explain his idea, James uses art historian Bernard Berenson’s term “significant form” (2002). This term has two key qualities. First, “tactile values” which “simulate[s] the consciousness of the viewer” so that the significant form of a piece of art becomes “life-giving, life-enhancing, to the viewer” (200; original emphasis). Second, “movement” makes the viewer want to replicate and experience the movement/s on display (199–201). James contends that cricket offers a complete “realization of movement” (201). Cricketing style, then, is significant form, as the “perfect flow of motion” (206), embodied and enacted by its practitioners and seen, felt and understood

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by the crowd—those who are stimulated by it and may also want to reenact what they see. Additionally, where “fine arts” have a permanent and fixed aesthetic image, the cricket spectator can, according to James, “constantly” re-create or re-access cricketing style and the art of the game in different moments, performances, matches and locations, meaning its “life-giving, life-enhancing” powers are perpetually available to and for the people (205). To make his case for cricket as an art based on style, James first turns to fast bowling, citing John Arlott’s description of Maurice Tate’s bowling action as “as lovely a piece of movement as even cricket has ever produced” (203). James then himself describes Australian pace bowler Ray Lindwall as the “poetry of motion” (204). Both examples concentrate on the bowler’s physique, bodily movements (including arms, shoulders, chest, stride, release and follow-through), and how they create their unique fast bowling styles. Across his cricket writing, James approaches the embodied individuality of other bowlers similarly, detailing how they create pace, bounce, line, angle and threat in ways that are particular to them, even, or especially, when they sit within an established and successful bowling tradition, as seen historically with West Indies fast bowlers. Artistry and style, though, are more commonly associated with batsmen, and instead of the imperially encoded version of an amateur gentleman’s elegant play (of cover drives and off-side shots), James conveys the openness of aesthetic possibilities in the game and enacted by batsmen, especially great batsmen. He sees a batsman’s ability to “hit practically round the points of the compass” and to play “off the front and back foot” with relatively little departure from his original stance as showing how “infinite variety [comes] from one base” (206–207). James has a similar sense of the aesthetic possibilities for fielders. Moreover, he argues that it is an “examination of the stroke” and of “the brilliant piece of fielding” that pushes us further than Berenson’s description of the boundaries of art by showing that humans respond to “physical action”, where such action has an “integral” and embodied use of lines, motion and, in cricket, tools, because it is part of our human and civilisational development, part of how we function and thrive (207–208). James even positions cricket as an art in which physical, aesthetic actions and popular reception are linked to the advancement of humanity’s self-understanding generally. In these and other ways, James describes cricket’s potential for worldhistorical style by pulling together the aesthetic creativity of the individual

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performer, the historical, economic and political pressures in which they exist, and the need for collective human advancement. The individual batsman, in particular, expresses himself and his contextual world through his play. So, in James’ reading, the batting of George Challenor, Wilton St Hill, Learie Constantine, Frank Worrell, Everton Weekes, Clyde Walcott, Gary Sobers and others is the manifestation of personality and an articulation of sociopolitical and historical circumstances. Their actions, their physical movements when batting, are microcosmic political acts as well as individual, artistic endeavours—the “best of their time” and even defining an epoch, according to James (221). This is why James always analyses the technical performances of players and specific cricketing actions (a shot, a delivery, a catch, etc.), by watching the game “critically”, as he says, and why he draws his ideas and conclusions about cricket and the world from his reflections on embodied action (35). He also sees the originality of individual cricketers as bound to their technical abilities, meaning that spontaneity and improvisation are pegged to a technical base (though this can still be unorthodox), and these together constitute a player’s style. As Andrew Smith explains, spontaneity for James is a counterpoint to totalitarianism, standing not as a free-for-all mode of self-expression or a glorification of individualism, but as a means of originality within the frame of possibility (2010, 152). Brett St Louis suggests it is with such creative acts of “disciplined spontaneity” that the greatest players are able to forge a space for the articulation of new ways of being (2014, 133). With aesthetic performances, then, cricketers present their own self-creating power while also offering national and worldly possibilities for creative transformation, and this is especially the case for James with great batsmen. St Louis writes: “The batsman is […] framed as the World Historical figure James often favours; his individualistic brilliance does not simply indicate or anticipate change, but inspires public passion in the social possibilities ahead” (164). St Louis also explains that James’ articulation of a “zeitgeist of cricket”—where a “generation of cricketers thinks in a certain way and only a change in society, not legislation, will change the prevailing style” (James 2013, 36)—means that “the radical imagination of alternative social organisation might be reflected in the creation of unorthodox styles” (164). This zeitgeist idea also conveys the world-historical predicament of individual heroic actors—and, again in Jamesian and cricketing terms, especially batsman—whose future-oriented aesthetic performances can prompt and inspire even as they are shaped by existing conditions.

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Crucial to all of this is James’ conception of cricket as a popular art form, one whose spectators read the action as he does—closely, and with an investment in style. He often conveys the poignancy of cricketing shots or moments by presenting the expectation and appreciation shown by spectators, those he takes to be involved and knowledgeable, as well as emotionally and sociopolitically connected to the players who represent them. Famously, in his call for an extension of the category of art, James writes: “The spontaneous outburst of thousands at a fierce hook or a dazzling slip-catch, the ripple of recognition at a long-awaited leg-glance, are as genuine and deeply felt expressions of artistic emotion as any” (2013, 207). St Louis presents this in terms of James’ refusal to define the masses “solely through their relationship with wage labour” in order to reclaim “emotion, imagination, and creativity” as “central to the human condition”, and as pivotal to his idea of a “dialogic aesthetic community within cricket where participant and observer are connected through symbolic exchange based on (non-market) aesthetic values” (2014, 167, 174). In this non-market exchange, cricketing performances are physical enactments of freedom—for the individual cricketer and, simultaneously, for their community, most immediately the spectators, who carry forward, including in political terms, the consequences of what they see and feel. Relatedly, Smith describes James’ understanding of embodied performance as part of a creative economy of bodily movement that is the “common possession” of the people, and one of the “resources of hope” James offers in a “glint of utopianism” (2010, 141, 15). What repeatedly strikes in the writing of Smith and St Louis is how useful their analytical readings of James are for a reading of Lovelace’s fictional use of cricket, and for his intellectual proximity to James. Unpacking James’ methodology, St Louis explains how James’ sociopoetic dialectic of style fits his ambition for national and postcolonial advancement, and identifies the wider, humanist Marxist impulse for radical change that stands behind it all. Further, St Louis enumerates the three Jamesian “fronts” on which the “high (but not elite) aesthetic idealism of cricket […] effects a broader civilizational transformation as well as decolonisation”: first, cricket’s “popular aesthetic”, which restores “full human sensibilities” to those playing and watching; second, its “technical acumen” and “discernible” creativity that explode “myths of superiority” and help dissolve “racialised distinctions”; and third, the game’s “exposé of class and racial hierarchy” because this makes “a broadly inclusive postcolonial sociality […] more imaginable”

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(2014, 187). Lovelace not only mobilises these aspects of Jamesian thinking, and has a similar intellectual trajectory, he also carries forward the same depth of commitment to postcolonial and radical new futures for the people of the Caribbean and elsewhere. St Louis sees James as “reuniting the sentient and rational in the human” by combining cricket’s aesthetics with historical materialism and establishing “a sociopoetic dialectic between technique and representation [that] begins to emerge with the notion of style” (162, 171–172; original emphasis). We can also see this across Lovelace’s writing, with both his depictions of style— as performed by his characters—and with his own investment in new narrative styles. However, St Louis says that the problem, so central to James, of “how [one] might one retain a sense of individuality alongside a responsibility towards the collective and the desire to achieve radical social transformation” is “easily resolved within literary narrative or historical reconstruction, yet [is] incommodious in political life” (123). Lovelace’s work—like James’—actually makes clear that this is far from the case. Any effort towards resolution or attempt at forward momentum in Lovelace’s fictional world is politically fraught, both for the individual and for their community, particularly at the level of the nation. And although potential avenues for creativity and freedom-creation are marked by Lovelace, most significantly through embodied style, as in cricket, their effectiveness is typically left open-ended—expected but not yet achieved. Nevertheless, Lovelace’s own literary style provides a sense of how the future might be enacted, as Michael Niblett (2012) has argued, and establishes another firm link to James. Smith writes that while “not all recent expositions of James’ work” have thought the “question of style was worth bothering about”, James’ work and thinking was fundamentally invested in an open aesthetic style that determined his writing practice and helped him remain open in his “intellectual production […,] not just to the experiences of ordinary men and women, but to their own often insightful and critical interrogations of those experiences” (2010, 13–14). The same might also be said of Lovelace, whose fictional style is part of his effort to render visible the culture of the Caribbean people while also ensuring they can access his cultural contributions, most often his writing, because for him they are critically re-making the world, and forging the future, together.

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II James and Lovelace knew each other well, and Lovelace characterises James as a “great friend and a great mentor” (2003b, 11). Funso Aiyejina, Lovelace’s biographer and critical champion, writes that James visited Lovelace at home in Matura and Francis Trace, and also attended the launch of Lovelace’s The Wine of Astonishment (1982) in London (2017, 64–65, 3–4). More substantially, James and Lovelace praised each other’s work, with each author noting their interconnections as well as their points of distinction and generational difference. Where, like many other writer-émigrés of the time, James grew up in the European mould and later moved to England, Lovelace has largely remained in Trinidad and Tobago, finding worldliness in island life despite periods spent in the US and travelling for his literary career. Writing in 1969, James describes how he and other writers of his generation had to leave the Caribbean “of necessity”, while younger authors like Michael Anthony and Lovelace constituted a “new” and “native” generation, staying at home and closer to their people (James and Anthony 1969, 79; original emphasis). When critics cross reference James and Lovelace they often place this generational and geo-professional gap alongside their similar interest in nation-building. Stefano Harney’s view, for example, is that James is “right” to label the younger authors “national and native” for the way they work within and “through” the nation (1996, 45). Harney claims that James sees “Lovelace as a product of […] the birth of postcolonial nationhood”, but also as challenging the nation-state in his recognition of the “sovereignty of the individual identity and creativity” (45). However, James does not praise Lovelace’s interest in the nation in terms of “individual identity”. Instead, he underscores how local, embedded knowledge and creativity comes from the people and is developed outside of, and often in opposition to, imperial culture and its literary classics. As James says, younger writers are “native” because “their prose” and their content “spring from below, and are not seen through a European-educated literary sieve” (James and Anthony 1969, 79). Lovelace is certainly of this ilk, and James praises Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979) as “a landmark […] in the contemporary novel”, holding to the vision of revolution “even if only symbolically”, but doing so while offering “more of the realities of a whole country disciplined into one imaginative volume” than he had ever seen before (1980/1981, 84; cf. Love 2008, 84).

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Lovelace’s response to James’ work has been similarly appreciative in its assessment of James’ contribution to Caribbean intellectual development. In his journalism and other writings collected in Growing in the Dark ( Selected Essays ) (2003), Lovelace portrays James as an influential historian and intellectual forefather, articulating “profound things” with which later artists, himself included, are still grappling (2003b, 56, 80). Like V.S. Naipaul, Lovelace registers the differences in education between himself and James—as he did not gain a scholarship to attend secondary school in the way that James and other earlier writers did—and also their different upbringings. He contrasts James’ cultured family, who would be “comfortable in a Victorian parlour”—or even the “Queen’s parlour”—with his own relatives, who would be uncomfortable and out of place, either “show[ing] off a little too much” or “stay[ing] off by themselves” (12). Nevertheless, Lovelace appreciates James’ depictions of his Caribbean roots and his family as anchoring his achievements (11– 12). He even describes how James’ sense of belonging should, like his own semi-rural life, help others feel “solidified” in the culture, environment and people they “live among”, especially across Trinidad’s “villages and countryside” (12). In this way, Lovelace praises James’ own “native” credentials as well as his investment in the intelligence of ordinary people, since, Lovelace suggests, democracy arises from their ongoing demonstration of “human decency and civilization” in “the adventure of their art and strife” (85). Lovelace also appreciates James’ efforts to bridge his early domestic maturation and his later, seemingly more worldly, insights and experiences, and connects James’ intellectual reputation back to the masses, saying that he represents their people well, “enlightening” the people’s vision of their “own achievements and future”, so that they are “pleased to have him also claimed by the world” (85). Across Growing in the Dark Lovelace’s Jamesian interest in embodied aesthetics becomes apparent. He claims that Caribbean people “do not mimic anybody” in dance, and “are not mimic men in cricket”, because their “distinct West Indian personality” brings new confidence and accomplishments in and through these physically performative domains (59). He accepts that Caribbean people may “have mimicked” in cricket in the past, but contends that this provided a “self”—however “vulnerable and insecure in certain areas”—with which “to encounter the world”, and express its “own gifts” (59). Although, like James, he has defended Naipaul’s reference to “nothing” being made in the West Indies as really pertaining to the importing of culture (8), Lovelace’s repudiation of

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hollow mimicry strikes as anti-Naipaulian. Indeed, his view of mimicry as a phase to be worked through using creative self-development reinforces Bill Schwarz’s point that, despite similarities in their early fiction, Lovelace can be taken as “Naipaul’s contrary”, especially in his emotional register and positive depictions of Caribbean people and their heroes (2008, xiii). In fact, Lovelace’s optimism holds close to James’, and he often echoes James’ account of the aesthetics of West Indies cricket heroes in similarly positive terms: We didn’t set out to produce a West Indian cricket; we thought that we were playing cricket. What has happened is that we have produced a distinct style of cricket that everyone recognises as West Indian and, increasingly must seek to emulate because at the heart of our play is a truth that is not only attractive but modern. Here in the West Indies our game has not only been played by Headley and Sobers and Collie Smith and Richards, but by Kenny Trestrail, by Kanhai and Kallicharan. (Lovelace 2003b, 59)

Like James, Lovelace suggests that the particularities of Caribbean cricket produce an “attractive” quality (59), a pleasing and technical aesthetic that works to amalgamate all players (African-Caribbeans and IndianCaribbeans) in a modern form of representative play that bespeaks their opposition to both their imperial past and the current world order. Lovelace carries these Jamesian ideas forward in his fiction, showing his understanding of the “distinct style” of play that characterises his people and reverberates out from his cricketing fictional action across his works. Lovelace says that he finds his “own […] CLR” in James’ heroic “portraits” and ability to grant access to never before imagined “dimensions” of the “worlds” of these heroes, and, thereby to “express” his own “wholeness [as well as] his sense of human worth, and the value he places on human achievement” (2003b, 82). Lovelace pays special attention to James’ portrait of Sobers, including the way James rebuts the “pundits” who “colossally misunderstand” Sobers (see Chapter 7), and how James moves from Sobers’ cricketing record and style back to “his people”, especially his mother, before declaring him “a West Indian of the West Indies” and “a citizen of the world” (82–83). Lovelace describes such portraits as “of inestimable value” to the “West Indian” because they supply “impressions of our heroes” along with:

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a sense of the people, of their history in a time in which much of what passes for West Indian history is little more than a footnote of European expansionism, and where the West Indian people are presented as the objects rather than the makers of their history, and their outstanding individuals as exceptional rather than as expressions of a people and civilization. (83)

With this statement Lovelace clearly reiterates James’ explanation of the relationship between cricketing heroes and the history and selfunderstanding of the Caribbean. To James, “West Indians crowding to Tests bring with them the whole past history and future hopes of the islands”, so that where the English might rely on their long story of national and imperial history to define themselves, Caribbean crowds have great cricketing names like “the three W’s, Ram and Val wrecking English batting, [to] help to fill a huge gap in their consciousness and in their needs” (2013, 233). Such sentiments are worked through in Lovelace’s fiction, and his praise of James’ portrait-making might stand as a manifesto for his own efforts to depict heroes, specifically cricketing heroes, in their historical and communal contexts—to wed them and their styles of play to their people and place/s, their past and potential future/s. Lovelace’s concern with his people being cast as objects rather than subjects in their own history-making is central to his fictional projects, and is also explained in his account of experiencing, for the first time in person at a stadium, West Indies lose a Test match (against England at the Queen’s Park Oval on 25 March 2001). Criticising the media commentators’ tone of “censure rather than appreciation” in response to the team’s efforts, and how the crowd positions itself as “wiser and keener than the players”, Lovelace calls for a more engaged approach to the action and the West Indies cricketers (2003b, 90). He wants commentators to stop making players the “objects” of their observations and instead see them as agents (90). Similarly, he wants the crowd to recognise that although he only batted briefly Ramnaresh Sarwan “took up the challenge” presented by the bowler, however “Unwisely” (90). Lovelace even explains that his own cricket experiences make him “sympathise” with Ridley Jacobs’ decision to take on the fielder’s arm, only to get run out by a direct throw (90). Further, rejecting the Americanised dancers who now chant and sing in Trinidad’s Queen’s Park Oval, he calls for local music and other performative modes of support to inspire and motivate the players. He wants to re-establish an affirming relationship between the cricketers and those

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who watch them, as well as a renewed effort to embed cricket within the local cultural activities and the aspirations of the Caribbean people. Lovelace reports that, at a post-match party organised to celebrate the victory expected but not achieved, he discussed the need to teach “selfconfidence” to young Trinidadians, and was comforted by how those present experienced the West Indies “loss” as heavy, silently taking it “in” and feeling “like somebody dead” (91). These links—between cricket and death, and between style and life—also appear in Lovelace’s fiction, particularly his latest novel, Is Just a Movie (2011), and thus require a critical dialogue with James. In his “comparative reading” of The Dragon Can’t Dance and James’ work, Aaron Love characterises James’ review of Lovelace’s novel as registering the “subjective element” of Caribbean history (2008, 84). Love argues that while Lovelace shares many of James’ “concerns”, he demonstrates “a more intimate grasp of the dialectic between self and society” in Trinidad than his predecessor, and actually supersedes James’ methods of analysis (76, 77, 84). To Love, James developed an ambitious idea of “the self -activity of the working class” while he was in America (1938–1953), but was “unable to translate” his theoretical insights “into an effective Caribbean politics” (77–79; original emphasis). According to this argument, versions of which appear in other criticism, James relinquishes his radical understanding of, and demand for, working-class self-activity in favour of race-based nation-building and propaganda with his return to Trinidad in 1958, and his role as editor of The Nation. A more sympathetic view, though, would see James as acting in accordance with his vision of strategic political gain, and note that when he saw that Prime Minister Eric Williams’ regime was not developing along the lines he desired, James removed himself and even stood against Williams and his party, the People’s National Movement (PNM). In this, a parallel can be drawn with Lovelace’s own early enthusiasm for Williams and the PNM as well as his later critical distance, including his standing with the opposition Liberal Party at one point. Clearly, both James and Lovelace critique nationalist politics and politicians in the name of the people. Love is, therefore, right to suggest that “Placing Lovelace and James in dialogue illuminates each, and offers us a privileged perspective on the travails of the Caribbean in the years following Independence” (92). However, Love does not address the essential cricketing link between James and Lovelace, in Dragon or elsewhere, and, since he is writing before the publication of

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Is Just A Movie, he is unable to draw on the more detailed intertextual and style-based cricketing connection between James and Lovelace explicitly signalled by this novel. Love’s view of the relationship between James and Lovelace, and the way Lovelace offers a “more concrete—a more historical—sense of how the making of a new world might yet be imagined” (92), might be reconsidered given the way this latest novel draws directly on a relationship between style and freedom that doesn’t surpass James so much as re-enact his reading of cricketing aesthetics in a character-based fictional mode. This is the project for the rest of the chapter.

III Aiyejina’s short biography of Lovelace links his sporting interests and experience to his fiction, listing Lovelace’s interest in sports as one of his “key characteristics” as a developing writer (37–38). Aiyejina tells of Lovelace’s regular involvement in sports, especially in community football and cricket teams, and presents the young author as “an accomplished athlete” and “notable cricketer, excelling in bowling” (2017, 37). He also reveals that Lovelace “wrote two [unpublished] fiction manuscripts in quick succession after While Gods Are Falling [1984]”, and suggests that “many of the issues raised in them – such as the role of education and sports […] have remained central issues in [Lovelace’s] works” (52). According to Aiyejina, these unpublished texts and Lovelace’s athletic activities—including his participation in sports at school in Valencia, Rio Claro and, especially, at the Eastern Caribbean Farm Institute—inform his depictions of Alford (as cricket umpire) and Carabon (as footballer) in Salt , as well as Franklyn (as batsman) in Is Just a Movie (46). While such connections have received little critical attention, this discussion brings them to the fore to examine the cricketing content of Lovelace’s fiction. It analyses the juxtaposition of feigned self-aggrandising performances of authority with the complexities of communally linked aesthetic displays seen in Lovelace’s rendering of sporting actors. It also explores his mobilisation of the intersections between cricketing aesthetics, heroism and nation-building at the community level, as well as his intertextual relationship with James’ idea of cricketing style. Cricket appears briefly in The Dragon Can’t Dance, and more substantially in Salt , but in both texts Lovelace connects the game to politically

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impotent as well as socially awkward and personally isolating performances of authority, before revealing the importance of an alternative understanding of the game’s significance. In both novels, Lovelace weds ideas of “the law” to the role of the cricket umpire, twinning juridical authority and sporting adjudication. When, in The Dragon Can’t Dance, Aldrick, Fisheye and “the others” are in court for their failed armed rebellion, the judge’s “implacable frown” is that of a “presiding umpire at the Queen’s Park Oval in a cricket test-match between West Indies and England, knowing that he was a black man […] there to interpret the law; and he would show them that he knew the law” (Lovelace 1998, 173). The judge understands that instead of castigating society, instituting justice or changing men, his only mission is to uphold “the Law” (173). In this way, Lovelace establishes the performative farce of the judge’s insecure desire to prove himself to those before him, even those in the dock, and to the (soon-to-be-former) imperial master. With “his wig around his head like the large drooping eyes of a Saint Bernard dog”, the judge is a loyal rescue animal in juridical costume, set to impose the imperially-derived laws and their bolstering of inequality regardless of “his blackness”, or the memory of his mother’s death (173). The emptiness of his supposedly powerful decision-making position suggests that nothing can change for him or others if, as in Franz Fanon’s (1967) famous diagnosis, old colonial standards, assumptions and conceptions of authority are simply re-articulated by Black middle-class professionals in an emerging former colony. In contrast to the judge’s position and performance, Aldrick’s time in prison allows him to see that his group’s rebellion was flawed because it was always a performance directed towards an external authority rather than a demonstration of self-determining power. This distinction between outward-facing, hollow performances of self-aggrandising authority and a growing appreciation of the importance of collective, self-determining power structures much of Lovelace’s later fictional world, and is often a source of comedy. These and related ideas are continued and developed in Salt through cricket, and again through the figure of the umpire. In the very middle of the text, there is a rum-shop dispute between two comic figures of law enforcement over who should lead the West Indies, situating us in 1960, or just before, during the transitional period of the West Indies Federation (1958–1962). Fats Alexis, a “Council worker” and local umpire who has never played cricket, says its “time for them to make Frank Worrell captain”, whereas police constable Stephen Aguillera is “talking

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about” Gerry Alexander (Lovelace 1996, 135), Jamaica’s inexperienced white wicketkeeper-batsman and Cambridge blue who, James argued, was never qualified “to be captain of a side in which Frank Worrell was playing” (2013, 233). In this brief exchange—a kind of comic rendering of the public debate James references in Beyond a Boundary—the umpire is always-already right, identifying the people’s hero and leader, and trumping the policeman’s institutionalised view of continued white leadership. The self-declared know-all umpire is a figure of fun, but he is also an authority in this instance. His declaration comes not from any particular cricketing “law”, though, but rather from his proximity to the people, carried “everywhere”, as he is, “by Cascadu cricket club” (Lovelace 1996, 134). In this sense, he is a counterpoint to the judge of Dragon, and to Alford in Salt , because their styles of umpirial self-performance are empty gestures, oriented towards an external and distant audience of (post)imperial approval that sets them apart from their people, while Fats’ assertion is a repetition of popular judgement, despite being conveyed in an amusingly exaggerated and self-aggrandising form. Like Aldrick, Fats realises that self-determination is achieved not by looking towards Oxbridge and white captaincy, but by advancing the “best man”, in James’ words (2013, 57, 135), who in this instance is also Black and someone who will help forge a new period of locally determined, politically aware and successful (cricketing) leadership. In this episode, then, the umpire is only authoritative when he speaks on behalf of the people, and Lovelace channels popular insight and ambition through James’ early view of this pivotal cricketing and political moment. Cricket references stretch across Salt , with the game described as the only reason Michael goes to school and as a space for men to retreat from the “stifling” smells of the marital home (Lovelace 1996, 49). Its primary importance, though, is as a communal activity that brings people together and demonstrates how individual performance styles can either be hollow gestures of self-importance that are never truly heroic, as with Alford, or the demonstration of heroic efforts at self-activity and self-expression directed towards national integration and new ways of individual and communal being. Following the “epic” opening two chapters (Niblett 2012, 163–164), Alford’s initial engagement with cricket comes in chapter three, titled “Umpire”. Arriving late to school, Alford is too big and cumbersome for his classmates’ games, and is also too uncomfortably incompetent to play with boys his own age or his own older brothers. Wanting to be included, he sets up cricket matches for

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local boys and provides the equipment. Nevertheless, the “sirness” of his demeanour makes his peers resort to inviting him to be their umpire instead of picking him to play, and “Later, it would be forgotten by everyone but himself that he had any other ambition” (Lovelace 1996, 32). Critically, this transition—from a longing for communal inclusion to the isolated exceptionalism that comes with “the exercise of power”—is transformative for Alford (32). Initially, as a schoolboy umpire, he tried “his best to please”, wanting “to be fair and give correct decisions”, yet “all timidity” left him when he realised “he was the power [and] his was the final authority” (32). By a “recitation of the rules” and “an inflexibility of will”, Alford “establishe[s] his control”, penalising for “minor infringements” and “delivering his judgements not as an upholder of the law but as an angel of vengeance victoriously punishing sin” (32). Here, authority is derived from the technical, detailed knowledge of rule-bound judgement others have failed to obtain, as with Dragon’s courtroom judge, but it also becomes an almost godlike power to punish, separating Alford from the mere mortals of the game, including those who should be his peers. Alford’s performance of authority also has an aesthetic dimension. He “work[s] himself into the drama of the game, signalling boundaries with the elegance of a dancer”, and ultimately “making a theatre of his adjudication until he became as much of an attraction as the star batsman or bowler at school” (32). But this drama is not the Jamesian drama of cricket. Rather, it is a pantomime of attention seeking and feigned maturity. Nonetheless, Alford’s performances impress the adults around him, and he is invited to umpire for their clubs and “become a Pupil Teacher”, aged just sixteen (32). As Xenobia Barrow-Delgado writes, “Alford finds pleasure […] in his role of umpire, gatekeeper, and protector of law”, and his position as “god of his empire on the cricket field” leads, quite “naturally”, to him becoming “an imperial schoolmaster” (2017, 109–110). Hence, Alford’s cricketing authority is also tied to literacy, education and his entry into Standard English (SE). His attempt to raise himself, ready for a life beyond the island, in England, means sifting through the dictionary, practising his elocution and, like Naipaul’s Titus Holt in Miguel Street (1959), speaking and teaching in a language that fails to relate to the environment around him and actually inhibits his ability to communicate. As a zealous young teacher, he combines his umpirial and educational authority to supersede the power of his pupils’ parents in his efforts to ready their children for the island scholarship exams, and,

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thereby, for the world. When he later returns to his school as a politician, he even offers prizes for the cricket team and “best umpire” because he believes in “train[ing] those who have to control the game” (131). Across these episodes, and the novel as a whole, Lovelace repeatedly signals the insubstantial nature of Alford’s aesthetic performances, and specifically the kind of narcissism that is socially acceptable in a colonial (almost postcolonial) context but actually lacks personal integrity and never constitutes a genuine sociopolitical contribution, partly because it removes the possibility of self-activity for others. Alford gets lost in his role as umpire, and the self-alienating performativity that begins with this role is carried over into his teaching and political career. When, as a teacher, Alford finally becomes a cricketer, playing for Wanderers Cricket Club, the isolating performative pride of his youth continues. He enjoys walking through town in his cricket whites for all to see, and his eagerness means he is still out of step with his teammates as “the first man” to arrive (36). This position—as the first and only man—is maintained with the idea that he will leave the island soon. When Alford is made Vice Captain despite his obvious lack of talent, his girlfriend, Vera, explains that this is not because, as he thinks, his team expect to be rid of him soon, but rather because they are proud and think of him as “taking them with him” (36). After failing to leave, though, Alford enters politics and his cricketing connection is again seen through his “little weakness”, his vanity, so that as a Minister he “went all about where people gathered” and played for both sides in the annual “Bachelors v Married Men” fête match (131). It is only when a stranger tells him he is the “biggest pappyshow [i.e. fool] in town” that Alford recognises he has become “part of the tapestry of pretence at power” that separates political leaders from the people they claim to represent (129, 130). However, this has been the case throughout Alford’s development, particularly as displayed through his cricketing encounters. Repeatedly, he has been happy for those around him to relinquish responsibility and concede authority to him when they were unable or unwilling to accept him as a peer and equal. From a position of insecurity and often incompetence, then, he has accidentally become a kind of heroic martyr—for staying on the island, for being a disciplining teacher, and for returning to teaching after his hunger strike—and he is repeatedly described as such. But at each stage of his advancement, Alford’s growing celebrity status traps him between his own good intentions and the call of popularity, and his supposed martyrdom is comedically undercut by Lovelace at every

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turn. Moreover when, in a conversation with the Prime Minister, Tannis explains that Alford “really wanted to be a hero” rather than working for genuine political change (193), the political adviser reveals Alford’s lack of collective thinking and action. Indeed, it is Alford’s inability to become a self-determining, rather than approval-seeking, cricketing hero or genuine team member that is set against the critical lessons of responsibility, emancipation and community-building that come from Bango (officially Emmanuel Durity), and the purity of batting offered by Sonan Lochan—where both Bango and Sonan allow different, and important, readings of the novel’s use of style. Alford’s adolescent peer, Sonan, is an “Indian” who feels the paralysing weight of racialised expectation through cricket. The young Sonan is “passionate about cricket” and his batting almost secures victory for the Hindu School against their Government School rivals for the first time (228). “Scenting possible victory”, all the parents attend the match the following year, but “Sonan who everybody depended upon was a failure” (228). He “looked good at the beginning but turned out to be mediocre”, in school and throughout college (228). What prevents Sonan from batting “up to his potential” is not any cricketing difficulty or “big game” jitters, but the pressure of having to carry Indian-Caribbean or Indian-Trinidadian hurt, and to strike a note of defiance—or, better, victory—during the supposedly Black nationalist upsurge: Sonan knew he could bat. […] What he came to realize was that batting for himself, he was all right, but faced with the hopes of Hindu School or Naparima [College], he was batting no longer for himself but for them. He was not just a batsman, he was an Indian. That was the burden that weighed him down. (228)

Like Alford, Sonan’s schoolboy experience of cricket carries over into adulthood and eventually a kind of political career. As a young man he “add[s] cricket implements […] to the stock of things sold” in his father’s shop and plays for Ventures Cricket Club (229). Later, he uses his understanding of batting to try to express his political vision for the people of the island (229). Sonan was part of the racially mixed political group Alford and Kennos establish, believing that Indian participation in carnival is a step towards an integrated national body and culture. However, when Alford leaves for the African-identified “National Party” (229), Sonan feels compelled to move across to the Indian-dominated Democrats and

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again believes that he is expected to be “the one to make the difference” (242). When Sonan speaks at a Democrat meeting in Cunaripo, for instance, he looks out onto an audience that includes cricketing “fellars” he knows from school and from Ventures. He thus begins to talk “of batting”, of his “anxiety” about batting “just for Hindu School” and his fear that without him they would “collapse”: What he learnt from that was that he had to bat for something bigger no matter who he was batting for. And that is why, now, […] they mustn’t expect him to bat for some little idea, some Indian people alone. “If I am called upon to bat for the Democratic Party the best way I can do that is to bat for batting. Because […] no man is an island […] Any man’s death diminishes me. Because I am involved in mankind”. (234)

Akin to the “art for art’s sake” mantra, Sonan’s longing “to bat for batting” is a claim to the aesthetic purity of batting itself. It is also a rejection of race-specific representational performativity. In typical Lovelacian fashion, though, when Sonan attempts to repeat his ideas at a party rally in Woodford Square, his voice and, thereby, his cricket-derived hope for collectivity and investment in “mankind” is drowned out entirely by the noise of the partisan crowd. Sandra Meek describes Sonan’s political efforts as a reminder that his grandfather, Moon, was able to buy land when Bango was not, and, hence, evidence of the kind of “Afro-Caribbean bias” that destabilises Lovelace’s claims for liberation and equality (2001, 273). Meek reads Lovelace as presenting “the Indian community as separatist”, and as positioning racial awareness as an impediment to individual and national liberation except where it is derived from “Afro-Trinidadian culture” (289–292). There is much in Salt , and similarly in Is Just a Movie (considered below), to support Meek’s reading, but it seems that while Lovelace depicts the separation and isolation of Indian-Trinidadians, he also makes clear that this is not an individually desired or communally useful separation so much as the outcome of complex sociocultural encounters that need refashioning. Vishnudat Singh (2006) argues that Lovelace’s Indian characters are “salted”, creolised and rooted by their locality. In many ways this idea marries with Sonan’s growing connection to the performative culture of cricket and to Lovelace’s built-in Jamesian markers of “West Indian” cricketing identity. Indeed, Sonan’s view of batting looks to move past race on the same grounds that

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James does in Beyond a Boundary—that is, in the name of national and regional solidarities and new modes of creative self-articulation found in the aesthetic action of the region’s cricketers. That Lovelace also recognises the need for land reparations for the descendants of those enslaved does not invalidate this position. Further, when Lovelace presents Sonan as a batting “failure” his description is markedly similar to James’ description of Wilton St Hill, the Black West Indies batsman whose play “atoned for a pervading humiliation and nourished pride and hope”, but who, in England in 1928, was “an incredible failure” (2013, 93–95). Neil Lazarus presents St Hill as failing during this first official Test tour “because no one person could have succeeded, at that time, in doing what he was asked to do […] to perform uncolonizability” (1999, 165–166). The parallel between Sonan and St Hill might thus be understood as flagging the impossibility of one person carrying their racial, communal, national or regional group. They might be able to represent them, through their aesthetic cricketing skills, but they cannot do for the people what they have yet to do for themselves, especially in political terms. Finally, we should note that each of the novels’ three key cricketing actors—Alford, Sonan and Bango—are over-burdened and, in some ways, paralysed by their relationship with their immediate community. Nevertheless, Lovelace uses their interrelated struggles to move the novel’s cricketing investment from Alford’s feigning attempts at selfimprovement in its early chapters, through Sonan’s thoughtful insistence on the widest implications of batting, on to Bango’s sense of heroic style, land redistribution and unity-at-independence. In the opening pages of Salt , Travey, the boy narrator, introduces his Uncle Bango as he enters the family yard with the same “brawling parrot-toed sure-footed walk” he used to “step on to the cricket field and into the stickfighting ring” (Lovelace 1996, 2). As Bango marches “disdainfully [with] an arrogance” into this domestic space, Travey’s mother withdraws and her animals seem “aware of the danger [Bango] carried in his person” (2). Travey sees “nothing threatening” in Bango’s presence or person, and can only connect his uncle’s confident demeanour to his “story” of the rebellious resistance of Black men and women to slavery and its aftermaths (7). This is a story that expresses the critical “problem” the novel establishes as central to contemporary Caribbean life: namely, the problem of “how to set people at liberty” (7). Bango’s entrance and story sets out the stall for Lovelace’s own narrative project, the combining of storytelling and aesthetic embodied action in an effort

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to allow physical “style” and literary “style” to co-operate in the exploration of self-expression and freedom creation. Hence, Bango’s entrance is noteworthy. Aiyejina explains how he needed to understand “the walking style” of the Caribbean when he first arrived from Nigeria (2017, ix– x), and we might read Bango as offering a poignantly local “walking style” that registers his ancestral line, his links to his environment, and the dissenting power of his bodily confidence. It may also carry a gentle nod to Sobers’ “parrot-toed” walk (see Chapter 2). Aiyejina also reports that Lovelace “had to learn to walk again” aged five or six after contracting typhoid, implying that the author has a particular understanding of the importance of walking for social (re)integration (10). With Bango we see a related idea of re-emergence conveyed in his journey across the text yet, from the outset, his walk, his personal style, establishes a confidence derived from struggle and physical contestation, as if to fight and survive is as ordinary and unending as walking, and to carry oneself is to lay claim to one’s body and, by extension, life. Bango’s walk also declares, more specifically, that he is ready for sporting and other kinds of communal exertion. The extent of this communal commitment becomes clear when Myrtle first sees the “implements of Cascadu cricket club” cluttering their unfinished and unrefined home. She realises that she will have “to share Bango with the team and village” because “nothing was done without him” and his leadership “was not just authority”, as with Alford, “it was responsibility” (143). As Myrtle sees others look to Bango “to serve and lead them” without “pull[ing] together and shar[ing] responsibility” (147), her only compensation is the tear-inducing sight of Bango “on a Saturday afternoon lead[ing] the Cascadu team […] all of them in baptismal white, leisurely like princes dismounted from horses” (143– 144), in a nod to what these men can be, or already are in unrecognised ways, beyond the field of play. As Myrtle and Bango grow and age together, she also comes to understand that his style and pride are part of his effort to offset the pain of his landlessness and the isolation he experiences as a self-determined yet collectively minded organiser of cricket and community. For Alford and Sonan, cricket is about the struggle for acceptance and the difficulties of representational responsibility for uncertain young men. With Bango too, Lovelace explores the difficulties of communal responsibility, but with Bango the self-sacrificing heroics of participatory leadership indicate an optimism that can be carried forward politically

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when his story and the fairness of his claim to the land are appreciated. In fact, Alford is only seen as having “arrived at a self” when he decides to resign from parliament and the National Party rather than abandon Bango’s land claim (254). Jennifer Rahim writes that with Bango “Lovelace seems to have compressed the best of his heroes”, combining Bee’s non-violence, Bolo’s stickfighting strength and “Aldrick’s fidelity to the liberating power of the Carnival” (1999, 158). Lovelace uses this compression of heroic endeavour to bind local cricketing leadership and the politics of a reparatory national welcome, enacted with Bango’s efforts to organise a multi-racial children’s march as part of the Independence Day parade. In the final moments of the novel, as the march begins, Alford recognises that Bango had kept the self that he, Alford, needed to find in order to make “his way back to the people from whom he had stood apart from the beginning”, especially as a cricketing umpire early on (257–258). Consequently, the novel’s close—with its young multi-racial national unit “parading for independence”—reinforces Bango’s idea of cricketing leadership, steel band strength and unending communal possibility, as well as the importance of Bango’s physical, masculine, stylised self-confidence (260). The end, in many ways, is a return to the beginning, as structurally the novel reuses the idea of Bango marching. This time, though, dressed “all in white”, Bango is leading a new generation, “cross[ing] the chasm into the past” and readying himself for the future by “keeping his strength in reserve” (257, 260). As others have noted, before Salt Bango had already been introduced by Travey in Lovelace’s earlier short story “A Brief Conversion” (cf. Evans 2014; Niblett 2016). In this tale of near-surrender, Travey wants to escape the imposed style of conformity and subjection, coming via his mother’s disciplining, the assault of colonial education, and the violence of the school bully named “Police” (Lovelace 2003a, 21). Just as Travey is about to concede his “marbles” to Police, Bango arrives, hailing his nephew as “Bull”, in a gesture that links the two of them with Travey’s father and reminds Travey of the “comradeship” and “pride” Bango offers (26). Feeling “saved” by his Uncle, a “hero” “plucked” from the “landscape” (26), Travey explains that, across Bango’s abilities to “dance, bongo, fight stick and sculpt heads from dried coconuts”, he brings one specific characteristic:

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What did he bring? I suppose I must call it style. It was not style as adornment, but style as substance. His style was not something that he had acquired to enhance an ability; rather, it existed prior to any ability or accomplishment – it was affirmation and self looking for a skill to wed it to, to save it and maintain it, to express it; it was self searching for substance, for meaning. (27)

Carolyn Cooper sees this as emphasising Lovelace’s “conception of style as the essence of the man, the substance of the self flamboyantly awaiting realization” (2006, 3). It may be the “substance of the self”, but it is also the masculine substance of strength and aesthetic skill that connects him to his familial line and is the opposite of the empty, narcissistic version of style Alford cultivates and is trapped within. In Lovelace’s register, Bango’s style is specifically the substance of self-expression and confident rebellion, the ability to create and to hold up under the pressure of unfreedom. His style also inspires Travey to recognise that he, too, is a hero for Bango and “his whole generation”, because he has the educational “substance” they were seeking (27). Niblett reads Travey’s depiction of Bango’s style as equally applicable to Lovelace’s own narrative style, arguing that Lovelace’s “long, sinewy sentences [are] informed by the rhythms of various Trinidadian cultural practices”, including “the rhythms of calypso and the steel band” that help channel “the energies of the mass of people” (2016, 42). Niblett also sees that “a self ‘search for substance’ […] entails a rejection of the empty promises of Williams’ petro-modern citizenship” and its attendant “imperialist oil interests”, and a move towards “autonomously organized modes of life- and environment-making that would allow the Trinidadian “self” to realise itself fully (42). This concern with self-activity and self-realisation through style—as content and as form—extends across Lovelace’s A Brief Conversation and Other Stories (1988) via discussions of clothing, bodily posture, music and hairdressing. Style is also bound to the communal dimensions and crowd appreciation of cricket in his short story “Victory and the Blight”. Though Cooper’s discussion of Lovelace’s “Politics of Style” does not make this link, Lucy Evans (2014) does, detailing the dangers facing local ideas of style because of the pressure coming from globalising modernisation, felt in Lovelace’s rural Trinidad through things like the arrival of new haircutting clippers from the US and the erosion of the local cricket team because of departures to the city and abroad. Having juxtaposed, as

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the story itself does, the unstylish haircuts Travey’s mother has Mr Fitzie impose on her son and Victory’s sense of the “craft” of barbering being like an art where “[e]verything have to flow”, Evans rightly links Victory’s sense of artistic movement to his barbershop conversations about cricket (80). She also emphasises how the story presents cricket as “a symbol of post-independence nationhood which has given Trinidad global importance”, and how issues of personal playing style are considered important (81). We can extend these ideas by appreciating how Lovelace uses a Jamesian understanding of cricket as art to connect Victory’s claims about barbering and the claims made by his visitors, Ross and Pascal, about cricketing style. When Victory defends the continuity and stability provided by a cricket “club”, specifically Wanderers, as outlasting the loss of individual players, it is Ross, the newcomer and supposed “blight” on Victory’s business, who introduces the critical and Jamesian connection between style and community in his explanation of the aesthetic batsmanship. The importance of this link for spectators is then taken up by Pascal, Victory’s long-standing local friend and customer: Is not the going away […] Is what they do while they here … I see Housen. I see him play in Arima […] He bring excitement, a magic, a life. You see him on the field and you see life. You see yourself. […] “Is true, Victory,” Pascal said. “I play against him once […] and when he finish bat … I mean when we at last get him out, the whole field was clapping, not because we get him out, because of the innings he play. Is true. The man coulda bat.” (Lovelace 2003c, 139)

Here, the idea that a spectator sees their own life on the field through the aesthetic performativity of the batsman, and that individual and collective expressions of life are made through batting, strikes as fundamentally Jamesian—as the fictional rendering of cricket’s “tactile values” and “lifeenhancing” qualities, prompting those watching to see themselves and their lives in the batsman’s performance of cricketing art. The link to James is even explicitly signalled with the expression “The man coulda bat”, because in Beyond a Boundary James’ uses the same terms in his famous portrayal of Matthew Bondman. Moreover, this link to James, to style, and back to the example of Bondman, is reworked and expanded in the cricketing content of Lovelace’s Is Just a Movie, where it becomes clear that the Lovelace’s Jamesian mode of thinking helps him enlarge his understanding of the importance of embodied aesthetic action as style.

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IV Lovelace’s Is Just a Movie interrogates the nation-building efforts and failures of the independence era, of the Black Power movement, and of the International Monetary Fund and oil booms that have shaped Trinidadian political ambition since the late 1960s. As Niblett writes, the novel “deals explicitly with the petro-driven politics of both the 1970s and post-2000s booms”, engaging “directly with the government’s efforts to ‘create a national identity in energy’”, and works into “its own narrative apparatus the experiential peculiarities and aesthetic dilemmas that derive from oil’s seemingly miraculous transfiguration of social reality” (2016, 41). As with The Dragon Can’t Dance and Salt , Is Just A Movie is also strongly attached to the aesthetics of carnival and calypso as important local cultural practices. It is also concerned with the difficulties of negotiating the relationship between singular heroic actors and their communities. What is of particular interest here is the way the novel uses cricket, in an explicitly Jamesian mode, as an aesthetic and politically purposeful cultural practice, best expressed through a batsman’s playing style. Indeed, it is within the novel’s style-economy that we find the clearest expressions of, and investment in, the energetic gains of aesthetic self-creativity for the individual and the nation, but also for a wider and deeper understanding of humanity. And this, it seems, is not Lovelace exceeding James, as Love (2008) argues, but deliberating and closely standing with a Jamesian vision of cricket as physical art that contributes to, and can stimulate, new ways of being. As the leading narrative voice, the poet-calypsonian King Kala opens the novel by establishing the critical importance of style. When King, Sonnyboy, Evrol, Stanley and others are recruited into the production of an American film, a “jungle picture”, they are “paid to die” as “natives” in grass skirts (Lovelace 2011, 23). In contrast to the “give-and-take reasonableness” of their childhood games, they are shot down at will in the background as the all-American hero survives unscathed. Realising he cannot be “falling so”, King wants to “compose [his] dying like a poem”, to become the “centre of [his] own dying”, because he needs his “death to live” and to carry the collective “human signature” of the Black men acting (25, 26, 28). His friends, though, are more experienced actors used to racial typecasting who want King to follow direction and not endanger their earnings. When Evrol declares “Is just a movie. You

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don’t need to make style”, King’s response reclaims style as a foundational right and possession of the disenfranchised, standing above wage labour: “Style? Style? Style? You want to deny my style. Evrol, I am dying and you want to deny me style […] What else do I have but style?” (31). As an artist whose poverty is marked, King defines himself via style and understands style as exceeding the economics of survival in the way it makes life and death meaningful. He senses a similar life-claiming resistance in Sonnyboy, and it is Sonnyboy who brings into his performance of death a “dance in salute of life”, wherein the “spontaneity of his action” brings to light his previously “hidden self” (31–32). Sonnyboy’s spontaneity expresses his personality, the resistant pressure he embodies and feels compelled to enact. These opening scenes frame the novel’s concern with style. They expose the exploitation built into the performance of disposable blackness for the Americanised world market and the backlash of self-reclamation achieved through performative style. For Sonnyboy, this (re)styling of death later mutates into repeated attempts to find a place for himself within a politics of purposeful rebellion and communal integration, as he sheds his acquired “bad john” image in an attempt to align himself with Black Power. It is Franklyn, though, who pulls together the novel’s interest in style as individual and public performance with its concern with the deaths of young Black men trying to forge new avenues towards freedom. It is specifically through Franklyn’s batting that Lovelace makes clear his Jamesian claims to the political ramifications of cricketing style. Franklyn is the young Black man whose cricketing skills convey to his mother the same “dancing movements” of his father, “Mr Music”, a “charmer” and “womaniser” who leaves her with a son whose “smooth skin” and “poetry of […] batting” is the reincarnation of his father’s “smoothness” (85). In a chapter entitled “Franklyn’s Batting”, Lovelace captures the elegance, artistry and communal patterns of expectation, engagement and aesthetic recognition that come with Franklyn’s mesmerising skill with the bat. When he plays for Cascadu, the “the whole village” comes out to watch his innings, leaving behind work, cards and chores as they “feel the tug of a grand event” (86). Men and women, young and old, turn out just to “watch”, still and silent, taking in the beauty of Franklyn’s skills. In a Jamesian manner, Lovelace is careful to insist on the aesthetics of Franklyn’s batting, how the “action” of batting is not simply about scoring runs, but is rather derived from Franklyn’s elegance, his bodily postures and movement, his muscular exertions and

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habits of refinement, the confidence and exactness that characterise his style of play, even when he leaves the ball, refusing to play a shot. Indeed, Lovelace does not open his presentation of Franklyn’s batting with dynamic run-scoring shots or explosive, rebellious big hitting. Instead, he presents a detailed account of “style as substance” without accumulation. The poise and socioeconomic layering of Lovelace’s cricketing description make it worth quoting at length: his batting wasn’t only runs, it was the spring in his step, it was the dance of his body, the confident readiness of muscles to move forward or sideways or back: to tiptoe or pivot or kneel or duck; and then the ball would come and he could leave it alone, just that, watch the ball and withhold his bat from it. And although it didn’t show in the scorebook, that was a stroke, that was a statement, that was an acknowledgement of the bowler and an announcement to the world that we here. We have eyes. We ready, just to hint to them that they can’t play the arse, that they have to put it on a length, we not going powerful-stupid chasing the wide balls. Put it on the stumps. Put it on the stumps. Until I ready for you. […] Franklyn had three leave alones. […] He had a lot of no’s, that is, when he actually play the ball for no runs […] And all that is batting and he ain’t even start to score yet. I not even talking yet about Franklyn going down on one knee and sweeping to square leg or climbing back on his foot and slapping it back past the bowler, not a man move. I ain’t talking yet of Franklyn up on tiptoes, his eyes fixed big on the ball he been watching its whole journey from the bowler’s hand, and even after it pass his waist and look like it about to go past his wicket, he had already pivoted like he doing a bullfight dance and just when the keeper feel he have the ball in his fists, his bat come down sweet and long, long and sweet, slap, between the keeper and slips, How you going to stop we? How you go keep we down? And all round the wicket, each in its own time, each off the chosen and appropriate ball would be the music of bat on ball, punctuated by the chorus of our applause; though it wasn’t Franklyn alone we were applauding. When Franklyn batting we were the ones batting, and in the mirror that he had become we would see ourselves in contest with the world. He was holding the bat but the strokes was our strokes and the bowler was England or Australia or Pakistan: the world. (88–89; original emphasis)

The detailed exuberance of this depiction marries Franklyn’s calm with the excitement of those watching, holding together the pause and patience

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of the batsman with the village’s eagerness to behold such composure. Franklyn’s movements and repeated “leave alones” are the mark of his self-control, the sign of his ability to wait and watch, to discern and judge according to circumstances without the need for rushed runs and risky shot-making. When James tells of how George Headley revealed to him that what he “feared most” in an innings was the “loose ball” that came after being “tied down” because “You went at it greedily and made a stupid stroke”, he presents Headley as expressing the dangers of the Caribbean’s position as an emerging and developing region in the worldeconomy in terms of cricketing shot-selection (2013, 36). For James, Headley’s explanation encodes the weight of historic and economic constriction the region carries as it tries to wrestle itself free from empire, but also the dangers, especially at independence, of an all-too-hasty snatch at opportunity, for such opportunities can bring death—symbolic in the loss of a wicket, but real outside of the game. Lovelace seems to be using the same encoding in Franklyn, insisting, though, that the young batsman knows how to handle such dangers by waiting for and then capitalising on opportunities rather than risking himself—his wicket—at inopportune moments. He bats to face the world’s great cricketing nations, and, it seems, to confront “the world” as a systemic whole. With Franklyn, then, Lovelace is making explicit the way that the batsman’s announcement to “the world” is one of self-assurance that presses back against any need to grab, snatch or hurry to accumulate, because the batsman refuses to give into being “tied down” and instead manages his move into shotmaking and run scoring. In a cricketing context, Franklyn would be said to be “building his innings”, hopefully establishing the foundations for a long stay at the wicket. In the context of Niblett’s (2016) reading of the novel, it seems that Lovelace is slowing down the energetic pace of national development, particularly in relation to the rush caused by oil, ensuring that Franklyn manages his bodily energetics as his own settling at the wicket requires, as the local conditions and his own mindset dictates. Franklyn recognises the challenge of the bowler, and can even “smile […] to acknowledge the ball deceive him a little”, but he is a man in control of himself, of his dancer-like movements and his artistic expressions (88). When he begins to play his shots, he plays them late, waiting until the ball is almost past him until making contact, as the best batsmen do, expressing a patience that runs counter to the oil-logic and developmental haste of the newly independent Trinidad. His “music of bat on ball” is

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the sound of the right shot being played to the right ball, of the riskmanagement and beautiful self-articulation that is the “smooth un-hurry of Franklyn dispatching the ball to the boundary” (91). With this musical batting, Franklyn stands for and with his people, allowing them to see themselves in his art, in the execution of his shots and in the patient determination of his aesthetic self-expression. His body and batting prompt communal insight and aspiration. Lovelace offers the collective thoughts of the crowd in his italics—How you go keep we down?—and indicates that they are a rebellious force inspired by the art of batting. All of which is notably Jamesian, recalling James’ explanation of the “impact” of “a fine batsman” and the effects of watching singular moments of cricketing beauty, or the unlikely artistry of an otherwise unappealing cricketer (2013, 4)—a point that Lovelace also weaves into his narrative through the cricketing observations of Manick’s father. Just as Alford’s cricketing experiences and “style” are cast against those of his Indian-Trinidadian peer Sonan, in Salt , Franklyn’s batting is depicted in relation to the cricketing interest and aesthetic efforts of Manick and Manick’s father—the local “Indian” family living within but separate from the Settlement. For much of the novel it appears that Manick’s father’s knowledge of the community around him comes solely from watching “the cricket matches played on the savannah” (Lovelace 2011, 152). He watches from the sanctuary of his own home, sitting in his hammock on his veranda, with his children beside him, “not moving, saying nothing” when Franklyn bats (153). Meek’s (2001) critique of Lovelace’s portrayal of Indian-Trinidadians as “separatist” strikes a telling note here. Yet across the novel we learn that this is not what Manick or his father desire, and their reaction to Franklyn—though loaded with racialised antagonism—is evidence of Lovelace’s Jamesian sense of cricketing aesthetics binding local people together beyond categories of race. When the local “crowd roar[s]” at Franklyn’s “genius strokes”, Manick’s father “clear[s] his throat uneasily”, “choking”, and has to drink his water to “wash down the words that had stuck in this throat” while Franklyn is out “in the middle” of the pitch (153). While it seems that there is something hard to swallow about Franklyn’s skills, with the fall of Franklyn’s wicket Manick’s father would “heave himself out of the hammock and with new force and drive” begin his chores “with a sense of urgency”: as if he, his family, the community too and the whole district, if not the world, needed to immediately exert some equivalent force and style to

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match Franklyn’s batting; so that Manick and his sister felt compelled to find something useful to do. (153)

Here, Lovelace can be read as mobilising, or at least echoing, James’ explanation of tactile values and the ways in which spectators of cricketing art are themselves compelled to act as if there is a new enlivening force coming to them through the aesthetic performance observed. In addition, just as Pascal uses the phrase “The man coulda bat” in “Victory and the Blight”, Lovelace presents Manick’s father as asserting “That boy could bat ”, in a mumbling acknowledgement of Franklyn’s achievement—an acknowledgement that bleeds into “The little bitch could bat”, articulated as if it is Manick’s view of his father’s thoughts, or the unchecked thoughts of the father himself (154). The reference to James here seems clear. In Beyond a Boundary James describes Bondman, his childhood neighbour, as the “dirty”, destitute and disapproved of “ne’er do well” who “dropped out early”, lacks shoes and “subscription” money for cricket, and possesses a “vicious character” that terrifies the young James (2013, 4). But James also presents Bondman as having “one saving grace”: “Matthew could bat. More than that, Matthew, so crude and vulgar in every aspect of his life, with bat in hand was all grace and style” (4; emphasis added). This sentiment—that aesthetic batting can compensate for other flaws and areas of life—is crucial to Jamesian thinking and appears in a number of Caribbean literary texts as well as Lovelace’s own writing. For example, Earl McKenzie’s short story “Cricket Season” describes Vincent, “a slim sixteen-year-old” local cricketing hero and “son of a prosperous truck operator”, in overtly Jamesian terms: “It was well-known that Vincent did poorly at school. But put a bat in his hand and he was transformed: he became expressive, confident and masterful. He said things with the bat that he could not put into words” (1991, 22). This connection to James was reinforced in “C.L.R. James on Cricket as Art”, an article in which McKenzie places James’ sense of cricket as significant form within the context of formalist and expressionist aesthetic theories. McKenzie agrees that cricket is aesthetic, and “find[s] the view that a cricketer can express his emotions through his playing convincing”, but stops short of seeing cricket as itself an art (1994, 95). Lovelace, though, animates Franklyn’s batting with the very idea that cricket is art and, as with Bondman’s batting, it seems to be received by Manick’s father as Franklyn’s “saving grace”—the skill and style that insists on being appreciated,

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even by those who stand apart from him and his racial or community group. Manick reasons that his “father’s assessment of Franklyn’s batting” comes only after an effort to find his “deficiency”, or “flaw”, and so has “more weight” because it is “forced out of him” by the sheer quality of Franklyn’s cricket (154)—just as James would have expected. With Franklyn, then, Lovelace creates a figure akin to James’ Bondman. However, where Bondman is racialised in an aggressive and fear-inspiring manner, Franklyn is the “smooth” young man whose batting brings an expectation of future success—with Trinidad and Tobago, and from there perhaps with West Indies. And where Bondman, as Anthony Bateman notes, is “transformed” on the cricket pitch (2009, 190), Franklyn more subtly becomes the fullest version of himself. Bondman and Franklyn are also linked quite directly in the way their batting brings their community together in aesthetic appreciation without run accumulation. Lovelace’s introduction of Franklyn’s batting style with “leave alones”, cited above, recalls James’ depiction of people simply wanting to watch Bondman bat, even when he is merely practicing and not scoring runs. James’ portrayal of Bondman similarly emphasises the impact that his batting has “on all those around him, non-cricketers and cricketers alike” (2013, 4), and this impact is behind Franklyn’s importance to his community. James pinpoints “one particular stroke [Bondman] played by going down on one knee”—something like “a slash through the covers or a sweep to leg” that brought “a long, low ‘Ah!’ from many a spectator” and “thrilled” James’ own “little soul […] with recognition and delight” (2013, 4). This is James’ rendering of the effects of significant form as performed by Bondman. Lovelace carries this forward in Franklyn, whose signature strokes similarly include him “going down on one knee” to sweep and a “long, long and sweet, slap, between the keeper and slips” that prompts a response of collective thought: “How you going to stop we?” (Lovelace 2011, 89). According to Bateman, Bondman’s unorthodox elegance offers “a remaking of cricket’s performative grammar” with its “structured gesture of resistance, a meditation of the habitus of workingclass colonial life realised at the level of bodily performance” (2009, 190). Franklyn’s historically updated “performative grammar” works similarly, yet in the context of his island’s newly achieved independence his resistance is both to the colonial life and to the limited freedoms, or unfreedom, of a shallow independence. In his reading of Bondman’s shot-making, Smith emphasises James’ depiction of the crowd’s collective “Ah!” as the point at which something is made from cricketing style, the

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point at which James’ definition of art and the linking of popular culture and politics comes into play (2010, 84). Again, the same can be said of the reception of Franklyn’s batting in the Settlement, including at its margins, as Manick’s father’s reaction shows. Using the same example— “the long, low ‘Ah!’”—and linking it to Lovelace’s writing generally, before the publication of Is Just a Movie, Schwarz thinks of Bondman’s “grace” as “convey[ing] the smooth elegance of a kind of spiritual transcendence embodied in cricketing action”, and as alluding “to some kind of salvation – bodily, grounded and performative” that was a salvation that came right “down to earth” and much like the sense of salvation that reoccurs across Lovelace’s fiction (2008, ix). This assessment seems appropriate for Is Just a Movie itself, as Franklyn’s batting is positioned as the Settlement’s aesthetic salvation, a mode of salvation that Manick also preaches and that his father, ultimately, cannot resist. We might connect this idea of salvation back to James in another way too. When Lovelace uses the popular phrase “not a man move” in response to Franklyn slapping a back foot drive back past the bowler, he seems to be invoking James’ description of Sobers’ ability to defend aggressively by taking the ball on the “rise” and driving a delivery “barely over the good length” so as to send the ball “shooting between mid off and mid on” in a stroke that brings the crowd’s “favourite phrase: ‘Not a man move’” (James 2006, 220). This phrase has come to be familiar in Anglophone Caribbean literature, but in this particular example it is part of a coded amalgamation of the awe-inspiring grace of Bondman and the aggressive, world-class batting eloquence of Sobers. In this manner, Lovelace’s Franklyn is an iconic young batsman, grounded as local and carrying the potential to be world leading. This is what makes Franklyn’s early death in the novel consequential. The entire village is “waiting, all of us”, for Franklyn to be called up, as expected, for a “trial match to represent his country”, but this possibility is destroyed with the arrival of Black Power (Lovelace 2011, 91). When a Cascadu cricket match is interrupted by the drumming of Black Power supporters, Franklyn’s mother, Aunt Magenta, sees her son for the last time, walking differently as he comes from the cricket pitch accompanied by a young woman whose clothing and hairstyle indicate she is a Black Power activist. The reader learns, in an abbreviated fashion, that Franklyn is said to be “A revolutionary in the hills”, and is soon killed by the authorities (93). His death falls in the chapter break that moves the reader from “Franklyn’s Batting” to “Black Power Comes”,

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meaning there is only a brief textual moment (of two pages) separating the communal hopes for his cricketing future and the revelation of his death, as the police “bring him down on a stretcher” with “five bullets in his body” (93). Franklyn’s death haunts the rest of the novel and his mother continues to talk to him, “asking him how he could […] run away from his future”, and leave her and the “cricket field without his light” (95). This reference to the light of human life stands in contrast to the government’s plan to bring electricity and, thereby, light to the village, and to rural Trinidad generally, thanks to the economic rise of oil. When the Prime Minister comes to explain this new energy provision, Magenta is there, waiting to be enlightened about her son’s killing, but there is no chance for her to speak and no explanation forthcoming. Nevertheless, talking to herself, at home, in her grief, she verbalises her questions to the Prime Minister: “How you expect him to be less than the man you paint in your speeches […] And how, if Franklyn didn’t bow down to anybody in cricket, how you expect him to bow down to in life [?]” (95). In this formulation, Magenta captures the gap between the performance of equality possible on the cricket pitch for young Black men like Franklyn, and the demand that they still “bow down” to others beyond the field of play. The long shadow of Franklyn’s batting is also felt through Manick’s entry into the social life of the Settlement via cricket. After remarrying, Manick’s father finally releases his son from his chores to play with the other boys, and it is at this point that Manick discovers his cricketing ability. Previously, he had been a fraught and hurried batsman because he rarely had a chance to play: “If his father wasn’t at home he would […] take his turn at bat […] not looking at the ball closely, lashing out at it and getting out quickly so he could hurry back to the [family] cow” (150). By the time “his boyhood was nearly spent”, though, he discovered that “he had talent” after all (157). Manick’s style of batting is compared with Franklyn’s: he began to bat, not with the easy disdain of Franklyn but with great care, little chance-taking, protecting his wicket, with a careful flourish all his own until the team became confident that he could anchor an end. Yet there were occasions when something dangerous and daring would come over him with a gleeful spite, as though trying to break out of the very mould in which we had set him. (158)

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The steady style of batting is tempered with a unique, though careful, “flourish”, as if Manick has his own style beneath the “mould” assigned to him by his peers whose stereotyped understanding of the cautious Indian batsman seems to be seeping in. Like Sonan’s experience in Salt , Manick begins to understand himself as one of the boys through cricket. However, he finds that when his friends come together to organise themselves into a protest group, he only receives the placard “Africans and Indian Unite”, and is denied the Red Flag of rebellion and violence associated with Black Consciousness. Consequently, marked as solely Indian, he walks away from his young friends and adolescent cricket. Later, he joins “Tunapuna” Cricket Club—in a direct reference to Beyond a Boundary— and is “called up for trials for North Trinidad” (166). Manick is left wondering “what he would have accomplished had he started out in the savannah earlier […] If he was free to play like Franklyn, how would Cascadu have looked at him?” (166). In this gesture, Lovelace undercuts the racial modes of separation the novel repeatedly depictions by making clear that Manick’s potential might have been akin to Franklyn’s had he had the opportunity to play. As Manick moves from playing to coaching he articulates his own allegiance to West Indies cricket, the vision of multi-racial communality it stands for and how self-confidence, playing style and freedom can come together in the playing of the game, as shown by the regional team. Initially, Manick coaches his own nephews and, while demonstrating to them “how to bat […] the various strokes”, he talks to his sister about their strength, and about the need to establish, both within and beyond the game, “their freedom, their self-confidence” (167). His nephews, though, are soon redirected towards schoolwork by their father, and away from Manick’s conception of cricketing as self-determination and selfexpression. When he was later “invited” into schools to coach cricket, Manick tells the children “about Sonny Ramadhin and Rohan Kanhai, Garfield Sobers, Viv Richards and Alvin Kallicharran […], how widely they were respected, how they belonged to the people” (168). He wants the children to aspire to be like these West Indies greats, and to “Visualise” success, to call it into being through their imaginative powers and their abilities to shape themselves and their futures (168). He even “roped in some of the Settlement players as coaches” for the young players, and he would take groups of boys to any Test match at the Oval (168). He encourages sports for Indian girls too, and “carried on with such enthusiasm that he came to be known in all the schools and cricket grounds

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in the constituency” (168). But later, as his political career grows, his performances become like his batsmanship, and his “campaign changed from dream to the practical, as if he too was not allowing himself to cut loose”, and consequently he doesn’t “have the fire to inspire” (171– 172). He “straddle[d] two worlds”, becoming a member of the “Eastern Cricket League” and representing “Chutney bands on the New Cultural Council” (321–322). Having “played cricket” with the local boys, he ends up “talking mostly about cricket and the disaster the West Indies team was becoming” at Sonnyboy’s (322). It is in this setting that King wonders why Manick hasn’t yet articulated the problem of racial division, as it affects both sides, African-Trinidadian and Indian-Trinidadian, and imagines that perhaps each side is “perfecting [its] own offering to the world we had to enter”, and that this, rather than antagonism or distrust, was what prevented or perpetually delayed full unity (322). The same rationale is used by Lovelace to explain Manick’s father’s distance from the life of the Settlement. Magenta’s eventual husband, Clephus, theorises that Manick’s father’s “weekly examination” of Franklyn’s batting—which “represent[s] the people of the Settlement, not only talent but application, discipline”— was either to find fault and, thereby, “grounds to reject” the Settlement, or was “the measure by which he would measure the people of the Settlement” because he wanted “to join them” (154). Magenta discovers that it is the latter. She becomes the first non-family member to enter Manick’s home when she visits his sick father. After speaking about Franklyn and cricket she discovers that, for years, Manick’s father has been creating a costume, persona and style of performance that would enable him to participate in carnival. In this move, Lovelace plots the intersection of cricketing aesthetics and carnival-creation, even for the seemingly distant “Indian” father who, like Franklyn, wants his art to articulate his own sense of self because to join a band he has to “bring something worthy” of himself (321). Magenta reassuringly suggests his costume is already good enough to “join any band”, but we never see the consequence of their communication (321). We are simply left with the potential for a future communal coming together. While this means that there is no political resolution provided in Lovelace’s text, or across his fictional world, it is clear that, in the connected realms of cricket and carnival, style is the substance of life—articulated through embodied performance, offering self-determining possibilities for the individual and the community they represent. Style can even stave off death-in-life as it helps future-making

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possibilities come into view. Moreover, where Love reads Lovelace as exceeding James—with his fictional exploration the “subjective element” in Caribbean society and his ability demonstrate more clearly “how the making of a new world might yet be imagined” (Love 2008, 92)—the cricketing content of Lovelace’s work indicates that he directly engages James and James’ cricketing methodology in order to establish his vision of communal possibility through style. And we can see the importance of style manifest in similar and related ways elsewhere, in Caribbean cricket poetry particularly, as discussed in the next chapter.

Works Cited Aiyejina, Funso. 2017. Earl Lovelace. Kingston, Jamaica: The University of West Indies Press. Barrow-Delgado, Xenobia. 2017. With Only Human Hopes: Reading Earl Lovelace. Ancaster, Canada: Priory House. Bateman, Anthony. 2009. Cricket, Literature and Culture: Symbolising the Nation, Destabilising Empire. London: Ashgate. Cooper, Carolyn. 2006. “‘Self Searching for Substance’: The Politics of Style in Earl Lovelace’s A Brief Conversation and Other Stories ”. Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 4 (2). Online. Evans, Lucy. 2014. Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 2001 [1967]. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. London: Penguin Books. Harney, Stefano. 1996. Nationalism and Identity: Culture and the Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora. London: Zed Books. James, C.L.R. 1981 [1980]. “Life on the Hill”. Race Today 84. James. C.L.R. 2006 [1969]. “Garfield Sobers”. In A Majestic Innings: Writings on Cricket, edited by James, 218–232. London: Aurum. James, C.L.R. 2013 [1963]. Beyond a Boundary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. James, C.L.R., and Michael Anthony. 1969. “‘Discovering Literature in Trinidad: Two Experiences”. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 4.1: 73–87. Lazarus, Neil. 1999. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Love, Aaron. 2008. “The Crisis of Caribbean History: Society and Self in C.L.R. James and Earl Lovelace”. In Caribbean Literature After Independence: The Case of Earl Lovelace, edited by Bill Schwarz, 76–93. London: Institute for the Study of the Americas. Lovelace, Earl. 1986. The Wine of Astonishment. London: Heinemann.

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Lovelace, Earl 1996. Salt. London: Faber. Lovelace, Earl. 1998 [1979]. The Dragon Can’t Dance. London: Faber. Lovelace, Earl. 2003a [1988]. “A Brief Conversation”. In A Brief Conversation and Other Stories, edited by Lovelace, 1–31. New York: Persea Books. Lovelace, Earl. 2003b. Growing in the Dark (Selected Essays), edited by Funso Aiyejina. San Juan, Trinidad: Lexington. Lovelace, Earl. 2003c [1988]. “Victory and the Blight”. In A Brief Conversation and Other Stories, edited by Lovelace, 133–141. New York: Persea Books. Lovelace, Earl. 2011. Is Just A Movie. London: Faber. McKenzie, Earl. 1991. “Cricket Season”. In A Boy Names Ossie—A Jamaican Childhood, by McKenzie, 19–24. Oxford: Heinemann. McKenzie, Earl. 1994. “C.L.R. James on Cricket as Art”. Caribbean Quarterly 40 (3–4): 92–98. Meek, Sandra. 2001. “The ‘Penitential Island’—The Question of Liberation in Earl Lovelace’s Salt ”. Journal of Caribbean Studies 15 (3): 273–297. Naipaul, V.S. 1971 [1959]. Miguel Street. London: Andre Deutsch. Niblett, Michael. 2012. The Caribbean Novel Since 1945: Cultural Practice, Form and the Nation State. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Niblett, Michael. 2016. “‘Black was Never More Beautiful’: Ecology, Culture, and the Oil Boom in Trinidad”. Journal of West Indian Literature 24.2: 27– 45. Rahim, Jennifer. 1999. “The ‘Limbo’ Imagination and New World Reformation in Earl Lovelace’s Salt ”. Small Axe 5: 151–160. Schwarz, Bill. 2008. “Introduction: Where is Myself?” In Caribbean Literature After Independence: The Case of Earl Lovelace, edited by Schwarz, xi–xxii. London: Institute for the Study of the Americas. Singh, Vishunat. 2006. “Earl Lovelace’s ‘Unsalted’ Indians”. Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 4 (2). Online. Smith, Andrew. 2010. C.L.R. James and the Study of Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. St Louis, Brett. 2014. Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics: C.L.R. James’ Critique of Modernity. Abingdon: Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

Rites and Heroics

This chapter works out from the links between calypso and poetry to examine the tradition of cricketing praise poetry found within Anglophone Caribbean literature from the 1920s through to the present. The discussion focuses particularly on praise poetry’s investment in the heroic batsman and their style of batting. It also connects this poetic tradition to the hero worship and critical commentary found in calypso music, introducing important Caribbean cricketing moments and corresponding calypso clusters. The chapter begins with an analysis of C.L.R. James’ early efforts at cricketing praise poetry. It then establishes the heroic uncertainties of Kamau Brathwaite’s poem “Rites”, and reads the batting heroics of the region’s cricket poetry and its investment in iconic players, especially Viv Richards. The chapter also interrogates a group of poems about Brian Lara, situating these in relation to James’ rendering of Gary Sobers as a world-historical cricketer embodying the “great tradition” of West Indies cricket (James 1992, 380), before briefly turning to poems about Chris Gayle. What is clear, from the introductory work already done by Hilary Beckles (1998b), Stewart Brown (2012) and Gordon Rohlehr (1994) is that three broad thematic areas dominate Caribbean cricket poetry, namely: heroes and historic events; spectators and crowd commentaries; and the metaphorical or figurative deployment of cricketing ideas, images © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Westall, The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65972-1_4

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and terminology. The next chapter, Chapter 5, will turn to the varying modes of metaphor that bring new and unexpected plays on the game’s poetic potential. Chapter 6 explores poems and other literary works depicting Caribbean women in relation to the game, and Chapter 7 details the small but poignant group of poems that warn against reductive and stereotypical connections between cricket and men of Caribbean descent, especially in Britain. This chapter, though, deals specifically with heroic praise poetry in its multiple cricketing guises and in its concentration on the heroic batsman, as well as the fundamentally connected role of vibrant and prescient crowd interaction. The discussion brings to the fore a mode of the sublime that ties cricketing action and cricket poetry to the region’s history of slavery and sugar, and its related ecology, drawing on Brathwaite’s sense of the “environmental experience” and hurricane aesthetics of Caribbean literature (1984, 7–10; original emphasis)—or what Sharae Deckard terms Caribbean literature’s “storm-aesthetics” (2016, 43). To do so, it also adapts Paul Gilroy’s sense of the “slave sublime” (1993, 37). The chapter argues that the Caribbean’s cricketing praise poetry is heavily invested in the performative aesthetics of the batsman-hero— where a batsman’s style is read through the region’s experience of violence and its climate, or ecology—and that a dialectical relationship between the single heroic figure and the crowd, between the one and the many, is vital to the politically enlivening effects of Caribbean cricket’s aesthetic codes and their literary redeployment.

I In Cricket, Literature and Culture (2009), Anthony Bateman rightly suggests that “the legacy of James gave rise to a significant tradition of Caribbean cricket literature, including a particularly rich body of oral and written verse” (197). Before turning to this “rich body” of work, it seems appropriate to add that James provides an account of the earliest Caribbean cricket poems recorded when he tells, in a slightly selfdeprecating manner, of his own early forays into cricketing praise poetry. In Beyond a Boundary (1963) James explains that in 1921, following the first intercolonial tournament since 1912, he composed some cricketing “comic verse”, including a poem celebrating Victor Pascall—the left-arm spinner and uncle of Learie Constantine, who bowled “splendidly” during the tournament (2013, 89). Having seen this poem in the local newspaper, a fanatical Wilton St Hill supporter visited James at home and

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“commissioned” something for his own hero (90). James duly “sweated out” a serious sonnet about the batsman which was published “in the next issue of the paper” (90). He cites himself as having composed: O Wilton St. Hill, Trinidadians’ pride, A century and four came from your bat, And helped to win the victory for your side, But more than that you did, yea, more than that (90).

James also portrays himself as struck by the “earnestness” of the St Hill fan, and as taking “years to understand” the common desire to see St Hill excel as a Black West Indies batsman—especially in England, at Lord’s—as “the instinct of an oppressed man” (91). Within James’ poem (which James himself recognises as weak in literary terms), the line “But more than that you did, yea, more than that” points to the expansive yet seemingly inarticulable significance of St Hill’s batting, with the internal repetition of “more” creating a quiet insistence on the excess that flows from the heroic batsman’s performance out into the collective consciousness. Such significance meant that, according to James, St Hill’s exclusion from the 1923 regional side that toured England left an indelible “wound” in the popular imaginary (94)—a wound compounded by St Hill’s failure in England during West Indies’ first official Test series in 1928. This Jamesian idea—of cricketing heroes and their performances exceeding the bounds of the game and becoming part of a popular understanding of politics—is a prominent feature of Caribbean cricket poetry. It is also a key part of what binds such poetry to its principal antecedent and overlapping oral tradition: the cricket calypso. In the two decades that followed James’ play at cricket poetry, the West Indies entered cricket’s world stage, the region gained a burgeoning literary culture, and the tradition of cricket calypsos began. Both Beckles and Rohlehr have tracked the intersections of calypso music and cricket, paying attention to the rise and evolution of cricket calypsos, and the connections between such calypsos and cricketing literature, including poetry. According to Rohlehr (1994), a flurry of cricketing calypsos emerged in the late 1920s and shortly afterwards, including songs from leading calypsonians. For example, Lord Beginner composed three such songs: “Bad Selection”, attacking the composition of the 1928 team; a calypso, probably from 1932, praising the long-standing captain of Trinidad, Colonel A.E. Harragin; and “MCC v West Indies, 1935”

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(Rohlehr 1994, 59–60). Meanwhile, Chieftain Douglas created “MCC v West Indies” in 1929, and Atilla the Hun had “International Tournament: 1937” (Rohlehr 1994, 56–63). Following Kim Johnson’s 1993 article, “Calypso cricket”, in the Sunday Express of Trinidad and Tobago, Beckles records Beginner’s calypso in praise of Learie Constantine’s performance during the 1928 tour of England as “the first celebration in song of a West Indies cricket hero” (1998a, 108). In this calypso, Beginner describes Constantine as “That old pal of mine”, offering a prelude to the refrain Beginner would famously use in 1950 (noted below). In 1939, the year of Constantine’s retirement from cricket, Lord Caresser sang of a “man of perpetual energy” in his calypso, “Learie Constantine”, and poet and author Eric Roach published his sonnet, “To Learie”, in Trinidad and Tobago’s Guardian newspaper. In both Caresser’s calypso and Roach’s poem, Constantine’s vitality as a player is central to his achievements and immense popularity—which is to say, his heroic status is built on the energy and movement he demonstrates on the field of play. These depictions echo James’ emphasis on movement as intrinsic to cricket’s status as art, and also the importance of Constantine’s father for his son’s cricketing and political development (see Chapter 3). Roach’s composition is the earliest cricket poem identified by Rohlehr (1994, 62). The sonnet honours Learie’s cricketing lineage, with “Of famous father a most famous son”, and records that Constantine’s praises are sung both under his “native sun” and in the “cold clime” of “Northern England”, owing to his achievements for West Indies and for Nelson Cricket Club in England’s Lancashire League (Roach 2012, 110; see Chapter 7). Constantine is “renown” wherever “men discourse of wonders done / By wisden wizards”, of “fine feats displayed / In the great empire game” (110). Seemingly magical, elegant and all competent, Constantine “wears cricket’s triple crown” as batsman, bowler and fielder (110). He also cultivates a sense of connection with his Caribbean supporters: on taking “A grandest catch” he gives “the thundering crowd / A smile as though he’d done it for our sake” (110). Notably, this gesture of significant but conditional connection with the crowd (“as though”), and the identification of the poetic voice with this crowd (“our”), become critical features in the tradition of Caribbean cricket poetry that follows, including in Brathwaite’s “Rites”. So, too, does the identification of a kind of climatological impetus, with Constantine’s performance igniting or prompting the “thunderous” crowd, with what might be a cliché of applause gaining new importance in relation to the

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Caribbean’s climate and its impact on the region’s literature. Further, we might read a telling, perhaps schizophrenic, tension between the exuberance of Constantine’s play (his “run and leap and swing”) and the tight, conventional constraints of the fourteen-line English sonnet in iambic pentameter. Yet we should note that the same paired, structuring beat helps convey the rhythm of a bowler’s run-up and also alludes to the come and go of cricketing action (where bowling comes from alternate ends and batsmen run back and forth). Here, the containment of poetic ingenuity within poetic strictures might be seen as analogous to the relationship between cricket’s structuring elements and the creativity of individual performances, particularly as understood by James (again, see Chapter 3). Roach’s closing couplet rhymes Constantine’s bowling “swing” with “taut matting”, meaning that the “havoc” caused by his bowling emerges from the binding together of ingenuity of movement and tight, stretched, challenging conditions (110). In this fashion, Constantine is depicted as existing within the imperial game—of cricket and iambic poetry—but performing in newly creative and crowd-inspiring ways that connect with the “environmental experience” Brathwaite views as critical for the region’s aesthetic separation from the imperial-literary master (1984, 10; original emphasis). Although neither Roach nor Constantine have broken the pentameter, as Brathwaite later advocates, Constantine’s cricket is indicative of the coming storm, of the “havoc” he brings under the “thunder” of applause from the crowd. Heroic praise, then, derives from a particular kind of cricketing and, analogously, life dynamism, cultivated and practiced within the imperial game and the conditions of empire, but nonetheless prompting the noise of the environment to be carried through the people as they are inspired by the artistic play of the heroic cricketer working within local conditions. (We might also want to note that it was Constantine’s onfield ability that prompted Leslie Frewin, the English editor of The Poetry of Cricket (1964), to write the poem “On Seeing Sir Learie Constantine Return (Temporarily) from Diplomacy to Cricket” in 1963.) In many ways, Roach’s portrayal of Constantine’s cricketing efforts sets the ground for later Caribbean praise poetry, particularly in its metaphorical management of the dynamic life-enhancing and ecologically informed aesthetics of heroic action. If the 1920s and 1930s saw the seeds of cricket’s intersection with calypso music sown in the dawn of regional and diasporic literary production, it was the 1950s that cemented these cultural practices, and cricket

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calypsos became more common from this point onwards. In 1950, Lord Beginner and Lord Kitchener regaled West Indies supporters at Lord’s with their calypso, “Victory Test Match”: a musical celebration of bowlers Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine, “those two little pals of mine”, who helped West Indies secure their first Test match victory and series win over England in England. Kitchener also composed “Kitch’s Cricket Calypso” about the same triumph, while King Radio had “We Want Ramadhin on the Ball” (Rohlehr 1994, 66–68). Cecil Gray’s “Sonny Ramadhin”, from his first poetry collection, The Woolgatherer (1994), reconnects with such heroic praise for the iconic spin bowler, glorying in how “The name of Ramadhin / made pride plush our veins”, but mourning the way “children […] now trample” on the rusty dust of Ramadhin’s aging statue (105). Since the 1950s, memorable matches, tours, players and points of controversy have regularly featured in cricket calypsos: Laurel Aitkens’ “Tribute to Collie Smith” commemorated the eponymous young player following his death in a car driven by Sobers during their 1959 season in England; Kitchener’s “The Cricket Song” was about the 1964 series against Australia, while his “Cricket Champions” marked the rise of West Indies in the 1960s and their victory over England in the 1966 Test series; and Mighty Sparrow’s “Garfield Sobers”, also from 1966, gave praise to its namesake as “the greatest cricketer on earth, or mars” (Beckles 1998a, 110). Such praise was echoed in John Agard’s “Sir Garfield”, a recent short poem concentrating on Sobers as a cricketing “king”, as he is so often named, and celebrating his 1968 record as the first batsman to hit “six six in a row” (Agard 2014, 16; see Chapter 1). In the 1970s, Maestro sang “World Cup”, Short Shirt performed “Vivian Richards” and Sparrow’s 1978 track, “Kerry Packer”, offered a biting critique of the money-oriented and spectacle-driven professionalisation brought by Packer’s World Series competition (Rohlehr 1994, 84–93; cf. Beckles 1998a, 108–112). Such songs often have heroic individual players and performances at their centre and also, as Beckles says, “reflect both the celebratory and commemorative values of the wider society, and are rooted in the cultural bedrock of their ‘call-and-response’, ‘praise song’ and ‘judgemental’ oral traditions” (1998a, 111) Within and beyond calypso, later musical tracks about cricket have maintained many of these attributes and, from David Rudder’s iconic anthem “Rally Round the West Indies” (1988) onwards, such tracks often offer a kind of rallying call to support the regional team in times (mostly) of adversity. Following the redemptive sound of “Here Come the West

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Indies” (1993), Rudder—the calypsonian of cricket, as we might call him—released “Legacy”, tying Brian Lara’s first world record Test innings of 375 runs, in 1994, to the tradition of West Indies cricketing heroism. (Originally released on the 1996 album Lyrics Man, “Legacy” was later collected in Cricket Chronicles, an album released by Rudder for the 2007 World Cup). The continuation of the praise tradition was obvious in 1994 with a run of calypso and pan “praise songs” about Lara and his batting world records (Fuller 2013, 108). Adding up to perhaps thirty-five tracks, this included: “Lash dem Lara” by Alexander de Great; Delamo and Gypsy’s “Up and Away Lara”; Watchman’s “Prince of Plunder”; “Signal for Lara” by Superblue; “Four Lara Four” by de Fosto; and two tracks entitled “Laramania”, one by Becket and the other by All Rounder (cf. Fuller 2013, 108–111). In the decade that followed, calypso songs traced the regional team’s decline, including its disputes and frustrations, alongside a lingering sense of cricketing hope for the future—as with Bally’s “We Coming Back”, Contender’s “Ah Ready” and Brother Marvin’s “Bat On”, which marked Lara’s first appointment as West Indies captain (Fuller 2013, 111). In 2004, Lara’s world record reclaiming innings of 400 “not out” brought new celebratory tracks, with Rootsman’s “Lara” and de Fosto’s “He Strikes Again”, a pan sequel to his first Lara hit in 1994 (Martin-Jenkins 2004). The mix of cricket news, critical commentary and ongoing hope found across this swathe of tracks is also found in the back catalogue, spread over four decades, of Dave Martin and the Tradewinds, a band from Guyana whose music is linked to calypso traditions. Their cricket tracks include: “Cricket in the Jungle”, released in 1981, which gently sends up the local crowd’s advice to on-field players; “Where Are Your Heroes”, which asks why the region no longer benefits from the kind of heroic figures, cricketing and political, they had in the past; “West Indies Take A Rest”, which tells the regional cricket board to stop the “pappyshow” of incompetence and financial mismanagement that leaves past players crying in despair, and insists that the board “fire Lara so many times / the man have third-degree burns”; and, finally, “We Are the Champions”, which celebrates West Indies winning the 2016 ICC World Twenty20 competition. This track reflects back on tournament success, but songs released in advance of international tournaments have also become common and, though they are typically not calypsos, they do tap into cricket’s place in the Caribbean’s musical history. The 2007 official World Cup track was the deliberately light and superficial.

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“The Game of Love and Unity”, by Shaggy (Jamaican), Ruppee (Barbadian) and Faye-Ann Lyons-Alvarez (Trinidadian), offered an upbeat, high tempo dancehall-style set to appeal to British and American markets rather than a Caribbean audience, specifically. More successfully, for the next World Cup in 2011, “We Are The West Indies” by Jamaican dancehall singer Keida (featuring Tian Winter, the Antiguan Soca Monarch from 2010), was part of an effort to reconnect Caribbean people with the region’s cricket culture and its team. With calypso rooted in Trinidad yet regionally significant as a musical tradition, cricket calypsos and their musical offshoots offer a number of common patterns that have passed into or influenced Caribbean cricket poetry, namely: the documentation of a match or series, sometimes with substantial artistic licence, for popular memorialisation; pointed criticism of players, a team (island, regional or simply local), selectors or management through calypso’s combative and satirical style of humour, picong; direct intervention in domestic and international issues pertaining to the game and its popular reception, including efforts to garner support or effect decisions; and, most often, the celebration, even deification, of specific cricketers in terms of their status as warriors and as examples of masculine self-assertion, seen to speak for the people and uplift them through their on-field style of play. Indeed, those focused on individual heroes and their heroic cricketing actions are by far the most common type of cricket poem. These heroes are often West Indies players, but they can also be more obviously local, even familial figures. Sometimes the lives and careers of former players are also recollected and commemorated. Importantly, there is a related bulk of poems exploring crowd behaviour and speech, the support and proximity offered, and the connections between cricketing action and popular-political sentiments. We should also note that while there are many individual examples of cricket poems and poets making use of cricket, some artists have offered more sustained engagement with the game. Besides Agard and Paul Keens-Douglas, three other poets have released collections that concentrate specifically on cricket, namely: Howard A. Fergus, with Lara Rains & Colonial Rites (1998); Joan Anim-Addo, with Janie Cricketing Lady with Hurricane Verses (2006); and Roger Bonair-Agard, with Gully (2010). Each of these titles links cricket to the climate and ecology of the Caribbean. So, with Fergus’ title Lara’s run getting is not only bound to the cultural patterns of empire—the “Colonial Rites” experienced within and beyond the game—it is imagined to be like rain (we might say seasonally heavy,

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monsoon-like when it falls). Anim-Addo’s reflections on her mother’s cricketing past in Grenada are tied to a present effort to survive the force of Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Finally, and slightly more obscurely, Bonair-Agard’s title connects the fielding position “Gully” with a ditch or gutter, as in the gutters/gullies that feature so often in depictions of Caribbean children playing cricket in the street and may also provide the space for monsoon rains to flow away from homes and streets. Given such prompts, this chapter will look to develop connections between cricket, poetry and the wider ecological patterns governing life in the Caribbean as it unpacks Caribbean cricket poetry’s traditions of heroic praise. Its main focus, though, is on the poetic tradition of presenting heroic cricketers, and especially sublime batsman—a tradition that really takes hold with Brathwaite’s 1973 poem “Rites”.

II Brathwaite’s “Rites” laid the ground for what Caribbean cricket poetry would become, particularly in its use of what Brathwaite (1984) famously termed “nation language”, as well as in its rendering of the intersections between local cricketing action and the post-war position of the West Indies team, and in its depiction of the Caribbean crowd’s vocal investment in the performative power and anti-colonial violence of the (then emerging) Black batsman-hero. Brathwaite first published this work as “Cricket” in Andrew Salkey’s Caribbean Prose: An Anthology for Secondary Schools (1967), where the piece stood more as “prosepoetry” than “conventional short story” (Salkey 1967, 61). Thereafter, he reworked his content into a long poem, cutting long sections and enhancing the dramatic, communal and political rituals characterising Caribbean cricket culture. The poem was then published at the centre of Brathwaite’s collection Islands (1969), the third book of The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973). Given Brathwaite’s description of this trilogy as loosely thesis-antithesis-resolution in structure (Mackey 1995, 13), “Rites”, falling in the third book, seems to be part of some kind of resolution that is yet to be fully realised, and this idea is conveyed in its depiction of batting. In the context of a local cricket match on “Brown’s Beach” (Brathwaite 1973, 198), “Rites” famously depicts West Indies batsman Clyde Walcott striking out against the “M-C-C” (199), as England, in a Test match at Kensington Oval. As with the beach players, Walcott and his briefly

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jubilant supporters appear caught between the inescapable past of slavery and the not-yet-achieved freedom of the hoped-for future. For Nathaniel Mackey, Brathwaite “underscores the centrality of slavery, the plantation system and colonialism to the history and predicament of the region”, as seen in the “linguistic replacement of umpire with ‘empire’” and other similar moves in the poem (1995, 134). Yet the poem’s umpire/empire punning substantially abbreviates Brathwaite’s earlier presentation of the importance of the umpire in “Cricket”. This abbreviation in “Rites” means, as Miles Osgood explains, that there has been a trading of cricketing action and analysis—literally the trading out of on-field incidents centred around the umpire’s management of colonial tensions in the game—“for political allegory”, which drops “the context of player influence and fan suspicion [of bias] in favor of the simple image of an imperial umpire” (2021, 140). In a similar move towards allegory and metaphor, the poem’s new title, “Rites”, points to the unification of the language of African-Caribbean religiosity and memory (collectively, “rites”) as well as the language of protest as an affirmation of rights. For Beckles, though, it does so within a tale of “indiscipline and irresponsibility” (1998a, 107). To Frank Birbalsingh, the poem captures the “Rise and Fall” brought about by the mid-century “inconsistency or fickleness” of the people, the West Indies team and the politics of the islands at the point of federation (1996, 221). Indeed, the 1950s was a decade in which regional emergence and union sat alongside fractious collaboration and failure, with the formal attempt at federation (1958–1962) falling away almost immediately and, in cricketing terms, West Indies’ success in 1950 being followed by substantial defeat to England in 1957. “Rites” exposes this mid-century limbo for the Caribbean as it stands caught between colonialism and independence, federation and failed regional collectivity, heroic possibility and communal expectation. And it does so by negotiating with the idea of the heroic batsman and his responsibility within a team struggling not to collapse. The story-within-a-story structure of Brathwaite’s poem sees the batting collapse of West Indies at Kensington Oval framed by a local beach team’s batting collapse (1973, 199). Both narratives are relayed by a Barbadian tailor in creole, or “nation language”, while he works in his shop. Birbalsingh rightly reads the tailor’s shop as a “democratic forum”, underlying the “democratizing and nation-building function of Westindian cricket through its promotion of discussion” and shared analysis

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(1996, 221–222). In addition, though, the tailor’s authority, performative personality and storytelling ability dominate the space and his customers, even as his role suggests a metaphorical stitching together of constituent parts in the creation of something new. As an exemplar of local wit and wisdom, with the ability to draw on verbal word play, allegory and an ironic yet warm sense of humour, the tailor functions akin to both the calypsonian and the griot in the West African oral tradition, simultaneously leading and including those who listen. The tailor’s repetition of short statements, like “watch de ball, man” and “dis is cricket ” (Brathwaite 1973, 198, 202; original emphasis), offer examples of what Merle Collins calls “speaking in headlines”: “a way of encapsulating the whole philosophy of life” so that anyone can understand its essence (qtd. in Berrian 1995, 39). In “Rites” watching the ball becomes shorthand for sociopolitical and personal vigilance. The tailor also performs a version of Brathwaite’s idea of “total expression” (1984, 18; original emphasis), bringing together speaker and audience, and, thereby, binding the storyteller/creator/poetic voice to the people/audience/spectators through cricket. The tailor’s report of the beach match concentrates on the confrontation between “Hop- / a-long-Cass”, as bowler, and “Gullstone”, the batsman sent out to try to save his team (Brathwaite 1973, 197). Cass is a “big-able” fast bowler whose job as “Harbour patrol” empowers him as a water-bound authority figure. Yet his cow-kicked deformed leg ties him to an uneven or unbalanced sense of power as well as the force of the gatekeeping god, Legba (273). Gullstone is a Barbadian batsman identified as a period “saga-boy” (a fashionable playboy of sorts), whose name connotes both gallstone (as the blocking of intestinal waste) and the “Gull” or “Fool of Shakespearean drama” (Rohlehr 1981, 229). Fearful and uncertain of “Ol’ / Hoppy” bowling like “hurricane father”, Gullstone fails to heed the tailor’s advice, “watch / de ball like it hook to you eye”, and is instead “fishin’”, “missin’”, “swishin’” and “wishin’” until he is dismissed, just like his teammates in their batting collapse (Brathwaite 1973, 198). We might note that, as well as suggesting—in cricket parlance—that the batsman is playing and missing the ball outside the off stump, the rhyming of “fishin’” and “missin’” hints at the difficulty of self-sustaining livelihoods, of not being able to catch a living or a meal, perhaps. The additional “swishin’ / he bat like he wishin’ / to catch butterfly” also reinforces the flights of fantasy and connected efforts at evasion involved in acting unproductively and without sufficient caution (198). It seems that the “hurricane father”, as a bowler also bound to the

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sea, is dangerous even for a local team of batsmen and their shared lives or livelihoods. In telling of this local batting collapse, the tailor is reminded of the previous week’s international game. He rebukes his visitor for not knowing about such an important public event—where not knowing about cricket is, like the visitor’s “slip slop shoe strap”, a sign of casual, tourist-like indifference (199). Birbalsingh and Rohlehr both insist on the representative quality of the game described, but also situate it historically. Birbalsingh claims that this game was the second Test of England’s 1954 tour (1996, 225), while Rohlehr identifies it as the first Test during England’s 1948 tour (1981, 230). Rohlehr’s case is supported by the similarity of West Indies’ first innings score, and also by Brathwaite’s own explanation that he used this game because he was present as a youth of seventeen helping with the scoreboard (Westall 2006). This would actually make the game Walcott’s Test debut, in which he only scored 8 runs in his first innings before being bowled out by England’s Jim Laker (though the poem has him trapped “LBW”, as leg before wicket, off Laker’s bowling). This game ended in a draw, but West Indies secured a 2-0 series win overall. In Birbalsingh’s reading, the game at issue is a Test in which Walcott scores 220 runs before being stumped off Laker’s bowling, with West Indies going on to win the match by 181 but then drawing the series. This huge individual score seems at odds with the brief moment of eruptive potential that constitutes the poem’s view of Walcott. Nevertheless, the poem clearly draws Walcott’s physical and reputational size together, as if large scores and big shots are bound to his broad frame and expected by those who watch him bat. Indeed, moving swiftly past the batting contributions of Frank Worrell and Everton Weekes with notable poetic licence, the poem declares Walcott “de GIANT to come” (Brathwaite 1973, 200). Rohlehr has written that Brathwaite is not interested in the “real gigantic status of Walcott […] but in the game as a metaphor for the post-World War II encounter between the colonies and the ‘Mother Country’ on the field of political exchange” (1981, 230). Rohlehr’s primary point is accurate. However, it is precisely Walcott’s size and strength that Brathwaite uses to mark the scale of Caribbean potential, and, thereby, cricketing-political failure, at stake. In fact, the depiction of Walcott as a young and large batsman of inspiring power who falls all-too-quickly demands that we place his bodily and reputational stature in relation to both the imperial history and federation-creating context in which his short-lived heroic actions are couched.

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In “Rites”, as in his cricketing career, Walcott’s heroic status derives from his elegant yet aggressive batting style. With Wardle bowling “sweet, sweet medium-slow syrup”, Walcott watches two balls cautiously—calling “N…o…o” run twice—as if observing the temptation of dangerously hot, melted sugar, before imposing himself and inspiring the crowd: Clyde back pun he back Foot an’ prax! Is through extra cover an’ four red runs all de way. “You see dat shot?” the people was shoutin’; “Jesus Chrise, man, wunna see dat shot?” All over de groun’ fellers shakin’ hands wid each other as if was they wheelin de willow as if was them had the power; (Brathwaite 1973, 200; original emphasis)

The onomatopoeic quality of “prax!” captures the crack of Walcott’s bat in an aural reversal of the sound of Massa’s whip. However, the warning note carried in the division of “prax! / Is” indicates that the political ramifications, the praxis, carried through such batting cannot yet be fully realised as the combination of theory and practice. Nevertheless, Brathwaite envisions a giant whose strength provides a moment of anti/postcolonial violence, a blood-red shot of a fleeting rebellious force, as this signature shot makes the ball—and English hearts—bleed all the way to the boundary with the rolling r-sounds of its “red runs”. This symbol of “blood, fire and revolution” racing past existing boundaries ignites the crowd (Rohlehr 1994, 73), while pitting thick red blood against sugary syrup. Walcott’s power is even converted into a call for “B….L…O…O…D” by the “ball-headed sceptic” spectator who had been “lickin’ gloy / pun de Gover’ment stamps” for “twenty- / five years” in “them Post Office cages” (Brathwaite 1973, 200–201). With this “gloy”, or glue, we have the introduction of another sticky substance (akin to syrup), but one linked to bureaucratic bondage, as wage labour, that fills the mouth with adhesive, weighing the tongue down and drying it into a silence that continues until Walcott provokes an almost cannibalistic demand for life-blood. The crowd’s appreciation of Walcott, though, is not only about this single shot, but rather how his effort to break free expresses something of their own experience. Walcott’s batting also offers

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a combination of aesthetics and aggression that is recognised as his art, as his mode of creative self-expression and his way of speaking for the masses. It makes sense, then, to read the depiction of Walcott’s performance in relation to James’ assertation that we “integrate our vision of Walcott on the back foot through the covers with the outstretched arm of the Olympic Apollo” into the category of art (2013, 211). With this statement, James is suggesting that Walcott’s batting is as much art as a painting or sculpture of Apollo, and that the batsman’s performance is evidence of cricket’s status as a democratised and popularly understood physical art of Caribbean self-expression, linking cricketer and crowd (see Chapter 3). James’ point also prompts a comparison between Walcott and Apollo that sees Walcott as a cricketing colossus who may also be a Caribbean God of the Sun, (de)colonisation and healing. Yet where James expresses the aesthetics of Walcott’s stroke play as constituting a new sense of art’s fullness, and, thereby, freedom and even life itself, Brathwaite focuses exclusively on Walcott’s power, but he undermines its value as an expression of freedom by showing its instability and political impotence. Simultaneously, though, and like James, Brathwaite understands the aesthetic impact and significance of physical and popular art forms to the people of the Caribbean. As indicated above, the crowd’s sense of awe, of congratulatory adulation, soon becomes a feeling of empowerment “as if” Walcott’s strength, carried by the ball, has passed into them. Initially, the conditional “as if” sounds positive, as though the crowd’s proxy position can become one of collective empowerment, but its repetition begins to subtly mark the illusory quality of this feeling. The tailor’s shift from an earlier “we” to “they” and “them” indicates his growing separation from the crowd’s overexuberance, from their false sense of achievement and shared yet personal glory. This separation becomes an open critique of the crowd’s useless or ill-informed opinions, as “Ev’ry blabber mout’ talkin’, / ev’ry jack givin’ advice” (202). Nevertheless, the tailor identifies with the community of spectators again when Laker gets on top of Walcott: “we so frighten […] / we could piss we pants” (202). Having hit Wardle, Walcott faces Laker’s “off-breaks” and is hemmed in by their deception, as the bowling pushes him into a position akin to that of the post office worker (201). With his batting restricted, Walcott, now a trapped giant, is made to “LOOK FOOLISH”, getting hit on the pad and then forced into urgent defence (202). With the tension building, the crowd begins to offer instruction with calls to “hit it, hit it”, and then “Swing

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de bat ”, which Walcott duly does, only to miss the ball and get hit on the pad: “biff ”, LBW (202; original emphasis). Thereafter, only collapse is possible—for Walcott, the team, the crowd and, it seems, the region, with the tailor returning to his repeated mantra: when things goin’ good, you cahn touch we; but leh murder start an’ ol man, you cahn fine a man to hole up de side… (203).

Crucially, then, “Rites” recognises the sheer force of Walcott’s batting, its aesthetic qualities, the seemingly vengeful ambition it inspires in the people, and the fleetingness of any individual moment of success. It is as if Walcott’s batting cannot successfully overturn, avenge or even take up and redirect the kinds of violence that Caribbean people have been subject to for centuries. That Walcott’s offering to the crowd does not last, and ultimately becomes just another part of a collective collapse, is all the more painful because of the momentary exaltation his batting brings, and also because of the sense of possibility-making potential that came through early on in the poem. In fact, the poem begins on an often overlooked note of positivity, with the tailor’s opening lines stating, “Many a time I have seen him savin’ / the side” (197). In Brathwaite’s “Cricket”, this is the line that connects the action at Kensington Oval to the cricket on Brown’s beach near the close of the narrative. It also helps establish a series of positive connections between local cricket, the sea and the heroic stature and example set by Bebe, the player, in “Cricket”, who has been “savin’ the side”. Bebe is described as the batsman who sets up the playing area and stumps on the beach before “dipping his bat three times in the sea”, as a “special mark of privilege” and one of the “rites” reserved for the best players (Brathwaite 1967, 67). Brathwaite closes “Cricket” poignantly, with the lines: So Bebe slapped water, dipping his bat three times in the sea, and stood, for a moment, the tide’s silver chains round his ankles; then turned, the sun’s ball flashing full from his bat as he turned, dragging the delicate chains of the water as far up the beach as they’d go as he walked slowly up to the wicket. (67)

This powerful image brings the ecological and historical importance of the sun and sea into the game, as the batsman emerges from the “chains” of his oceanic past to carry with him, onto the land, the cleansing power

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of the water, before settling at the wicket, the physical trinity—standing as three stumps—that echoes his own triadic bat dipping. Bebe’s godlike qualities ensure that as a local hero he is the glorified figure of salvation, standing in contrast to the batsman of the regional team and their collapse at the Oval. As Osgood writes: “The ending […] places hope in a beach cricketer, suggesting that cricket, played on local grounds according to local customs, might yet be able to ‘save’ […] or free the Caribbean” (2021, 144). All of this is cut from “Rites”, though, and the optimism of Brathwaite’s opening assertion—“Many a time I have seen him savin’ / the side” (1973, 197)—never holds. The first line of the poem carries an aborted gesture of hope, but the implosion of heroic possibility in cricketing terms casts a long shadow over the political moment, including the heroic figures—cricketing and political—who were set to bring the region into its new dawn. In “Rites”, what has passed, including the past of Brathwaite’s “Cricket”, as honour-bound salvation cannot be recaptured in changing and challenging times, it seems. Thus, despite the poem’s appreciation of the significance of the individual batsman and his aesthetic, representative and anti/postcolonial performances, the close of “Rites” is cautious about the overinvestment in the heroic figure of the batsman and singular cricketing episodes when they are not supported by a programme of sustained political and economic reform.

III After “Rites”, though, almost all poetic depictions of West Indies players are in praise poems. Where Brathwaite showed the significance of stunted cricketing-political performances and mid-century failure, the decades that followed, from the mid-1960s through to the early 1990s, saw West Indies become dominant internationally. It is no surprise, then, that poetry from this period or reflecting back on it typically concentrates on the heroic performances of their key players and overall team success, and that, because of the game’s history in the Caribbean and racialised division of labour (with Black bowlers and white batsman), there is a particular focus on the region’s world-class batsmen and the significance of their batting for fans watching (see Chapter 1). Such praise poetry also demonstrates a concerted effort to establish a bond of familiarity between the poetic voice/the fans and the batsman, while demonstrating that the honorific elevation of the batsman-hero is in response to the sociopoetics of their stroke play, that is, in a Jamesian sense, their style

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(see Chapter 3). As with the short stories of Chapter 2, cricketing praise poetry sometimes arises from memories of boyhood or adolescence, and the impact West Indies cricket had on the confidence and worldliness of young supporters. As Kwame Dawes explains: “I grew up expecting the West Indies to win every time they played. I grew up never getting nervous when a game seemed close” (2010, 9). And, again as Dawes indicates, the confidence that comes from this cricketing inspiration cuts up against a painful history and compromising present for the Caribbean and its diaspora. What praise poems written during the victorious West Indies run of the 1970s and 1980s share more exactly with those coming later but remembering this period, is a combination of ecological and saccharine imagery that looks to embed the hero-batsman within the climatological forces of the Caribbean and also within a saccharine-specific revision of Gilroy’s conception of the “slave sublime” (1993, 37). In this poetry, brutal, awe-inspiring and skilful batsmanship evokes terrors past and present, while also repurposing the violence of such terrors to suggest a different kind of future might be possible. In this way, and as part of what Carl Pulsa (2009) sees as the wider repurposing of sugar’s iconography in post-war Caribbean poetry, the horrors of sugar’s history are combined with the “sweetness”, the glory, of new-found selfexpression and beautifully aggressive success in what can be called “the saccharine sublime” of Caribbean cricket’s sociopoetics. This approach is used to depict batsman of African and Indian heritage, in particular, even when racial tensions between these groups are made explicit and despite the clear predominance of Black West Indies batsman-heroes. However, where Black batsman-heroes are represented, the saccharine sublime is also bound to ecological or environmental terms that reflect an understanding of the impact of tropical conditions, of hurricanes, storms, rain and heat, on Caribbean art and aesthetics—or, in this instance, on the artistic performances and style of individual batsman. What is seen across this tradition of cricketing praise poetry, then, is the saccharine-ecological sublime of the batsman-heroes of the Caribbean, including when those heroes are called into question, as seen in depictions of Lara and Gayle discussed in the next section. Two poetic depictions of Rohan Kanhai, the iconic Indian-Guyanese West Indies Test batsman (1957–1974), help bare out these observations. David Dabydeen’s “For Rohan Babulal Kanhai”, from Coolie Odyssey (1988), and “Call Him the Babu” by Sasenarine Persaud, first published in 1996, both depict Kanhai’s batting style and use the term

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“babu”—meaning a father or brother held in affection, and functioning as a play on Kanhai’s middle name, officially Bholallal—to establish an intimate connection with the cricketer. They also portray Kanhai as a heroic Indian-Caribbean agent, able to represent his people and perhaps compensate for their hardships with his batting. In both poems, Kanhai’s bat is a repurposed cutlass that references the indentureship of Indian immigrants shipped to the Caribbean, between 1838 and 1917, to fill the plantation labour gap left by the end of slavery. The poems also connect the rebellion of Indian-Guyanese sugarcane labourers with Kanhai’s batting technique. Indeed, Dabydeen’s poem establishes Kanhai as a protector and redeemer, standing against both the “White Overseer” of the plantation and the “Blackman” of nationalist bloodshed (1988, 25). In the first stanza, Kanhai’s batting ferocity and run accumulation stands against the empty and exhausted figure of the “Whiteman” who is bowler, master and God (25). Kanhai’s batting is his labour. It re-enacts the kind of cutting conducted by his sugar-field peers and predecessors, but also expresses a new type of potential-filled cutting/scathing/cropping: “Cutlass whack six” and “One-ton cane-runs / Cropped” (25). Though he is working “all day in the hot sun”, when he “cut / And drop on he back”, Kanhai is not collapsing under the strain of his efforts, perhaps as a sugar-field labourer might. Instead, he is executing refined cricket shots, including a cut shot and his unique signature stroke, a falling hook, to “lash four” runs (25). In the second stanza, his batting becomes compensation for and defence against Forbes Burnham, the Guyanese Prime Minister (1964–1980) behind the racially motivated killing of Indian-Guyanese citizens at Wismar in 1964: And when darkness break and Blackman buss we head Wismar-side and bleed up we women And Burnham blow down we house and pen Like fireball and hurricane And riverboat pack with crying and dead Like Old Days come back of lash and chain Is round night ration to huddle to catch news Oh Kanhai batting lonely in some far country Call Warwick-Shire, and every ball blast Is cuff he cuffing back for we (25).

In both stanzas the weather conditions seem only to support the enemies of Indian-Caribbean people. Initially, the “rainburst” saves England from

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Kanhai’s assault, and then Burnham’s attack is like “fireball and hurricane” (25), where clearly the hurricane and Black nationalism are pushed together in a negative and endangering fashion. Yet by the close, Kanhai’s cricketing labour is seen to psychologically shield or “guard” those “coolies” who bind themselves together around the radio listening to his batting display in “Warwick-Shire”, England (the county that became Dabydeen’s UK home at one point). Kanhai, seemingly alone in England, is “Driving sorrow to the boundary” and “putting down [a fence] to guard we”, so that when his “century come up, is like dawn!” (25). Despite this new dawn reading as if it is only for Kanhai’s IndianCaribbean followers, the sociopolitical significance of sugar dominates and might be conceived as broadening the implications of his batting protest. As with Dabydeen’s portrayal of Kanhai, Persaud’s poem rejects a regional or creolised reading of Kanhai—including the misreading of “critics” who describe Kanhai as a “calypso cricketer”—and instead focuses exclusively on the batsman’s Indian heritage (2012, 106). Referencing Kanhai’s innings of 256 in Calcutta during the 1958–1959 West Indies tour, Persaud presents Kanhai’s prolific and inventive batting—with the same hook shot, here the “backsideboundary”—as deriving from his Asian roots and connected to the Indus river that runs through India and Pakistan (2012, 106–107). Meanwhile, to his Indian-Caribbean fans, Kanhai is “Hanuman” the heroic Hindu God associated with strength and initiative (106; original emphasis). He is simultaneously “bitter / and thrilled” to return to India, and his batting expressing these feelings with “Whack[s] to the boundary” (106). The poem also expresses Kanhai’s links to the cane cutters of Guyana, and the inherited separation from India he shares with them. With his bat or “cutlassblade” in hand, he uplifts his people (onto his “shoulder”), protecting them and offering some solace in the face of political crises and open discrimination (106). These people—the “we” of the poem—“called for The Babu” in the face of “Jagan CIA-ed” and “rigged elections” (referencing Cheddi Jagan and the 1968 election in Guyana), and as a protest against the political suppression of the Indian-Guyanese, with “50 + 1% / minoritied for years” (106–107). For them, it seems, Kanhai has “bladed every comrade”, and particularly “The Comrade Leader”, Burnham, who “would send the military to the / canefields when the Indian cutters striked” (106–107). More historically specific than Dabydeen’s allusion to the same issue, Persaud’s reference to the 1977 strike by Indian-Guyanese cane workers that lasted 135 days positions Kanhai as standing against the

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repressive, seemingly Black-socialist and violent state led by Burnham, and with the unionised sugar workers who called for profit sharing from the state-owned Guyana Sugar Corporation. As the protection and promise for his people, then, Kanhai is invoked—through the closing chant of “The Babu”—by all those who watch him in order to articulate, and see him articulate on their behalf, an aesthetic protest against the “great white lie” of promised future freedom used to lure Indians across the waters into indentureship (107). This community of listener-spectators are all those who will not see India, and experience the pain of “unreturning”; and all those dispersed into the “the cold…” of the Northern hemisphere (107). In this way, the poem captures the heroic example, guardianship and even warmth that comes through Kanhai’s cricketing status and batting performances, where his cutlass mimics that of the sugarcane workers, but works in a different field, offering a new, protective and forward-looking art of cutting even as it maintains an idea of terrorising violence. A similarly purposed sense of racial pride, paternal protection and heroic cricketing compensation emerges in poems portraying iconic Black West Indies batsmen. Faustin Charles’ 1986 collection, Days and Nights in the Magic Forest, features three such poems—“Cricket’s in my Blood”, “Greenidge” and “Viv”—all of which set their hero worship within a wider exploration of the dense ecological relations of the Caribbean and particularly Trinidad, Charles’ own birthplace. Famed in the UK for his 1998 children’s book, The Selfish Crocodile, Charles’ earlier poetic dealings with cricket emerged after England suffered two 5-0 series defeats to West Indies—as “Black washes”—in 1984 and 1986. “Cricket’s in my Blood” begins with “Blood Fire!”, expressing both excitement and hell as it charts how the “game swells the blood” via “Strokes in the middle of the imagination” (Charles 1986a, 41). Batting is associated with the history of the Caribbean people and the ecological force of the region’s landscape and weather patterns—its sun, and winds, and rains. Yet it also expresses the rebellious and life-giving qualities of the region’s ecosphere: “bat on heat, clash, ball bouncing century” and “torrents of slashes” come from “the sweeping willow”, as tree and bat are entwined in an emotional, tear-stained, sweep shot (41). Meanwhile, “mounting runs” are propelled “skyward”, like the ball, and the heroic performances “propelled by a gift / And a hunger” (41). As part of this exaltation, anguish and exhilaration are taken to new sublime heights, with pain and light becoming bound together, “Shattering the field / Shattering the mind”:

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The ball serves, lifts and strikes Widens with pain and anguish Breaking heights beyond the sun, And the light circles all Screaming in the extremity Of lives laid out bare in the height of sacrifice. (41)

In the context of this seemingly sublime horror, the poem names boundary “melting” batsmen, George Challenor and Constantine, and the “thundering” West Indies bowler, Emmanuel “Manny” Martindale, indicating that these figures are carried in the “blood” of the poetic personae, and enable that poetic voice to speak in the ecologically bound language of the Caribbean. The poem ends, though, with the significance of two batsmen who were also the first two Black captains for West Indies. As the “winds swell”, George Headley’s use of the bat as “the conqueror’s wand” magically orchestrates the “ticking time-bomb” of a coming popular uprising, while Frank Worrell’s “ghost walks / Through the village / Delivery inspiration” to the people who want to act for change (42). As Bateman writes, the poem’s “series of organic images”— connected to the trees, sun, wind and thunder—produces “an alternative canon of Caribbean cricketing heroism” (2009, 198). Yet this use of a socioecological frame of reference is common to Anglophone Caribbean literature, and it seems that Charles’ poem casts heroic cricketers as drawing together the myriad ways in which, according to Deckard, the hurricane trope functions in the literature of the region: “signifying the emergence of personal or national consciousness”; registering “modalities of revolt and rebellion” while opening up “historical possibility”; providing “apocalyptic magical events […] to circumvent forestalled revolution”; and creating a new space for “the possibilities of collective action or consciousness [to be] reactivated” (2016, 40–43). Charles’ hero-batsman portrait-poems, “Greenidge” and “Viv”, also mobilise such “storm-aesthetics” (Deckard 2016, 43), and do so in relation to sublime forms of batting that express a reconfiguring of slavery’s brutalities, a sense of magical eco-disruptions bringing new possibilities, and a reconnection with the land itself. Charles renders Gordon Greenidge—the West Indies opening batsman (1974–1991) whose technical precision, attacking style and match-determining double centuries in 1984 made him iconic—the “Gladiator on the battlefield blading the landscape with an all-conquering sweep” as his “sword-bat wields, raging

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/ A mighty run-running storm” (Charles 1986b, 43). Greenidge’s bodily postures and movements, his “lunging limbs” that “jump and jive”, are commanding, even as he “walks a tight-rope” of cricketing danger (43). His prowess stands with the “Islands [that] somersault […] shooting fiery eye-balls / Against a current of robust lashings”, until “Muscles snap!” (43) But body and island together fight back, pushing their way to a new “conquest” in a kind of regional and (then) Third World resurgence: “Hearts rip!” and “Heads roll!” as “balls are head where storm-winds reside” (43). Again, the action, the accumulation of the “run-running storm”, is akin to the storm winds of the region just as spectators, like players, are “Beaten into the heroics of God” when watching from their “green ridge, smiling” (43). This image of an elevated viewing position beside the pitch—punning on the batsman’s name and his own elevated reputational position—ensures that land and body are bound together in the celebratory raising up of the people through the batsman’s aesthetic stroke play. In the face of a “slippery magician”, Greenidge’s warrior-like prowess binds the people and his own life-force to the land, the pitch, in a clear reversal of the pastoral ideas of Englishness and cricketing imagery more commonly associated with the game (Bateman 2009, 197–199), and in a reclaiming of the land from which they have been historically alienated. Charles uses a similar approach in “Viv”, this time imagining the Antiguan Richards—the legendary “Master Blaster” West Indies batsman (1974–1991) and captain (1984–1991)—as a “warrior” bound to the sun, land and sky, touched with magic and able to uplift his fans (Charles 1986c, 42). In this poem, Richards’ batting responds to the unspeakable terrors of slavery with sublime cricket, as if batting is a kind of redirection of past violence that is now directed at the former imperial master. Throughout, his style of play carries the beauty of creative destruction associated with tropical storms. Although Gilroy explores music as the primary example of the “slave sublime”, in which there is a “centrality of terror in stimulating Black creativity and cultural production” (1993, 131), we can transpose Gilroy’s idea onto the physical articulation of this terrorising performance in cricket, especially given that its loaded imperial legacy and postcolonial backlash reached its peak in Richards. In this light, Richards is cast as the prophet of transformation, expressing and combating the brutalities of the past through his cricketing performance. Or, in Gilroy’s terms, Richards is a representative body of the “politics of

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fulfilment” (1993, 37)—both the future fulfilment that previous generations left unaccomplished, and a sign that there is still much to do for and by the people. Moreover, such a politics of fulfilment is always intimately connected to the land, and to the ecological forces and aesthetics felt and articulated by the Caribbean people, making a kind of enslaved-ecological or, given the abundance of sugar-specific images and ideas, saccharineecological vision of the sublime. This saccharine-ecological vision of the sublime allows Richards’ batting to bring a radical sense of rupture and new possibility: Like the sun rising and setting Like the thunderous roar of a bull rhino Like the sleek, quick grace of a gazelle, The player springs into the eye And lights the world with fires Of a million dreams, a million aspirations. The batsman-hero climbs the skies, Strikes the earth-ball for six And the landscape rolls with the ecstasy of the magic play. (Charles 1986c, 42)

As the natural beginning and ending, as the raw power and grace of nature, Richards is able to enliven the earth, making the land feel an exquisite sense of joy, and, simultaneously, to transcend the bounds of earth, climbing “the skies” to strike the “earth-ball” over the boundary. Deified as a kind of Rastafarian god, he is “the warrior” who “thrusts a majestic cut”, slicing through the opposition and their resistant flesh (42). He is, through such “magic play”, the cause of shared jubilation and emotional outpouring as he acts as the conduit for mass aspiration (42). He is the explosive performer, forcing change and this change seems to come, tellingly, when his batting is recognised by the crowd: Hands clap, eyes water And hearts move inside out. The volcano erupts And blows the whole game part! (42)

Michael Niblett argues that not only is “eruptive nature” commonly depicted in Caribbean poetry, but that such representations are working

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to express a “political consciousness” as coming through and with nature’s explosive potential (2009, 62; cf. Deckard 2016, 32). The ecological disruption of cricket’s accepted sociopolitical order amount to an overturning of the imperial past and legacies in the present. Here, Richards himself seems to be volcanic and revolutionary, forcing change with his sublime batting. But the crowd too, in their unification with Richards, are part of the dynamic explosion that links them all back to the land, perhaps even referencing the Pacaya Volcano of Antigua or the Piparo mud volcano of Trinidad. Richards’ sublime batting thus expresses not only his own personal politics of confident rebellion, but also the sometimes dormant yet still rebellious energy of the Caribbean people. Charles’ poem is representative of the core ideas used to represent Richards in praise poetry. Where Short Shirt’s 1976 calypso “Vivian Richards” praised the cricketer’s intense all-round contribution to the game as batsman, bowler and fielder, poems about Richards focus on him as a batsman-hero—a warrior or conqueror in battle, defeating England and all comers. At the same time, they often express how Richards’ personality and batting enables Black men to feel proud and able to rise up within the light of his achievements and style. As the exemplar of West Indies’ world dominance and destructive batting, closely associated with a positive picture of critical Black masculinity and Third World solidarity, poems about Richards are laden with gestures of brilliant batting brutality and a personalised politics of revolutionary significance. Such poems convey a strong sense of the immediacy and importance of Richards’ impact at the crease. His godlike presence is repeatedly seen through associations with the natural elements (sun, fire, lightning and thunder), reinforcing his affinity with Ogun, a Yoruba deity of fire, iron and warriorhood, and Shango, the Yoruba god of thunder and lightning often linked to rebellion. These praise poems support Richards’ right to express himself forcibly as a Black man against accusations (most often, during his playing career, in the British media) of arrogance, and to speak openly about cricket’s political content. In his autobiography, Hitting Across the Line (1991), Richards famously declares: you cannot evade the point that playing cricket is in itself a political action […] coming as I do from the West Indies at the very end of colonialism […] I believe very strongly in the black man asserting himself in this world and over the years I have leaned toward many movements that follow this basic cause. (186–188)

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Aligned with Black Power, Rastafarianism, regional nationalism and cricketing dominance, in Anglophone Caribbean poetry Richards stands for a pan-African sense of communal belief, Caribbean freedom and unity, and the individual will of a single, rebellious man who must fight. Indeed, praise poems carry a sense of Richards’ batting being motivated by the racial prejudices and legacies of slavery embedded within the game. And, as Richards has himself repeatedly stated, this kind of motivation was famously fuelled by Tong Greig, the South Africa-born England captain who, in 1976, said that he would make West Indies “grovel” on their tour of England (Richards 2000, 132–134). Richards’ batting rebuttal to this incident and his importance to the West Indies overturning of England in the mid-1980s is central to poems about him from that period—as with Charles’ “Viv” and Fergus’ poem “Conquest”—as well as to other poems written later by Ian McDonald and Bonair-Agard. Across these examples, Richards is seen as having a transformative, enlivening effect on those fans watching, as if his “innings” “could make life good”, as McDonald writes (2012, 99). In his poem “Conquest”, from the collection Volcanic Verses (2003), Montserratian poet and historian Fergus depicts Richards in terms of his masterful batting. Where Charles uses “Viv” to establish a tie of familiarity between the batsman and his public, Fergus adopts the formal, commanding “Richards” to make his demand for English supplication all the more imposing. The poem opens and closes with a call for “northern stars” (seemingly England players and cricketers in England generally) to “Bow to Richards”, and for “panmen” (seemingly of the Caribbean) to celebrate him and his team (Fergus 2003a, 59–60). “Conquest” places Richards within a West Indies batting tradition—“Marching in an epic line of marshalls – / Worrell, Sobers, Kanhai and Lloyd”—that “infected” the Caribbean with “victory”, thereby “levelling Montgomery’s England” (59). Emily Greenwood’s reading of the poem describes the “allusion to Field-Marshall Montgomery as apposite, recalling as it does, a British war hero who brought his tactician’s mind to bear on his love of cricket, opining that a ‘test match is a battle’” (2010, 204). And this battle is situated within a sustained war for freedom and equality in which the Caribbean people had not dared to “dream” that they could “zero England” or “capture lords”, but this is what Richards has enabled (Fergus 2003a, 59). Richards’ batting is also understood to overturn the historically induced intoxication of the masses:

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Drunk on dank tobacco leaves, Warner poisoned us with cane; your deadly strokes are calm for the sugar in our brains. (60)

The reference to the Warner family, a pioneering colonial family spread across the Leeward islands, must point specifically to Pelham (Plum) Warner. Warner’s lifelong association with cricket is here subsumed beneath his family’s economic ties to sugar cane and its disturbing physiological effects. Intoxication—via tobacco and cane—is overcome, in the poem, with the “deadly” strokes of Richards, as if the strength of killing is the detoxifying cure still required (60). Stretching further than the Caribbean in its significance, though, Richards’ batting assault is a strike for a mode of confident Pan-African defence, leading Fergus to warn: Children of empire defend your wicket-gate from wicked men who batten an orange black free state (60).

Highlighting the need to fight on and against South Africa’s apartheid, with the punning “orange black free state” and Richards’ public opposition to playing cricket (even for large sums of money) in South Africa, the poem ends on a wider note—“we play to win the war”—where Richards’ batting is seen as both part of and helping perpetuate the long-running effort to overturn violent and oppressive regimes reliant upon racism and colour-based segregation (60). Later poems have extended similar ideas and imagery. This is clearly seen in “Massa Day Done”, from 2003, by Ian McDonald. McDonald’s title invokes the first Prime Minister of Trinidad, Eric Williams, and his “Woodford Square Speech” of 1961, laying its public call for independence and political awakening over the batting excellence of Richards. Richards’ aggressive intention is noted from the outset, with his “backlift big”, and his “grinding” jaw reminds us of his famous gum-chewing just as it works to highlight his devouring, bone-crunching determination, and his “stabbing the pitch” suggests his striking preparation will become field-piercing batting (McDonald 2012, 99). Richards’ start is expected to be “sudden, violent, a thunder shock”, an assault on those who dare to oppose him (99). He is “holding the bat” like an “axe”, the

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symbol of possession by Shango (100). Cutting is first mentioned when the poetic voice calls for the “mightiest man” because “Viv husk he”, saving his “best fo’ the best” (100). The m-sound alliteration emphasises Richards’ masculinity in contrast to the “flight finery” that is bowled to him, and underlines the emasculation he will perform with the metaphorical harvesting, cutting down and back to the core, of his challenger. The “covers”, as an area on the field of play, become the blanket of suppression that is shredded as Richards slices through the past by levelling his cricketing enemy (100). At the height of Richards’ “butchery”, “bat spill blood / and he cut like he cutting hog on a block” (100). The alliteration of “butchery”, “bat” and “blood” builds the burbling sound of the liquid of life and death, which flows over onto the next line until the strong, short sounds of “cut”, “hog” and “block” bring it to an abrupt end. The chopping block replaces the “altar” of morning worship, as Richards’ batting becomes a scene of murderous sacrifice (100). The sense of Richards’ belonging and his ability to overturn or compensate for the past is made clear at the close: We know from the start, he one o’ we. Something hurt he bad, you could see, as if he alone could end we slavery! (100)

Communal suffering is not only represented by Richards but felt by him, individually, because he is “one” of the Caribbean people—the “we” of the poem. Richard’s “hurt”, though, is tied to his ability to free the people from their slavery, a slavery of the past and seemingly continuing into the present in the poem. The “as if” implies that this is Richards’ feeling and, as he is one of the people, the communal feeling too. It also registers an ambiguity about what might be possible and what might be achieved through such batting. That Richards is acting with and for Black pride is understood, but the use of “we” by the white, Trinidad-born, Guyanese author indicates that either McDonald is ventriloquising an African-Caribbean “we” supporting Richards, or is marking a “we” that includes all Caribbean people, where regional references to slavery mark the history of systemic, racialised violence, and also perhaps the region’s broader, contemporary economic enslavement to old and new colonising masters, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

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In contrast, while using similar motifs and tropes to express the importance of Richards’ batting, Bonair-Agard’s praise poems, in his collection Gully, make explicit the links between Richards’ batting heroics and his politicised example of Black manhood, as well as how Richards was emulated by his fans, especially the young men of Bonair-Agard’s own boyhood in Trinidad. Gully features “Dragon-Slayer”, a poem that is specifically about Richards, and “Boundary”, which also concentrates on him. In “Dragon-Slayer”, Bonair-Agard almost lists the ways in which Richards’ confidence, style and batting inspired those watching. For the first five stanzas, it is Richards’ walk to the crease that is iconic; his “sauntering to the wicket” with a “saga-boy lean”, the masculine beauty that meant “women wept”, his “swagger[ing] across the ground” with his “arms windmilling” (Bonair-Agard 2010b, 41). For the narrator, reflecting on his younger self: Viv taught us how to walk shoulders drawn back and always smiling like he knew the secret meaning of a song everyone was humming (41).

The ease of Richards’ walking style conveys not just confidence but also insight, a kind of knowing that others have missed or can’t access, despite sharing the same cultural reference: here, a popular song that “everyone / was humming” (41). This insight, though, is really about what lies ahead with Richards’ “savage” batting, as if only he knows the “secret” of the cricketing performance to come (41). Richards’ batting motivates young boys to play and practice. These boys “feared” and “loved him the way / the village does the dragon-slayer”, as Richards becomes a mythical warrior figure, set to defend his people against the threat of danger—perhaps even of being burnt and consumed by fire—by committing his own “terrible deeds” (42). At the same time, through his example the boys “learned how not to fear” and “learned the ways of men”, employing “steel nerve” and “hawkish eye” (42). Richards’ combination of bravery, hardiness, concentration and assertive, forceful batting stands as an example to follow—when playing cricket and in life, generally. The boys “even stood like him” and announced themselves, to the world it seems, in the grandiose way Richards’ full name—“Sir Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards”—was often used, so that their sense of themselves

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was enlarged, as with “Roger Anthony Bonair-Agard” and “Cyril Elliot Smith” (42). Richards’ performance of the “knightly code” that enabled him to “look good” upon returning to the pavilion, whatever his score, provides an example of how to “make ourselves matter / even at our lowest points” and even, at the end of the poem: how to carve out dignity out of the nothing of which we sometimes believed we were made (42).

This touching image gives a sense of the effort involved (via carving) in the shoring up of masculine selves against the hollow “nothing” of worthlessness through identification with, and emulation of, a cricketing hero. It also suggests that this effort is tapping into an anti-nothingness felt “sometimes” by individual boys/men as well as the Black male collective to which the poem refers. These ideas and the issue of cricketing emulation in boyhood are repeated in other poems by Bonair-Agard, most explicitly in “To Mimic Magic”. This poem reimagines Michael Holding’s 1981 bowling performance and iconic single over of attack against England batsman (and, later, famed commentator), Geoffrey Boycott, from a boy’s-eye-view of television coverage in Black and white. Holding is described as the symbolic “father” of all the local boys watching who then attempt to imitate their hero’s bowling technique (as far as possible) “on the courtyard the field the pitch” (Bonair-Agard 2010c, 55). Richards, though, is the poetic focus of Bonair-Agard’s hero worship, as seen again “Boundary”. In this poem Bonair-Agard recounts a young boy’s trip to the Queen’s Park Oval—instead of school—to watch a one-day game between the West Indies and England under sun so scorching that only boys already “too black” can endure it (2010a, 34). Like Mark McWatt’s short story (discussed in Chapter 3), the poem tells of an adolescent entrance into cricketing spectatorship. The poetic voice recalls becoming part of the buoyant and expectant Oval crowd, enjoying the beer, the communal occasion and getting to watch “what everyone had come to see”: […] the world’s best batsman Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards beat on the English bowling with such disdain

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and smooth style you’d take off your shirt in the stands sing along with the other faithful there who’d called in sick to work or had no job (Bonair-Agard 2010a, 35).

The offering of runs as a substitute for paid work is coupled with the desire to celebrate with a kind of physical exposure, with the showing of Black bodies, en masse, and standing skin-bare under the gaze of the skin-blackening sun. As Richards plays he becomes “the Viv”, iconic and without compare, smiling at “every delivery” and making “all manner of blackman saga-boy / inventive stroke”, including against his friend and teammate at Somerset Country Cricket Club, Ian Botham (35). As the poem grows into its investment in “beating the English”, it opposes the imperialist “it’s not cricket” cliché with an assertion of what cricket “is” to the West Indies fans watching, describing how these supporters, caught in the moment, experience a brief release—or perhaps distraction—from other intrusive forces: and it is cricket to rally around Viv’s exorbitant hooks and brilliant late cuts and Holding’s ridiculous pace and Marshall’s hostile rising bumpers and you look around you and marvel at a mad people who celebrate everything […] who weren’t yet noticing the dollar fall or that oil money was done or that Satellite TV and Video Music Box were coming – and Germans would buy up all Tobago’s beachfront – who didn’t yet know of a fall from grace or that Brian Lara was yet to come (36).

Although the crowd is caught within the cricketing moments of skill and excellence wrought by “hooks”, “pace” and “bumpers”, the future is still endangering and pressing in on their cricketing sanctuary. The poem closes with a boundary shot that “rockets through extra cover for four / so fast that not a man on the field moves” (37). In this gesture, the poem reflects on the glorious movement and speed of cricketing action, and the surprise and stasis it brings to the opposition. However, just as

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these fielders are bypassed while static, so too are the cricketing spectators whose future is marked by falling markets, dollars, music videos and tourist-invaders. The list of future pressures—economic and destabilising—points forward to new or exacerbated forms of invasion, while the reference to “oil money […] done” marks the waste, theft and short-term vision that accompanied the oil boom of the 1970s, for Trinidad especially (37). These warnings also point forward to the “fall from grace” that awaits West Indies cricket and comes with Lara, despite him being, in the words of the poem, “probably the best player in the game ever” (37).

IV In his assessment of Sobers, both in Beyond a Boundary and in his 1969 essay “Garfield Sobers”, James establishes a world-historical mode of thinking about the cricketing hero that is taken forward by Beckles in his reading of Lara and is also reflected, this section suggests, in the rendering of Lara found in Caribbean praise poetry. James presents Sobers’ batting, bowling and fielding as “a living embodiment of centuries of a tortured history” (1992, 389). Although he identifies and writes of Sobers’ “individual style” (2013, 205), James rejects an English journalist’s view of Sobers’ individualism as exceptionalism. Instead, he asserts that Sobers brought together immense talent, dedicated training and the unique history of the region to make him “the fruit of a great tradition” (James 1992, 380; see Chapter 7). Kenneth Surin argues against this assessment of Sobers, positioning himself specifically against James’ mobilisation of Hegel’s world-historical individual—that is, a prodigious man whose individual passions coincide with the unconscious will or spirit of the people. Surin argues that no man or individual, even one as significant as Sobers, can express a fraction of the Caribbean’s “impulses and disposition” (1995, 318). In contrast, Beckles’ reading of Sobers and Lara follows the Jamesian model. Beckles presents Lara as not just standing for his people, but carrying the full tradition of West Indies cricket and expressing the nexus of pressures that characterise modern times while also determining the course of history. Beckles also sees Lara as the inheritor of the West Indies tradition that James saw in Sobers, and indeed Sobers himself has described Lara as “a real West Indian batsman in the time-honoured tradition” (2002, 277). Beckles appreciates the aesthetics of Lara’s performances as offering the sociopoetic significance James saw

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in Sobers’ play, and connects Lara’s style of batting to his status as the new sporting entrepreneur of his time, the player who would set the path for a whole generation of neoliberal West Indies cricketers. Having watched Lara reach 375 from inside Antigua’s St John’s ground, Beckles reports that Lara possesses the “eye, technique and timing of Gary [Sobers], the ideological contempt for foolishness of Viv [Richards], and the occasional display of Sir Frank’s [i.e. Worrell’s] grace and elegance” (1998b, 145). In examining Lara’s status, Beckles evokes a “critical consciousness” that meets with a “reorganization of information” to be put into “exceptional social use by individuals at the edge of expectations” in a manner reminiscent of a world-historical figure (150). Casting Sobers as Lara’s master-teacher, Beckles goes on: “With Lara we see flashes and we hear sounds of all those who have gone before”, but, like the favoured pupil, Lara claims that, “What has gone before is excellent, but must be improved” (150; original emphasis). This is to say, Lara is of tradition thanks to his inheritance, absorption, enactment and manipulation of greatness; he joins the long list of West Indies cricketing heroes, especially batsman, but also changes tradition by joining it. In this way, the tradition of Caribbean cricket and Lara’s place within it can be understood as akin to T.S. Eliot’s explanation of the impact of the great poet on poetic tradition in his 1920 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. According to Beckles, Sobers helped prepare Lara mentally for his 375 record by playing golf with him in the morning and by emphasising to Lara that he should focus on West Indies needing 45 more runs, rather than his personal score. Beckles posits that in cricket, particularly West Indies cricket, “supporting the ‘whole’ motivates more than pleasing the ‘part’” (1998b, 146). Sobers then, Beckles claims, had handed Lara the authority to surpass him, and he had done so through the power of a selfless belief in unity—an appreciation of how the individuality of talent must reside within a collective, through the team and its regional representativeness. This seems to be the manner in which such visibly successful cricketing heroes are represented within the Caribbean popular and literary imagination and, in the praise poetry that depicts Lara, seems also to align with James’ idea of the batsman as a world-historical actor, representing and embodying a world-historical people. Lara’s international playing career began as the curtain was falling on that of Richards, and reached its own end at the 2007 ICC World Cup Finals, held for the first time in the Caribbean. He made his Test debut in Pakistan in December 1990, but in his autobiography, Beating the

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Field (1995), Lara talks of a faltering and frustrating start to his Test career, describing how he felt that young players were not respected by older team members nor given their chance by the captain (Richards) or management, until the stalwarts of past successes decided to retire. Lara even depicts Lance Gibbs, the team manager during the 1991 West Indies tour of England, as accusingly saying: “You think you can bat like Gary Sobers” (1995, 33–42). However, as is well known, in 1994, the “Prince of Port of Spain” made 375 against England to surpass Sobers’ 365 (not out) record for the (then) highest ever Test score. Shortly afterwards, Lara amassed 501 (not out) for Warwickshire to secure his superstar status. And perhaps most impressively, almost a decade to the day after he first obtained the Test world record in Antigua, Lara regained his title (from Australian Matthew Hayden) by becoming the first batsman to accumulate 400 Test runs in a single innings. These incredible feats, along with multiple others, have ensured Lara a unique place in West Indies and world cricket; a place reflected by his (then) unmatched financial attainment as a West Indies player, and the way this wealth separated him from his immediate teammates and from former West Indies players. Moreover, it is fair to say that the economic truths and dependencies of the Caribbean were written into Lara’s pay cheques, with advertisements and endorsements financed from outside his home region accounting for the vast majority of his income. Lara’s individual talent and immense world records were set mostly against the decline of West Indies cricket, and as three-times captain of the formerly great regional team, Lara was often at the helm of their sinking ship. His batting may have repeatedly helped stave off disaster, but it did not (and perhaps never could) work to raise the team to the point of regular success, which Beckles claims the traditional historical paradigms of West Indies cricket demands of its heroes (2001, 245). In addition, Lara’s behaviour both on and off the field was regularly viewed as running not only against his team’s best interests, but contrary to the accepted image of a good West Indies captain (modelled on Worrell). Incidents such as disputes with West Indies captains and team members, missed planes and tours, player strikes and contract disputes, resignations and the declaration that cricket was “ruining” his life all worked to sour Lara’s public image, and sat awkwardly alongside his hard-hitting, elegant stroke play and his professional reputation as one of the few remaining world-class batsmen who would “walk” (leaving the field before the umpire signals them out). These aspects of his career

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have created a potent and much commented upon tension between the individual batting excellence of Lara, including the rewards it brought, and the predicament of a declining West Indies. Beckles describes Lara as “(Con)testing the Caribbean Imagination” by occupying a critical position within the paradigmatic shift caused by “the age of globalization” (see Beckles 2001; 1998b). Similarly, Tim Hector has identified how, as a player of his time, Lara was “trapped between the ways of his raising and the value-less globalizing invasion which assails us all” (1999). We might, therefore, want to see Lara and the behaviour of his supporters—their “Laramania”—as indicative of what happens to cricket and the Caribbean under neoliberalism. This framing is pertinent, not least because, while in the cluster of calypsos and poems discussed below, the batsman-hero is praised as world-historic, as standing for and representing the Caribbean people. A key part of this pattern of representation includes representing their socioeconomic challenges and temptations. Jean “Binta” Breeze’s “Song for Lara” praises Lara and the “young generation” of the West Indies team in the 1990s who refuse to stand “in awe of Wisden” (cricket’s revered yearbook) (1997, 67). While calling on dance, pan and kaiso (calypso), Breeze draws directly upon Rudder’s famous 1987 calypso, “Rally Round the West Indies”, referencing the difficulties facing West Indies cricket, as well as his call for regional solidarity in the face of generational change and defeat. However, Breeze still chooses to concentrate on Lara as the batsman-hero who plays himself into a collective history. She views both Lara’s sense of self and the collective Caribbean self as contained and maintained through his cricketing excellence, and ends her poem with a claim for Lara’s combination of self and selflessness: an he playing hiself he playing hiself but he doan play all hiself yet he playin hiself he playin hiself but he doan play all hiself (69).

In a similar tone, in “On Lara’s 375”, Rajandaye Ramkissoon-Chen writes of Lara’s world record as a moment of Caribbean carnival and highlights Lara’s humility as “Humbly like a hero / he bows to the wicket” and

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“kisses the earth” (1997, 101). This image—one to be repeated a decade later, and an important motif in poems about Lara generally—is an act of connection, of loyalty and locality being expressed to the soil and people of the region to show that he comes from them and belongs to them, that he gives thanks to them and the islands “instinctively”, as his autobiography says (Lara 1995, 100). There are several small points within the poem that allude to the challenges that come with Lara’s achievements, including a reference to Lara as “bubbling like unstoppered cola”, marking his emotional state and the global wealth of sponsorship money coming towards him at that very moment. We also see the reduction of Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Lara’s on-field batting partner, to the anonymous and juvenile “little partner”, and similarly, the erasure of Sobers from the scene despite his on-field presence after his batting record was broken (Ramkissoon-Chen 1997, 101). The crux of the poem becomes the emotional intensity felt by Lara (fuelled by the absence of his father), and its reflection in the crowd, as he becomes the body of achievement: “He walks the victory sign”, in the now-famous pose with his arms and bat held above his head and is transfigured into the (young) father and protector of the region, standing with “arms that unite / beneath an uncertain sun” (101). This tone of ambiguity casts a long shadow into the future, and the same sense of heroic endeavour carrying with it a sense of uncertainty is also seen in Fergus’ Lara poems. Fergus has penned four poems about Lara and entitled his 1998 collection, which features three of these, Lara Rains and Colonial Rites, reiterating the importance and connection between Lara’s performances and the colonial history of the region. In “Lara Reach”, the ordinary hero worshipping spectator sees the arrival of Lara at the wicket as bringing a certain century, while the poetic voice’s own cricketing experience of “singles and dots” is soon ended when he is given out (Fergus 1998c, 10). The poem offers a comedic reinforcement of the notion that almost impossible public expectations weigh on Lara, and that the pressure this causes actually widens the gap between professional and social cricketing experiences. Nevertheless, Fergus’ other Lara poems offer more conventional praise for Lara, including through ecological connections and volcanic batting eruptions, even as they simultaneously register the struggles and uncertainties facing West Indies cricket and the Caribbean more generally. In “BC Lara”, a poem that playfully celebrates Lara’s 501 (not out) for Warwickshire, Fergus traces the idea that Lara brings about historical and religious transformation. Identifying 1994 as “Anno Lari”,

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in what reads as a play on Queen Elizabeth II’s description of 1992 as her annus horribilis, Fergus claims that time will now be divided between before Lara and after Lara, with the player’s initials also pointing to the name of Christ as if, it seems, Lara becomes godlike thanks to the Latin reference (1998a, 11). As Greenwood explains: Fergus marks the collapse of empire linguistically […] playing on the resemblance between Lara’s name and the Latin masculine proper noun Lar, Laris (third declension) – a tutelary household deity. In the phrase “Anno Lari” – in the year of Lara – Fergus has coined his own genitive (Lari, not Laris the correct genitive of the third-declension noun), as though Lara has become Larus, a Latin second-declension noun. Lara [thereby] becomes the god of a new world religion, eclipsing the Christian god of the colonizers and supplanting a Roman deity through verbal coinage. (2010, 205)

So, with Lara’s arrival set to “eclipse” old empires, Fergus’ double-edged attack appears to be directed both at a Christian timeline and, relatedly, at imperial cricketing history (Fergus 1998a, 11). Lara, in this context, is the world-historical godlike father, though the idea of paternity is quickly brought back to earth. In his newly generative role, Lara is described as a father, “Papa Lara!”, and children call his name in adoration and as an amusing claim to parentage. Meanwhile, middle-aged women are “padding up” their bras in order to have a “500 to 1” shot of becoming Lara’s wife (11). Fergus’ poem quite clearly echoes Hector’s optimistic sentiments about Lara’s impact on Caribbean history: [I] would want to think that Lara’s 375 innings put behind the Caribbean the conditionalities of the IMF with its structural readjustments that has structured Caribbean people out of their own economy and history. They will return centre stage after Lara because Caribbean history can be divided into BL (Before Lara) and AL (After Lara). (Hector, qtd. in Searle 2001, 44–45)

Hector’s view of Lara as marking a watershed for his people, and indeed for the world, again suggests the world-historical significance of the cricketer. We should recognise, though, that Hector’s hope has not come to fruition. If anything, the distance between the local population and the economics underpinning their subsistence, including the cricketing economy, has only increased with neoliberalisation—both during and after

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Lara’s career. This fact was demonstrated explicitly by the general absence of local cricket fans from the World Cup venues at the start of the 2007 tournament. Fergus’ poem about the 375 record, “Lara Rains”, emphasises the savage demise of England caused by Lara’s batting. Cutting the opposition “Over and over with a blunt willow”, Lara bludgeons England to death until they are buried under a “ruin of runs” in an “Antiguan graveyard”, that is, the Antiguan Recreation Ground (ARC), the site of both Lara’s highest Test score records, which has St John’s Catholic Cathedral on its west side (1998b, 9). Fergus draws on Catholic iconography with the umpires as priest-like “ombudsmen”, calling “over and out” as they enact the last “rites” of England’s cricketing and imperial superiority (9). Having “dug their hell”, Lara again becomes that famous “shape of victory”, walking with his hands aloft despite “an uncertain resurrection / After 375 years of rain under Lara” (9). Like the “uncertain sun” of Ramkissoon-Chen, the “rain” of Lara, as the life-sustaining water source of the lush Caribbean landscape, may also be a play on the monarchical “reign” that must end, though Fergus writes that “the sun will not set / On the united states of the West Indies” (9). In Fergus’ poetry, Lara’s “resurrection” occurs on “15.12.2000”, as recorded in “Lara Again” in Volcanic Verses (2003b, 61). This poem captures Lara’s first innings of the Third Test in Adelaide, against Australia, during the 2000–2001 tour when West Indies were 2-0 down in the series. Three days after having scored 231 against Australia, Lara came in at 52-2, was 136 (not out) overnight and went on to make 182 the next day. Although West Indies secured a first innings total of 391, they collapsed to 114 in the second, lost the match and endured a disastrous 5-0 series defeat. In spite of this, and the wider story of West Indies batting collapsing around Lara, by focusing exclusively on the first day’s play, Fergus is able to pay homage to Lara’s spectacularly commanding performance as the batsman who, like “Santa”, makes a Christmas “gift” to his people (61). It is noteworthy that Fergus recognises the batting efforts of a young Marlon Samuels who stays with Lara at the crease, but he insists on identifying Samuels’ strength as his ability to “follow the beat of the master” (61). (And it is an irony of history that Samuels ran Lara out in ignominious fashion in Lara’s last international game, a One Day International (ODI) against England at the 2007 World Cup.) Fergus also praises Lara’s volcanic or eruptive qualities as a batsman, conveyed by his repetitive boundaries against “terrorists” like Glen McGrath (the Australian pace bowler), but also sees that

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a volcano is unpredictable and unreliable, and this matches many reports of Lara’s own youthful exuberance (9). Where criticism of Lara begins to seep into Fergus’ vision, we might say that Lara’s heroic status and the popular overinvestment in him is most effectively probed by Keens-Douglas who, among his array of humorous cricketing performance pieces, has two texts—one poem and one short story—specifically about Lara. Almost three decades after her first poetic outing in “Tanti at de Oval” in Tim Tim (1976; see Chapter 6), KeensDouglas’ “Tanti Merle” reappears in “Tanti Backin’ Lara”, a short story celebrating Lara’s famous 375. On discovering that Lara can surpass Sobers’ 365, Tanti wants everybody in her Trinidad home “to back de boy” playing out in Antigua (Keens-Douglas 1997b, 33). Tanti’s notion of “spiritual support” means everyone putting their hands on Blackie who then acts as “aerial” with his hands on the tiny TV (33). Before and during the game, the local viewers (Tanti’s guests) offer the usual “bad talk”, criticising everyone from the selectors and Tony Cozier, the Barbadian cricket journalist and commentator, to Lara’s “winjy” Guyanese batting partner, Chanderpaul (34). They nevertheless support Lara, with calls of “Yesssss Lara, Nooooo Lara!”, until he misses the ball and they cry out: “Oh Gooooooooood Lara!” (35) Then, with Lara needing only six more runs, Tanti’s curry goat starts to burn and, as she heads off to save her dish, she accidental knocks over the TV. By the time the TV has been resurrected Lara is standing triumphant with his bat in the air and they “never see ah ting” (36). As in “Tanti at de Oval”, Tanti’s calamitous engagement with cricket frames a historic moment to create an amusing folk story. Her personality seems to overwhelm the cricketing occasion, leaving a blind spot in the recollection of those caught up in her adventure. Her insistence on supporting Lara, though, is part of her protective and maternal care for the young men of the region, and her sense of the importance of his achievement reinforces the idea of cricketing success creating Caribbean confidence and allowing the region to speak for itself, to the world beyond. In his collection Misapprehensions (1995), the Montserrat-born E.A. Markham uses a similar figure to Tanti in his poetic portrayal of his own mother, “Mammie”. Mammie is an elderly Caribbean immigrant in Britain, who insists on the need to support West Indies and offers up her own critical reading of the game, and even Lara’s technique, across the poems “Conversations at Upton Park iii” and “For Brian Lara”. In “For Brian Lara”, Mammie is critical of Lara’s “too high” backlift and, although her observations are contradicted

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by Lara’s century, she is almost proven right when he is nearly bowled by a straight ball (1995b, 78). In both instances, Mammie’s love of the game is comedically infectious and carries the weight of her connections to the islands and people she has left behind (see Chapter 6). Lara is rendered the omen of talented potential, but also the danger of uncertainty that challenges her view of the distant Caribbean. Keens-Douglas’ other tribute to Lara, “Lara Fans”, offers a poetic critique not of Lara himself, but of those “die hard Lara fans” (1997a, 8). He complains that “Dey eh askin […] bout West Indies, / Or if de wicket takin’ spin” but only want to know “how much Lara make”—as a play on both his run getting and his moneymaking (8). Worshipping Lara as a kind of “demi-god”, in the way that has come to be expected for cricket heroes (Beckles 1998/1999, 87), they believe “Lara alone could win dis match!” and want him to be allowed to “open” and “bat twice” (KeensDouglas 1997a, 8). When Lara makes a duck, that is, zero runs, they are discussing luck, fatigue and Obeah, not concentration, determination or shot-selection. This is reminiscent of B.C. Pires’ experience at the Queen’s Park Oval in 1998 when he attempted to unearth some criticism of Lara on his debut as captain only to discover that, at this point in history, Lara was “infallible in Trinidad” and that, when he made a mistake, “everyone was immersed in a personal struggle to transform a dropped catch at a critical point into something positive, if not a sign of genius” (Pires 2002, 215). This supposed criticism-free experience for Lara did not continue, however, and towards the end of his career he was praised and condemned almost in equal measure, with criticism coming from past players and supporters alike. Nonetheless, Keens-Douglas’ poem remains useful in its rejection of the idolisation of a single man, as he reveals his concern about the overinvestment in Lara and the problems this poses for both the West Indies team and regional unity. The poem ends poignantly with Keen-Douglas’ ambition for West Indies cricket: Ah hope West Indies start makin’ runs, For everybody sake, Because ah tired hear dem askin’, “How much Lara make?” (1997a, 9)

This hope for cricket is also Keens-Douglas’ aspiration for the Caribbean. Along with cricket’s popularity, its relationship to England and the success of West Indies, this dream is why he continues to write about the game.

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As he has repeatedly shown, cricket has the language, humour, action, structure and beauty that make it a part of the popular and literary imagination in the Caribbean. Cricket also supports the maintenance of both the individual and the collective in a medium that is known to and appreciated by the masses. Keens-Douglas hopes that the West Indies team, and the Caribbean more generally, can and will move beyond their overinvestment in the isolated heroic individual, cricketing or otherwise, and towards a new era of unity in purpose and action. Understandably, the tone of unadulterated praise that Keens-Douglas attacks returned when Lara notched up his record-breaking 400, and this is reflected in two poems from 2004 by Eutrice Cowie-Hope: “Lara the Brave” (2004b) and “Celebrating Brian Lara” (2004a). Although CowieHope notes that it would have been historically crippling for West Indies to endure a “white wash” series defeat to England in 2004, she still insists on Lara’s achievement being more significant than the avoidance of such an outcome. However, after the 400 (not out) record, Lara himself said: “It was different last time. Then we were winning the series and you’ve got to look at this in the context of the series, which we’ve lost. So really it doesn’t mean that much” (qtd. in Martin-Jenkins 2004). Lara’s sentiment was taken up by other commentators, including Fazeer Mohammed (2005), who did not wish to downplay Lara’s achievement, but called for it to be capitalised upon in a socially productive fashion for the people of the region. Voices like Mohammed’s insist that the work of heroes such as Lara needs to be used as part of a wider sociopolitical uprising, part of the improvement of the masses and their communal enjoyment of the game. In a pitch-side interview after his last game for West Indies, played during the 2007 World Cup, Lara asked the crowd: “did I entertain?”, and they responded with a resounding “YES”. His ability to entertain, with strokes, with passion, with power, was key to his success, but it did not sit alongside successful leadership or collective achievement as it had done historically in West Indies cricket. Nor did it represent the dream of regional nationalism held by earlier generations. Instead, his entertaining batting spoke of contractual disputes, corporate sponsors, televisual marketing and distribution rights. It suggested, like much of the poetry in this chapter, that emancipation is an ongoing project, even when a single figure strikes as the embodiment of tradition and a figure of world-historical significance.

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V In the period following Lara’s career, defeat, division and uncertain relations with the board and fans have plagued the West Indies team. New stars have risen across the 2000s and 2010s, but rarely have their achievements helped the West Indies find regular success, and especially not in the Test arena where their previous supremacy was most marked. Perhaps unsurprisingly, across this period, relatively few poems have celebrated West Indies cricket, although the presence and persona of Gayle has prompted a small flurry of commemorative pieces, including pieces from supporters beyond the Caribbean invested in the cricketer’s international Twenty20 performances. There are also a small number of poems on blog sites by fans and others enamoured with Gayle’s Indian Premier League (IPL) performances. For example, on Boloji.com, Padmaja Iyengar has a playful limerick for Gayle, titled “Beware of this Typhoon”, which, after briefly noting a kind of Caribbean storm in India, climaxes with “With Gayle, RCB can never fail!” (where RCB were Gayle’s IPL team, Royal Challengers Bangalore). Two more sizeable poems emerged in 2016 following a pitch-side interview with Gayle conducted by Mel McLaughlin, after he had scored 41 for the Melbourne Renegades against the Hobart Hurricanes in the Australian Big Bash Twenty20 competition. This interview became infamous for Gayle asking to buy the female interviewer a drink and then saying, “don’t blush baby”. This line became the title for a poem by Hopeton O’Connor-Dennie, of the Vision newspaper, published during Canada’s Black History Month. In the Caribbean itself, Sandre O. Lowers’ poem, “A West Indian Compliment”, was published by The Gleaner newspaper in Jamaica on 31 January 2016. In it, Lowers depicts how “Like a dust devil – a small compliment swirled out of hand”, and though he never condemns Gayle as sexist or misogynistic, as many did, he praises the interviewer’s “professionalism” and offers a toast both to “women everywhere” and to “all who see what they want and take a dare”—though it is unclear if this refers to Gayle or his interviewer. Lowers’ follow-up poem, published in The Gleaner on 24th April, celebrates the men and women’s West Indies World Twenty20 tournament wins of 2016. However, Lowers directly references his earlier poem and when praising Stefanie Taylor, the women’s captain and official “Player of the Tournament”, indicates that it is her time “to blush”. This strikes as notably odd, and perhaps ill-judged, given that a previously inflammatory and sexual line is redeployed to engender a sense of modesty in success

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for the female captain who was actually on a cricket pitch celebrating with Gayle and the rest of the men’s team at the end of the men’s tournament (see Coda). Beyond these examples, there are two Caribbean poems about Gayle that more directly tap into the region’s cricketing praise poetry tradition. First, Gayle is mentioned in Czedale Smallwood’s “My Prayer For The Nation”, which featured in The Gleaner on 3 October 2015. In this poetic song, addressed to and asking the Lord for guidance and support, Smallwood writes: Dear Lord, please grant us peace so that like Chris Gayle we can bat away doubt at life’s crease. Give us the strength to hit fear over the boundary ropes and celebrate the permanence of hope. (Smallwood 2015)

Second, and with a more developed cricketing focus, “Weather Report” by Ian Dieffenthaller depicts the World Twenty20 tournament match of 6 June 2009, between West Indies and Australia in England, in which Gayle’s blazing 88 (scored off 50 balls, with six fours and six sixes) secured victory for his team, then under his own captaincy. Against a backdrop of “insouciance and scattered inconsistency”, Deiffenthaller depicts the “driving hurricane” that becomes Gayle’s rain of runs, including hits off Brett Lee’s bowling that are so big they “Mashin up Australian[’s] car behind de Oval stand” (2012, 76). Reports of the match described the sheer force of Gayle’s batting, and several stories reported that “Stephen Fay, the […] former Wisden Cricket Monthly editor, [had] remarked that not since Clyde Walcott could he recall a blast of such magnitude at The Oval” (Brown 2009). The narrator of “Weather Report’ claims never to have seen “a storm wid so much”, personalising it with his pun on Gayle’s achievement, but also rebuking him: Date gale Big man wid twenty-twenty vision Really test we patience oui A strange wind blowing Windies outa Englan. (Dieffenthaller 2012, 76)

The poem ends on a note of contradiction, or ambivalence at least, as “date small red sun rising from / De storm […] was fine”, but “They

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say an ill wind blow no good” (76). The clichéd critique of Gayle—as unreliable, as doing what he wants, as not doing enough to build up the West Indies team and perform in accordance with its traditions or in line with popular understanding of its past heroes all—is here invoked. So too, though, is Gayle’s ability to harness the storm-aesthetics of his home even though, in Dieffenthaller, the storm wrought by the Caribbean cricketer seems to push West Indies into defeat—out of the tournament—rather than inspire revolt or revolution as it did with earlier Caribbean batsmanheroes.

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Fergus, Howard A. 2003a. “Conquest”. In Volcanic Verses, by Fergus, 59–60. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Fergus, Howard A. 2003b. “Lara Again”. In Volcanic Verses, by Fergus, 61. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Frewin, Leslie. 1964. The Poetry of Cricket: An Anthology. London: MacDonald. Fuller, James. 2013. Brian Lara: An Unauthorised Biography. Oxford: Macmillan Education. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Gray, Cecil. 1994. “Sonny Ramadhin”. In The Woolgatherer, by Gray, 105. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Greenwood, Emily. 2010. Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hector, Tim. 1999. “Lara in Cricket Time and Social Place”. Fan the Flame. 9 April. Online. Iyengar, Padmaja. 2013. “Beware of This Typhoon—Chris Gayle”. Boloji.com. 13 April. Online. James, C.L.R. 1992 [1969]. “Garfield Sobers”. In The C.L.R. James Reader, edited by Anna Grimshaw, 379–389. Oxford: Blackwell. James, C.L.R. 2013 [1963]. Beyond a Boundary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Keens-Douglas, Paul. 1976. “Tanti at de Oval”. In Tim Tim: The Dialect Poetry of Paul Keens-Douglas, by Keens-Douglas, 26–32. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Keensdee Productions. Keens-Douglas, Paul. 1997a. “Lara Fans”. In Roll Call: Poetry and Short Stories by Paul Keens-Douglas, by Keens-Douglas, 8–9. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Keensdee Productions. Keens-Douglas, Paul. 1997b. “Tanti Backin Lara”. In Roll Call: Poetry and Short Stories by Paul Keens-Douglas, by Keens-Douglas, 33–36. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Keensdee Productions. Lara, Brian. 1995. Beating the Field: My Autobiography, with Brian Scovell. London: Partridge. Lowers, Sandre O. 2016. “A West Indian Compliment”. The Gleaner. 31 January. Online. Mackey, Nathaniel. 1995. “An Interview with Kamau Brathwaite”. In The Art of Kamau Brathwaite, edited by Stewart Brown, 13–32. Bridgend: Seren. Markham, E.A. 1995a. “Conversations at Upton Park iii”. In Misapprehensions, by Markham, 77. London: Anvil. Markham, E.A. 1995b. “For Brian Lara”. In Misapprehensions, by Markham, 78. London: Anvil.

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Martin-Jenkins, Christopher. 2004. “Scintillating Lara Peaks at 400”. The Times. 13 April. Online. McDonald, Ian. 2012. “Massa Day Done”. In The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and McDonald, 99–100. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Mohammad, Fazeer. 2005. “Of Misguided Celebrations and Misplaced Priorities”. ESPN . 30 November. Online. www.cricinfo.com. Osgood, Miles. 2021. “Umpire, Empire: Kamau Brathwaite, Victorian Athletic Education, and the Literature of Self-Rule.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 52 (1): 121–151. Niblett, Michael. 2009. “The Arc of the ‘Other American’: Landscape, Nature, and Region in Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death”. In Perspectives on the “Other America”: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture, edited by Niblett and Kerstin Oloff, 51–72. New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi. Persaud, Sasenarine. 2012 [1996]. “Call Him the Babu”. In The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 106–107. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Pires, B.C. 2002. “Emperor of Trinidad”. In The Picador Book of Cricket, edited by Ramachandra Guha, 215–216. Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador. Pulsa, Carl. 2009. Slaves to Sweetness: British and Caribbean Literature of Sugar. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Ramkissoon-Chen, Rajandaye. 1997. “On Lara’s 375”. In Ancestry, by Ramkissoon-Chen, 101. London: Hansib Caribbean. Richards, Viv. 1991. Hitting Across the Line: An Autobiography. London: Headline Books. Richards, Viv. 2000. Sir Vivian: The Definitive Autobiography, with Bob Harris. London: Penguin Books. Roach, Eric. 2012 [1939]. “To Learie”. In The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 110. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Rohlehr, Gordon. 1981. Pathfinder: Black Awakening in The Arrivants of Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Tunapuna, Trinidad: G. Rohlehr. Rohlehr, Gordon. 1994. “Music, Literature and West Indian Cricket Values”. In An Area of Conquest: Popular Democracy and West Indies Cricket Supremacy, edited by Hilary McD. Beckles, 55–102. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Salkey, Andrew (ed.). 1967. Caribbean Prose: An Anthology for Secondary Schools. London: Evan Brothers. Searle, Chris. 2001. The Pitch of Life. London: Parrs Wood. Smallwood, Czedale. 2015. “My Prayer For The Nation”. The Gleaner. 3 October. Online.

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Sobers, Garry. 2002. Garry Sobers: My Autobiography, with Bob Harris. London: Headline Books. Surin, Kenneth. 1995. “C.L.R. James’ Materialist Aesthetic of Cricket”. In Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture, edited by Hilary McD. Beckles and Brian Stoddart, 313–341. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Westall, Claire. 2006. Personal Conversation with Kamau Brathwaite. At the Judith E. Wilson Memorial Lecture by Brathwaite. 26 April. University of Cambridge.

CHAPTER 5

Metaphors and Manoeuvres

This chapter builds on the previous chapter’s interest in praise poetry to explore the ways in which cricketing metaphors, motifs and terminology feature in Anglophone Caribbean poetry more broadly—and sometimes quite unexpectedly. Stewart Brown writes that in the Caribbean “cricket is so entwined” with the popular “morality and system of values that many writers have understood that the language and lore of cricket is a fertile source of metaphor that will resonate beyond the usual literary domain” (2012, 22). Hilary Beckles (1998) and Gordon Rohlehr (1994) share this view, emphasising in particular the historical, sociopolitical and popular modes of critique that sit within the region’s literary mobilisation of cricket. Taking up these prompts, this discussion returns to the “Preface” of Beyond a Boundary (1963) to unpack the connections C.L.R. James establishes between his question, “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”, and William Shakespeare’s Caliban (2013, xxvii; original emphasis). It then reads the same coupling—of cricket and Caliban— in John Agard’s poem “Prospero and Caliban Cricket”, and explores the broader interrogation of English Literature and poetic composition found in Agard’s other cricket poems. Thereafter, the chapter examines poems by Bruce St John and Grace Nichols that work out from Kamau Brathwaite’s “Rites” to portray cricket in religious terms. It then

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Westall, The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65972-1_5

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reads a range of poems that utilise cricketing imagery and playing positions to convey sociopolitical and economic critiques, where there is, in some cases, an association with the land that is articulated through the saccharine-ecological sublime (as seen in Chapter 4). Finally, the chapter unpicks the ways in which personal relationships and intimate “googlies” have been poetically coded through cricket. What is important, across this wide range of examples, is cricket’s enabling function, the way in which the game’s language, history and familiarity in the Caribbean is manoeuvred, typically through metaphor, to help create a shared frame of reference through which different modes of critique, revelation and salvation can be explored.

I In his “Preface” to Beyond a Boundary, James states that his book “poses the question What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”, and that answering this involves “ideas as well as facts” (2013, xxvii; original emphasis). While we might read the whole of his book as a response to this opening question, James offers two specific answers. The first comes at the end of the “Preface”, with James declaring that “To establish his own identity, Caliban, after three centuries, must himself pioneer into regions Caesar never knew” (xxvvii). James casts Shakespeare’s Caliban, of The Tempest , as an individual body representing the Caribbean people and set within a cricketing context. In doing so, he establishes an amalgamated view of this representative figure: as a Renaissance Caliban, pointing back to the indigenous Caribs that Columbus thought of as cannibals and whose genocide came with European arrival into the “New World” in Shakespeare’s time; as an Enlightenment Caliban, marking the history of slavery and indentureship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, forced—as in Shakespeare’s play—to learn the master’s language and culture; and as an Independence-era Caliban, finding new territory and looking towards the future. But rather than naming Prospero, Caliban’s theatrical nemesis and the European imperial figure in most postcolonial readings of Shakespeare’s play, James’ metaphor places Caliban in opposition to Caesar, in a mixing of imperial referents. Although, as Robert Hill (2013) has noted, this makes the metaphor complicatedly unclear, by removing Prospero, James eradicates the sorcery and mysticism presented as the cause of The Tempest ’s opening storm. Sharae Deckard describes this “storm event” as sparking, among other things, a

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“crisis in the social order, […] the manifestation of obscured histories or realities, the temporary dissolution of existing structures and antitheses, and [the] temporal double-consciousness” that comes with a connection between “real time” and “theatrical time” (2016, 26). Yet even without Prospero, James appears to condense many of these ideas, particularly as his mixing of imperial time and figures registers a dissolution of existing structures and expected oppositions. James replaces the British Empire and the earlier Renaissance explorations of Shakespeare’s period with Caesar—a single human figure famed for contributing to the fall of the Roman Empire. This move suggests that European incursions into the Caribbean will come to an end just as the Roman Empire did, leaving Caliban to strike out and into new territory in search of new modes of self-understanding, using and adapting the tools of his former master/s as needed. In deploying Caliban in this way, James is part of a group of Caribbean and African artist-intellectuals who, after 1959, turned to Shakespeare’s text as part of their call for decolonisation and who saw Caliban as a figure able to “contribute to their self-definition”, as Rob Nixon explains (1987, 558). Nixon identifies George Lamming, in the The Pleasures of Exile (1960), as the first Caribbean writer to do this, and describes how Lamming took up Caliban’s pronouncement, “You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse”, to convey his own position as an émigré Caribbean writer (Shakespeare 2011, 1.2. 364– 365). Nixon establishes how Lamming and other writers appreciated that where Caliban might be a purposeful anti-colonial figure, the institutionalised role of Shakespeare within Britain’s cultural imperialism remained oppressive and inhibiting. Nixon also writes of Lamming’s description of James’ history of the Haitian Revolution in The Black Jacobins (1938) as “show[ing] us Caliban as Prospero had never known him” (1987, 569; cf. Lamming 1984, 119). James’ position on Caliban and Shakespeare is similar to that of his friend’s, Lamming’s, and in Beyond a Boundary, James again presents a Caliban “never known” to Prospero—one whose relationship to cricket conveys the worldly knowing of the Caribbean masses implied by James’ own opening question. Beyond a Boundary’s more developed second answer to the “What do they know […]?” question comes in the book’s penultimate chapter. James contends that, where the English have a “national tradition”, featuring “Nelson, Shakespeare, Waterloo”, “West Indians crowding into Tests bring with them the whole past history and future hopes of the islands”, and that the performances of great West Indies players “help fill a huge

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gap in [the people’s] consciousness and in their needs” (2013, 233). This now famed assertion comes within his description of the campaign to make Frank Worrell the West Indies captain, and James’ interpretation of the crowd disturbance at Trinidad’s Queen’s Park Oval during the 1960 Test match against England. It is also part of his explanation that “the populace of the West Indies are not fools”, but rather that what happens in cricket corresponds to long-standing inequalities in employment and other areas in which locals—Black men in James’ examples—are excluded from appropriate and deserved positions of authority (233). James’ sense of the political awareness and sensitivities of his people highlights the difference in his question from its intertextual forerunner, found in Rudyard Kipling’s 1891 poem, “The English Flag”. Kipling’s poem asks, “what should they know of England who only England know?”, and calls on the “Winds of the World” to give answer to the “poor little street-bread people” he satirically castigates for standing and “yelping at the English flag!” as part of their opposition to the British Empire—an empire Kipling suggests they neither know nor understand. Both Kipling and James are interested in the knowledge that imperial experience gives the masses, and in the way that one area of knowledge (England for Kipling, cricket for James) cannot be appreciated without a wider frame of imperial reference (see Westall 2010). However, where Kipling claims that the imperially uneducated masses of England fail to comprehend their worldly position, James is adamant that the Caribbean people cannot help but “know” their complex sociopolitical milieu because it is evident in their constant and compromising lived experience, through education, employment and even popular cultural practices such as cricket. James’ reformulation additionally allows him to also highlight the way an English audience may claim to “know” cricket, but cannot really “know” the game if they maintain the imperial ideal of sporting neutrality as beyond politics and therefore see cricket in isolation. In these ways, James is adapting and redeploying English literary references—Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Kipling’s “The English Flag”—to present a Caribbean Caliban who stands for a collective body of popular insight and uses cricket as part of a new effort at self-definition that remains tied to the English language and literary canon imposed with empire but uniquely transformed by the people of the Caribbean.

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II These and similar ideas are further expressed in the poetry of Agard, the African-Guyanese author and playwright, resident in the UK since the 1970s, whose work is widely disseminated and taught, in part because of its intertextual engagement with questions of cultural imperialism, canonicity and Standard English. In “Prospero Caliban Cricket”, from 1993, Agard reimagines James’ use of Caliban in poetry, but reinstates Prospero as the white imperial batsman having to face the dangerous Black fast bowling of his former captive: Caliban arcing de ball Like an unpredictable whip. Prospero foot like it chain to de ground. Before he could mek a move De ball gone thru to de slip, And de way de crowd rocking You would think dey crossing de atlantic Is cricket is cricket in yuh ricketics But from far it look like politics. Prospero remembering How Caliban used to call him master. Now Caliban agitating de ball faster And de crowd shouting POWER (Agard 2012b, 38).

Agard’s poem encapsulates Caribbean cricket’s plantation roots and the racialised division of labour this initially brought with white batsman facing Black bowlers. It also expresses the physical-political rebellion carried within the region’s cricket and associated particularly with the figure of the Black fast bowler (see Chapter 1). Agard’s Caliban is thought of as young, new and naïve by Prospero, but Caliban’s bowling skill and ferocity force the sorcerer–batsman to appeal to the iconic English doctor of hypocritical cricketing amateurism “W.G. Grace / to preserve him” (38). As with many of the praise poems in Chapter 4, Agard’s piece is dense with references to the former “master–slave” relationship and the horrors of the middle passage. Caliban’s ability to move the ball

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in the air, like “an unpredictable whip”, insists that he is taking up an imperial weapon and launching it back at his enemy-opponent in a redirection of slavery’s violence. As in James Berry’s poem “Fast Bowler”, where the ball is “a nation’s voice” and the bowler’s arm “works his nation’s arm” (1997, 45–46), Caliban’s “striding confidence” means his bowling is “breathing a nation”—seemingly a regional nation—and his ball is swinging “like it hear bout self-determination” (Agard 2012b, 38). Caliban, then, is the body of movement and forceful, anti-colonial action, while Prospero’s lack of footwork stands for immobilising fear and (neo)imperial stasis, reinforced by the rare end-stopped line, “foot like it chain to de ground.” The crowd’s collective wave-like motion in support of Caliban explicitly evokes the transatlantic passage, with the internal rhyme of “rocking” and “crossing” moving the reader back and forth, in an ebb and flow of sound that ties all who watch and read to this past journey. The collective movement may also act as the synchronised pulsing of a life-force fuelling Caliban’s bowling agitation and expressing a wave-like potential to inspire rebellion back out across the Atlantic. Motion here is critical, and perhaps carries James’ sense of the aesthetic importance of movement within cricket (see Chapter 3), as well as the idea of explosive or revolutionary momentum coming through fast bowling. Indeed, Prospero remembers the former imperial hierarchy of deference (his being called “master”), but he is compelled to understand himself as the target of a reversed cricketing and poetic assault. This attack is envisioned as a revelation to Prospero, and, like the poetry considered in Chapter 4, one articulated in terms of the saccharine-ecological sublime, with the brutalities of slave sugar being recast against the imperial body of old and the Caribbean’s hurricane breath propelling the body of attack. Further, the poetic refrain, “Is cricket is cricket in yuh ricketics / But from far it look like politics”, alludes to an imperial space or body that is rickety, unstable and potentially diseased, malformed, misgrown and likely to break. The refrain melds together the fragility of the old British Empire as a system of domination and the frailties of individual bodies, claiming, in a Jamesian fashion, that the view from a distance (from the periphery) reveals the political breakdown of the ailing centre. It is the speed of the current danger that threatens such a break and it comes with the crowd’s shout of “POWER”, as if the two forces are interlinked and emerge in unison. This shout, though, comes with marked uncertainty, nodding explicitly to Brathwaite’s earlier poetic deployment of the same motif in “Rites” (see Chapter 4). It seems that the crowd

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is demanding power, given that Prospero has yet to be given “out”, but their shout might also register the strength they understand themselves as already possessing and on display in Caliban’s bowling. And this bowling is always a metaphorical rendering of local cricketing talent as well as a metaphor for the literary skill on display in the poem that itself points up the wider accomplishments of Anglophone Caribbean literature. As with many of Agard’s works, the force of British cultural imperialism is evident throughout. Yet, with Prospero “wishing / Shakespeare was the umpire” and that “snow” or an “appeal for light” could “stop all play”, the poem makes use of a clichéd joke about English cricket (that poor weather and light conditions can save a side from defeat) to expose how farcical the “enlightenment” white-out of imperial-literary education was for those in the Caribbean whose environment never matched the literature they were proscribed, and who more readily identify with hurricane-paced Caliban figures bowling under the “carib glow” of the sun (38–39). Here, Agard redeploys his long-standing assertion that the centre can no longer rely upon its claims to canonical certainty and Standard English, as so famously expressed in his poem, “Listen Mr Oxford Don”. With these gestures, Agard is, like James, close to Lamming’s use of Caliban in Pleasures of Exile. He also appears to follow on from Lamming’s appreciation of Caliban’s coming into vision by presenting his bowler as a figure of cricketing insight whose newly fashioned line of sight is penetrative and destructive in its self-fashioning creativity (Emery 2007, 2). In addition, if, as Deckard suggests, the Caribbean’s “storm aesthetics” enable the “revolutionary opening up of historical time” (2016, 25), then Agard presses home this point with Caliban as the cricket-storm representative of centuries gone, who holds together the political, cricketing and literary content of empire’s education only to repurpose past lessons so as to act with and for his people in their effort to establish a different or “revolutionary” kind of future. Rebellion as a kind of cricketing storm aesthetic is also seen in Agard’s more recent poem, “Give the Ball to the Poet”, published in 2014, which makes fast bowling analogous to the writing of poetry. It features in an anthology for school children of the same title, and is dedicated to Angus Calder—the famed Scottish literary critic and intellectual who enjoyed cricket and sports generally. The poem presents the “commune with nature” expected of a poet as being like a fast bowler’s ability to “talk to de wind” (Agard 2014, 22). In its rejection of the “sing” and “lyrical flight” of poetry that we might take as a reference to Romantic

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sensibilities, Agard’s turn to the wind is a metaphorical expression of his allegiance to Brathwaite’s (1984) hurricane aesthetics, and also a rejection of the romantic vision of idyllic English cricket that can be linked to Romanticism. Agard’s poem advocates “grit” and “double bite” in the work of literary composition, as if biting hard labour stands behind poetry. Moreover, the labour and wind of poetic creativity are imagined through the “double entrendre swing / of a Michael Holding”, whose “strictly hurricane whispering” delivers a “six ball sonnet” (22). The West Indies fast bowler’s nickname, “whispering death”, is the source of the pun here, and the metrical and rhyme control necessary for a (seemingly English) sonnet is likened to the rhythm and physical control exhibited in a six ball over from Holding. What might look like an oxymoronic juxtaposition, of “hurricane” and “whispering”, is actually the coming together of Caribbean storm winds and the elongated hush of human breath, that is, a binding of the climatological force of the region and the cultivated quiet of the long run-up (almost from the boundary) for which Holding was known. In this light, Holding’s bowling provides metaphorical insight into how Caribbean literary practice is hurricane-inflected and simultaneously connected to the quiet self-management of embodied art, including, in a Jamesian manner, cricket as art. The poem also instructs poets to graft at their poetic craft, to “rub a poem on your flannel, / rub de poem as red as hell”, until, it seems, a poem is rapid and raw, and able to move through the air unexpectedly, like a cricket ball, creating an opportunity to “Bounce a home truth or two / and force a conscience / to go for a stroke” (22). However, what strikes as poetry’s political utility—an ability, shared with fast bowling, to call out “conscience” and make it play—is complicated by the text’s definition of poetry: You might think I aiming joke at the laws of the canon, if I say poetry is de motion of three wrecked stumps re-collected in tranquility. But is no laughing matter when a poet feeling on de boundary, and a crowd hungry for blood start to shout a prophecy: Give the ball to the poet. (22; original emphasis)

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Poetry is defined, then, as the artistic ability to recall and recount the beauty and carnage of “three wrecked stumps”, to retell cricketing action and convey the aesthetic performativity of sporting and symbolic success-in-death from a moment of calm—here stamped with the end-stopped line. Consequently, the literary reanimation of fast bowling violence is pegged to a rational and sensuous poet-subject able to watch, digest and reflect upon the region’s performative culture so as to draw its whispering-yet-hurricane spirit into their art. In this way, seeing and thinking are combined with emotional engagement and critical appreciation to produce literary works inspired by Caribbean cricket’s sociopoetics. This definition of poetry also works against the “laws of the [literary] canon” (22). Yet the climax of the poem indicates the “boundary” position of the poet, standing at the edge of the sporting action and close to but separate from the wider crowd. The hungry crowd’s prophetic demand, to “Give the ball to the poet ”, to include the poet and seemingly to make the poet work, suggests that there is a popular demand for literary representation, including representation of cricket, and that this can be fear-inducing for the poet, even if it also works to put the poet into communally embedded creative action (22). Agard’s poem, then, is a fun example of the way cricketing terminology, names and traditions function in Anglophone Caribbean poetry as part of an exploration of the creative relationship between individual performances and the attitude and vibrancy of the masses, as well as how cricketing action can metaphorically express what’s needed for the poetic craft itself. Using cricket as a metaphor for writing in this way is well known within English and Caribbean cricket literature (Bateman 2009). Moreover, in a Caribbean context, this link between cricket and literary composition is often imagined as working to represent the people and their ambitions for the future. Faustin Charles’ “Cricket’s in my Blood” uses the same link that Agard makes between cricket and writing poetry, but does so through batting (see Chapter 4). Like Agard, Charles portrays cricketing action as poetic action, writing “Bat on heat, clash, ball bouncing century. / The play is a poem”, where the cricketing “play” on the field-as-stage is itself poetry (1986, 41). As Anthony Bateman observes, this is an example of “a meta-discourse preoccupied with the relationship between cricket and its literary representation”, where the “analogy posits the idea of cricket as itself a form of text […] that can be read and interpreted” and also itself “demands […] a particular poetics” (2009, 199–200). This seems right, and Charles’ parallel insistence that cricket is in the “blood” marks this

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poetics as coming from a history of suffering, but also success and originality carried through the game and into the lifeblood and literature of the Caribbean people, including individual cricketers and poets. A comparable mode of thinking is conveyed in Agard’s “Professor David Dabydeen at the Crease”, his praise poem for the British-Guyanese author and academic. This poem compares Dabydeen’s literary work to the batting aesthetic of Rohan Kanhai, presenting Dabydeen’s “literary cowlash” as “a stroke known as Kanhai-brash”, where confident execution and innovation bind poet and cricketer together (Agard 2012a, 39). At the same time, “the tongue of [Dabydeen’s] Creole willow” is “oiled with the canon’s orthodoxy” (39). Tracing Dabydeen’s career out from university through his poetry collections, Agard points to the lack of a “level green” pitch of opportunity, declaring that “there might be ships in the deep / and canefield odysseys in the outfield” and that “Leg before wicket might mean limbo beyond water” (39). Where Dabydeen’s own poem depicting Kanhai focuses on the batsman’s Indian heritage and heroic performances (see Chapter 4), Agard’s poem expressly looks to Dabydeen and Kanhai in a Jamesian manner as Caribbean figures, and so combines canefield, slavery and indentureship references as standing behind the similarly aesthetic creativity of batsman and poet. Cricket, specifically batting, and poetry are, thereby, conceived as overlapping popular-political acts of imaginative ingenuity that can bring new possibilities as they reanimate and redirect the skills passed down with empire.

III There is also, across Agard’s cricket poetry, a sense of the religious significance of the game for those playing and watching, with trinities, prophecies, canons and orthodoxies carrying cricketing-literary metaphors and puns, as well as gestures towards the hallowed and revered, the godly and the spiritual. This makes sense given that, from Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) onwards, cricket’s popularity has meant that it is often thought of as something of a religion itself, with godlike-players and supporterdisciples. While this is a clichéd sporting sentiment, cricket’s imperial history gives substance to this coming together of cricket and Christianity. As is well documented, the development of cricket in empire was closely bound to the spread of Christianity by British imperialists, and a particular sense of Muscular Christianity that emphasised sport’s character building qualities (see Chapter 1). As J.A. Mangan has repeatedly

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demonstrated, when Britain’s nineteenth-century “games ethic” travelled, it had at its ideological core the three “Cs” of Christianity, cricket and “the classics” (1981, 1988, 1992). In the Caribbean, Beckles writes of the slightly altered triad of three Cs as “the holy trinity of Church, Canes and Cricket, [which] constituted the planter-merchant hegemony” (1994, xvii). Beckles also states that when cricket was imported into the Caribbean it came with “the ‘made in England’ hallmark [and] was marketed and consumed as a refined élite product in much the same way as was ‘high church’ Anglicanism, which also explains in part the kinshiplike bond that was forged between them” (1998, 3)—a bond historically explained in terms of civilising colonial subjects. In his book Cricket Nurseries of Colonial Barbados: The Elite Schools, 1865–1996 (1998), Keith A.P. Sandiford describes how the “civilizing mission was eminently successful” in empire, and how its three Cs took particular hold in Barbados’ three leading schools (1). Indeed, these schools became “cricket factories” under the leadership of headmasters raised with Victorian Britain’s sporting ideals and insistent on religion coming with and through cricket’s claims to ethical conduct (Sandiford 1998, 2–5). Such ideas are seen regularly in Anglophone Caribbean literature’s depiction of cricket, especially in poetry, but they also butt up against other kinds of spiritual connections. So, as noted in Chapter 4, Brathwaite’s 1967 poetic short story, “Cricket”, brings together religious and cricketing notions of revelation and salvation by combining Christian and African spiritual references, whereas the 1973 reinvention of this piece as the poem “Rites” maintains an investment in religion and ritual, but accentuates connections to West African religious traditions by presenting its revelation of failure as a kind of not-yet-achieved salvation. Since Brathwaite’s example, much Caribbean cricket poetry has made use of the cricketingreligious intersection. While some texts exclusively mobilise a broad Christian frame, others combine Christian iconography with local belief practices and West African religious inflections. Two examples will serve to highlight this combined approach to religiosity, namely St John’s poem “Cricket”, published in his 1982 collection Bumbatuk I , and Nichols’ “Test Match High Mass”, included in her 2009 work, Picasso, I Want My Face Back. Both poems establish religious rapture as connecting Caribbean cricketers and supporters, and both work through an interweaving of AfricanCaribbean and Christian traditions to suggest that revelation and salvation might come to their people through cricket. St John’s “Cricket” shares

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much with Brathwaite’s earlier poem, and Edward Baugh sees St John’s piece as representative of the “communal ritual talk of West Indian cricket” that “grew up” around “Rites” (2001, 270). Baugh also describes “Cricket” as “typical of St John’s art in that, while it incorporates the storytelling mode […] its métier is a kind of didactic ‘reasoning’”, possessing, like “Rites”, a “corner-shop philosopher” as its knowing speaker (2001, 270). However, where Brathwaite’s speaker-philosopher conveys team collapse as a sociopolitical metaphor for the Caribbean region, St John’s recounts how cricket’s Christian content helps bring success—and perhaps salvation—for those on and off the field. St John’s “Cricket” opens with the crowd camaraderie and sharing of food and drink that occurs at Kensington Oval, Barbados. This collective hospitality is contrasted with the “backbite” at church, as if the stadium, and not the institutional space of Christian worship, is where community is constructed and practised. The poem’s anonymous speaker addresses “Boysie” and thanks him for talking of “cricket an’ de Lord” in a way that prompts a wider consideration of God’s role in the game (St John 2012, 114). The speaker then explains that God’s hand in cricket is evident in the three-stump wicket being like “de Trinity” of “Three in One”—with “God in the centre”, the “Holy Ghost pun de lef’” and Jesus on the right—and also in the ball, imagined “like a crown”, the “pitch like an alter north and south”, the umpires “two high priests” and the “groundsman as sextons” (114). God also appears to be specifically interested in the game, and the speaker understands that it is divine intervention, “De Lord revelation da captain”, that causes a sudden and unexpected wicket to fall in a particular match (114). The captain is “Big Joe David” and this “revelation” is a reward for the way he gathers his team “roun’ de South stumps”, all kneeling in communal prayer, to share a flask of “de Stades”, to sprinkle the local rum between the wickets in an act of libation and to hold the flask up to the sun, and thereby the Lord, for blessing and in thanksgiving (114–115). The crowd finds this behaviour so funny they “hol duh belly an’ / Roll pun de groun’”, and, of course, the sharing of a flask of rum replicates their off-field behaviour, but it is amusing to them because of the seriousness infused into drinking alcohol while playing cricket, and the hope that the Lord will save such drinkers from defeat (115). This, though, is exactly what happens, as the opening bowler “Jonny run down like a bull-cow” and releases his first ball “Like a jet” (115). The victory that seemingly follows means that on Sunday “Pastor Worrell” is surprised to “see de fiver dollar / Pun de

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plate” and sings “de t’anksgivin’ him / Like an angel” (115). With this gesture, it seems that the cricket match secures a communal distribution of “winnings” under the grateful eye of a priestly Worrell—a figure often depicted in cricket literature and lore as the father of West Indies’ cricketing spirit or “soul” (see Beckles 1998, 2017), as in Baugh’s poem “The Pulpit Eulogists of Frank Worrell” and Charles’ “Cricket’s in my Blood”. Worrell appears again in St John’s poem, sitting alongside Everton Weekes and Clyde Walcott (all of Barbados) as one of the Three Ws of West Indies cricket, who the speaker understands as connected to the Christian trinity. The speaker insists that the reason “dem Ws did so good” is that the “W” is “de stumps upside down”, and the stumps are the trinity itself, and so the batting grace of these players is the expression of that trinity’s grace (115). What is at stake here is telling: the iconic batsmen are invoked as the personification of Christianity’s place in cricket, and then the poem attributes a particular batting shot to each of them, as if they are individual embodiments of Christ and collectively the trinity that constitutes God, and that this is conveyed in their stroke play. The first shot, perhaps from Weekes, is a “square cut from de Son for a four” (115). The second is from the “Holy Ghost” who, after poking around, “All of a sudden […] step back / An’ ’e stretch up in de air an’ ’e smack!”, and so must be Walcott (115). And the third, coming from “de ‘Father’” and thereby from Worrell, whose batting is all about “de grace when ’e place”, brings a “drive t’rough de covers smooth an’ sweet” (115). Each of these shots reaches the boundary and each arrival at the field’s edge is symbolically significant: the first shot is met by “a gal” who “pelt it / Back …”; the second “hit de board / An’ bounce back!”; and the third “tek it time t’rough dem han’ / T’rough dem foot kiss de board an’ stan’ still” (115–116). So, across the three shots there is, eventually, a calm and elegant standstill at the point of success. These moments of aesthetic action, to be remembered by the speaker until he is in the “grave” (115), are reminiscent of James’ investment in the sociopoetics of specific shots and moments (see Chapter 3). Nevertheless, the poem closes by moving away from the forward-moving and becalming achievements of such batting and into a more obviously didactic claim for the protective care cricket offers: “Cricket is de game o’ de Lord / Cricket is de game o’ de Master / Play de game right, Boysie boy / An’ you stan’ a good chance hereafter” (116). Brathwaite identifies St John as a fellow “nation language poet” (1984, 16), and St John’s creole idiom comes to life in the poem’s cricket talk, building to a sacred

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claim in this final prayer-like incantation. As Baugh suggests, the speaker’s “earthly sententious performance alternates between a comical pseudologic and an acute grasp of common sense” and, while the “extended analogy between cricket and Christianity […] might have seemed, if rendered in Standard English, too awkwardly extravagant and literary”, the creole-infused sporting commentary of the analogy works to locate, animate and localise the claims to the “hereafter” made in the name of cricket (2001, 270). We can also see this creole inflection underpinning the gestures of libation and sun worship that exist alongside, and sometimes within, the Christian iconography employed. While the reference to “Master” should remind readers of the forms of advancement that might come from cultural conformity and learning to play the imperial Master’s game, cricket is said to provide “a good chance” for the future in a more expansive, heavenly fashion, as if there is no limit or worldly restriction to the possibilities of the future. For Beckles, this sentiment is evidence of St John’s “generosity” of spirit and his nod towards the “utopian” (1998, 107). Certainly, in St John’s poem, playing cricket “right” leads to revelation and salvation for the players and, through their play and example, for all those who watch. Similarly mapping cricketing positions and objects onto religious roles and references, Nichols also takes up the idea of a special relationship between Christ and cricket in “Test Match High Mass”. She opens with “If Jesus was pressed into playing / a game, I’m sure it would be cricket”, and, more exactly, he’d be “the wicketkeeper”, the “openpalmed witness” standing “behind the trinity of stumps” (2009, 27). From this position, Jesus-the-wicketkeeper watches over “his white-clad disciples” who, in a kind of leisure-labour, work the “green field” and track “the errant red soul / of a ball”, watching it “arcing gloriously / across the turf of uncertainty” (27). This ball appears to be the heartsoul of the Caribbean. Its “arcing” echoes Caliban’s “arcing de ball” in Agard’s poem cited above (2012b, 38), and registers Brathwaite’s poem “Calypso” in which a stone “skidded” and “arc’d and bloomed into islands” (1973, 48). In this way, Nichols maintains a connection with the birthing of the islands that is outside of Christianity, even as the poem moves the life-giving power of the ocean seen in Brathwaite’s poem onto the land and the spiritual ground of the cricket field. Where the fielders are Jesus’ “disciples”, those closest to him and working with him directly, the crowd, are “his flocks”, who Jesus sees “flapping” at “every six and four” and who he watches as he did “Zachias in his sycamore”, in a

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reference to the tax collector climbing to see the Messiah as he entered Jericho (Nichols 2009, 27). As with St John’s poem, the umpires are religious figures, here “judgement-day-vicars”, but their “casting [of] fate” is set against the “casting of benediction” that comes from the sun and its blessing (27). The poem closes: “Dis is high mass. Dis is Bourda. / We the heaving congregation, / with Job-like patience, / wonder what miracles will spin / to feed a hungry multitude?” (27). This “mass”, at Bourda cricket ground in Georgetown, Guyana, points to the religious service in which the sacrament, or Eucharist, is taken, and also to the “mas”, or masquerade, of carnival and communal celebration associated with the Caribbean. The focus here is on the crowd—heavy, numerous and tightly packed—whose suffering, dedication to the Lord and hope for future salvation is akin to the experience of the biblical Job. Where St John’s poem seems to briefly reference biblical stories of Jesus’ “feeding the multitude” with fishes and loaves (most commonly thought of as the “feeding of the five thousand” that features in all four gospels) when the slip catch that turns the game is said to be catching a “fish!”, Nichols directly names the “multitude” as the “We” who wait for the cricketingreligious “miracles” that might “feed” their hunger and, thereby, bring both sustenance and salvation. The pushing together of cricketing drama and a wider, more historically pointed reference to the long-term struggle to survive experienced by the cricket-watching masses of the Caribbean reinforces a communal willingness to believe in and anticipate (“what miracles will spin”) unexpected outcomes that will arise from the onfield action and raise them up, sustaining them and their bodies and bringing them closer to the divine force imagined as determining their fate (27; emphasis added). The tension between the “will” of the people and the uncertainty of their future is captured in the closing question mark, as the poem leaves the reader in a kind of cricketing-religious limbo in which belief in the game and its significance is partially undercut by the uncertainty of the future.

IV As is evident from the poems above and in the previous chapter, Caribbean poets habitually use cricket’s playing positions and terminology as metaphorical vehicles for the past’s continuing effects in the present. While the figures of the batsman, bowler and umpire are most commonly deployed, a smaller number of poems are either premised upon or sustain

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metaphors derived from cricket’s fielding positions, equipment and locations. And with these examples the politics of personal and community freedom is sometimes offered up in comic form, as well as in other ways. In a humorous vein, Paul Keens-Douglas’ performance poem “I, Ball”, released on his album Crick…Crack…Cricket (2000), gives a first-person account of the male “ball’s point of view”. This speaking ball declares that rather than the batsman and bowlers who are typically praised and applauded, he is responsible for everything that happens on the field. Indeed, the ball claims to “control the whole thing” and to have secret knowledge of what really happens on the field and why (Keens-Douglas 2000). For example, he knows better than the umpire or bowler whether a batsman has edged him, the ball, before being caught behind. And he reveals that when he unexpectedly stops in the outfield he is conversing with his friends the red ants, and when he hangs high in the air he is pausing to greet the seagulls. Indeed, this speaking ball says that it is not the pitch determining bounce, or the bowler creating swing, but “me doing me own thing” (Keens-Douglas 2000). This claim to selfdetermination for the unappreciated is the closest this poem gets to politics. However, Bonair-Agard’s poem “New Ball” carries the same first-person speaking ball premise, but presents the saccharine-ecological violence of attack seen in Chapter 4 as arising from the rather than the players. The ball-persona characterises itself as a “conjurer” who believes in “ghosts” and will, through his tale, make the reader believe in them too (Bonair-Agard 2010, 49). The ball’s “whole purpose” is “to make / movement and pace out of thin air / to hiss and spit off the pitch like a hydra” (49). With this, Bonair-Agard brings the self-renewing powers of the Greek sea serpent, Hydra, out of the water and onto the pitch so that its powers, conveyed by the ball, can be “wielded” by “men whose business is carnage” and who possess “gladiator nerves” (49). These warrior figures are also those who care for the ball. The ball details how his “high gloss” is preserved by the players who show “a patient lover’s compassionate / assist to arousal” (49) with their polishing efforts and how, consequently, he transforms “placid wickets” into dens of dangerous movement for batsmen. The sexual note here, reinforced with “placid” standing instead of the implied flaccid, means that the ball is positioned as the power behind both the stand-up, erect strength of the bowler and the deadly dangers of the ground upon which the batsman plays. Addressing the batsman directly, the ball says he is looking to attack, to cause the “percussion of your stumps” or find the “soft cartilage / between your

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ribs”, until the poem climaxes with sublime violence: “looking / for the succour of your throat / the sweet hem of your jawline / shattering into the whitest light” (50). This conclusion turns the popular cricketing phrase “chin music”, associated with the West Indies tradition of fast bowling, into a terrorising assault on the face of sweetness, resulting in destruction of bone, race and enlightenment in its “whitest light”. It also implies a moment of explosive new beginnings, as if renewal or re-creation might follow this bone-crunching, ground-clearing, sky-brightening shattering. In a similar fashion, Krishna Samaroo’s “A Cricketing Gesture” reworks the terrors of the Caribbean past into the cricketing landscape, claiming that it is “not cricket” when “a wicket” is “worn to the bone, cracked / like a skull unearthed by / a spade clearing space for / another soul in this cemetery / of dreams we call hope” (2012, 111). In Samaroo’s poem, a slip catch ends a batsman’s career and as the batman leaves the field to applause, “the pattering palms in irony / flood with the horror of memory” (111). Such horrors reverberate outwards into almost all cricket poems using the game as a metaphor for the present’s connection with the past of slavery, and Bonair-Agard does this in multiple ways across his run of cricket poems. “New Ball” features in Bonair-Agard’s 2010 collection, Gully, which itself includes three separate entries in some way titled “gully” and another poem that makes use of the same term. Before the poem “Gully”, Bonair-Agard presents a kind of dictionary definition of the word as meaning “1. A ditch or gutter” and, in “2. Cricket”, as referring to “a. the position of the fielder between point and slips” (so where they stand on the pitch) and “b. the fielder occupying this position” (24). The poem “1978 – London Street, Arouca” begins with “We made her field gully” to highlight the playing ditch in which the only local female player was allowed to field (see Chapter 6). However, in “Gully” itself, Bonair-Agard gives a gully fielder’s seemingly gender-neutral but probably male account of their importance to the “whole day’s play”, with the same first-person strategy used in “New Ball”. “Trained to disappoint”, the gully is “snapdragon quick” and “become[s] a bird” or “winged reptile” to stop “cocky batsman” from scoring the runs expected to come from their powerful cut shots (25). This human body of agility and interruption is able to become a creature of flying grace, but one who, standing close to the batsman, has the potential to be “quiet for hours” and to become “a god, a trickster god / a two-faced orisha”, that is, a kind of Yoruba god who “delivers in

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the most excruciating manners” (25). The fielder’s claim to poise, readiness, concentration and patient toil is thus situated within their sense of cunning and their godlike ability to determine what happens to the men they watch. Within Caribbean cricket poetry this example is unusual in its ventriloquising of a fielder, but the complexity of Bonair-Agard’s use of gully is substantially extended when, late on in the same collection, he returns to his definitional presentation of gully under the title “gul . ly [guhl-ee]” (64). In this poem he gives the same cricket definitions as earlier, but this time lists them as 3a. and 3b. implying that there is some kind of hidden movement forward for cricket, or with cricket, across the collection. In addition, he lists a new entry that weaves together cricketing terms and the slicing open of Black bodies and lives: 4. A large knife we stay gully in the cut quick-handed for snatching or the razor’s sweet edge slip in and out of shadow ghost between point and slips […] gully for blood and black we stay underground like that (64).

This “we” is trapped in the ditch or gutter of life, as the gully, and is quick to snatch. They “slip” the razor “in and out” and a “ghost” appears to be the result of pointing the knife and then, perhaps accidentally, slipping. But this “slip” is also the result of a history of living in the shadows. With the knife or cut running “deep”, like “basement speakers”, the poem brings together an “underground” encasement of Black bodies, and especially Black male bodies given the focus of the collection, that brings back cricket’s violent Caribbean history. Where Bonair-Agard’s use of gully only hints at the land with its suggestion of ditches and the underground, cricket’s relationship to the

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Caribbean landscape features more obviously in poems that make more use of the cricket pitch’s metaphorical potential, for example, with the idea of the boundary or boundaries. In “Cricket Boundaries”, published in 1997, Jamaican poet Delores Gauntlett portrays the possibility of change as “enclosed / by doors of skin” yet still a “process of evolution” that “will spin / to the test” (2012, 82). This poem might be read in the context of the downturn in the fortunes of West Indies in the mid-1990s, with its references to a move towards “losing” and “answers” being sought in the “search for change” (82). Nevertheless, it is more obviously an abstract reflection on the relationship between boundaries, time and the challenge of waiting for slow progress, as if changes in race relations and racial prejudice are as slow as evolution, but perhaps as inevitable, full scale and ecologically embedded. Also making use of historical boundaries and the abstraction of cricketing terms, William Walcott’s 2005 poem “Bondmen” is organised into nine four-line stanzas, with each beginning “Fourteen West Indies on a field” and, thereby, raising confusion about why fourteen bodies are present when this seems either too many or too few, given the expectation of thirteen players and two umpires (2012, 117). Each stanza’s three further lines pose a “Who” question and rhyme, giving each ABBB stanza a stuttering sense of repetition that functions, across the stanzas, to drive the poem forward in cycles of closed repetitions. For the most part the questions pun on cricketing terms, as with “Who has seen the bats?”, “cleared the bawl?”, “kept the pace?”, “torn the covers?”, “saved the pitch?”, “borne the loss?” and “seized the runs?” (2012, 117). But as the poem builds its interrogative pattern, the last three stanzas move from a concern with the land— expressed as “Who has milled the ground”, “soiled the plot?” and “stalled the boss”—through “Whose bounties must we mould?”, to the last triad of questions about the captain’s “name”, who they should all “blame” and “Whose victory must we claim?” (117–118). With this trajectory, the “plot” marks the historical significance of the independent plots of land that enslaved people were permitted within the plantation complex but also indicates a spoiling of history’s storyline for the very people who have “milled the ground”. Further, the closing stanza ends with the joining together of victory and theft. This functions in three interlocking ways: it alludes to the history of slavery as bound to theft, and to imperial and cricketing history being written by the imperial “victors”; it suggests that those considered history’s losers understand that they must take, demand or lay hold of the victories others already possess; and it undercuts the

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mimicry, desperation and emptiness of such conceptions of victory and the claims that might be made against them. Moreover, across the length of the poem there is a growing sense that the economic and sociopolitical odds have already been set, and that the playing of the game with preestablished victors results in nothing but losses and impoverishment for those unable (or no longer able) to claim victories of their own, despite having worked the ground themselves. Where these poems look to the land and cricket field in abstract terms, Lloyd Brown’s “Cricket Grounds, Plymouth”, from Duppies (1996), reads a specific cricket pitch. The poem is explicitly interested in contemporary sociopolitical and economic constraints as these are filtered through cricket and symbolically linked to the Caribbean’s climate and ecology. With the poem dated and located as Montserrat, “May 1, 1989” (2012, 62), Brown writes from the British Overseas Territory (BOT) a few months prior to the arrival of Hurricane Hugo, and just a few years before Chance’s Peak’s volcanic eruption of 1995. Consequently, the poem’s investment in sporting movement and the connections that can be made to political and economic impasse are linked to the destruction caused by natural “disasters” and the (re)structuring impact these have on the relations and possibilities examined in the text. Ideas of movement and time, of the “bubbling” potential running beneath constraint and continuity, dominate the poem (62). From the outset, movement and possibility are set alongside stasis: “Movement is the seamless flow of practiced repetition” even as “motion becomes a seeming immobility” (61). Movement and stasis come together with the crease—the area in which the batsman is home at one end and from which the bowler bowls at the other. As both line and territory, the crease is rendered “a rectangular frame of fluid rhythms / anchored to the hard-packed earth / by the imperial measures of the sovereign wicket” (61). In this fashion, the wealth and weight of the British Empire and its sovereign power have pressed themselves onto the island’s earth with the marking out of the cricket pitch—with its frame of creases. In addition, Montserrat’s status as a BOT, with its continuing and formal ties to the UK and the Queen as sovereign, underpin cricket’s “proper form” and “genteel splendours” (61). The poem’s elongated and breathy lines connect trisyllabic and quadrisyllabic words—“repetition”, “timelessness”, “rectangular” and “immobility”—that work to create slow, soothing sounds that stand in contrast to the monosyllabic heaviness of the “hard-packed earth” of the cricketing surface in Montserrat. This tropical landscape is

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itself contrasted with the “soft green” of an imagined and idyllic “ancient / tapestry” of cricketing Englishness: Play is energy becalmed, then stirred into slow motion by an effortless elegance, […] Grace under the pressure of constraints sanctioned By the quintessential gentleman’s agreement; momentary explosions are extraordinary acts of civil obedience under stress and heat, and these creased lines of pitched battle are a formal declaration of lawful rule and orderly submission. (61)

The “momentary explosions” of big shots and run scoring are part of the expected pattern of play, the game’s “civil obedience”. Such brief and permitted outbursts constitute an “orderly submission” that avoids or invalidates open rebellion and enables formal rule from the imperial centre to continue. The “stress and heat” that arises from acting under such an obligation might be read as a prelude to the self-determining effort articulated by Montserrat with its Constitution Act of 1989. In their overview of British Overseas Territory Law (2011), Ian Hendry and Susan Dickson describe how Monserrat’s 1989 Act contains within its Preamble a recognition that “the realisation of the right to self-determination must be promoted and respected in conformity with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations” (351). However, as Hendry and Dickson also explain, this articulation was immediately undercut by the financial impact of Hurricane Hugo and then volcanic devastation, which meant that in the period between the late 1980s and mid-1990s Montserrat was bound all the more firmly to the UK and funding from its Department for International Development (DFID), despite the island’s own economy growing across the 1980s before these particular events. In this way, the momentary glimmer of independence was pushed back and remains in hiatus today. In addition to carrying these ongoing ambitions for independence, Brown’s poem establishes the cricketing connections between the imperial past and the continuing economic suffocation experienced in Montserrat and the Caribbean more widely. Indeed, the poem articulates a longterm and systemic view of the region, and does so in cricketing-ecological terms:

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enduring proprieties, like a tropical teatime break, are yesterday and tomorrow, the inviolate rituals of a prophetic remembrance in which memories are selected positions stock-still, screening the boundaries of legitimate being on the world’s assigned periphery. This field is set, Janus-like, in time, where the well-trained future scampers for meagre runs between the wooden bars of its allotted space, […] and looming over all, Mt. Chance’s fog-capped peak flaunts a windblown cape of clouds, sea-island cotton-white trimmed with black lava rock, in air still thick with sulphur from the exploding furies which froze, long ago, into an inert immensity of energy – caged and motionless – except for the hot springs bubbling underfoot, beneath the calm precision of play, from ancient bedrock furnaces, to die on black-sand beaches below the southern boundary, while a disciplined chorus of hands applauds the end of a well-played innings. (61–62)

The etiquette of cricket here stands as an ongoing imperial legacy, one that shapes and determines the future, limiting the opportunities and wealth of those caught within the game’s “wooden bars”. There is a clear sense of Montserrat, and seemingly the Caribbean too, as the predetermined or allocated margin of the global economy, the “assigned periphery”, never allowed to grow or gain in a manner that would challenge the world order. Indeed, the future is already “well-trained”, disciplined in its delimited offers. And yet all of this—the control and rule, the (mis)management of futurity, the “inviolate rituals” and performances of “calm precision”—stands beneath (or in the shadow of) the island’s ecological realities. “Mt. Chance” is the volcanic peak of Montserrat’s Soufrière Hills. The “cotton-white” of its clouds mark the slave trade’s bind to a Christian heaven, as well as the elevation of whiteness as untouchable, and the seeming innocence of a semi-dormant volcano. However, the trimming of “black rocks” immediately undercuts any sense of purity or ephemeral glory, and instead ensures that

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hard black rock, immovable and dangerous, encloses the whiteness of the sky. Further, the volcanic landscape’s blackening effect and “inert immensity of energy” is cast as analogous to the potential of local cricketers and, more broadly, the people of Montserrat and the Caribbean. The tension between a seemingly “frozen”, still and thereby innocuous mountain and the “hot springs bubbling underfoot” brings to life the energetic underbelly of the island—its volcanic “bubbling” as well as the “bubbling” of human cricketing energy beneath the “calm precision of play”. The superficial, even dangerous, suggestion of inertia is counterposed with a performative energy that ties the people to the landscape of their home. What appeared—or was made to feel—“caged and motionless” is alive with ancient “bedrock furnaces” of earlier lives and times, landscapes and peoples. The calamitous eruption of 1995 that destroyed the capital Plymouth, and with it Sturge Park, the site of this particular cricketing scene, should also reveal to readers that such energetic excess— deadly and beyond the control of any human power—is life changing and, geophysically, world changing.

V Not all cricket poems have such large-scale frames of reference. In fact, a good number of cricket poems employ the game and its vocabulary in order to examine personal relationships, including childhood friendships and family bonds. Such poems may sometimes be politically infused, but they tend to be couched in terms of playfulness, nostalgia, sentimental reflection or straightforward care and affection. As discussed in Chapter 1, cricket is frequently linked with childhood and adolescence in Anglophone Caribbean literature. Poems written for children about cricket typically express the delight and difficulties of playing the game as part of a developmental journey within a peer-group experience, especially for boys. For example, Berry’s “Quick Ball Man” praises the fast “bowlerman” as “a warrior man” who also turns himself into a batsman, and acts as a simple, song-like poem for children that encourages sporting activity (2014, 15). Meanwhile, Linda Deane’s “JoJo Johnson (Chant for a Cricket Hero)” celebrates a boy-hero who, as the last man to bat, scores his team’s winning runs and is thus celebrated as “a giant” among his friends despite being only “five foot high” (2014, 18). This poem, also song-like, encourages childhood confidence by presenting sporting skill as more important than mere height. In G.K. Sammy’s poem “Cricket in the

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Road”, a young bowler declares the “Game done” when the batsman— who has already “done score a set of runs”, but whose wicket hasn’t been taken—refuses to let anyone else bat (2012, 112). As in Michael Anthony’s short story with the same title, discussed in Chapter 1, the children’s game ends when there is a disagreement. This rendering of childhood emotion, the failure of peer-group negotiation and a demand for fairness as sharing provides an example of how not to act, even as its warmth ensures that there is an empathetic presentation of the disillusioned young bowler. In a more developed fashion, Bonair-Agard’s poems about cricket and childhood in Gully tackle hero emulation and the move into manhood. An especially poignant example is “Open Letter to Dave”, in which the speaker describes how Dave was worshipped by other boys because his batting “strokes came so easy” and because he “made it to the West Indies / youth team” (2010, 51). But Dave also drank and played “internationals tipsy” until, in adulthood, at just twenty-one, he is on “crutches” having lost “the feeling” in his legs (2010, 51–52). When faced with this revelation, the speaker presents his own anger at the loss of Dave’s cricketing dreams and, thereby, the loss of his own link to such cricketing achievement. He also confesses to turning to rum and laughter to evade Dave’s “immobility” (54). The speaker’s final move, towards drink and away from friendship, is exposed by the poem as a weak and dangerous act of denial, one that strikes as an effort to resist having to grow up “too soon”—as Dave has had to do. Kei Miller ties together cricket, friendship and alcohol in a similar fashion in “Drink and Die”. Where BonairAgard’s poem moves from childhood into early adulthood and recognises Dave’s mature readjustment to his mobility limitations, Miller’s speaker is grappling with his friend Paul’s passing and what reads as his own approaching death. Published as the last poem in a cluster about alcohol and dependency that rounds out Miller’s collection Kingdom and Empty Bellies (2005), “Drink and Die” presents a stark and unusual metaphorical mobilisation of cricket and, it seems, alcohol-induced death. The main body of the poem is preceded by a cocktail recipe, as if all that follows is filtered through this drink and only ends with the empty oblivion (literally the empty white page) of the book’s close. The speaker repeatedly tells Paul that he is coming to join him but is delayed—“I coming / but I coming late” (84), and reports having to escape his daughter’s insistence on healthy porridge for breakfast in order to get to Paul, or at least his spirit, at their rum bar. The poetic voice insists on his coming

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arrival and uses cricket to (re)imagine his typical exchange with Paul: “I will tell you / about West Indies cricket, / how Carlooper is our / salvation, and as always / you won’t agree with me” (84). This misspelling or shortening of Carl Hooper (referencing the West Indies legend) renders the conversation one of relaxed friendship, but also suggests slurring and truncation—as if the voices and their lives are being abbreviated by inebriation. That Paul “won’t agree” opens up the possibility that rather than just preferring a different cricketing hero, the speaker’s lost friend might reject the possibility of salvation altogether, or the idea of salvation finding them specifically—or, perhaps, the notion that a single heroic cricketer might bring salvation. With Paul already dead and the speaker having to manage his own deteriorating physical and mental capabilities (“recently, I been losing / my way” and “I feel / my bones being pulled into the earth”), the poem’s close—“I know / I coming, Paul, real soon”— implies the friends will soon be reunited in death (83–84). However, the perpetual delay of arrival means that, despite Paul’s imagined rejection of salvation, there remains a glimmer of hope for the speaker. These are not the only poems in which cricket is used to navigate illness and death. While Miller’s speaker declares himself on the way to death through cricketing conversation, Ian McDonald’s “Test Match”, from his collection Mercy Ward (1988), portrays the arrival of international cricket as a distraction for the Guyanese poor trapped on a ward for the terminally ill. The “Mercy” of cricket, then, means that the game replaces the “desperate centring on self” of the patients and their “endless question unexpressed: / How much time have I got left?” (McDonald 1988, 31). Indeed, the threat of disease is briefly supplanted by the threats facing these patients’ cricket heroes, so that “Those broken on the wheel of life / Feel at their throats a different knife” (31). McDonald uses cricket to stave off death, or at least escape its shadow, but what is more common in Caribbean cricket poetry, as Brown suggests, is the “image of life as a kind of innings and especially death as the final dismissal” (2012, 22). This is seen, for example, in “Short of a Century” by Howard A. Fergus, which was written “for George Allen”—a first-class cricketer who died in Montserrat, in 1990, aged 41 (1998, 17). In fact, cricket is frequently used to help commemorate the passing of men, as former players or fans, and is used aptly by Marc Matthews to remember James as a cricketing-intellectual father in “C.L.R. (by time)” (1992, 22). In particularly intimate terms, and as Brown also notes, cricket has been used as a “metaphor in lamenting the passing of […] fathers”, as

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in poems by Linton Kwesi Johnson, Merle Collins and Lorna Goodison (2012, 22). Johnson’s “Reggae fi Dada” uses cricket briefly at its close to establish death as an innings ended, addressing the father figure with “yu reach fifty-six / before yu lose yu leg wicket” (2012, 89). Collins structures her poem, “Quality Time”, around the same idea of a father’s life being an innings, though her poem has more in common with Goodison’s than Johnson’s. Collins and Goodison both use cricket to examine their family structures, specifically addressing the lives of their parents. Collins—a Grenadian teacher, writer and academic—came to poetry during the 1983 Grenada Revolution, and is best known for her first poetry collection, entitled Because the Dawn Breaks (1985), and her coming of age novel Angel (1987). Her poetry is often linked to music, performance and the combination of Standard English with creole language patterns. In “Quality Time”, from Lady in a Boat (2003), she uses cricket, and batting specifically, as a metaphor for her father’s form of defence, of “protecting his wicket”, against the aggressive attack of a malignant, cancerous, bowler (13). Reading her father through the medicalised discourse of “quality time”—that is, limited time—Collins allows present sickness and past strength to meet in her father’s fading attempts at cricketing resilience. Initially, he is “in the field again” and his batting is “steady”, surrounded by the imagined landscape of his Caribbean home: “cocoa and cashew, guava and gospo, mango and mortelle, nutmeg and nettle” (13). But soon the landscape fades, the crops wither and he can “feel strength going down”, until, finally, “Bowler runs in, crowd leaning forward, / ball hit timber, wicket done scatter and / Suddenly so, sun get swallowed by sea” (14). The simple, slow, tension-filled pauses in these lines reflect the paused onlookers “leaning forward”, those loved ones listening for a final breath, and these pauses also ensure that the reader’s breath is delayed or held. When cricket and the sun are “Suddenly […] swallowed” by the oceanic abyss, the alliterative “s” sustains the sound of the Caribbean “sea” as it absorbs this human life. Much of this poem is concerned with cricketing metaphors and idiomatic phrases, and it reads as if the daughter’s voice, as poetic construct, is replicating or mimicking her father’s cricketing language in order to speak of him in a way that represents him and that he would understand. It seems that cricket provides a language learnt from him and used for him, that is, in this poetic example, the language of the Caribbean father as the language of cricket and a daughter’s attempt to capture his struggle with life being recast through his lifelong negotiation with the game itself.

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In a comparable fashion, Goodison’s “For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength)” describes the meeting of the poet-speaker’s parents in Jamaica and reflects upon their subsequent life together in the context of her father’s death. When her future father arrives from a distant land as a “visiting dandy”, he is wearing his cricket uniform—“maroon blazer, / cream serge pants”—but the allure of her future mother keeps him away from the match (2000, 25). The poem charts the growth of their marriage told in retrospect following the passing of the father. Yet it is the mother’s strength, determination and forbearance (even when facing the loneliness of his adultery) that drives the poet-speaker’s voice to honour her courageous mother. At the climax of the poem, the mother is able to let down her defences, crying for all the life sacrifices she has made “because she loved him” (27–28). The poem navigates the impact of loss on both the daughter and the mother, and is thereby a continuation of Goodison’s ongoing concern with mother–daughter relations, the similarity between generationally separated women, and the ascent of the daughter into the position of the mother—issues she also explores in the poem “I Am Becoming My Mother”, from her 1986 collection of the same name. What we see in this poetic example specifically, though, is the placing of female struggle and strength as filling up the life-space between an initial cricket “match” (as game and marriage) and the eventual loss of a husband–father. In both “Quality Time’ and “For My Mother”, then, cricket is a zone of male participation and female observation (though this is not always the case in Anglophone Caribbean literature, as discussed in Chapter 6). Women—as wives, daughters, exiles, immigrants and poets— appear beyond the boundary but not outside of the game’s influence or its language. Collins and Goodison attach themselves to cricket in order to address the lives and lifelong journeys of their parents after the death of their respective fathers. They use cricket as part of their remembering and, in Goodison’s case, the emotional insight gained through loss also reveals the powerful example of female endurance and motherly love.

VI While we might say that such poems of illness and loss use cricket in ways that are relatively familiar, Anglophone Caribbean poetry also uses cricket and ties between cricket and women in far more unusual ways, including in ways that might strike us as cricketing “googlies” because they turn unexpectedly to catch the batsman—or reader—out. In his

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poem, “Googly” Bonair-Agard offers instruction, seemingly to a young male bowler, on how to learn to bowl this spinning delivery: Your fingers across the seam, short skip and a three step run up to the wicket, break the wrist in towards the body. bowl a good length and the ball will turn away from the right-handed batsman. Call this a googly (2010, 47).

The poem concentrates on the bodily actions required for a left-handed wrist spinner to get the “right-handed batsman” to “twine himself up” in confusion (47). But the poem is also about growing into manhood, about the need to hide the practice and dedication it takes to acquire this new bowling skill, and about how to maximise its unexpectedness by not revealing it until the “drift” has been mastered and the delivery can be executed reliably, “two out of three” times (47). The poem’s advicegiving voice says, “Don’t let your friends see you labour”, “you must look cool” and use the new delivery “when it is not expected in a real match” to maximise its surprising impact (47). The poem itself mimics the spin bowler’s run-up in its structure, pace and rhythm, building stanza upon stanza in slow bounds, until the ball’s release: “Bowl a good length, the ball will turn away. Call this a googly” (48). Although this bowling technique doesn’t bring a wicket in the poem, there is a sense of newfound self-control and probing patience, as if the skill, in and of itself, is important and will bring its own rewards. The poem might be read as a sustained metaphor for the act of poetic composition, but here I want to suggest that its interest in bodily technique and unexpected spin allows it to use cricketing details, metaphors and terminology in a way that is akin to the poetic “googlies” that examine sexual encounters in surprising ways. Indeed, in a playful mode, Jean “Binta” Breeze’s poem “on cricket, sex and housework” uses a similar idea of the googly. Published in The Arrival of Brighteye and Other Poems (2000), the poem domesticates and eroticises cricket in order to represent female sexual gratification. Raised in Jamaica, but resident in the UK since the 1980s, Breeze is often recognised as a major performance artist and one of the few women in dub poetry. In an interview with Jenny Sharpe, Breeze describes The Arrival of Brighteye as the collection that turned her and her poetry towards the explicit, playing on overt sexual content and linguistic puns and helping her broaden her poetic and performative style by moving her

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away from the rhythms of reggae. Breeze sees this as a result of the social and personal freedoms of living and working in England, away from her Jamaican “home”, and characterises the collection as “definitely English”, but also explains that she is speaking to her “audience in England, who are still West Indian” (Sharpe 2003, 612–613). Breeze’s interest in representing the “sexual desires and sexual strengths of the Caribbean woman” is clear in “on cricket, sex and housework” (613), and the poem is worth citing in full: I never liked ironing but there’s something steamy here that softens the crease and although I play it straight I fell to your googly I came out slightly crinkly perhaps it’s the strange things your fingers do around my seams (2003, 50).

The act of ironing depicted functions as an imaginative prompt, guiding the voice back to another “steamy” up-and-down, back-andforth motion, recasting a banal domestic chore as an erotic prompt. The poem works both as a commentary on a sexual interruption during the daily grind of domestic maintenance and as a meditation on the sexual exploits of the past—memories seemingly triggered by the clothes being cared for, potentially cricket whites, which spark the sporting association between clothing creases, cricketing terminology and the woman’s body. By condensing the clichés of “playing the game” and playing it “straight”, Breeze draws upon the traditions of cricketing participation and references the associated connotations of Englishness, propriety and the “stiff upper lip” of what was once the colonial game. Yet she infuses these slogans of English restraint and imperial conquest with an intense sensuality that allows notions of female decorum to disintegrate under the (self-imposed) pressure of sexual interest. The “straight” reference reminds us of heterosexual encounters and may transform thoughts of “a straight bat” into images of an erect penis. To “play it straight” also suggests honesty, integrity, even innocence in defending one’s sexual

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wicket. The heterosexual hint, though, is not fully developed and the lack of penetrative imagery situates female pleasure at the edge of, and not inside, the vaginal space. The attempts at chastity or resistance are thwarted by the poetic voice’s own sense of desire and the heat, the steam, “that softens the crease”, preparing her body to fall “to [the] googly” of her partner. Her “straight” performance has met with cunning, guile and deception, a delivery that has been difficult to read and has turned in the opposite direction to that expected. Although this implies that the speaker has been tricked, there is no sense of malice or regret. Rather, the light, bright, even satisfied tone of the poem delivers a soft, postcoital playfulness that ponders the mystical sexual prowess and physical dexterity of the anonymous partner. The speaking voice implies that she was cleansed and rejuvenated by the encounter in a way that left her “slightly crinkled”, altered gently and not smoothed or straightened out as might be expected with the ironing motif. The shift in tense—from “I fell” to “Perhaps it’s”—is noteworthy too, as the relationship seemingly continues, ensuring her fond recollections are tied to her sexual present. Where previously her lover had been the bowler of a deceptive and potentially dangerous “googly”, the speaking voice now understands herself as the personified cricket ball whose “seams” are the site of great affection, sexual excitement and erotic mystery, bound to female sexual knowledge and self-articulation. Thus, Breeze inhabits the terminology of cricket and forces the game associated with masculine sporting action to speak with the voice of a sexualised and knowing Caribbean woman. Cricket is also metaphorically managed into an explanation of sexual prowess and encounter by Milton Vishnu Williams, originally of Guyana but resident in England from 1960, in “Batting is My Occupation” from Years of Fighting Exile: Collected Poems 1955–1985 (1986). For the male poetic persona, “Batting”, as his penetrative role in heterosexual sex, is an “occupation; both by inclination and gift” (Williams 1986, 78). Wanting to rise to “the occasion”, in the “great match” of “cohabiting”, his “correct strokes […] must be keen, sharp and cleanly struck / as if Peter May, Cowdrey or Sobers or I / could never be out” (78). To be “out” is to be pushed out of the sexual space, seemingly the vaginal “home” of his “batting” and/or out of the domestic space. We might quickly see that “sharp” and “cleanly struck” point to well-timed shot-making, but also strike as unpleasant terms for vaginal penetration, connoting pain and force, while the speaker’s keenness could easily be understood as a nod to the naively eager. However, in aligning himself with Peter May,

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Colin Cowdrey and Gary Sobers, the speaking voice wants his own sexual wicket to be as unlikely to fall (meaning he’s as unlikely to fail) as the wicket of world-leading batsmen, players known for their skill, elegance, stamina and heavy run scoring as well as their status as Test captains, that is, as leaders of their teams. As with these heroes, his “blade flashes / from all angles” and his “ingenuity is stamped everywhere”—as if he moves around the woman and their home to good effect—meaning only a “genius of high character” could “distinguish and plot” his range of “strokes” (78). With the “blade” as bat, and thereby as penis/phallus, leading the imagery, there is much in this boastful rhetoric that is reminiscent of the hyper-masculinised humour of calypso. This is also reinforced by the additional overlaying of the blade as pen, with batting briefly aligned with poetic creation in the same way that many calypsonians push together sexual and compositional boasts. But just as in calypso, such boastfulness is undercut, in this case by the closing lines of the poem: “O womb bowlers, stir up the sleeping tribes / stuck in you. Wicketkeepers are idling contentedly” (78). The revelation here is that his batting is un(re)productive. Indeed, he’s batting without facing any bowling, it seems. Instead of a closing punchline depicting sexual satisfaction (for one or both of these players), the poetic voice speaks to the female body, pleading for the possibility of fertilisation. As ovaries (operating from either “end” in cricketing parlance), these “womb bowlers” are asked to deliver their orbs of futurity, with their eggs recast as cricket balls. These eggs/balls contain a familial and clan-like promise that remains inaccessible, trapped in the stasis of present sexual activity. The poetic voice bypasses the woman as subject, as sexual agent, and speaks directly to her reproductive organs and their refusal to “play the game”. It is unclear whether the use of “stuck” encodes a blockage caused by oral contraceptives (which stop egg release), a fertility problem, or simply an imagined delay in conception. This means that is it also unclear whether the effort at poetic persuasion that supersedes manly boastfulness is an effort to talk his cohabitant into motherhood, or only an effort to talk her body into doing what they (collectively) desire. By ending with “Wicketkeepers idling contentedly”, the notion of reproductive strain suggested by “O womb bowlers” is minimised as large, safe and contented hands (imagined as two gloved hands, holding/catching/cupping) are said to be waiting. The plural here—as “wicketkeepers”—makes it difficult to imagine that this is the womb itself and instead implies the hands of the parents-to-be

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and/or their extended family. In Williams’ poem, then, cricketing terminology is used for both the playfulness of sexual action and also the seriousness of futurity, of life-making potentiality and its importance to the sport of life sharing. A similarly uncertain view of sexual engagement comes in E.A. Markham’s “On Another Field, An Ally: A West Indian Batsman Talks Us Towards The Century”, originally published in Towards the End of a Century (1989). As with Williams’ conceit, Markham’s speaking subject is a batsman, thinking about his batting and linking it to a sexual encounter. Nevertheless, instead of Williams’ hope of batting into the intergenerational future, Markham’s batsman is despondent after getting out when his score was in the 90s and so failing to make the century that he, like all batsman, desired. His failure, though, reveals to him that “there’s no morality in this game / Protesting genocide or burying your head / In sweet Anna’s thighs, it’s all the same” (Markham 2012, 98). This brief pointer towards oral sex strikes a fantastically unexpected final note to the poem, pulling bodies together in a manner that seems bound to pleasure yet made numb by its comparative reference (“protesting genocide”), as if there is little or no compensation to come after losing your wicket. Markham’s other sexually infused cricket poem, and the focal point on which this chapter ends, is “Not Cricket”, from Misapprehensions (1995). And, as with Breeze’s poem, it seems best to cite Markham’s poetic “googly” in full: He’s part of the attack; think of dark alleys, crowd-applause. And presenting this match as one against one when geed by his pals, all ten of them, with the victim no longer whistling for courage, sort of thing … this is the charge. We won’t hear her self-blaming song, handed down, women saying “ouch” from the crease: this is the charge. So he retched at killing and maimings on the news, comes over her, then in dream betrays all to the team elevating group pressure to an art. And, yes, she’s allowed to defend herself within the rules: her batting on display, our “feel-good” factor. (1995, 76; original emphasis)

In this irregular sonnet, the tension between the singular and collective situates a seemingly young (or at least immature and uncertain)

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male within a pressured “team”, or gang, so that the “one against one” of penetrative violence is part of a wider inequality stacked against the woman he abuses. The group “attack”—on the woman who’d been “whistling for courage”—quickly becomes retrospective, told as though being retold, in court perhaps or to a judging audience at least. The revulsion at “killings and maimings” precedes and ironises the death-like violation and humiliating force of the sexual assault as he “comes over her”. The gendered “ouch” of pain points to a wider picture of sexual violence and self-blame that is woven into the physical hurt of this singular attack. Modes of defence are also juxtaposed, as the perpetrator’s explanation of “group pressure”, used seemingly as mitigation, is countered by the manner in which the victim is “allowed to defend herself” only in order to appease social judgement. These layers of critique begin to stack up and establish a kind of revelational logic as the cricketing terminology and metaphor spins in unexpected directions. The weakness of the attacker is revealed by his willingness to give “all to the team” to commit the attack and then betray them in an act of self-protecting mitigation and defence. In addition, the “crowd-applause” of the group itself exposes the horror of group violence against women, while the fact that this is “handed down” points towards the historical continuity of such violence. There is also a turn against the expectation that the woman should narrate herself as objecting, fighting back, as offering a technique of resistance in “her batting” so that there can be a “feel-good” certainty for a judging audience/reader/jury/public. Few poems are as metaphorically unusual in their manoeuvring of cricketing imagery as this one, with its shocking juxtaposition of cricketing ethics and sexual violence as social and historical revelation. Nevertheless, other cricket poems and literary texts do engage with women playing cricket and issues of gender inequality, and these connections are explored in Chapter 6.

Works Cited Agard, John. 2012a. “Professor David Dabydeen at the Crease”. In The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 39. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Agard, John. 2012b [1993]. “Prospero Caliban Cricket”. In The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 37–39. Leeds: Peepal Tree.

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Agard, John. 2014.“Give the Poet the Ball”. In Give the Ball to the Poet: A New Anthology of Caribbean Poetry, edited by Georgie Horrell, Aish Spencer, and Morag Styles, 22. London: Commonwealth Education Trust. Bateman, Anthony. 2009. Cricket, Literature and Culture: Symbolising the Nation, Destabilising Empire. London: Ashgate. Baugh, Edward. 2001. “A History of Poetry”. In A History of Literature in the Caribbean, Vol. 2: English- and Dutch-Speaking Regions, edited by A. James Arnold, 227–284. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Baugh, Edward. 2012 [2000]. “The Pulpit Eulogists of Frank Worrell”. In The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 43. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Beckles, Hilary McD. 1994. “Introduction”. In An Area of Conquest: Popular Democracy and West Indies Cricket Supremacy, edited by Beckles, xiii–xviii. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Beckles, Hilary McD. 1998. The Development of West Indies Cricket: Volume 1. The Age of Nationalism. London: Pluto. Beckles, Hilary McD. 2017. Cricket Without A Cause: Fall and Rise of the Mighty West Indies Test Cricketers. Kingston, Jamaica. Ian Randle. Berry, James. 2012 [1997]. “Fast Bowler”. In Hot Earth, Cold Earth, by Berry, 95–96. Newcastle: Bloodaxe. Berry, James. 2014. “Quick Ball Man”. In Give the Ball to the Poet: A New Anthology of Caribbean Poetry, edited by Georgie Horrell, Aish Spencer and Morag Styles, 15. London: Commonwealth Education Trust. Bonair-Agard, Roger. 2010a. “1978 – London Street, Arouca”. In Gully, by Bonair-Agard, 26–28. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Bonair-Agard, Roger. 2010b. “Googly”. In Gully, by Roger Bonair-Agard, 47– 48. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Bonair-Agard, Roger. 2010c. “Gully”. In Gully, by Roger Bonair-Agard, 25. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Bonair-Agard, Roger. 2010d. “New Ball”. In Gully, by Roger Bonair-Agard, 49–50. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Bonair-Agard, Roger. 2010e. “Open Letter to Dave”. In Gully, by Roger BonairAgard, 51–54. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1967. “Cricket”. In Caribbean Prose: An Anthology for Secondary Schools, edited by Andrew Salkey, 48–50. London: Evan Brothers. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1973. “Calypso”. In The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, by Brathwaite, 197–203. London: Oxford University Press. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1984. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon. Breeze, Jean “Binta”. 1997. “Sunday Cricket”. In On the Edge of an Island, by Breeze, 62–66. Newcastle: Bloodaxe.

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Breeze, Jean “Binta”. 2000. “On Cricket, Sex and Housework”. In The Arrival of Brighteye and Other Poems, by Breeze, 50. Newcastle: Bloodaxe. Brown, Lloyd W. 2012 [1996]. “Cricket Grounds, Plymouth”. In The Bowling was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 61–62. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Brown, Stewart. 2012. “Introduction”. In The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 19–34. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Charles, Faustin. 1986. “Cricket’s in my Blood”. In Days and Nights in the Magic Forest, by Charles, 41–42. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture. Collins, Merle. 1985. Because the Dawn Breaks: Poems Dedicated to the Grenadian People. London: Karia. Collins, Merle. 1987. Angel. London: Women’s Press. Collins, Merle. 2003. “Quality Time”. In Lady in a Boat, by Collins, 13–14. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Deane, Linda. 2014. “JoJo Johnson (Chant for a Cricket Hero)”. In Give the Ball to the Poet: A New Anthology of Caribbean Poetry, edited by Georgie Horrell, Aish Spencer, and Morag Styles, 18. London: Commonwealth Education Trust. Deckard, Sharae. 2016. “The Political Ecology of Storms in Caribbean Literature”. In The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics, edited by Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett, 25–45. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Emery, Mary Lou. 2007. Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fergus, Howard A. 1998. “Short of a Century”. In Lara Rains and Colonial Rites, by Fergus, 17. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Gauntlett, Delores. 2012. “Cricket Boundaries”. In The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 82. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Goodison, Lorna. 1986. I Am Becoming My Mother. London: Beacon. Goodison, Lorna. 2000. “For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength)”. In Guinea Woman: New and Selected Poems, by Goodison, 25–28. Manchester: Carcanet. Hendry, Ian, and Susan Dickson. 2011. British Overseas Territory Law. London: Hart. Hill, Robert. 2013. “C.L.R. James and the Moment of Beyond a Boundary”. The Beyond A Boundary Conference, University of Glasgow, 9–11 May. James, C.L.R. 2001 [1938]. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. London: Penguin. James, C.L.R. 2013 [1963]. Beyond a Boundary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Johnson, Linton Kwesi. 1991. “Reggae fi Dada”. In Tings and Times, by Johnson, 34–36. Newcastle: Bloodaxe. Keens-Douglas, Paul. 2000. “I Ball”. On Crick…Crack…Cricket, by KeensDouglas. Trinidad: Keensdee Productions. Kipling, Rudyard. 1892. “The English Flag”. In Barrack Room Ballads, by Kipling. London: Methuen. Lamming, George. 1984 [1960]. The Pleasures of Exile. London: Allison and Busby. Mangan, J.A. 1981. Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of the Educational Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mangan, J.A. 1988. The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal. London: Frank Cass. Mangan, J.A. 1992. The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire and Society. London: Frank Cass. Markham, E.A. 1995. “Not Cricket”. In Misapprehensions, by Markham, 76. London: Anvil. Markham, E.A. 2012 [1989]. “On Another Field, An Ally: A West Indian Batsman Talks Us Towards The Century”. In The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 97–98. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Matthews, Marc, 1992. “C.L.R. (by time)”. In A Season of Sometime, by Matthews, 22. Leeds: Peepal Tree. McDonald, Ian. 1988. “Test Match”. In Mercy Ward, by McDonald, 31. Calstock: Peterloo Poets. Miller, Kei. 2005. “Drink and Die”. In Kingdom of Empty Bellies, by Miller, 83–84. Coventry: Heaventree. Nichols, Grace. 2009. “Test Match High Mas”. In Picasso I Want My Face Back, by Nichols, 27. Newcastle: Bloodaxe. Nixon, Rob. 1987. “Caribbean and African Appropriations of ‘The Tempest’”. Critical Inquiry 13 (3): 557–578. Rohlehr, Gordon. 1994. “Music, Literature and West Indian Cricket Values”. In An Area of Conquest: Popular Democracy and West Indies Cricket Supremacy, edited by Hilary McD. Beckles, 55–102. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Samaroo, Krishna. 2012 [1992]. “A Cricketing Gesture”. In The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 111. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Sammy, G.K. 2012. “Cricket in the Road”. In The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 112–113. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Sandiford, Keith A.P. 1998. Cricket Nurseries of Colonial Barbados: The Elite Schools, 1865–1966. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press.

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Shakespeare, William. 2011. The Tempest. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Sharpe, Jenny. 2003. “Dub and Difference: A Conversation with Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze”. Callaloo 26 (3): 607–613. St John, Bruce. 2012 [1982]. “Cricket”. In The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 114–116. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Walcott, William. 2012 [2005]. “Bondmen”. In The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 117. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Westall, Claire. 2010. “What They Knew of Nation and Empire: The Interwoven Questioning of Rudyard Kipling and C.L.R. James?”. In Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism, edited by Karoi Nagai and Caroline Rooney, 165–184. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, Milton Vishnu. 1986. “Batting Is My Occupation”. In Years of Fighting Exile: Collected Poems 1955–1985, by Milton Vishnu Williams, 78. Leeds: Peepal Tree.

CHAPTER 6

Motherly Figures and Undomesticated Daughters

The previous chapters demonstrate that while there is much cricketingliterary content by male authors and many examples focusing on heroic male figures, both male and female Anglophone Caribbean writers engage with cricket in their work and do so in a variety of ways. There are also, it should be said, more cricketing poems and stories by Caribbean women than are surveyed across this book, including, for example: “Cricket (a-we Jim)”, by Ann Marie Dewar; “Cricket, Us and Other Games”, by Audrey Ingram Roberts; and Jean “Binta” Breeze’s “Sunday Cricket” (see Brown and McDonald 2012). This chapter, though, looks to texts by male and female Anglophone Caribbean writers that portray mature, maternal cricket spectators or depict female cricketing participation. This relatively small body of works taps into issues central to Anglophone Caribbean literature—especially around mothers, “othermothers” (Troester 1984) and mother–daughter relations—and is also important for a rounded view of cricket’s place in the Caribbean literary imaginary. Consequently, where Chapter 1 considered cricketing father and son relationships, this chapter concentrates on depictions of motherly figures in relation to cricket and on cricketing mother and daughter relationships, particularly as they are connected to domestic labour. As Abigail Palko writes, the “mother is perhaps the most important literary figure in Caribbean women’s writing” and, despite the spike in interest in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Westall, The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65972-1_6

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Anglophone Caribbean women’s writing, notably from the mid-1990s onwards, there is still relatively little scholarly work on the place of mothers and mother–daughter relations (2016, 41–45). Critical foundations were nevertheless laid by, among others, Joan Anim-Addo—with Framing the Word (1996), Haunted by History (1998), Centre of Remembrance (2002) and Touching the Body (2007)—and Simone Alexander’s study Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women (2001), which explains that direct depictions of motherhood should be read in relation to questions of symbolic, including imperial, mothering claims. Nancy Huston’s sense that Caribbean women are often writing from the position of the “disobedient daughter” is reflected in some of the examples used in this chapter (1995, 709; cf. Palko 2016, 32), although Anim-Addo’s own cricketing poetry casts her mother, rather than herself, in this position. Huston also suggests that such defiant daughters eventually “turn into moralizing mothers” themselves (1995, 709). Although this is not the case in Caribbean literary representations of female cricketing participation, there is a complicated set of connections to the imperial “mother country” behind such texts that bring issues of moral conduct and sporting (dis)obedience into a larger historical and political frame. Across this chapter, motherly figures are sometimes biological mothers, but they are also surrogate mothers or “othermothers”, that is, “women who assist bloodmothers by sharing mothering responsibilities” and who “traditionally have been central to the institution of Black motherhood” (Collins 2000, 192). It is in this context that the chapter first turns to C.L.R. James’ rendering of female relatives—especially his aunt, Judith, in Beyond a Boundary (1963)—before suggesting that, despite his own work’s focus on heroic males, James’ arguments about cricket’s sociopoetics can be taken up in gender-neutral ways. Next, the discussion attends to poems by Beryl Gilroy, Paul Keens-Douglas and E.A. Markham that feature motherly figures disrupting—in humorous and communally significant ways—the expectation that cricket is a protected male domain. Thereafter, the chapter considers texts that present young girls and women wanting to play cricket, but having to escape restrictive notions of femininity and domestic responsibilities in order to do so. These issues are seen in poems by Roger Bonair-Agard and Valerie Bloom, and in a short story by Sylvia Wynter. They are also more extensively unpacked in Anim-Addo’s Janie Cricketing Lady with Carnival and Hurricane Poems (2006a), a collection of poems about Anim-Addo’s cricketing mother that

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illuminates the rarely told history of women’s cricket in the Caribbean while grappling with mother–daughter differences, home-making and diasporic experience. Finally, the chapter reads Roy Williams’ play “The No Boys Cricket Club” (1996), with its vision of a fantastical reclamation of the physical competence and confidence derived from childhood cricket by middle-aged Caribbean women struggling to manage their lives and families in London. The chapter’s mix of examples demonstrates that both male and female Anglophone Caribbean authors consider women in relation to cricket. It also establishes a picture of Caribbean cricketing women as caught between gender-specific experiences of labour, familial responsibility and memory, on one hand, and, on the other, the possibilities for personal, aesthetic and sociopolitical modes of expression that come, in a Jamesian manner, through the game.

I Hilary Beckles writes that “James […] offered no opinions on and concept of women’s intervention [in] and contribution [to cricket], essentially because his vision was ‘seduced’ by the ideological maleness of early Victorian cricket philosophy” (1998, 131–132). In this, Beckles sits with a number of other scholars who draw attention to the gender politics and related omissions in James’ work—cricketing, literary and otherwise. Following on from Kenneth Surin’s early salvo in this direction (1995, 318), Hazel Carby’s Race Men (1998) describes James’ political biographies—from his 1930s studies of Captain Cipriani and Toussaint Louverture onwards—as presenting men as heroes, even when they act against the interests of the people, in contrast to his depictions of the “feminized” masses as, for example, in his only novel, Minty Alley (114). Grant Farred suggests that James remained unaware of how, in this novel, the women Haynes (the male protagonist) encounters “bring him into maturity”, and that James was unconcerned by “the fact that the woman who cleans [Haynes’] shoes is also his lover”, Maisie (1996, 102). In C.L.R. James and Creolization: Circles of Influence (2001), Nicole King interprets the relationship between Haynes and Maisie slightly differently, explaining that Maisie’s “body actually synthesizes James’ ongoing mind/body split and becomes, by extension, a fleeting representation of Trinidad’s capacity for social and political transformation”, despite James generally maintaining a mind/body distinction across a male/female class divide (58). In relation to Beyond a Boundary, Anima Adjepong explores

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the role of women in James’ presentation of cricket. Adjepong argues that James’ writing fails to offer a “consistently progressive position on women” regardless of the important place women held in his life, including in his political ambitions and intellectual activities (2018, 123). For Adjepong, James’ account of his grandmother, mother and aunts demonstrates that women were interested in cricket—bringing home news of Matthew Bondman’s scores or Arthur Jones’ batting—and, in this way, were connected to popular modes of resistance as well as James’ own political development and worldview. It would be more accurate, however, to remember that James says his female relatives “had never taken any particular interest” in cricket, and that their reporting on Bondman or Jones to a young James is presented as part of their care for him and their adult ability to bring news from outside back into the domestic sphere (James 2013, 12). In this way, and as in his other writing, these women are helping James (as the book’s central male figure) mature and gain access to the world as part of their domestic and caregiving labour. Indeed, alongside the influence of James’ own mother—with her voracious yet “indiscriminate” reading example and strident religious standards (16)—James’ grandmother and aunts shape his development directly, acting as his familial “othermothers”, particularly when he is away from his parents. In James’ explanation, what actually links these women, and most of all his aunt, Judith, to cricket is their Puritanism, encoded as “restraint in a personal sense”, the kind of imperial stiff upper lip taken to a religious and superior standard of individual conduct and sacrifice (39). This is how James connects Judith to his “Gospel according to Matthew [Arnold]”, why he sees her as “English Puritanism incarnate”, and the reason he thinks the association of her death with cricket “appropriate” (20, 11, 12). In Beyond a Boundary’s presentation of Judith, mind and body are united in her strength, intellect and ethical conduct, united, that is, in the very sense of duty that James imagines would lead her to nurse their neighbour, Bondman, the “child of the devil”, “to the end” should he become ill (12). She is primarily seen in relation to her domestic achievements: raising three children after becoming a widow early; knocking down and then rebuilding their cottage; and providing sumptuous meals for James and her family. Moreover, every year she prepared a feast to follow the annual festive cricket match her son organised. James reports that one year, after the match and the completion of her culinary labour, Judith sat down, indicated that she was unwell and died. The portrayal

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of her death highlights her domestic and gendered labour as self-sacrifice, and exemplifies the ways in which women have been expected to (and have) supported male cricketing endeavour and related communal activities in the Caribbean, and far beyond. James’ depiction of Judith’s death seems to appreciate these points. But he also recognises that as restrictive as this domestic fate might be, his aunt provided a kind of moral education that served him well, and was part of his cricketing and political development. Again, it seems, the female figure is bringing him into maturity. However, in this maturity James comes to see Judith as a communal and not simply a domestic figure, saying that he later learnt of her role as “matriarch of her neighbourhood”, someone respected and helpful, whose advice and assistance others would seek out (254). With this admission, James acknowledges that his childhood view of Judith was limited by his own domestic restrictions as a child and not necessarily her restriction to the domestic sphere. Indeed, James is never patronising or slight in his recognition of Judith, or his other female relatives, though they occupy a relatively minor role in Beyond a Boundary. Rather, as an adult looking back on his childhood, he is able to recognise the strength of character and domestic, religious and communal contributions of these women, as well as how their contributions helped guide him into adulthood and stay with him as he develops his sense of political and cricketing self-awareness. What we might see across Beyond a Boundary, then, is a genderspecific reading of cricket as a male domain and the domestic sphere as a predominantly female domain, but where it is also clear that these domains are linked to each other and to communal, political and religious action. In addition, it seems that James’ own rendering of cricket contains much that need not be gender-specific and, though he focuses on the male cricketing hero, including as a world-historical figure, James’ understanding of cricket as art—as an embodied art through which individuals and groups express their history and desires for the future—does not limit cricket’s sociopoetics to male participants. In fact, James’ view of cricket is premised upon the idea of open participation and the politically and historically animating potential of disruptive new players and playing techniques emerging within the structures of the game (see Chapter 3). If this idea is at all meaningful it should be seen as part of an appreciation of a participatory openness that prioritises aesthetic modes of play over the identity categories of race, gender, class and even generation, though these are also factors that, in James’ analysis, might

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shape an attachment to the game and will show themselves in particular playing styles. In these ways, James’ sense of cricket’s sociopolitical import and aesthetic modes of self- and communal expression can be used to think about women’s cricket and the performances of female cricketers, despite this having never emerged from scholarship on James. Accordingly, this chapter argues that, particularly in Beyond a Boundary, James conveys gender-specific experiences and realms as connected to larger communal and political worldviews, and simultaneously establishes a theory of cricket that carries the potential for a gender-neutral reading of cricket’s performed aesthetics—most notably the emancipatory and lifeor world-changing potential carried within aesthetic play. A similar nexus of pressures and ideas about cricketing participation seems to be built into the way in which Anglophone Caribbean literature tackles female investment in cricket, especially in female participation in the game. This, then, is the new ground explored in this chapter.

II Mature women intruding upon a male field of play is the central theme that runs through three very different depictions of female cricket spectators in works by Gilroy, Keens-Douglas and Markham. Where James navigates the connection between his aunt and cricket via the religious ethos derived from empire, these three writers look specifically to “aunts” and mothers who, as cricketing spectators, comedically intrude upon the local games of men they are closely connected to, whether through family or communal loyalty. In her story-like memoir, titled “Village Cricket”, published in Sunlight on Sweet Water (1994), Gilroy describes what local cricket and cricket watching was like during her early life in Guyana, before she left for Britain in the 1950s. Gilroy writes of cricket as a binding social force because “When the club played cricket, the whole village played”, and “everybody” attended Sunday afternoon matches as the Skeldon Cricket Club brought all races together in their team of “Brotherhood and belonging” (2012, 289). Remembering one particular match against Rosehall, the seemingly “invincible” visitors, Gilroy details how the exuberant support of her Aunt Ella and other Skelton women brought the game to a halt (289). As Rosehall recovered from the loss of early wickets and started to make runs, these women instigated a “prank” from the sidelines, deciding to “cook” the opposition batsmen in a “pretend obeah cauldron”, with “Aunt Ella and her friend

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Myra Clark” proving “pretty convincing obeah women” (289). Rosehall protested against the women’s intervention in the game when a wicket fell, and “Blows followed words” between the teams until the women “stopped [their] distracting activity of casting spells” (289). Emphasising the playfulness of the supernatural parody, Aunt Ella offered “to work obeah for the visitors” to be fair (289). When the game restarted, the crowd resumed their interest in the match and the social occasion, with people dancing, shouting and celebrating the cricket action. Children played their own “mini match”, and although girls were included Gilroy writes that they never played “with the same intensity as the boys” (290)—an idea called into question in the next section. Gilroy closes her account by refocusing on the players, those who had left behind their “low-paid jobs in field or factory” in order to become “upstanding, proud men, committed to playing in the finest tradition of the game”, noting how their “new personalities” and cricketing performances allowed the village “to forget the daily grind” and come together to enjoy themselves within “the boundaries set by our own place, our own space, and within our own culture” (290). This ending establishes the cricketing occasion as a protected space for Gilroy’s own community, something she recalls nostalgically. That the cricket match is filtered through the women’s act of comedic disruption, suggests that within this space there is an interactivefluidity between on-field and off-field action, and that women are able to penetrate a seemingly protected space of male play with their own performative display. The male reaction to the Obeah drama implies that even the men believe that the women can exert control over their sporting and physical activities. The Obeah acting also demonstrates the cultural knowledge, popular comedy and communal allegiance being signalled by the women. For Gilroy, the male players are symbolically significant yet anonymous, and it is the recollection of fun, older, example-setting women that connects her to her past, seemingly to her roots and the place of women in the community of her childhood. Like Aunt Ella, Keens-Douglas’ Tanti Merle manages to disrupt male cricketing enjoyment through exuberant support for her own team. But where Aunt Ella stays outside the boundary of play, Tanti Merle eventually makes it onto the pitch. As noted in Chapter 3, Keens-Douglas’ Tanti and Markham’s Mammie function similarly to establish humorous and warm connections between mature, mothering women and their cricket communities. Cynthia James claims that Keens-Douglas’ depiction of Tanti is part of a redeployment of enduring creole icons and

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that “Bringing Tanti, everybody’s surrogate mother figure, back to the forefront of West Indians’ minds established a socio-historical continuum”, reconnecting the performance artist and his audience with their cultural history (2005, 169). We may suggest that Markham’s Mammie, though based directly on his own mother, works similarly. In addition, both mothering women are shown to be at a distance from cricket’s physical action on the field, but able to use the game to connect with their wider Caribbean community, especially young male relatives and young male cricketers. Despite Tanti being in Trinidad and Mammie residing in London, their engagement with cricket is part of their motherly concern for a past home and its inhabitants, where home is figured as an immediate domestic space, and as the island-space they use to anchor their understanding of themselves. Keens-Douglas’ long poem “Tanti at de Oval” has been a staple of his performative repertoire since 1976, when it appeared on his vinyl record Tim Tim. It later became the titular piece of his 1992 poetry collection, Tanti at De Oval: Selected Works of Paul Keens-Douglas Vol 1 (1992), and is still available as a sound recording on his albums Crick … Crack … Cricket (2000a) and The Best of Paul Keens-Douglas, Vol 1 (2000b). Embedded within a shared cultural understanding of the need to respect older women, including the “othermothers” of family and community life, the piece also draws on obvious mother-in-law humour or humour about in-laws, given that Tanti is the aunt of the male speaker’s wife. The narrator’s obligation to Tanti, then, is an elongation of his duty to his wife and his wife’s family as well as to older women. As with Keens-Douglas’ oeuvre generally, the use of creole (termed “dialect” in some of his own publications) is key to the intimacy and comic development of the poem’s plotting of Tanti’s cricket adventure. The poem does what Valerie and Douglas Bloom describe with regard to the use of such linguistic strategies, namely: “assert the vibrancy and dignity of the language of the people and the value of their experiences”, and mark a “common heritage of the African oral tradition[,] with the emphasis this places on performance” (1984, 22). Along with figures like Louise Bennett, Keens-Douglas is widely held as helping to shape the language and idiom used in Anglophone Caribbean literature and helping to legitimise a creole voice of the people as it emerges from their oral traditions. His work, again like other creole poets the Blooms describe, needs to be “heard and read” and, “if possible”, it should also be “seen as well as heard as much of the meaning is communicated by physical gestures

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and facial expressions” (1984, 23–24). Given Keens-Douglas’ performative practices, and the decades-long performative history of “Tanti at de Oval”, it should not be surprising that there are differences between the printed poem and recorded performances—including the phrase “Never me again” being used only to open performances, and small details or connections appearing differently on the page. Nevertheless, overall, in performance and in print, the same points of emphasis, structural detail and character presentation are provided, and the bind between the cricketing action and the deterioration of Tanti’s behaviour is always the same. “Tanti at de Oval” is an account of what happened when Tanti Merle goes to the Queen’s Park Oval on her sixty-fifth birthday, as told by the speaker-husband to his wife when he returns home with Tanti. The poem is structured around a series of humorous and mild gender conflicts, initially between the speaker-husband and his wife, then between this speaker-husband and Tanti Merle, and also between Tanti and the men she encounters during her cricketing day out. At the outset, the speaker insists that Tanti could have stayed at home, listening to the cricket match on the radio or watching it on TV rather than accompanying him, indicating that a domestic, protective space would have been better for Tanti and, thereby, for him, too. He presents going to the cricket as a male social activity, and describes the pensioner Tanti as cramping his style and his freedom to enjoy the game and atmosphere. He contrasts how unencumbered he usually is when attending a cricket match, carrying just some money and rum in his pockets, with the excess baggage he had to help Tanti take with her, including an oversized and carnivalesque pink parasol and an overfull basket of food. Yet while these possessions are cast as markers of a misplaced femininity appearing in the cricket ground, the Christmas-like abundance of food becomes ameliorating for him and the other men around Tanti—just as in the poem “Tanti Backin Lara”. Indeed, this food-based communal care establishes Tanti as the maternal provider for the entire cricket crowd, and potentially for Trinidad’s capital city—“no body eh go’ starve she in Port of Spain” (Keens-Douglas 1976, 27). The speaker also explains to his wife how dangerous it was for him to be with the seemingly respectable Tanti because, to protect her (as well as himself), he was forced to apologise for her behaviour and keep the “peace” whenever she caused problems or challenged people—as with the taxi-driver who was prevented from collecting other passengers by her behaviour, or the “Bad John” Tanti accused of blocking her view of the

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game (28–30). The speaker’s claim to endangerment, to the trip being a near-death experience, is also conflated with a threat of domestic abandonment when he tells his wife how she “nearly lose ah husband” thanks to Tanti Merle (27). The cricket action described in the poem is the final day (day four) of the Shell Shield (inter-territory) match between Trinidad and Combined Islands, of 11–14 April 1975—a game that determined whether or not Combined Islands would be that season’s Shield winners. This, then, is the year after Keens-Douglas returned to Trinidad, having been born on the island but raised in Grenada. Tanti Merle, though, has been living in Curepe, Trinidad, for fifteen years, but is backing Combined Islands because her roots are in Saint Vincent. She informs everyone she could of the “whole history” of Saint Vincent, and her “small island” pride and support of the “underdog” stand against the home crowd’s support for Trinidad (26–27). The match is dramatically close, and the poem’s action takes place as Combined Islands chase 283 to win, needing to do so inside 262 minutes. The poem builds to the thrilling climax of the final balls until eventually Combined Islands level Trinidad’s run total. In the real match, as in the poem, this moment brought chaos. The announcers initially declared the match a tie, meaning Combined Islands would claim the Shield, but this was quickly overturned, with the match reclassified as a draw that meant Guyana would receive the season’s title (Seymour 2016). After weeks of confusion and debate over the relevant ruling and points allocation system used in the Shield Competition, the cricket authorities announced on 12 May 1975 that the game had indeed been a draw, and that Guyana were champions. There are two factual errors in Keens-Douglas’ account of the game: first, the scores became tied on 282 in the real game (not 283, as the poem states in Tim Tim); second, it was Dudnath Ramkissoon, not Larry Gomes, who caught Andy Roberts out as the eighth wicket to fall (Seymour 2016). In all other respects, the poem is a full-on commentary of the finale of a historic regional game, and it presents Tanti as engaging directly with what happened on the field, and as challenging the actions and authority of the men around her. She insults Gomes for dismissing Roberts, and declares the umpire “thiefing” for Trinidad when a young Viv Richards is run out in a relatively unusual manner while backing up (with the ball deflecting off the bowler’s hand and onto the stumps at the non-striker’s end, where Richards was momentarily out of his ground). When Combined Islands are denied the

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Shield with the announcement of a draw, Tanti insists she will complain to Trinidad’s Prime Minister. By concentrating on Tanti’s role in the day’s events, Keens-Douglas positions “everybody’s surrogate mother figure”, in Cynthia James’ terms (2005, 169), as central to the game’s historic climax and, thereby, to the region’s domestic cricket history. In fact, as the match moves to its conclusion, Tanti’s physical position actually charts her growing importance and eventual centrality to the action. During the course of the Combined Islands’ innings, she gets physically further away from the speaker, her male escort, and closer to the playing field by “climbin’ over de fence” (Keens-Douglas 1976, 32), before eventually becoming part of the small island pitch evasion. The poetic crescendo establishes a back-and-forth between the cricketing countdown and Tanti’s rising up: Eight balls six runs to go....Tanti start wavin’ de basket. Seven balls six runs to go....Tanti on top de seat. Six balls five runs to go....Tanti fall off de seat. Five balls five runs to go....Tanti wavin’ de parasol. Four balls four runs to go....police cautionin’ Tanti. Three balls three runs to go....ah can’t even see Tanti. Two balls three runs to go....Tanti climbin’ over de fence. One ball three runs to go....Tanti on de people field. Gore hit de ball […] An’ is den de bacchanal start, score tie at 283 An’ everybody say Islands win. Nex’ ting ah see Is Tanti parasol high up in the air An’ dey on de people pitch singing, an dancin’, and carrying on, [...] Nex’ ting loudspeaker say match eh tie, it draw So islands eh win de shield is Guyana. Well who tell dem say dat, Tanti nearly cause ah riot. (31–32)

Keens-Douglas’ skill at building through pattern, repetition, small detail and comedic excess is obvious here. It is also seen throughout the poem— as when the onomatopoeic “Braps” appears three times to signal the falling of quick wickets (31), or when the rhythm of the anonymous and repetitious ticket-purchasing process is relayed as simply “De hand de money an’ de ticket / De hand de money an’ de ticket” (29). By upsetting such monotonous actions, and through her physical journey

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and changing positions—from taking up the whole back seat of the taxi, to standing on her stadium seat, to invading the pitch and eventually standing on the roller—Tanti Merle takes up space, gains height and even dominates the flattening out of cricketing space and play. Her pink parasol, going “up an’ down, up an’ down” in the middle of the on-field crowd of small islanders, is a sign of her jumping up, in party and then in protest (32). It is also a very feminine marker of both self-protection (from the sun, initially) and self-assertion. Indeed, her independence is a source of repeated joviality throughout the poem. When the speakerhusband reports the taunts he received from men in the ground about the age of his female companion, mockingly referred to as his “wife”, he specifically says that they asked about her having “a will”, where the pun on her age as being near-death and the problem of her self-determination are conflated (29–30). Tanti is even cautioned by the police for her part in the pitch evasion protest and it takes, the speaker announces to his wife, nearly “two hours” to get her out of the ground (32). When, at the poem’s close, Tanti is said to have asked “when nex’ we goin’ back in de Oval” (32), we should not understand this as her need for male protection and permission, but rather a sign of her unfettered enjoyment and optimism about her own cricketing future—a future she wants to continue to share with her male relative. Where Tanti is a rambunctious public figure, Markham’s Mammie is based directly on his late mother, though she too is a figure of maternal fun and cricketing enthusiasm. In his collection Misapprehensions (1995a) Markham has a cluster of poems and two short stories about his memories of his mother, about their interactions since moving to Britain in 1956, and about the experience of her funeral, held back “home” in Montserrat. His mother’s absent-presence dominates the collection’s “Family” section, with her death and its aftermath rendered in “Some Extended Footnotes”, and in “i.m. Linda Ann Eliza Lee Markham / 1913–1989”. However, Mammie’s sense of personal confidence and her strained connection to the Caribbean re-emerges in “Cricket”, the penultimate section of the collection that contains five poems, all irregular sonnets. This section includes a sonnet dedicated to Andrew Salkey, as well as “For Brian Lara” and “It’s Not Cricket” (considered in Chapters 4 and 5), and “Long Shot” (discussed in Chapter 7). It also includes “Conversations at Upton Park iii”, the third poem in a run of four exchanges between mother and son that take place in her room within the house of her married daughter, Markham’s sister. In contrast to the first two

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sombre, reflective and quietly familial “Upton Park” poems, “Conversations” humorously conveys Mammie’s engagement with contemporary life as well as her—quite understandable—uncertainty about the current standing of her West Indies team. The other “Conversation” poems about Mammie establish her forthright, assertive and knowing mode of address, especially when speaking to her son, and they present her lively righteousness as part of a desire to direct and protect her family. These characteristics are given a lighter and more explicitly humorous touch when filtered through her interest in cricket, though they are always depicted in the context of her frailties and the complexities of what, as an aging woman, she is seeing and saying. “Conversations at Upton Park iii” establishes at the outset the contradiction between her willingness to play cricket and her immediate physical limitations. Mammie is “padded up, ready to come in at No. 3 for West Indies”, but the necessary gloves present “a problem for fingers / All tender and arthritic”, and she needs “a runner”, that is, someone to run between the wickets for her (Markham 1995a, 77). Hence, while Mammie is ready to do cricketing battle for her Caribbean home, her eagerness and bravery are curtailed by her age and bodily restrictions. In addition, where the troublesome gloves indicate her inability to get ready to play cricket, they might also mark her difficulty in protecting herself from England’s cold. Her willingness to bat and to face a bowling attack is set against her family’s history of having to counter “worse” than mere “short-pitched bowling and sledging” (77). In fact, any potential threat to her body has already been superseded by her family’s endurance of loss and hardship. This is made clear when her voice is used to explain how “Her eldest son […] cleared mines in Africa” and “lost his leg” (77). With this tragedy remembered, it seems that the call “To make an effort and pull West Indies through” is “not asking much” of her or the rest of her familial team (77). “Conversations” continues the juxtaposition of family strife and West Indies cricket in the second stanza, yet this is then cast as part of Mammie’s “confusion”, arising not from old age or dementia so much as the very real and common confusion about West Indies cricket after its period of dominance has ended: “She is confused whether we’re strong or weak” (77). This confusion is also pegged to Uncle George losing his powers of speech after returning from Panama. It appears that his resilience, as silenced survival, is somehow akin to West Indies playing on without their previous ability to articulate themselves through the game. It also seems unclear to Mammie whether West Indies, the family and

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perhaps all those like them, are strong enough to go “for a win” or are so weak they can only make an effort “to avoid defeat” (77). And when the poem questions whether “avoiding defeat” is a way to live, it is unclear whether this is the anti-death rebellion of Mammie, her poet-son, or both (77). Nevertheless, Mammie’s support for West Indies is permanent and her sense of loyalty is oriented towards a future she wants to influence, or even instruct. At the end, “All she needs is someone to follow her instructions – like that boy Lara” (77). It is as if Mammie knows enough about cricket and life to guide the young Lara into a future that will benefit everyone within the poem’s frame of reference. Whereas, in the next poem, “For Brian Lara”, Mammie is critical of Lara’s “too high!” backlift and worried that such an unorthodox and aggressive position leaves him vulnerable (1995b, 78). In this poem, though, her instructional mode takes no specific form and is left expansively open, as if her vision of the world and her family’s place in it is enough to secure her a right to connect with and guide the future heroes of West Indies cricket. Lara appears to be a surrogate son, perhaps the replacement of the son-poet whose views and experiences are thought to be distant and incomprehensible to the mother, now lost.

III Where Gilroy, Keens-Douglas and Markham depict older women as cricket watchers, Sylvia Wynter’s short story “Bat and Ball”, originally broadcast as part of the BBC’s Caribbean Voices series of the 1940s and 1950s, appears to be the earliest literary example to portray a Caribbean girl playing cricket. Seemingly set in Wynter’s own pre-World War II Jamaican childhood, it establishes a theme that runs through the relatively small number of texts looking at female participation directly: namely, how girls are only allowed to enter the cricket games of their male peers on limited or begrudging terms, and how they can be quickly pushed out again despite their sporting competence and willingness to contribute to team efforts. Wynter’s story tells of the limited inclusion and eventual expulsion of Stella from the cricket played by her brothers and their neighbours one summer. In addition, it features a budding romance cut short, the end of childhood innocence, and the tension between cricketing freedom and domestic obligations for the would-be female cricketer. The story opens with the narrator, Stella, detailing her efforts to make it to “Paradise”,

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that is, the “narrow patch of land which prolonged [her family’s] backyard into the estate” and led to the “rough clearing originally intended by [her] mother for lettuces”, but now the children’s “cricket pitch” (Wynter 2012, 237). Her two brothers, Rance, her elder, and Timothy, her junior, were able to enter this paradise easily—Rance through his status as a “manchild” and Timothy under his brother’s “protective shadow” (237). Stella, though, had to connive in order to escape for cricket, as a girl who “should help in the house” and whose mother insisted that she should learn to cook and clean in order to later “catch a husband”, since she wouldn’t have “much to offer by way of looks”, unlike Ruby, her younger and more feminine sister (237). Hating housework, Stella’s “only escape” came at great cost seeing as she had to break something or deliberately commit a “stupid act” so that she could flee her enraged mother and head for the cricket clearing (237). In this way, evading the mother and escaping her domesticating instruction is the only way to access the cricketing freedoms enjoyed by young boys. When Stella does manage to escape, her brothers ask about her “girl work”, and she calmly lies, claiming she had finished and thought she would contribute “a little fielding” to their game in order to secretly “bait” them into including her by making no demand to bat or bowl (238). Dedicatedly retrieving the ball from under barbed wire and bushes, Stella feels herself “one of the gang” and, because she has made herself useful, she is whisked away from home each day by Rance, who tells his mother he is tutoring her in algebra when she is actually becoming his “willing slave” at cricket (239). When two boys from next door join their family game, Stella remains the “sole fieldsman” as the newcomers merely wait to bat—as if this is the privilege of their sex. The sister of these neighbours, Melba, also comes and watches the game. Melba welcomes Rance’s gentlemanly kindnesses and, with her quiet presence and the blonde ringlets gained from her German mother, she presents an obvious feminine counterpoint to Stella. For a while, the scene is idyllic as “ball and bat fused” the children “into a summer’s day dance” so that they became “part of the sun and the growing green things” (239). The narrator describes the children as understanding that the game marked “recognition of the consciousness with which we had grown with green things, woken up and gone to bed with the sun” (239). The union with nature and its daily as well as seasonal cycle is short lived, though, with their “moment of recognition” also becoming the moment of “farewell” when the relatively peaceful

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mixed-sex sporting play ends abruptly (240). With the children tiring one late afternoon, Stella becomes angry that Rance is only batting for Melba’s approval and is yelling at his sister “impersonally and without animus” (240). Stella realises that “If [she] hadn’t been a girl [she] would have sat down and cried” (240). Instead, she angrily demands to bat. When Timothy says he won’t bowl any longer, Rance concedes that he will let Stella bat if she can bowl him out. This presents Stella with a “frightening […] choice”, between continuing with her limited inclusion by returning to field or taking up the challenge which would, she knew, mean “no more bat and ball”—where “bat and ball represented so many things, even more than those I was consciously aware of … like showering together […] happily unending arguments […] money making schemes” (240–241). Stella quickly comprehends that taking up her brother’s challenge will end their childhood innocence, not only because she will succeed in defeating him, but because forcing her own inclusion on equal and successful terms will mean she becomes dangerous. This will then relegate her back into her second-class gendered position, and, thereby, back into the domestic sphere and across the divide between the sexes that marks oncoming adulthood. Nevertheless, she takes up the ball and bowls, notably doing so without the “fanfare of flourishes” that Timothy employs (241). Her desire to play cricket and articulate herself in defiance of her brother’s dictatorship drives her and her bowling action: her “arm whipped over […] in some preknown rhythm”, destroying the “sticks of the wicket” (241). Her anger and skill come together in this moment, yet it seems that she chooses to bowl not to defeat her brother so much as to be able feel herself bowl and have a singular moment of cricketing self-expression. Painfully, in her moment of triumph, she becomes invisible—“Timothy and the two boys […] managed not to see”—and is forced away from the game (241). Rance also sends Melba away, cutting off his own developing mixed-sex encounter. When he rebuilds the wicket, Rance establishes a boys-only new beginning, without spectators or “hangers on running after the ball” (241–242). With this change, Stella has lost the protected, free space of the clearing and its cricket-based inclusivity, which though partial was her physical means of skilfully competing with her brothers in the sport of her own choice. With her expulsion, Stella is forced to return home to her mother and the domestic labour of girlhood. That the cricket pitch was her mother’s failed lettuce patch—a patch that failed to provide for the woman of the house—might have already alluded to the failures of women to grow in

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this space. Walking away, in a kind of success-fuelled isolation, Stella can feel the “earth still warm” under her feet and enjoys the “smell of limes bittersweet”, as the natural environment echoes her predicament (242). Where Wynter’s semi-rural vision of mixed-sex childhood cricket ends because of the dominance of an older male sibling, Bonair-Agard’s poem “1978 – London Street, Arouca” depicts a young girl playing urban street cricket with her male peers, only for an adult intrusion to disrupt an emerging, if uneven, male–female friendship. In this poem, from Gully (2010), Neela, a “shrill- / voiced pockmarked-legs Indian / girl”, is the only girl playing cricket with the boys her age, and also the only girl of their age living “on the block” (Bonair-Agard 2010, 26). The boys “made” her “field gully”, which meant standing in the “concrete canal” when the boy-speaker, a lefthander, is batting; in this restricted, lower but still important role, she has to field quickly to stop the ball and defend her own “bony chest” (26). The prepubescent Neela is dynamic, aggressive and even foul-mouthed while playing—“her quick hands / making throws while her mouth / parroted obscenities”—and she “cussed like [a] George Street / whore” when “provoked” by the boys (27). Yet the poetic boy-speaker describes how, outside the game, he and Neela would exchange pleasant greetings and smiles. This implies that not only is Neela friendly and potentially feminine beyond the field of play, but that her on-field performance is the competitive version of herself she uses to play sport, perhaps specifically to play with boys. It is an adult bystander, “Lenny”, who eventually instructs the boy-speaker to “leave the Indian girl alone”, claiming that the boys are “fretting her” (27). The speaker feels that this explanation is at odds with Neela’s own keenness to play and her sense of cricketing authority, achieved through cussing “at the top / of her lungs”, but he nonetheless changes his behaviour, being “nicer” to the girl because he trusts Lenny and is confident in his own ability to change (27–28). What emerges in Bonair-Agard’s poem, then, is the disruption of the children’s mixed-sex cricket game by an external adult whose motivations are unclear. The poem leaves open the idea that Lenny might be looking to protect Neela (seemingly unnecessarily); that he might be looking to inhibit the growing friendship between her and the speaker, which might also be the first signs of a young romance; and/or that Neela’s difference (in terms of race and vulgarity) means that the boy-speaker is the one who needs protecting. The result of Lenny’s advice, though, is that Neela will be pushed out of the game’s “gully” and back into a more protected, feminine sphere or position, and that the

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speaker will be separated from a female competitor and friend. However, Neela’s loss is clearly greater, as cricketing skills and vocal on-field confidence are superseded by an adult’s knowledge of her future as a woman, and perhaps as a woman marked as sexually available or at least not in step with gender expectations. The idea that female participants can only have restricted roles, typically outside of batting and bowling, when they are permitted to play cricket with family members and/or male peers is also seen in Bloom’s “Keeping Wicket”, which was commissioned for the anthology Give the Ball to the Poet (2014). This poem similarly highlights the opposition between full cricketing participation and domestic or family responsibilities, even as it uses wicketkeeping as a metaphor for familial duty. The girl/sister/daughter is the perpetual family “wicket-keeper”, who “would have loved to bowl […] would have liked to bat”, but finds herself cast as “too valuable a player” to become central to the action and its supposed dangers (Bloom 2014, 24). She is told that she has “the best job”, holding “the destiny of the team / In those thin gloves”, and acting as the “team’s/protector” (24). Yet wicketkeeping also expresses her position as family backstop, standing behind everyone else, picking up what they miss and having to remain in a specific, defined and limited position. And this cricketing job of childhood—of watching, catching, protecting and holding—continues into adulthood: And when their mother developed Into childhood, Their diabetic father became an amputee, They gave her the best job once again. Her brothers were all busy at the crease, So she crouched behind the stumps, Keeping wicket. (24)

Here, it seems that domestic and family duties weigh heavily as she has to protect or “catch” her elderly and ailing parents. As wicketkeeper, her body is cowed into the “crouched” position and hidden behind the “stumps” of life, in front of which her brothers perform “at the crease”, seemingly supported by other (invisible) women as wives and mothers to their children (24). Despite her brief effort to breakout of her familial-cricketing role, she becomes the wicketkeeper for her “nieces and nephews”, supposedly having “the best job / once again”, as an aunt whose playful involvement comes without the full joys of parenthood

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(24). When she finally “stands behind the stumps / Keeping wicket” (24), her move from being “crouched” to standing upright marks the lack of challenge in her role, and the ease of the children’s game she has entered. It also signals the elongation of her family commitment, and perhaps the necessary straightening up of her body after years of having to bend to the will or for the benefit of her brothers and their growing families. Yet even in this straightened position, she remains in her place, with her former desires to escape and play the game more fully either silenced or forgotten. The gendering of labour-as-care in the poem thus sets the cricketing fun of childhood in the context of women’s unequal and ongoing domestic servitude, reinforcing the idea that women cannot really engage in cricket “play” because of their responsibilities to others. The best they can hope for is to be the team’s reliable and necessary backstop, the long-standing wicketkeeper.

IV The above examples—from Wynter, Bonair-Agard and Bloom—all describe childhood cricket as a leisure activity to which girls have limited access, even when playing with family and in local friendship groups, and as a game they cannot take into adolescence or adulthood in a genuine sporting fashion. In contrast, Anim-Addo’s Janie Cricketing Lady collection conveys the lifelong commitment of a Caribbean cricketing woman, someone who plays for her island formally and takes her interest in cricket into adulthood, despite becoming a mother. The collection’s poems tap directly into the political, social and gender-specific difficulties built into the history of women’s cricket in the Caribbean, and so it is worth setting them in the context of this history. In her book, Skirting the Boundary: A History of Women’s Cricket (2013), Isabelle Duncan writes that “Not enough has been written about women’s cricket”, and this is certainly true of women’s cricket in the Caribbean (1). Despite the existence of numerous important histories of West Indies cricket, it is only in the work of Beckles—specifically in Liberation Cricket (1995) and A History of West Indies Cricket Volume 1 (1998)—that the emergence and formalisation of West Indies women’s cricket is placed in relation to the history of the men’s game. Consequently, Beckles is the primary source for Duncan’s survey of the Caribbean situation. While a full reiteration of Beckles’ historical narration is neither possible nor desirable here, it is useful to set out the core issues that have shaped Caribbean women’s cricket that

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pertain directly to Anim-Addo’s rendering of her mother’s passion for the sport, and her mother’s place in the game’s regional history. According to Beckles, gender “has proven the stickiest of cricket wickets, and the politics of female exclusion remain active and potent” (1998, 117). Beckles explains that, owing to cricket’s association with the cultivation of masculinity under empire, “white women in the nineteenth century West Indies did not establish a cricketing culture of their own”, even though women played cricket in England (1995, 224). This meant that unlike their male counterparts, Black women did not have immediate examples of their own sex’s cricketing competence to mimic and compete against. Where England, Australia and South Africa have long, if sporadic, histories of women playing cricket in leisurely and competitive forms—with the earliest recorded English game coming in 1745 (Duncan 2013, 3)—the Caribbean has no such centuries-long story of cricketing women. In addition, cricket’s ties to the reclaiming of masculinity and heroic endeavour by Black men was not only a key part of their rebellion against slavery, but also important for and during independence in ways that ignored or minimised the role of women. As Beckles writes: “Neither colonialism nor nationalism sought to problematize the principle of patriarchy upon which their cultural values rested”, and this continues to show itself in attitudes to women’s cricket (1998, 118). Indeed, Beckles suggests that such negative attitudes have led to the “suppression, textual trivialization, and gendered distortion of information” about women’s cricket, and notes that even the most ardent of cricket fans tend to know almost nothing of the women’s game (1998, 118). He argues that even though women play “competitive cricket up to Test level, the social ostracism of their game indicates more the pressures of hostility than indifference” (1998, 117). He specifically highlights the gap between the expectations of success placed on the West Indies women’s team, in part because of the shadow cast by the men’s game, and the poor funding, resources and support the women’s game has historically received. In the face of such challenges, though, women continue to play cricket in the Caribbean, and Beckles sees their struggles for inclusion and acceptance as indicating that female cricketers “share emotional experiences not dissimilar to those of Black male players in the early decades of the century” (1995, 223). At the same time, he pinpoints a crucial difference between the men and women who shaped the development of their respective entries into cricket. He explains that where Black male entry to cricket in the Caribbean was brokered by middle-class participation,

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the participants and administrators in the women’s game have most often been Black and working class, meaning the stigma they face is typically threefold—as Black, working class and female. This is exactly the identity triad with which Anim-Addo’s Janie poems negotiate as they revisit the cricketing history of the poet’s mother. Yet where Beckles details the post-war development and formalisation of women’s cricket in the Caribbean—from the first women’s cricket association in the region in 1966, through the establishment of formal inter-territory competitions in the late 1960s, to the arrival of Test matches and the women’s World Cup in the early to mid-1970s (see Introduction)—Anim-Addo’s reanimation of her mother’s past provides an earlier picture of cricketing girlhood and its connection to the politics and heroes of West Indies cricket in the 1930s and 1940s. There is also, across the poems, a Jamesian sense of the ways in which self-expression and sociopolitical articulation can come through playing cricket. This means that the poems draw together the gendered dynamics of cricketing history, including the struggles women have faced in order to play, and the embodied sense of politically aesthetic play that can help establish new ways of being. Grenadian-born Anim-Addo has dedicated both of her collections of poetry to her mother, Jane Joseph, a keen cricketing child who played against her male peers and went on to play for Grenada during the postwar period, when the “black man” was only just making a mark on the game in batting terms (Anin-Addo 2006a, 18). Her first poetry collection, Haunted by History (1998), is dedicated to this “Woman of Spirit, / Independence and Courage”, and includes “Thoughts From a Cricket Orphan” as its only cricket poem. This poem juxtaposes Janie’s cricket obsession with the feminine qualities expected of her as a woman and mother. It also pits the speaking daughter’s sense of her mother’s cricketinduced absence when she was a child against her adult admiration of the courageous strength and independence shown by her mother, including through cricket. The poem specifically counterposes Janie’s sight of the red leather ball with the daughter-speaker’s bedtime view of “sunset reds / like layered hair ribbons” (Anim-Addo 1998, 51). As the separation of mother and daughter stretches into the night, the daughter-speaker points to the kind of feminine communion expected for a mother and daughter through caring for and decorating the child’s hair. But this hope for reconnection is set against the daughter’s mental picture of her mother’s “plaits awry” in distant boyish pursuits (51). The poetic voice speaks

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of the loneliness and jealousy she feels as the act of waiting for her mother’s return becomes a perpetual yearning for an emotional union with a woman whose dissatisfaction with home life and immense passion for cricket keeps her away, even if it does not undermine her love. Negotiating with her young self’s feelings of abandonment and her mature respect for her mother’s quest at “the crease”, the daughter-speaker says “Mine remains a grudging sympathy. I’ll leave it be” (52). With this gesture, she relinquishes her childhood sense of loss and separation in favour of a mature appreciation of her mother’s independent personality and the example this set. The isolation of a cricket orphan is largely erased from “Janie Cricketing Lady”, the keynote piece of the Janie collection, though a generational tension or transition remains paramount. In this case, the daughter-speaker attempts to imaginatively reconstruct her mother’s journey, “caught in the difference / between life and game” (AnimAddo 2006a, 22), as Janie moves from “Tom Boy” child to child-bearing womanhood, then onto an independent life in London and grandmotherly return to Grenada. Towards the end of this long “journey poem”, or amalgamation of poems, the daughter-speaker sets out her mother’s instruction to remember their family tree, which had “not [been] marked on paper”, realising that her cricketing story is also not yet “marked on paper” (37–38). Such acts of preservation through poetic inscription underpin the entire collection as oral and physical history are carved into poetry. Indeed, as is explained in “West Indies Greatest Cricketer”, the poetic examination of Janie is dedicated “to memory, gender and our sporting pearl”, to “life, game and loss” (11). The collection’s recreated “version” of Janie’s tale is both biography and fiction (11), or fictionalised poetic biography, and it moves between a first-person reoccupation of Janie’s imagined persona and a third-person reflection upon her life that is coupled with a first-person engagement with the daughter-speaker’s own. Across the collection, then, Anim-Addo captures, politicises and mythologises her mother’s performance of sporting and gendered difference, the pull away from cricket that comes with work and domestic responsibilities, and her mother’s maintenance of an interest in typically masculine activities, including watching cricket, well into old age. Although Janie’s father is a supportive “trunk of a man”, encouraging his daughter’s cricketing play and even providing a new, flat practice space for her when the family move home (12), Anim-Addo’s poems focus on a layering of mothers as generations of the poet’s female line are

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recalled—herself, her mother, her grandmother and “mother” England. Throughout, mother and daughter relationships are filled with affection, but not necessarily understanding. Janie’s mother is continually exasperated by her daughter’s boyish endeavours, her avoidance of tasks like cooking and sewing (unless to make a cricket costume for carnival) and her continuing athletic interests. In “Tom Boy” Janie’s mother crosses herself in the hope that her daughter’s boyish “phase would quickly pass”, while in “Watch She” Janie’s mother bemoans “what goin’ become of” her daughter (13). Haunted by such disapproval, in “Letter to Mammie”, Anim-Addo constructs a written request by Janie for her mother to appreciate her love of cricket and her need to enjoy the “little space” of independence and self-expression her game provides (22). This reaching across female generations through the poetic word is repeated with the daughter-speaker’s own negotiation with Janie’s mode of female resistance. Where the daughter-speaker reads her mother’s cricket playing as an act of sociopolitical dissent and an assertion of self-determination, Janie’s voice insists that she had no means of interpreting herself or her actions in such a way. Janie even says, hers was a path dictated by a love of “anything boys did” (19; original emphasis), and a special adoration of cricket because “The game was all” (23). To Janie’s mind, women of her time “had no vocabulary of difference […] / gender wore a midnight cloak of silence” and women simply “did silence” (23, original emphasis). Nevertheless, the daughter-speaker recognises the political implications of this early “female athlete, black / and the wrong class” (23). She also takes up her mother’s cricketing “Herstory” and infuses it with her own diasporic idiom of feminist transgression, social reclamation and political boundary crossings (44), where gender carries “no fixed lines” of restriction and self-expression comes through physical, sporting performance (23). Throughout, Janie is an example of a woman seen to “ever assault the boundary” in both cricketing and gendered terms (19). Anim-Addo (2006b) has insisted that cricket holds little interest for her personally, yet she clearly uses her mother’s love of cricket to identify a quest for equality and excellence in the face of discrimination. The Janie poems identify a woman’s body as developing through successful sporting performance and as resisting feminised domestic roles, even when motherhood arrives. From the outset, the collection charts Janie’s exclusion from, or difficulty within, the male cricketing domain. While Janie’s father guides and coaches his cricketing daughter, others, including local boys and her visiting cousin, Dolphus, are quick to mock her. With her young

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bowling talent defeating her cousin from Trinidad in “Dolphus Boy” (15–16), and her batting and bowling leading Grenada’s women to a win in “Grenada Beat Trinidad” (26–28), Janie’s nickname “cricket lady” becomes the ironic redirection of the taunting she experienced from boys who’d been happy to poke fun at her sporting ambitions and undeveloped chest (15). Echoing the sentiments expressed by Beckles, Anim-Addo links this gendered prejudice to the structures of Caribbean cricket and women’s institutional exclusion from the nationalist project of cricketing representation: “blame is not in question / for petticoats or flannels in the net / reflect our boards vision of the pavilion” (10). She thus positions Janie as an innocent but loaded challenge to the post-war climate: “island girl handling bat like she born with it, heedless of political storm: black man hardly get foot in region competition” (18). Additionally, though the poems state that Janie’s name is proclaimed across the islands, the daughter-speaker notes that she’ll “never get an OBE” or be written into cricket history like the male heroes of the past—the “Three W’s, Sirs Learie and Garfield […] Clive and Viv” (that is, Worrell, Weekes, Walcott, Constantine, Sobers, Lloyd and Richards (10)). Throughout, we hear the voice of the daughter-speaker valorising her mother’s success in defeating her male peers, but also championing the women whose in-between situation—within cricket but outside of its institutional structures—reinforces the game’s status as a sport of oppression and resistance. Anim-Addo is clear in her demand for the women’s story to be told and upheld, and for their game to enter equally into the cricketing field. Using the metaphor of kaiso (calypso), she claims that the rhythm is not “sweet” without soprano alongside tenor, and so women simply must be included in Caribbean cricket and its organisational structures (10–11). Across the run of poems, cricket intersects with Janie’s developing womanhood, initially her sexual adolescence, then her experiences as wife and mother, and later as a mature, ageing woman and grandmother. As Janie moves from a “potato-slip of a girlchild” into a young cricketer, her athletic physique becomes one of sexual attractiveness (12). This is something that takes her male playmates by surprise as they “praised anew her long limbs”, and she becomes one “of fine leg (any field)” (25, 28). In “Grenada Beat Trindad”, Anim-Addo binds together Janie’s performative skilfulness—the manner in which her body moves to execute her batting strokes and the way she bowls consistently—with her emerging womanhood:

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And how she lashed that red leather, punching the ball off the offside gravitating to her knees to make a sweep and place the ball sweet between fielders. Bowling at that steady, persistent pace, she struck a lajablesse awe pretty girl with she nice, nice hair and that intensity of purpose. (27–28)

In this passage, Janie’s batting strength (her “lash” and “punch”) come with subtle skill and the ability to choose where to “place” the ball. Meanwhile, her sweep shot marks the kind of clearing away of attack that repeatedly appears in the poems. The combination of an external view of her “nice, nice hair” and a more appreciative reading of her concentrated sense of sporting perseverance brings a kind of awe-inspiring demonic sporting femininity. Janie, in this moment, is at the height of her sporting powers: strong, elegant and thoughtful in her batting; focused, reliable and purposefully intense in her bowling. Her personality is cast through her cricketing performance, and the “awe” this inspires is clearly challenging expectations. Janie’s cricket is her way of presenting herself to the world and pushing against those “pretty girl” descriptions that might quickly work to exclude her from the game she loves. Indeed, the poem records the “special memory space” that is created with female cricketing success and how the women players “astonished the crowd” with their performances, particularly Janie’s own contribution, scoring eighty-seven runs and bowling steadily to advance her team despite the loss of their captain and vice-captain to injury (27). This rendering of Janie’s most important game, and historically an early inter-island women’s match, is immediately followed by her move into motherhood. Janie falls into a relationship with an “overseer” who delights in plucking young “fruit”, before and after they unite (30). They have two daughters, but Janie is not tamed by her marriage or her husband’s absence. Her resistance to traditional female roles is taken forward into her job as the first woman bus driver of Grenada, and eventually out into a life in cold, friendless London. Later, her return to Grenada as a grandmother is also a “Return to Queen’s Park, Grenada” (39). She sits among the colour and noise of the West Indies crowd, and even at the age of eighty she is seen bending over to fix her own car (44). By this point she has become a “businesswoman” with a “truck”,

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and conducts a “workforce of males, cement, sand and water” (40). She is actively building in her home island, even as she supports Kenya in the 2003 cricket World Cup after the early departure of West Indies. Her physical competencies and athletic body are still in evidence in a way that is similar to the depictions of Caribbean cricketing women in Williams’ play “No Boys Cricket Club” (discussed below). Late on in Anim-Addo’s cricketing cycle, the poem “Hurricane Cricket” details the kinds of survivalist strength Janie personifies, making use of storm aesthetics and the hurricane trope explored in Chapter 4. “Hurricane Cricket” links the game to the impact of Hurricane Ivan in 2004 and comes before the later poems that tell of the hurricane’s impact on Grenada, on Janie, and on her family’s return to the island to provide supplies, comfort and hands for rebuilding. The poem draws together cricketing performances with the threatening power of the hurricane, charting how Ivan “became one monstrous whip mashing up the country” as “Grenada learnt bitter lessons through sculpted galvanise” (42). The vulnerability of the people is caught in the “fearful cry” let slip by the “ex-cricketing woman” (42), and even the sports stadium of “concrete and steel” has been “brought […] to heel” by the hurricane (42). With the “Terror powered winds”, we are reminded of the sublime dangers and poetic appeal of this ecological phenomenon (42). The poem closes: Now considering hurricane vocabulary: flog, thrash, drub, punish, licks without mercy, with Windies due at Queen[’s] Park this coming tour, Hurricane Ivan meanings inform cricket lore. (42)

In this passage, the violence of the hurricane, and its corresponding terminology, is akin to the violence of cricketing action, but also to cricket’s “lore”, its accepted traditions, stories and points of communal knowledge. The “licks without mercy” reconnect slavery, cricket and Hurricane Ivan, but do so in the context of Janie’s own sporting competence. That is, the hurricane carries the historic and embodied performative power of Janie’s sporting rebellion and yet, at the same time, presents an immediate physical danger to her and to the cricketing facilities of her island. The destruction of the Queen’s Park complex in 2004—which had only just been completed as a new development in 2000—was only one aspect of the mass destruction experienced on the island and elsewhere in

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the region, which came with the loss of sixty-five lives across Grenada and Jamaica. Grenada had to be rebuilt, and the stadium itself was resurrected ready for the 2007 World Cup. In the immediate wake of Ivan, though, the West Indies team were in England for the 2004 Champions Trophy and, somewhat surprisingly, defeated England to win the tournament. The success was directly linked to the hurricane-induced devastation back in the Caribbean, and the prompting motivation provided by a woman from Grenada interested in cricket and insisting West Indies perform well on behalf of their people back home. According to media reports, Tony Howard, then West Indies’ manager, relayed to the team a phone call he’d had from this woman before the final: She said “my house has been blown down but if you guys win for me tomorrow, it really doesn’t matter. I’d be the happiest woman in the world.” I expressed that to the team and, with one voice, they indicated that it was never going to be a problem. (BBC Caribbean 2004)

As captain, Brian Lara reinforced the importance of this connection, recognising that he and his team “lay in our beds very comfortably while our people in the Caribbean were fending for their lives”, and claiming this as the spur to victory for his young team (qtd. in Alexander 2001). It seemed a cricketing Janie from Grenada had prompted the team to uplift the people again, to fill them with pride, hope and renewed energy for the future building they all required. As in Anim-Addo’s poetry, this moment pointed up how female Caribbean voices can see, feel and communicate the personal and communal power of cricketing action.

V The connection between womanhood, domestic duty and cricket is explored in detail in Williams’ play, “The No Boys Cricket Club”, as is the sense of female competence and self-articulation being enabled through the skills cricket requires. Emerging from Williams’ degree work at the Rose Bruford College, Sidcup, the play was first performed in May 1996 at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London. The director, Indhu Rubasingham, claimed it was a “shock to most people” that a play that “focused so sensitively on the lives of two middle-aged women was written by a young man” (2002, xv). This shock must have been compounded by the role cricket plays in the lives of these women.

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The play presents the grindingly domestic and semi-magical story of Abi Carter (née Sandford), a sixty-year-old Jamaican woman living in a London council house with much “disappointment and disillusion” (xv). After the death of her husband, Teddy, whom Abi had known since childhood but seemingly never loved, she was left to raise their two children alone and they are seen, on stage, as difficult adults. Michael, aged twentysix, is an aggressive small-time drug dealer, estranged from his own baby son, Patrick, and living back with his mother and sister. Danni, nineteen, is a college student often caught up in public fights over her brother’s activities and furious at her mother’s wilful ignorance. When Abi’s childhood best friend, Maisie, comes to stay with them in the aftermath of her own son’s death, the two mothers return to their childhood, timetravelling back to Jamaica in the hope of changing the course of their adult lives by altering the outcome of their pivotal cricket match, against the Clarence Street Boys who mocked and defeated their girl’s team, the “No Boys Cricket Club”. Thus, the play moves between 1990s London and Kingston, Jamaica in 1958 and is, Williams has said, “loosely based on [his] mother’s experience of growing up” (2002a, xi). According to Rubasingham, “you could hear gasps from the audience when the stage changed for the first time from contemporary, grey London to the magical beach of Jamaica” (2002, xvi). London’s oppressive greying effect stands not only for the British weather, but also for the hard, dull and domesticated life Abi has experienced after forgoing her dream of becoming a nurse. The exotic, bright warmth of the Jamaican beach also offers more than a touristic vision of the Caribbean, with the glowing allure of home for those abroad as well as a wishful connection between nostalgia and childhood possibility for these female returners. However, where Maisie ultimately refuses to return to London and instead remains permanently in her past in a death-like state, Abi takes up and forward the life-affirming aspirations of her younger, cricketing self. The play ends, then, with Abi asserting herself against Michael and working to reconnect with Danni— in effect, she moves from attempting to mother her younger self in a mystical intergenerational exchange to becoming a confident, cricketing mother within her real UK life. As Rubasingham explains, cricket in the play is “a metaphor for dreams, strength and the rediscovery of self” (2002, xv). For the young Abi and young Maisie, cricket is also a space away from their difficult family lives, and a means of cultivating physical and emotional competences that seem to help protect them from family guilt and low social expectations. In

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their Jamaican childhood both girls are without mothers. Watching a young Maisie bowl, Abi explains that Maisie’s “Mother ran off when she was just a baby”, leaving Maisie nomadically moving “from one relative to another”, relatively unwanted (Williams 2002b, 15). But Abi juxtaposes this unanchored childhood and low public opinion about Maisie with Maisie’s skills as a fast bowler, reporting that “Everyone thought she’d turn out bad, but she was the fastest bowler I ever saw” (15), as if precise, aggressive bowling was evidence of the kind of disciplined selfcontrol that would bring salvation. Abi’s mother died while beating her daughter for “sneaking off school” and, although she had a heart condition, Abi had “prayed” for her mother to stop and so carries the guilt of her mother’s death (39). This sense of guilt is only compounded by her father’s abandonment and the tyranny of her “moma’s sister” (17)— Miss Tyler—with whom she is forced to live. As with Maisie, cricket is presented as anchoring the motherless Abi, and providing her with the sense of achievement and belonging she otherwise lacks. Where Maisie bowls and captains their female-only cricket team, Abi is their “starplayer” and batter (24), integral to the girls’ team and their ability to compete, especially against boys. Hence, it is Abi’s absence—as she dutifully waits for her never-to-appear father, rather than joining the cricket match—that leads to the girls’ defeat by the boys of Clarence Street. Up to this point, cricket had been what the girls “lived” for, inspiring confidence and ambition—including an ambition to become famous and “rule the world” (24)—as well as providing physical competences that stay with them into adulthood in a dormant yet ever-ready fashion. Maisie sees their defeat as a turning point, as bringing gendered restrictions and life limitations, with the girls becoming wives and mothers in ways that inhibit the expansiveness and potentiality envisaged through childhood cricket. From their childhood onwards, cricket is set against gendered domestic obligations, especially as articulated by the “othermothers” they live among. Playing cricket enables a young Abi to escape Miss Tyler’s criticism and domestic demands. Yet eventually Abi writes a letter to her father outlining how she is giving up on “foolishness” (which means cricket) to focus on her studies and chores so as to make him proud enough to return to her, though he never does (57). On entering womanhood, the gap between her attachment to cricket and the gender norms of adult life is cast in stark terms. Maisie tells Abi how, on her wedding day, her new mother-in-law threw her “cricket bat in the dustbin”, declaring that Maisie was now “carrying responsibilities” having married her son (24).

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Moreover, the play itself opens by juxtaposing Abi “carrying a bag of washing” and the sounds of “young girls playing cricket” as she recalls her own “serious form” in the defeat of “class 2c” (3). Abi, though, is accused by both Maisie and Danni of using her domestic labour as a way of “still hiding” (24)—hiding from herself and her past, but also from the challenges immediately surrounding her as an embattled mother. For Maisie, Abi is hiding from the cricketing “plans” they shared as children, and from who she actually is because she has silenced and denied her status as a cricketer. Indeed, when Maisie describes Abi as “a devil with a bat” who could hit the ball “pow and pow!” (21)—with the onomatopoeic gesture suggesting the beginnings of power to come—she is doing so in front of Danni, as if Danni needs to be introduced to her mother afresh, as a cricketer of promising talent. For Danni and Michael, though, Abi is weak and empty, undeserving of respect or admiration. When Abi attempts to threaten her children into better behaviour through the loss of her cooking, she is “outraged” at Danni’s suggestion that she “can’t even cook properly” (43, original emphasis). What might easily be ingratitude in a child seems instead to imply that Abi is disconnected from her daily activities and her adult children—providing for them without offering the nourishment that might be needed. Michael even suggests that his mother has taught him that being a Sandford means you “care about nothing”, and that his mother stands as “nuttin” without his father, whose surname—Carter—has been dropped (51–52). Hauntingly for Abi, this idea of “nothing” reverberates back to her claim that there is “nothing inside of [her]” when Maisie challenges the pain she must feel after the loss of her own mother (39). This motif of mothers being separated from their children is repeated across the play. Initially, it comes with the motherless experiences of young Abi and young Maisie, but it also plays out in Maisie’s explanation of her husband’s shaping of their son, Jeffrey, suggesting that he was pulled away from her and into a violent fight against racism that ultimately killed him. For Abi, her life is one cast against the experiences of her children. Having lived in her house in London for twenty years, she still “hate[s] the damn place” that her children must call home (43), and she fights seemingly for them by fighting with them—over their friends, responsibilities and compromised futures. With such strained mother–child relations, both Maisie and Abi attempt to become surrogate maternal figures for each other and also to their younger selves, offering advice and encouragement in an effort to protect and improve their own developing lives. However,

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when this backfires for Abi she is able to return to her own daughter with a new, cricket-liked effort to rebuild their connection. Across the play, there is a repeated type of cricketing scene where Abi is at the centre of an all-female, makeshift moment of batting and bowling. In fact, these sequences mark the play’s pivotal early, middle and closing exchanges. The first comes with Maisie’s effort to get Abi to remember her former cricketing self; the second is the young Abi’s demand that her older self performs the cricketing skills they have acquired; the last is Abi’s request that Danni joins her in a new cricket-based, mother– daughter bond. All three are premised on Abi’s immense talent with the cricket bat, and the way in which she cannot, physically, forget or lose the sporting power of her childhood and what this meant to her. When Maisie wants Abi to remember their cricketing childhood, she demands that Abi use a rolled-up paper in her living room as a makeshift bat. When Abi claims not to be able to bat and refuses to “play”—to either bat or bowl—because she has to “get dinner ready”, Maisie accuses her of “going [to] hide” (26). Maisie, as more of a “dreamer” (36), wants to take Abi back via the wish-induced teleporting she has found herself able to do. When Abi gives in to the lure of Jamaica and its warm, “huge cuddle”, she embraces herself as if she is learning to love herself again thanks to the comforting protection of her island “home” (30). Feeling “reunited with her soul” (55), Abi wonders why she ever left. In this familiar environment, she gently approaches her younger self—something Maisie has already done with her junior self—trying to explain how she is giving young Abi “a chance to change things” and “Hit some sixes” in the pivotal match she’s missing (59). Instead of heeding her advice, young Abi forcefully reproaches the older woman for having given up and let their potential fade. Like Maisie, she refuses the claim that her older self “can’t even hit a ball now” and insists that they play together, right there on the beach, asking: “When we moved from the country did we forget everything [Charlie Bennett] taught us?” (62). Making use of rolled-up paper as a ball and a piece of wood as a bat, young Abi bowls to her older self who “misses […] completely”, sparking an angry rebuke: “This Abigail Sandford would never give up. I know who I am, I don’t know you. I hate you” (63). It is in response to this confident declaration of self-knowledge and rejection of future, self-limiting failure that Abi is able to hit the next ball, clean over the bowler’s head, so that she “feels something” of herself coming alive and “beaming” (63). Young Abi

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rejects the idea that this is a “fluke”, insisting instead that it is evidence of their batting “gift”, the skill that cannot be lost (63). Abi’s talent is not just being able to bat, but being able to hit sixes—to get the most from a single striking of the ball. It is this talent, specifically, that Maisie admires and wants to recreate, and that the young Abi understands as the key to their shared, unique ability. Hitting the ball hard and in the air in this way, and being able to do so repeatedly, speaks of Abi’s ability to open her body up and use the full flow of her arms, synchronising her body and head, her hands and eyes, to lift the ball high and far and out of the field of play. Such shots convey her technical ability with the bat, but also the expansiveness of possibility that is being articulated through her cricket. To Maisie, Abi’s shot-making power is the vehicle pushing them out into the world, extending their influence positively and forcefully. Early on, a young Maisie playfully describes how she is “still waiting” on a ball, hit by young Abi, to “come down”, imagining it as a sporting rocket that “Must be in Frankfield now”, “na Guyana”, “Florida”, as if a single cricketing strike will send their message of ability and success out into the world ahead of them (4). When the adult Maisie insists that Abi should remember her former cricketing self, she tells Abi to “score a six like the old days” (25), but Abi dismisses Maisie’s idea that “scoring some sixes” against the Clarence Street Boys “would have changed [their] lives” (39). However, when Abi hits the paper ball back over the head of young Abi, the bowler, this is in effect what she is doing. In a “perfect” moment of cricketing action that thrills and delights her body, she recognises not only that she can hit the ball, but that this singular moment of aesthetic cricketing action encapsulates and expresses the power that is within her and her ability to shape the world and her place within it. Hence, it is not sporting victory that brings a new sense of purpose to Abi. Young Abi doesn’t return to the game in time to overturn the defeat of the No Boys Cricket Club. Instead, and in a Jamesian manner, it is the aesthetic, embodied action of hitting the ball that transforms her understanding of herself and her impact on the world. Claiming that “Abigail Sandford does not hide” (65), or at least will not hide after her cricketing revelation and reconnection with her former self, Abi returns to her present time and space having not changed the past but having undergone a cricketing renewal of strength and character. Back in London, Abi changes dramatically, throwing Michael out of her home and insisting that she and Danni live without his illegal and oppressive behaviour. Danni is initially surprised by this, mocking her mother for

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being “a bit late” with “the assertive mother act” (72). But when Danni declares that Michael won’t change, Abi responds “I have”, and asks her daughter “How about a game of cricket?” (72). A confused Danni ignores the invitation, leaving her mother alone. The play then closes with a stage direction: “Lights up on the cricket field. Young Abi is with the team and is getting ready to bat / They both smile at each other just as Young Abi swings the bat and scores another six” (72). This theatrical close reinforces the positive effects of cricketing confidence for Abi—both as her younger and her older, motherly self. While there is much in the play that is positive about the physical selfarticulation of Abi and other girls and women, including through sporting action, there is a nagging concern that such a sense of female-centred pride has come through the exclusion of men—as fathers, husbands and sons, and as potential teammates. When Maisie rebuts the idea of Teddy Carter playing for their cricket team, asserting “We are not called the No Boys Cricket Club for nothing” (18), her rejection of a potential teammate open to playing equally with the girls strikes as unfairly dismissive and perhaps overly protective of the female domain she has created. Later, when she rejects her husband Ferdy’s efforts to reconnect with her after Jeffrey’s death, she accuses him of adultery (which he strongly denies), of stealing away her son and of making a liar of her as a mother who promised to protect her child. In these ways, she pulls herself away from her marriage and into the abyss of her childhood by rejecting male interest and affection during a period of loss and mourning. Indeed, Maisie’s return to her past and subsequent disappearance is predicated on her inability to work through Jeffrey’s death and the consequent loss of her status as a mother. In contrast, Abi reasserts her power as a mother, and reclaims her home and daughter from the oppressive presence of Michael. In pushing her son outside the home, Abi creates a female-only space for herself and Danni, which seems positive, but is also predicated on the expulsion of an endangering young man who is also a son and a father. That said, the play wants the women cricketers to be understood as staving off negative, depressing and life-limiting ideas of femininity, especially those associated with older women and mothers, and it uses the cricket of girlhood to help Maisie and Abi rediscover important parts of their younger and inner selves. Abi asks Maisie whether her feeling “fed up” with life is merely “what it feels like […] Getting older” (25), and worries that their wish-based return to the past is actually part of them “Losing their minds” (53). But it is Maisie who articulates most clearly

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what is at stake for the older women when she asks where the “young feisty go-getter of a girl” that was her younger self has gone, because she “love[d] those things” about herself, misses them and feels trapped as “some sad old woman” (66). Before she departs she tells Abi that if she ever returns to a cricket field at home she “might see a very, very old woman waving a bat” (67). This is Maisie’s goodbye, to Abi and to life. By contrast, Abi’s new strength and sense of self-worth simultaneously come from cricket and push towards a new future for her and her daughter, beyond her old depressingly domestic life into a familial homely space of intergenerational female connection.

Works Cited Adjepong, Anima. 2018. “‘Periodically I Pondered over It’: Reading the Absence/Presence of Women in Beyond a Boundary”. In Marxism, Colonialism, and Cricket: C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary, edited by David Featherstone et al., 123–136. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Alexander, Simone A. James. 2001. Mother Imagery in the Novels of AfroCaribbean Women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Anim-Addo, Joan, ed. 1996. Framing the Word: Gender & Genre in Caribbean Women’s Writing. London: Whiting and Birch. Anim-Addo, Joan. 1998. “Thoughts from a Cricket Orphan”. In Haunted by History: Poetry, by Anim-Addo, 51–52. London: Mango. Anim-Addo, Joan, ed. 2002. Centre of Remembrance: Memory and Caribbean Women’s Literature. London: Whiting and Birch. Anim-Addo, Joan. 2006a. Janie: Cricketing Lady, with Carnival and Hurricane Poems. London: Mango. Anim-Addo, Joan. 2006b. “Writing the Other America: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Literature”. Conference paper. 25 February. University of Warwick. Anim-Addo, Joan. 2007. Touching the Body: History, Language and AfricanCaribbean Women’s Writing. London: Mango. BBC Caribbean. 2004. “Elated Windies Return Home”. 24 September. Online. http://www.bbc.co.uk/caribbean/news/story/2004/09/040928_ windies-return.shtml. Beckles, Hilary McD. 1995. “A Purely National Extension: Women’s Cricket in West Indies Cricket Culture”. In Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture, edited by Beckles and Brian Stoddart, 222–236. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Beckles, Hilary McD. 1998. The Development of West Indies Cricket: Volume 1. The Age of Nationalism. London: Pluto.

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Bloom, Valerie. 2014. “Keeping Wicket”. In Give the Ball to the Poet: A New Anthology of Caribbean Poetry, edited by Georgie Horrell, Aish Spencer, and Morag Styles, 24. London: Commonwealth Education Trust. Bloom, Valerie, and Douglas Bloom. 1984. “The Development of Caribbean Dialect Poetry”. Cambridge Journal of Education 14 (3): 21–24. Bonair-Agard, Roger. 2010. “1978 – London Street, Arouca”. In Gully, by Bonair-Agard, 26–28. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Brown, Stewart, and Ian McDonald, eds. 2012. The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Carby, Hazel. 1998. Race Men. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000 [1990]. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. Duncan, Isabelle. 2013. Skirting the Boundary: A History of Women’s Cricket. London: Robson. Farred, Grant. 1996. “The Maple Man: How Cricket Made a Postcolonial Intellectual”. In Rethinking C.L.R. James, edited by Farred, 165–186. Oxford: Blackwell. Gilroy, Beryl. 2012 [1994]. “Village Cricket”. In The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 289–290. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Huston, Nancy. 1995. “Novels and Navels”. Critical Inquiry 21 (4): 708–721. James, C.L.R. 2013 [1963]. Beyond a Boundary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. James, Cynthia. 2005. “From Orature to Literature in Jamaican and Trinidadian Children’s Folk Traditions”. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 30 (2): 164–178. Keens-Douglas, Paul. 1976. “Tanti at de Oval”. In Tim Tim: The Dialect Poetry of Paul Keens-Douglas, by Keens-Douglas, 26–32. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Keensdee Productions. Keens-Douglas, Paul. 1992. Tanti at De Oval: Selected Works of Paul KeensDouglas Vol 1. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Keensdee Productions. Keens-Douglas, Paul. 2000a. Crick … Crack … Cricket. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Keensdee Productions. Keens-Douglas, Paul. 2000b. The Best of Paul Keens-Douglas, Vol 1. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Keensdee Productions. King, Nicole. 2001. C.L.R. James and Creolization: Circles of Influence. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Markham, E.A. 1995a. “Conversations at Upton Park iii”. In Misapprehensions, by Markham, 77. London: Anvil. Markham, E.A. 1995b. “For Brian Lara”. In Misapprehensions, by Markham, 78. London: Anvil.

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Palko, Abigail. 2016. Imagining Motherhood in Contemporary Irish and Caribbean Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rubasingham, Indhu. 2002. “Introduction”. In Plays: I , by Roy Williams, xv– xxii. London: Methuen. Seymour, Roger. 2016. “Who Won the Shell Shield in 1975”. Stabroek News. Online. https://www.stabroeknews.com/2016/features/05/15/won-1975shell-shield/. Surin, Kenneth. 1995. “C.L.R. James’ Materialist Aesthetic of Cricket”. In Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture, edited by Hilary Beckles and Brian Stoddart, 313–341. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Troester, Rosalie Riegle. 1984. “Turbulence and Tenderness: Mothers, Daughter, and “Othermothers” in Paule Marshall’s “Brown Girl, Brownstones”. Sage 1 (2): 13–16. Williams, Roy. 2002a [1996]. “Foreword”. In Plays: I , by Williams, ix–xiv. London: Methuen. Williams, Roy. 2002b [1996]. “The No Boys Cricket Club”. In Plays: I , by Williams, 1–72. London: Methuen. Wynter, Sylvia. 2012. “Bat and Ball”. In The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 237–242. Leeds: Peepal Tree.

CHAPTER 7

Migrant Movements and Cricketing Stereotypes

This chapter concentrates on a relatively small set of texts predominantly set in, or written in relation to, London, that specifically navigate cricketing and sporting stereotypes associated with Caribbean and British African-Caribbean men, including how these stereotypes are mobilised in territory-crossing cricket encounters. It also examines how the rhetorical rejection of cricket is used as a strategy to highlight both the reductive vision of Black masculinity dominant in Britain, and the need to counter it and its consequences. The chapter begins with C.L.R. James’ explanation of the importance of England to his understanding of cricket’s place in his life and worldview, and then explores his response to the stereotypes used to describe West Indies cricketers, particularly Learie Constantine and Gary Sobers. The discussion then examines Samuel Selvon’s short story “The Cricket Match”, from Ways of Sunlight (1957), for the way it both uses and sends up stereotyped ideas of Caribbean manhood, and the way it investigates a move from the mixed-raced space of the metropolitan factory out into the English village. From here the discussion moves forward a generation, to Playing Away (1987), the film directed by Horace Ové and written by Caryl Phillips, which manages and unpicks the racially coded stereotypes at work in London and England under Thatcherism. Finally, the chapter analyses poems by A.L. Hendriks, John Agard, J.D. Douglas and Benjamin Zephaniah that tackle racism, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Westall, The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65972-1_7

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social exclusion and the flattening assumptions held about British AfricanCaribbean men in Britain during the 1980s and after, particularly as they pertain to the success of the West Indies cricket team. With this set of examples, it is clear that cricket has been important to the self-articulation and confidence of Caribbean-linked men moving to or living in Britain, but also that cricket’s ties to the continuing legacies of imperial conceptions of race and Englishness mean that the relationship between cricket and Black men of Caribbean heritage can be co-opted, hollowed out and used as part of an effort to minimise their roles as aesthetic, political and history-making agents.

I Physical and intellectual movement characterised James’ life. Physically, he moved from Trinidad to England in 1932, then on to the US in 1938, before returning to the Caribbean as independence was dawning, and then later resettling in London. Intellectually, too, he was perpetually on the move—questioning and responding to what he learnt, experienced, read and thought while taking up, adapting and moving past earlier ideas, positions and allegiances. As is often noted, this makes him a tricky thinker to fathom, and it has left his work open to accusations of contradiction and inconsistency, despite his retention of several key tenets or grounding principles—including the importance of cricket to his worldview, and the need to always keep moving forward. The significance James attaches to movement is evident across his writing and especially in Beyond a Boundary (1963), where the term appears in relation to the nationalist movements of the Caribbean, is a crucial part of his argument that cricket is art, and forms part of his method for reading cricketers and their individual styles historically. It also comes to the fore when he states that much had to change before he understood that what matters most is “movement; not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there” (James 2013, 113). James makes this comment in the context of Constantine’s critical response to his friend’s imperially derived view of cricket, and Constantine’s simple yet enlightening counter assertion, “They are no better than we” (112). This position, expressed by Constantine, the West Indies cricketer, as early as 1923, was more politically direct than James’ thinking at that point. It gained new traction with James, though, when he migrated to Britain and realised that his own mixture

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of “knowledge and ignorance” about cricket and the “mother country” came, as Constantine had indicated, from his development as a Victorian “British intellectual” in empire (112). James first came to Britain on the back of an invitation from Constantine, who had himself left Trinidad in 1929 to play for a small cottonweavers town called Nelson, in the Lancashire League of northern England. “If things get too rough”, Constantine wrote, “I’ll see you through” (110). And this was certainly what he did. James lived with the Constantines in Nelson from May 1932 to March 1933, and he describes Constantine’s “sponsorship” of him as part of his friend’s efforts to help fellow Caribbean migrants in Britain and support those who would represent their people well (125). While in Nelson, James was aware of the representative pressure he and Constantine carried: as two of only three Black men in the area (the other being a dust cart driver), they felt “automatically under observation” and like “whatever [they] did would be judged as representative of the habits and standards of millions of people back home” (124). Constantine, James says, would sometimes depart for the relative “anonymity of London or even Manchester” to gain some respite (124). Although things hadn’t been easy for the Constantine family when they first arrived, by 1932 they were firmly established “Nelson citizens” (124), with Constantine himself central to community life because of his critical role in the town’s cricketing fortunes. Their integration helped James enormously. In lots of ways, James’ time in Nelson was fantastically productive and was marked by his intellectual move into Marxism. As Christian Høgsberg (2014) argues, James’ time in Nelson set the tone and pace for the intellectual transformation and acceleration that he underwent while in Britain in the 1930s. From the domestic and social base provided by the Constantines, James was able to ghost-write Constantine’s first book, Cricket and I (1932); secure a local publisher for The Case for West Indies SelfGovernment (1933); and complete the work for the book’s abridgement published by Leonard Woolf. James’ ground-breaking novel, Minty Alley (1936), also gained a publisher around this time, and he started research for what would eventually become The Black Jacobins (1938). Most immediately, though, Constantine’s instruction to send a piece James had written about cricketer Sidney Barnes to Neville Cardus resulted in Cardus appointing James to the Manchester Guardian as a cricket correspondent, providing James with a much-needed income source. Meanwhile, James records that his time in Nelson was one of “growth”

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for himself and Constantine as they embarked upon a campaign of political education, speaking about the Caribbean and independence, race and class, often with James following Constantine’s cricketing point of departure or taking up invitations on the back of Constantine’s fame (118). James also describes himself as causing some disruption to the family life of the Constantines—and possibly also to Constantine’s cricket—with his presence, his nocturnal study habits, and even his overly casual (or selfish) distance from his host’s cricketing career during his political awakening, and specifically his move towards Marxism and the Labour Party. Indeed, James writes that he was “singularly fortunate in that [his] first introduction to England was to the working people of the North, and not to the overheated atmosphere of London”, and that his introduction to cricket in England was the Lancashire League and not the county cricket he observed later (134). While James minimises his initial 1932 sojourn in London, and his regular trips back to the capital from Nelson, his explanation serves to underscore the importance of learning about England, Britain and class by maintaining a distance from the metropolitan centre and the imperial Englishness of southern England, and instead living and working in “Red Nelson”—a hotbed of working-class activity, pride and protest that informed James’ view of the labour movement generally and the Labour Party’s position on empire specifically. In Beyond a Boundary James writes that the book’s ideas “originated in the West Indies”, but that it was “in England and in English life and history that [he] was able to track them down and test them”, and he did so first in Nelson (2003, xxvvii) and later when he returned to England in the 1950s. He also says something notably similar about his understanding of Constantine: It took England to reveal to me the hidden aspects of Constantine’s personality, as a politician and as a human being. I thought at any rate that I knew his cricket. I didn’t. I couldn’t, because he was the same man on the field that he was in our private and public life. The difference was that there, or rather in the Lancashire League, he was able to give his powers full play. (128)

James’ enlarged view of Constantine is part of his increasingly sophisticated appreciation of the relationship between individuals and wider sociopolitical and historical patterns. This manifests directly in his reading of cricketers and their playing styles, as well as his view of figures like

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Toussaint L’Ouverture. But, as he develops his complex vision of the connections between an individual, especially a great or historically significant Black figure, their people and history, James also repeatedly writes against scholars and commentators who reduce such Black figures to racialised types or symbols and inert or accidental performers, rather than recognising them as conscious political actors and active, historymaking agents. As Høgsberg records, just before he left Trinidad, James wrote a particularly scathing response to a 1931 article, published in The Beacon, by Sidney Harland—an Englishman resident in Trinidad— in which Harland claimed that he saw the Black population around him as “a race inferior in intelligence to whites” (2014, 26). James’ rebuttal exposes the clichés at work in Harland’s assessment, and insists that whatever the shortcomings of his people, intelligence is not one of them. James carries this approach to challenging racially reductive accounts of Caribbean actors forward into his cricket writing, and he appears to learn much from F.R. Leavis and the Scrutiny movement of the 1950s because he applies their close textual reading strategies to his own reading of cricketers and the “texts” of their individual playing styles (Hill 2013). Indeed, it is by deploying such technically detailed readings that he is able to repeatedly write against the false readings, misconceptions and superficial depictions of West Indies cricketers, including, most substantially, Constantine and Sobers. Andrew Smith insightfully compares James’ response to Don Bradman’s depiction of Constantine to James’ response to an article on Frederick Douglass. Smith points up how James makes a similar demand for Constantine’s and Douglass’ standing as historical actors, whose selfdetermination and political agency was purposeful and directed (2010, 61–62). They were not empty Black bodies who found themselves acted upon by history: they were, in their own ways, making and expressing their historical and political views through their actions. James lambasts the account of Constantine given in Bradman’s autobiography—which avers, “In a quarter of an hour of terrific speed bowling or unorthodox hitting [Constantine] could swing the fortunes of a match”—as “embarrassing” (James 2013, 129). Indeed, James insists that “Speed bowling, however terrific, and quarter-hours of unorthodox hitting do not win first place in a league competition seven years out of nine”, as Constantine did with Nelson (129). Without dwelling on the racial markers of physical strength, aggression and natural or unthinking power, James then unpacks

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just how this reductive description fails to attend to the skilful and practised bowling and batting strategies Constantine displayed. James marks out two particular strokes, offered in a single over of league batting, as indicative of Constantine’s abilities, insisting that there was no “recklessness or chanciness” in them, and that anything appearing “unorthodox was carried out with a precision […] equal to the orthodoxy of [the bowler’s] classical action and perfect length” (131). James states: Constantine’s leg-glance from outside the off-stump to long-leg was a classical stroke. It was not due to his marvellous West Indian eyes and marvellous West Indian wrists. It was due, if you must have it, to his marvellous West Indian brains. He saw that the best league bowlers were always out to put him down, and the conditions, including the marvellous league crowds, compelled him to work out new and safe ways of countering them. (132)

In the same manner, James rebuts Wisden’s account of Constantine’s last Test innings. He cites cricket’s most holy of publications as presenting the “care free cricket of the West Indies”, with Constantine offering a “gaiety” that reflected his work in league cricket, as he “revolutionized all the recognised features of cricket” and gave the bowling his “aggressive treatment” (qtd. in James 2006b, 243). While recognising that their “facts are correct”, James’ retort rejects both the idea of a “carefree and impudent manner” and that this was ever in evidence in Constantine’s league career: “There were times when he would amaze spectators by the audacity, even the daring of his strokes but it was all very seriously and systemically done: league cricket was not played for fun” (243). The “not played for fun” phrasing here seems to signal both a northern and professional appreciation of league cricket, channelling, potentially, the voice of England’s northern working class (at least in Nelson), and reflecting the seriousness that Constantine himself brought to his playing career, which was—after all—his livelihood. With this small gesture, James positions Constantine in opposition to the amateur ideal of southern England, still held within cricket, and also against the racialised tropes attached to positive depictions of Constantine’s play. He also turns again to the two particular strokes described above to explain Constantine’s style of play, insisting that Constantine’s batting is not marked by the “unorthodox”, unthinking big hitting that colours these descriptions. Instead, for James, Constantine’s mode of attack is positive, considered, strategic—especially

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when inventive—and entirely invested in the importance of the game, whether a League, Test or other type of match. Constantine’s attacking style is evidence of both his individually skilful style and his expression of the tradition of West Indies cricket that is similarly marked by such an approach to batting. James describes this approach to batting as “a West Indian heritage”, part of the attacking and stylish forms of play that characterise Caribbean cricket and were notably absent from mid-twentieth century English and Australian batting. James uses the same anti-stereotyping approach to explain the significance of Rohan Kanhai’s batting and the playing style of Sobers. As Smith observes, when James describes Kanhai’s play as embodying “some essence of […] the history of the West Indies”, he is “responding to those pundits who greeted the emergence of high-profile, non-white West Indian cricketers with sotto voce hints about a very different kind of ‘essence’, about the supposedly superior athleticism of non-European bodies” (2010, 60). And Smith continues, much of James’ “best cricket writing […] involved a deliberate refutation” of those claiming reductive “biological difference”, and a working through of how the achievements of West Indies players and the team were “historically explicable and politically meaningful”, at once linked to individual playing styles and expressing the ongoing “West Indian quest for identity” (61). This is especially clear in James’ writing on Sobers. As briefly noted in Chapter 4, James presents Sobers’ batting, bowling and fielding as “a living embodiment of centuries of a tortured history” (1992, 389). Although he identifies and describes Sobers’ “individual style”, he rejects an English journalist’s view of Sobers’ individualism as a form of exceptionalism (2013, 205). Instead, James asserts that Sobers brought together immense talent and dedicated training with the unique history of the Caribbean to make him and his style “the fruit of a great tradition” (1992, 379–380). James also refutes England batsman Colin Cowdrey’s view of Sobers, stating that: Cowdrey believes that West Indians are naturally gifted for cricket, and Sobers is undoubtedly a very gifted man. It is admitted that West Indies Test players play in a special “manner”. Physique? I don’t think so. It is the product of a tradition […] Nearly all West Indies Test players today have played Saturday afternoon league cricket where they do not lose but have to develop the home style. (2006a, 217)

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James’ rejection of the association of Caribbean cricketers, and Black men generally, with the physical body only is here made explicit, though it runs beneath much of his work, including his writing on the relationship between the individual, intelligent style of a great cricketer and their historical representativeness. Outlining James’ position, Smith explains that James provides a “deliberate compounding of two ideas”: first, that “all great artists” exhibit “mastery” of their art, by drawing on and remaking tradition (in a manner akin to T.S. Eliot’s account of tradition); and, second, that individual achievement, as with Sobers, for example, “rested on and was acclaimed by a specific community […] as belonging to them and demonstrating something about them” (2010, 119). This means that “creative daring is not reducible to intrinsic individual ability”, and neither are individuals, however great in their own domains, “mere conduits for some kind of historical meaning” (119). It also means that “the two claims that James makes […] for greatness are interleaved”, so that the “specific claim (that what the genius does is in some sense ‘definitive’ in terms of a particular activity) and the wider, sociological claim (that what they do becomes part of a process of historical self-definition for those around them) are part of each other” (121). These are the grounds on which James rejects and counters the stereotyped flattening out of West Indies cricketers and other Caribbean and Black historical agents. This idea is at the centre of Beyond a Boundary, and was shaped by his writing of the book in the mid-1950s, after his return to Britain in 1953, and while in conversation with George Headley and Constantine (Hill 2013). While it cannot be said that the complexity of James thinking is directly reflected in the Caribbean cricket writing that emerges in Britain with the post-war influx of migrants—or later, generationally— there is a continued relationship between cricket, Black masculinity and the critique of similar stereotypes that is seen in such writing, most notably in its negotiation with boundary or territory crossing. This is the focus of the rest of this chapter.

II Just two years after the landing of the Empire Windrush in 1948, Selvon arrived in Britain as part of the post-war influx of Caribbean migrants travelling to and settling in the imperial “mother country”. He stayed until 1978. Selvon had made the transatlantic crossing with George Lamming, and both writers commented on the ways in which coming to Britain

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provided them, and many like them, with a regional Caribbean identity— an identity that was important to, and expressed within, Anglophone Caribbean literature as it emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, largely from their London base. Lamming suggested that “no islander from the West Indies sees himself as a West Indian until he encounters another islander in [a] foreign territory” (1960, 214; cf. Sindoni 2006, 148). Similarly, Selvon detailed how, “for the first time in [his life,] he lived amongst people from all over the Caribbean” while he was in London (qtd. in Sindoni 2006, 150). Part of Selvon’s experience was “discovering a pride, a national pride, in being what [he was], that [he] never felt at home” (qtd. in Sindoni 2006, 149). This sense of pride shows itself in Selvon’s London stories, from Lonely Londoners (1956) onwards, manifesting in their content, characterisation and creole idiom, even as those stories negotiate the everyday and often difficult experiences of migrant life for the community of young Caribbean men that Selvon depicts. It might also be said to show itself in Selvon’s use of calypso comedy and, relatedly, his interrogation of masculinity. As James observes, “Selvon’s role in establishing Caribbean writing in English is now widely recognized” (2001, 104). This is in no small part because of Sevlon’s rightful claim to having been the first “Caribbean writer to explore and employ dialect in a full length novel [for] both narrative and dialogue” (qtd. in Nasta 1988, 63). Selvon’s use of creole in his novels has been the focus of much critical attention, on account of its originality, for the way it positioned him with his ordinary migrant peers, and for its bridging between oral Caribbean traditions and a literary vernacular that was digestible for his international/British as well as Caribbean audiences (Sindoni 2006, 127; cf. Nasta 1988, 9). In addition, Selvon’s original use of calypso-like comedy, and what Gordon Rohlehr (1988) identified as his deployment of calypso rhythms, comedy and modes of masculine speech and social performance has meant that his early work has typically been read in relation to this musical tradition. In an interview with John Thieme, Selvon agreed that he had a “debt to calypso” that shows itself in his writing, and explained that this comes from his writing directly about people from the Caribbean, and specifically Trinidad, because “they present themselves most truthfully in that form” and so he too “uses that form” to depict them (Thieme 2003, 119). With such comments, the centrality of calypso to Caribbean writing in the 1950s and 1960s, and the scholarly attention given to calypso and

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masculinity in Anglophone Caribbean literature generally, Malachi McIntosh (2016) is right to caution against the overuse of calypso-focused interpretations of Selvon’s work, and the way this dominant approach has overshadowed other attributes, strategies and the developmental changes seen across Selvon’s canon. Nevertheless, where most critical discussions have concentrated on calypso in Selvon’s London novels, relatively little attention has been paid to Ways of Sunlight, Selvon’s only collection of short stories, and even less to “The Cricket Match”, which cannot be discussed without the centrality of calypso being recognised. This story demonstrates how cricket might be the prompt for a regional and personal confidence that buffers Caribbean men from the judgement, competition and exposure built into their encounters with British or English men in London, and out in England’s villages, and it does so even as its version of narratorial calypso comedy ensures that their performed confidence is also given depth and ironic layering. Published just after Lonely Londoners, Ways of Sunlight is organised into two parts, with the first nine stories set in Trinidad and the last ten located in London. Mark Stein suggests that the two sections demonstrate how a transgression of national boundaries and a connection between the two locations have not yet been integrated into a singular vision or writing practice for Selvon (2004, 44). However, it might be more useful to consider not only that the stories were written at different times, before and after Selvon’s arrival in London, but also that there are similarities of concern, approach and humour sprinkled across the two structural sections—even if the focus on rural lives in Trinidad and war-related disruptions in Port of Spain of the first section present quite different contexts to London life as it appears afterwards. In addition, it seems that the idea of travelling, moving and crossing territories is critical to the structural logic of the collection as well as to a number of its stories, some of which are set in Trinidad and others London. For example, “Johnson and the Cascadura”, the romance between Urmilla, the Indian-Trinidadian peasant, and Garry, an Englishman, navigates the transatlantic, imperial and personal journeying that is necessary for their relationship to grow, especially with Garry travelling to England and back again to Trinidad. Relatedly, in “Waiting for Aunty to Cough”, Caribbean migrant Brackley travels far outside inner London to date his English girlfriend, Beatrice, who lives with her aunt in a suburban, and, therefore, strangely alienated, location beyond Brackley’s metropolitan or inner-city

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frame of reference. Despite the many differences in the ways the relationships and characters are presented in these two stories, there is a telling interest in patterns of movement and the strains—in personal and potentially political terms—emerging with cross-cultural and territorycrossing relationships. These stories, of course, sit within Selvon’s broader representation of migrant life. As Maria Grazia Sindoni says, Selvon’s London novels explore the “theme of contact” in terms of the “clash among cultures […], languages, [and] ethnic groups, each with its own social, economic and cultural priorities or hierarchy of values” (2006, 28). This is also true of the London stories in Ways of Sunlight, especially “The Cricket Match”, which comically depicts the racial and national stereotypes of “West Indian” and English factory workers in Chiswick by bringing them together through cricket. “The Cricket Match” is set against the 1950 West Indies tour of England, which the visitors won (see Introduction), and opens with reference to the “time when the West Indies cricket eleven […] show the Englishmen the finder points of the game” (Selvon 1987, 148). The story also references the 1950 Test match at Lord’s specifically, along with the iconic calypso “Victory Test Match” that celebrated West Indies’ win in that game. The protagonist, Algernon, seizes the opportunity to “lambast the English fellars” he works with in a tyre factory, declaring West Indies to be playing “cricket, lovely, cricket”—citing the famous refrain of the calypso (see Introduction)—and even singing a calypso he creates that ends with the tellingly simple rhyme, “that in the world of sport, is to wait until the West Indies report” (148). A direct link is made between the successful and exciting cricket played by the West Indies team and the confidence this provides Algernon and his fellow Caribbean factory worker, Roy—“the more the West Indies eleven score, the more they getting on” (150). From the story’s outset, then, Caribbean cricket is bound to a kind of calypso-performance of masculine confidence for the migrant worker, even as Selvon deploys the ironic and exposing humour of calypso to send up—without belittling or abandoning—Algernon. Indeed, Algernon and Roy are able to present themselves as cricket experts who used to live and play alongside West Indies’ star players. Algernon comments on the cricket action conveyed by the BBC radio, even “making demonstration” as if he knows how Sonny Ramadhin spins the ball (149–150). In response to the “English fellars tell[ing] him” that they “bet he used to play a lot back home”, Algernon claims, “I don’t want to brag […] but I used to live next door to Ramadhin, and we

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used to teach each other the finer point” (150). We should note here that Algernon is replying to his English co-workers in Standard English, giving his performative deception a grammatically correct and polite form, while the narration continues around him in Selvon’s crafted Caribbean creole. We should also note that the English workers are telling Algernon about his own past because they presume they know it already. In fact, at the start of the story, it is clear that Algernon is able to regale the English with his claims to cricketing greatness because the standing stereotype is that all Caribbean men love and play cricket: Well in truth and in fact, the people in this country believe that everybody who come from the West Indies at lease like the game even if they can’t play it. But you can take it from me that it have some tests that don’t like the game at all, and Algernon was one of them. But he see a chance to give the Nordics tone and he get all the gen on the matches and players, and come like an authority in the factory on cricket. In fact, the more they ask him the more convinced Algernon get that perhaps he have the talent of a [Clyde] Walcott in him only waiting for a chance to come out. (148)

Algernon’s claims cash in on English expectation and presumption, and are motivated by his desire to “give the Nordics tone”, that is, to cheekily boast and dominate the seemingly cold, distant and white (hence Nordic) English workers. Yet his claims also establish the possibility of self-delusion, as if he isn’t entirely sure where his calypso-inspired picong performance (of combative humour) stops and his own potential for cricket begins or ends. The narrative voice even addresses the reader directly, asking: “But what you think Algernon know about cricket in truth?” (150). This gesture is gently revealing, bringing readers into the joke about Algernon’s empty bravado, all the while hinting at a quiet critique lurking beneath the humour. Readers are being told that Algernon knows nothing, but the question’s underside might be taken to point up just how quickly some readers will have expected Algernon to actually know and like the game, and such reads might have quite easily been drawn into his farce of cricketing authority—just like the white English factory workers—without this guiding narrative voice. Eventually, Charles, “an Englisher” from the suburbs, invites Algernon to put a Caribbean team together and come to play his village eleven on their “Real English turf”, stating that even if his village side aren’t quite a match for their Caribbean standards, the game will still be “fun”

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(150). This opportunity presents a clear danger of exposure for Algernon and Roy, and yet not wanting to “back out”, Algernon gathers together “the boys” they think “should know how to play” (151)—where perhaps their own presumptions about other Caribbean men playing cricket start to creep in. In typical calypso fashion, Algernon understands himself as needing to “hustle […] somehow” to get a team together (151). In a positive manner, though, cricket becomes a prompt for male communality, for the gathering together of migrant Caribbean men, and it provides them with an opportunity to escape the city and compete against the men of (semi-)rural England. As Bettina Jensen suggests, Ways of Sunlight is “vitally concerned with communal identity” and the cricketing prompt enables “the boys” to organise themselves as a kind of Caribbean collective in the face of British or English opposition (2018, 68). It also, as Jensen reads it, demonstrates how their collective action—as a group drawn seemingly from across the Anglophone Caribbean—“prefigures the idea of the West Indies Federation” (72). This argument is bolstered by the background presence in the novel of the regional West Indies cricket team. Ironically, though, the seemingly benign offer of an English village cricket match turns out to be a potentially embarrassing adventure that presses Algernon’s Caribbean collective to venture outside of the metropolitan centre and into a competition and environment that might expose them—collectively—as hollow, self-deluding and flawed public performers. As many others have noted, Selvon’s London stories are heavily invested in the experience of “the boys”, the community of Caribbean men working to survive in post-war London. His prose is filled with their experiences of racism and social exclusion, employment and unemployment, financial and other hardships, sexual (mis)adventure and relationship struggles, as well as their enjoyment of London itself. In many ways, Selvon’s construction of a literary creole, which he said was an effort to render a “Caribbean way of talking”, comes from him acting as their “witness” and, to some degree, being part of that communal experience (qtd. in Nasta 1988, 67, 71). Yet Selvon shouldn’t be conflated with the voice of the workers he presents. Indeed, in an unpublished autobiographical essay, Selvon revealed that not only did he become “a bit fed-up of being taken as the mouthpiece of the coloured community”, but that his own “circumstances […] were far removed from that of the hustling immigrant in a factory” (qtd. in McIntosh 2016, 58). So, we might understand that, where Algernon is cast as this kind of hustling

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factory immigrant, and his “boys” the typical mix of workers, night-shift survivors and money-borrowers found across Selvon’s London fiction, the narrative voice is sympathetic to them and their performances, but is also working to reveal how their verbal, social and cricketing performances function as coping strategies. In one scene, Wilky, Williams, Heads and others gather at Algernon’s place in Kensal Rise to discuss the proposition of playing the English village team. Their talk—including about how Algernon’s “big mouth […] land him in trouble”—reinforces the rejection of the stereotype that all Caribbean men are invested in cricket, as they share their limited or non-existent cricketing past, including memories of childhood cricket and an insistent “Cricket, I never play in my life” (Selvon 1987, 152). Still, “the boys begin to remember what they could of the game”, with Roy’s effort at a batting grip being corrected, Wilky declaring himself captain and Chips admiring himself wearing a cricket cap (152). In a “half-hearted sort of way”, then, they agree to play the match even if, on the day itself, only eight show up and the English captain limits his team’s size to a sporting eight to make sure the contest can go ahead (152). The long-awaited game “on the village green” is described as “historic” (153). It seems historic because of the performances of the two teams: the lucky batting enjoyed by Algernon and his teammates, and the terrible bowling offered by their hosts. The narrative voice even hypothesises that the village team’s poor performance might be related to the international match between England and West Indies: that “cold feet take the English [village] side because of the licks the West Indies eleven was sharing at Lord’s” that day (153). The success of the West Indies team gives Algernon’s team something to anchor themselves, providing a prompt for claiming knowledge of a crucial area of imperial ideology— cricket and the sporting ethic—which, at the same time, might be causing a postimperial crisis of confidence in England, and for the English men in the game. So, instead of Algernon’s team being exposed as cricketing imposters, the English side bowls “some nice hop-and-drop” that “the boys lashing for six and four” (153). Even Algernon himself is able to have a moment of glory: When Algernon turn to bat he walk out like a veteran. He bend down and inspect the pitch closely and shake his head, as if he ain’t too satisfied with the condition of it but had to put up with it. He put on gloves, stretch out his hands as if he about to shift a heavy tyre at the factory, and take up the

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most unorthodox stance them English fellars ever did see […] No doubt an ordinary ball thrown with ease would have had him out […] but […] the bowler come down with a nice hop-and-drop a baby couldn’t miss. Algernon close his eyes and he make a swipe at the ball […] the ball went right out of the field and fall in the road […] Algernon feel like a king: only thing, when he hit the ball the bat when after it and nearly knock down a English fellar […] Them Englishers never seen a stroke like that in their lives. (153)

There is much happening in this small sequence. Algernon’s cricketing performance is made ironically large and deliberate, his unorthodox stance gives away his lack of experience and skills. That he feels like “a king” for a fleeting moment reminds us of the power of sporting success as well as the beauty or significance of an individual shot. In this specific example, Algernon is able to exceed the boundary of the game, the very territorial enclosure that appears to threaten or expose his masculine performance. Nevertheless, the comedic incompetence of losing his bat means that there is no doubt about this being a fluke, and something he’s unlikely to be able to replicate. That the opposition had “never seen a stroke like it” reinforces both the difference expected of Caribbean players, and the manner in which any difference in their play is quickly glorified and pegged back to preconceived ideas of natural-born talent and unorthodox playing styles. This is part of what leaves Algernon and his players unchallenged when they discuss the game with their English counterparts. The description of the match is only one-third of the story, with the preceding two-thirds being given over to Algernon’s talk and build up, indicating that the match itself is only the climax of his continuing performance of masculine bravado. And instead of Algernon and his team being exposed as cricketing imposters, the English side’s bowling gifts them simple opportunities for run scoring until rain eventually halts play and protects the visitors from having to bowl and finish the game. In the pub later, the migrant team have all taken up Algernon’s boastful idiom: “the Englishers asking all kinds of questions […] and the boys talking as if cricket so common in the West Indies that babies born with either a bat or ball” (154). Yet this match-day sequence ends on a revealing note. Charles praises Algernon’s “wonderful shot […,] grudgingly”, because he “still had a feeling that the boys were only talkers, but so much controversy raging that he don’t know what to say” (154). The “still”

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is revelational. Up until this point there has been no textual acknowledgement that Charles suspects Algernon of bluffing or bragging in a superficial fashion. Here, though, it becomes clear that Charles’ politeness is a mask he wears while trying to expose Algernon and his teammates. Charles sought not only victory over them, but also some kind of pegging back of their competitive boasting. At work, Charles continues to try to get Algernon to bring his team back in order to complete the match, but Algernon repeatedly dodges the invitation, explaining “how the boys scatter about” (154). The closing line nevertheless sees Algernon take up his previous posture, declaring that “next season [he] will get a sharp eleven together”, and looking to demonstrate to Charles the miraculous shot he made during their game: “Now, if you want me to show you how I make that stroke...” (154). In the end, Algernon knows how to maintain his mask, and while it seems that he is at once milking and managing the irony of his claims to cricketing expertise, the story allows him to remain masked. He never loses face in front of the “English fellars”. Rather, he is protected from their scrutiny. In this way, there is a protective warmth offered by the story in that despite the reader gaining a clear sense of Algernon’s shortcomings and superficiality, his lack of skill and his cricketing confidence trick, he is never exposed to those he has to work with and survive among. Selvon allows Algernon’s external facing performance of masculinity and bravado to stay intact, both within the space of the English village green and back in the realm of the London factory. It should be clear from this ending that calypso comedy is also wedded to the idea of territory crossing. The Caribbean team is invited out of London, out of the city centre they know and to which they are typically confined by work and housing. Their trip to the village is not just “historic” because of the cricket match. It is history-making because they are penetrating, seemingly for the first time, a crucial space of imperial Englishness—that of the cricket pitch on the village green. While the story itself doesn’t elaborate on the direct significance of this, it seems clear that, structurally, the story moves from the mixed-race employment setting of London, into Algernon’s London flat, and then out into a kind of (semi-)rural countryside setting, with its cricket pitch and English village pub. There is a direct juxtaposition of the inner city and the village, as if these spaces are clearly colour-coded and racialised, as (predominantly) Black and white, respectively. Although the two sides meet in the single, but still segmented, space of urban manual labour, and all are invited into the village pub after the game, it seems that in both spaces

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the Caribbean migrants are not only newcomers, but newcomers looking to find a way of performing themselves in front of the white men of England. In interviews, Selvon himself has commented on his attachment to, and affection for, both London and the English countryside, while indicating that he appreciated their significant differences for migrants and for the cultural imperialism that marked Caribbean education when he was growing up. In a 1988 interview with Thieme, he said: “What I wanted out of London, I got. […] I had difficult times sometimes – jobs and things like that – but by and large I love London” (2003, 123). Later, in an interview with Alessandra Dotti, he twinned this “love” of London with his “great love” of the English countryside: I had a very great love for the English countryside although I had never known it at all […] and one of the things that I did when I first went to London was to go out into the country districts, trying to see the flowers and the fields and the valleys and the landscapes I had read so much about. I found a great deal of satisfaction out of that … that love of London and the English countryside as a whole. (2003, 124)

In this passage, escaping London for the English countryside reads as if England can be an extension of London or that England is part of an imperial imaginary that wants to consume and be part of both London and the countryside. However, in his essay, “Little Drops of Water”, Selvon wrote that “Nothing could be as peaceful or inspiring as the English countryside: it is worth being killed by London to spend a few months amongst the aspens and pines of a cool wood” (qtd. in Nasta 1988, 62). The juxtaposition of London and the English countryside is striking here, and this is the kind of opposition that is structuring “The Cricket Match”, even as the story alludes to an affection for both spaces. It is the territory crossing performed by the Caribbean migrants that unsettles and eventually destabilises the English village team, and it is the return of the migrants back to the city, and factory, that allows the previous order of Caribbean boast and polite English response to resume. Elizabeth Maslen writes that Selvon “offered subversive readings” of the national condition of England in Lonely Londoners (2004, 45; cf. Jackson 2016, 121), and a similar point might be made about his brief rendering of England and Englishness in “The Cricket Match”. In this short story, Selvon deftly navigates the separation of British-metropolitan London and an English (perhaps national) space beyond, and the comedic performances of imperial culture that enable Caribbean migrants to access an England beyond London, without then being exposed or defeated.

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III One of Selvon’s last writing projects while residing in London was his work on the script for Pressure (1975), a ground-breaking film directed by Ové about the limited employment opportunities and racism encountered by a Black boy just out of school. With this project, Selvon was connected to the protests against race-based exclusion seen in Britain, and especially in London, during the late 1970s and across the 1980s (cf. Jackson 2016). When asked about contemporary race relations in the UK, after his 1978 relocation to Canada, Selvon indicated that, while he thought things had improved during his time in London, the situation (as he’d heard and read about it) seemed to be turning back upon itself and getting worse. It is in this context, a generation after Selvon’s “The Cricket Match”, that Caryl Phillips develops his screenplay Playing Away, which is similarly invested in territory crossing and the movement out of London and into the English countryside by a Caribbean-derived cricket team. This screenplay became a 1987 film, also directed by Ové, with relatively few changes beyond small sequencing, editing and scripttightening gestures. Ové’s filmic rendering captures in detailed terms the contrasts between metropolitan and multicultural London, on one hand, and English village life, on the other. Like Selvon, Phillips chose to have his Caribbean-linked cricketers travel, explaining that they were “the team that had been playing away the longest” (1987a, x). Consequently, the story follows the so-called “Brixton Conquistadors” as they travel out into Norfolk/Suffolk to play against Sneddington. The Conquistadors seem to have been invited as part of the village’s “African Famine Relief” and “Third World Week” efforts, making them the chosen Black subjects standing for white charitable action—even if this is recast in terms of sporting competition—and representing London, the Caribbean, Africa and the “Third World” in an enormous conflation that marks a totalising of Black Otherness. Phillips also has the team name, Brixton Conquistadors, work hard, flagging the Spanish and Portuguese control of the Americas that largely preceded British presence in the “New World”. The name also highlights the importance of crossing and recrossing the Atlantic Ocean, and indicates that the team’s former, enforced “New World” “home” was the periphery they left in order to establish themselves in a new “home”, potentially as conquerors, in an imperial centre. That its members occupy London, or more precisely Brixton, gives their version of conquering a link to the

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(then) recent race riots, of 1981 and 1985, particularly, and a clear sense of the communal density of inner-city life for its inhabitants of AfricanCaribbean heritage. The team name also looks to signal and play on the sense of migrant invasion articulated in British discourse—the fear of colonisation in reverse—that is most acute in the spaces of Englishness referenced through cricket. And all of this is cast against the two “Black washes” that West Indies inflicted on England’s cricket team in the mid1980s, and the world-conquering powers of that Caribbean collective. So, where Selvon’s “The Cricket Match” draws explicitly on the pride and confidence spreading out from the West Indies victories in 1950, we might say that Phillips’ sense of British African-Caribbean pride can be thought of in relation to the success of the West Indies team in the 1980s. And, again like Selvon, Playing Away manages its comedy with a sense of depth, and an ongoing questioning of the performances of masculinity and sporting conduct depicted (Phillips and McLeod 2015). Phillips characterises the story as “a comedy with a dark undertone” (qtd. in Wilkins 2009, 129; cf. Carrington 2017, 136). Following this line of thinking, John McLeod argues that Playing Away takes “a predominantly comic approach” to its central tensions—around race, class, gender and generation—as it establishes a “forward looking but also gloomy” consciousness to investigate what might spring from Black/white encounters managed through sporting competition (2012, 1795, 1798). Although Phillips was raised on football and in Leeds during the 1970s and 1980s, in Playing Away he reverts to cricket, the sport of his father’s arrivant generation (Phillips 2002a, 298–301). In doing so, he is able to access the racial and class markers of Britain and England that were imperially coded through cricket, and trace their continued currency in contemporary British and English life. He is also able to tap into, and situate the text in relation to, the significance of cricket for first- and second-generation British African-Caribbean men—where this isn’t always the same—and do so with a grounding sense of the Jamesian reading of the game. Phillips (2002b) has written about Beyond a Boundary and James’ view of cricket more broadly, demonstrating his sense of James’ wide and nuanced reading of sporting politics and its significance for Caribbean communities. Where McLeod (2012) links Phillips to James relatively briefly, Ben Carrington (2017) has developed this connection, drawing parallels between their stories of boyhood and sports watching (cricket in Tunapuna for James, and football with Leeds

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United for Phillips). Carrington argues that the two are both “sportswriters” who do not transcend sport in the quality of their writing about it so much as demonstrate the politically nuanced and progressive ways in which sport can help to conceptualise new ways of being, including new ways of being “at home” for those historically bound to the British Empire. Carrington sees Playing Away as grappling with the problem of how to be “at home” when those around you think you are somehow “playing away”, are an “outsider” in their domestic/homely space, and as signalling how the idea of “beating them at their own game” has to work differently when both teams are, effectively, or in some fashion, “at home” (150, original emphasis). Carrington also explains the mismatch between “playing away” and “playing at home”, where the latter marks the location of a team’s advantage as distinct and known, and is far from the complexity that would come from the grammatically odd phrase “playing home”, that might be opposed to “playing away” (151, emphasis added). In addition, we might note that “playing away” carries a sexual, adulterous implication that is woven into Phillips’ plot lines, though this is not noted in Carrington’s analysis. Carrington is certainly right to emphasise the purpose of cricket for the race-based examination of territory crossing that Phillips constructs, and to highlight that Phillips “avoids fetishizing ‘travel’, ‘movement’, and ‘homelessness’” even as he explores ideas of home and migrancy (145). However, his sense of both of Phillips’ cricket teams standing as British needs a minor refinement. Carrington states that cricket has come to stand for “a middle-class inflected and nostalgic notion of a lost colonial Englishness”, and as “a sport that helped frame a sense of post-independence West Indian nationhood” (136). He also says that this enables Phillips to “stage a confrontation between black and white British people in a rather direct, if symbolic way” (136). Yet what seems to be at stake in Playing Away is a contest between Black/urban/London and white/rural/England, as represented by the two cricket teams and their identity-creating and proscribing locales. In his introduction to the screenplay, Phillips emphasises the territorial distinctions between those Black subjects typically coming from rural Caribbean communities into the “industrial forests” of urban cities, and those white English subjects who reside within the Home Counties and are still closely connected to the rural idyll of what might be termed imperial Englishness (1987a, ix). Sarah Neal prefaces her study of “Ruralism and Racism” with the

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example of Playing Away, identifying the two zones of race/space— Black/urban, white/rural—and the manner in which the discourse of pastoral England that separates them relates back to the colonial idiom of the nineteenth century and continues to erase race from the countryside by insisting on its absence, or refusing to “recognise a race/rural relationship” (2002, 448). She describes how the English countryside, associated with Anglo-Saxon purity, has become a site of “white safety”: a location of regression and retreat into a supposedly pre-war sense of Englishness, uncontaminated by immigration and urbanisation. Though Neal does not develop a close reading of Playing Away, the substance and relevance of her argument are evident throughout the text. Moreover, her argument can be complicated by drawing upon Ian Baucom’s (1999) sense of Britain being permitted to become multicultural, mixedraced and metropolitan, particularly as imagined through London, partly because, within the imperial imaginary and long after empire, England and its villages have been understood as a protected space, somewhere those connected to empire’s colonies could not reach or penetrate, and to which they could not belong. Playing Away opens with this iconic image of the green, “picturesque” village, shot from above, with its sense of “peace and harmony”, only to switch to the noise and hassle of London life (Phillips 1987b, 1). Willie Boy (played by Norman Beaton) waits impatiently for the public phone box to become free so that he can confirm his team’s match against Derek’s Sneddington team. The sense of contrasting, even opposing, territories is efficiently established with a repeated back-and-forth between these two defining locations. Coded gestures of entrapment or containment—with Willie Boy squashed into the phone box, and Derek having to squeeze out of the village hall—are also offered as the respective captains confirm the game. As in “The Cricket Match”, it is the white village representative who introduces the idea of cricket as leisure, with Derek characterising the game as, and inviting Willie Boy to agree to, “Just a nice little friendly, eh?” (3). The loaded phrasing works to signal Derek’s smug confidence, as if victory for his side will casually be expected and where feigned modesty leads to a downplaying of the game’s significance. It also intimates a degree of fear that might be behind the invitational “friendly”, as the Black visitors are already being presented with certain behaviour codes and expectations. This opening sequence further emphasises the patterns of movement and migrancy shaping each team’s cricketing connections. In the village, Derek has to

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escape Marjorie’s slide show about the life she shared with Godfrey “in Africa”—clearly the prompt for the village’s vaguely African-inspired invitation to the Caribbean-linked Conquistadors— as if the imperial British frame not only contextualises the match to come, but also provides its chief yet disruptive authority figure, with Godfrey becoming the game’s controversial and seemingly pro-visitor umpire. In the early London scenes, the importance of historic and present journeying as well as the dangers of making “crossings” are reinforced. With an exact sense of Brixton’s geography and significance, Phillips has Willie Boy walking “from Cold Harbour Lane” and “approaching the traffic lights at the Atlantic Road crossroads”, only to be nearly run down by the deliberately reckless driving of Errol, the “youth” in his own team who is currently dating Yvette, his daughter and the passenger in the car (4). At this busy, life-threatening juncture, between “Cold Harbour” and the “Atlantic”, the land and the water of Britain’s colonial past are laid against the immediate migrant experience in London, where Black Britons, young and old, collide in open conflict. Later that same night, Willie Boy’s friend and Vice-Captain, Robbo (acted by Joseph Marcell), drunkenly confesses that his wife wants to return to the Caribbean, meaning that he is stuck, nearly fifty years after making “the biggest decision of [his] life” to cross the Atlantic, “trying to make the same decision again; the same frigging thing in reverse” (17). With Willie Boy’s wife already “home” in Jamaica, and Willie Boy insistent that he will join her soon, the position of first-generation migrants is cast as perpetually uncertain or at least newly unsettled, as if these working men are caught between the “home” they left but are forced to still imagine, and the “home” they have made in London that their wives now want to escape. That Willie Boy eventually seems to agree to Yvette’s request that they should go to join their mother, and be a family again, appears to open up the idea of a “reverse” or “return” in a way that is notably distant from the ordinarily embedded London lives of the younger cricketers in his team—particularly those enjoying the house party that most of the team migrate to after they have confirmed, in the local pub, their players for the game. When they do leave London the next morning, already a player down, the journey of the Conquistadors out into the English countryside is long and confused, with their minibus ending up on the hard shoulder after they realise that not only are they lost, but the place they are trying to find does not feature on the map and is unknown to the

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petrol pump attendant they consult. The expansive shots, and their journeying up and down the same stretch of motorway before arriving all flag how their efforts to find Sneddington are, from the outset, laborious as well as farcical, and that their invitation into one of England’s hidden and protected cricketing villages is an unprecedented event. The idea of difficult journeys is also reinforced each time Willie Boy has to struggle on a bicycle to and from his out-of-village accommodation with Miss Rye. The more formal aspects of the village’s hospitality efforts, led by Marjorie, include a welcome speech in the village square and accommodation being provided by individual villagers as the visiting cricketers are invited to stay in specific domestic homes. With this mechanism, Phillips emphasises and layers the idea of Black invasion or penetration into England and her “homely” spaces. Of course, the village is the “home” of England and cricketing Englishness by default, so their arrival is a penetration of this non-metropolitan space, somewhere seemingly more homely than Britain’s worldly, multicultural London. The move into the domestic spaces of their hosts reinforces and tightens this idea, especially when Derek and Boots begin to clash as Viv, Derek’s wife, serves tea to their guests. When Derek tries to ingratiate himself with the guests he and his wife are hosting, his patronising, book-derived view of the traditions of West Indies cricket is cut short by Boots’ assertion that he bowls “strictly pace” (32), a phrase set to unsettle Derek, and one that Derek returns to when drunkenly sharing his fears about facing the Black bowlers with his friend and teammate, Kevin. At home, though, Derek “jokes” to his guests that “there’s not much call […] around here” for “race relations”, in response to Jeff’s explanation of his professional career (32). Although Viv and the guests look down or away after these remarks, the text has no character to directly rebut Derek’s point. Instead, he is repeatedly emasculated, and his assumptions about England and the village’s racial homogeneity are clearly ironised with his wife’s sexual interest in Jeff and the revelation that she and Derek can’t have children (32). Jeff, though, is himself a problematic figure who eventually abandons the village and the Conquistadors before the match starts (leaving his team two players down). He stands as the only middle-class Conquistador, and is presented as selfish, egotistical and prone to using women, including white women, as part of his effort to rise up the socioeconomic ladder. Yet his presence helps to expose the stereotyped fear of the Black man as a sexual predator or competitor, and sits alongside Errol’s sexual encounter with Angie, where, in both cases, the village women are equal, if not the primary

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instigators. Errol and Angie have sex in the local graveyard, with all the implications this carries for the ancestral line of the village. Indeed, for Angie this is the climax of her immediate sexualisation of Errol and her interest in him over the young white males of the village. Meanwhile, it is this male group that threatens Yvette with sexual violence when she becomes lost on a country road, in a nod to the long history of Black female vulnerability at the hands of white men. Multiple village scenes—of drinking tea, of sharing sandwiches and cakes with a vicar, of singing together in church—are set to establish just how far the Black visitors have come from their London lives. Yet their differences to the white villagers, in clothing, in music and even in demeanour, continue to be flagged and often linked to polite and patient behaviour. Nevertheless, the text also makes clear that, while there might be some ambition for cultural exchange or even simple exposure to difference resting beneath some of these encounters, the visitors are always framed by and caught within the stereotypes about them that abound in the village, whether revealed through direct dialogue or navigated silently through the plot lines Phillips constructs. Before and after their arrival, the Conquistadors are associated with “trouble”, “drugs” and criminal “danger”, both by the uncouth farmer Fred and by Derek and Kevin, the middle-class captain and vice-captain of the cricket team, whose racist sentiments resurface after a period of drinking. The Conquistadors preemptively understand the mix of hospitality and endangering hostility at play, and when Willie Boy sees Boots smoking a “joint” as the minibus arrives he rebukes him—“you want us all banged up in jail?”—only for Boots to declare England already “a prison” (29). Hypocritically, it is actually Fred, the village’s chief racist and alcoholic, who ends up smoking Boot’s provisions later at the local pub. Where the visitors are able to access the more working-class pub, a drunk Willie Boy is “ejected” from the middle-class tavern, with Derek and Kevin escorting him out in a patronising manner that Willie Boy links back to the stereotypes he recognises: the idea that he won’t have enough money to buy his drink, that he is volatile and potentially dangerous, and that he doesn’t know how to behave in a refined environment. All of this then fuels his desire to beat Derek and the village team the next day. Before the game, the Conquistadors realise that Jeff’s silent departure has left them further depleted, so eventually, after a mix of opinions about female participation, Maisie, one of their travelling female supporters, is

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permitted to play. Later, she is the player to catch Derek out, in something of a blunt plot-move that reinforces Derek’s ongoing emasculation by the women around him. Willie Boy’s team talk is brief: “No gentleman shit out there. We play, we win, and we gone. But most of all we win, you hear?” (57) His sentiments are set against the performance of mannered gentility they have encountered in the village, as the veneer sitting atop the usual racial presumptions and prejudices—a veneer that is quickly removed during the game itself. The two teams do exhibit relatively similar internal tensions before the match. With both teams, the women are generally cast aside or pegged to a supportive/domesticated role, the younger players are overtly critical of their seniors, the seniors are impatient and superior, and there are ripples of class antagonisms emerging too. McLeod’s reading of the teams’ similar tensions and difficulties suggests that Phillips shows that for things to change with Black–white relations in England and with Britain, there needs to be “transformation on all sides” (2012, 1802). McLeod contends that Playing Away puts forward a simple version of “divisive attitudes on the move”, so as to ask whether the “uncovering of parallels [between the two teams] offers a meaningful retort to the logic of opposition” emerging from their sporting rivalry (1802). However, as the game advances, it is clear that the Conquistadors come together in direct proportion to the manner in which the village team is pulled part. It might be said that the Conquistadors’ unity is cast in the context of their victory, while Sneddington’s infighting and farcical implosion comes from both facing defeat and thinking that their impending loss is being unfairly orchestrated by the umpire, Godfrey. Godfrey, the former resident of “Africa” who has spent time in the Caribbean, is kind towards Willie Boy and seems to spend his time trying to escape from his wife and the village by walking his dog or hiding out in his snooker room. It is Godfrey who asks Willie Boy directly “whether black men should play games in such times as these”, when there are more “serious considerations” (Phillips 1987b, 36). Willie Boy’s alcoholfuelled and initially jovial response is to insist that everyone “has to relax” sometimes, and that such questions are only arising now that “black men always licking you” (36), in what seems to be a direct reference to the high standing of West Indies and their total dominance, especially over England, at the time. Godfrey explains his own experience of the Caribbean and its poverty, instructing Willie Boy not to “be ashamed of poverty”, and attempting to sympathise with him as another migrant

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emotionally attached to the idea of returning: “We’re all going back” (36). Willie Boy not only rejects the association of his home with poverty, and poverty with shame, but also insists on his difference to Godfrey, because he is “from” the place he wants to return to whereas Godfrey was a late imperial tourist of sorts. In the match itself, Godfrey is accused, by Ian (Neil Morrissey), one of Sneddington’s repugnant young bowlers, of refusing to give the Conquistador batsman out when he should. Ian also accuses the batsman, Errol, of cheating by not “walking” (or voluntarily giving up his wicket) and, in doing so, provokes a conflict in which the assumption about gentlemanly play standing over the technical rules of the game is offered by the white bowler and the adherence to the rules as rules is the response of the Black batsman. The text presents Godfrey as stoic, unmoved by either of the appeals against Errol, and firm in his declaration that “The rules of the game say that I determine whether or not the batsman is out” (71). This explanation—rather than a word on where the ball was going or why the batsman is not out—is intended to remind Sneddington that not only is his authority final, but he can weld it as he sees fit. McLeod writes that “Godfrey subjects the Sneddington team to a sporting version of the social predicament of black Britons, by making them subject to an authority which seems to act discriminately and deliberately unfairly” (1801). However, it is never certain that Godfrey is biased, and the film’s footage of the action is not accurate enough (in cricketing terms) to make the situation clear. In fact, while Godfrey’s previous patronage of Willie Boy might indicate that he would look to advance the Conquistadors, both to support his fellow African-linked travellers, and to injure the obnoxious men he lives among in the village, any presumption that he is cheating actually minimises the achievement of the visitors and replicates the kind of presumptions at play in Ian’s outbursts. Nevertheless, it is Godfrey’s umpiring decisions that cause the final breakdown in the Sneddington team, as half the team walk off in protest, leaving just five cricketers in the field to defend their score against Conquistador batting. When, facing this farce and the humiliation of the home team, Errol asks Willie Boy (his batting partner) if they should “make a game of it” by gifting their opposition “a chance” to get into the match, Willie Boy is dismissingly aggressive in response: “The thing I notice about you, youth, is how you like to shape tough for the white man, but you don’t really know how to deal with him, do you?” (74) And it is from here that Willie Boy and Errol go about finishing the game and securing victory.

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Following some brief post-match courtesies managed by Marjorie, and with no invitation for a post-match drink, the Conquistadors head back to London, looking to make it before the pub closes, and eventually arriving back late into the “familiar urban gloom” (79). Carrington reads the “arguably pessimistic ending” as providing “no easy solutions to the […] antagonisms lying just beneath the civil veneer of English cricket”, and evidence, instead, that “sport’s supposedly redemptive qualities cannot overcome the gap between black and white experiences” (2017, 136). This seems right, and is further complicated by the teams travelling back to Brixton, which reinforces how quickly the Conquistadors are expelled (or even willingly depart from) an England beyond London. It is also complicated by the disarray of the village that comes with their visit. It would be easy to suggest that the presence of the Conquistadors merely exposes and brings to a head the underlying division already in play within the village—and this is certainly true—but their visit also raises a kind of paranoia about all those who have left the island and returned, including Godfrey, and in this way the parochialism of the village is more (or worse, perhaps) than race-specific, and cannot adjust to the movement of people it has cast itself against, or set itself apart from historically. In this way, an imperial vision of Englishness is left imagining England as separate, distinct and in need of homogeneity— perhaps even more than the village already has. England is, therefore, cast against London and Britain, even though its claims to purity and its racial expectations about migrants and cricketing travellers derive from Britain’s institutional coding of empire and its metropolitan management of those attached to imperial spaces in personal, familial, cultural and historical terms.

IV The realities of racism, social exclusion and the flattening assumptions held about Black men in Britain during the 1980s that underpin Phillips’ Playing Away are also made evident in a set of poems that directly rebut stereotypes pegging British African-Caribbean men and boys to cricket, including: Hendriks’ “Their Mouths But Not Their Hearts” (1974); Agard’s “Stereotype” (1985); Douglas’ “I’m a West Indian in Britain” (1985); and Zephaniah’s “How’s Dat” (1992). E.A. Markham’s “Long Shot” (1995) also refutes, by exposing, related stereotypes, but his

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critique moves away from the individual male subject and is instead cast in more overtly socioeconomic terms. With “Their Mouths”, Hendricks penetrates the white hypocrisy of neighbours, “the Englishmen who live beside”, and the English teachers “shipped out” to the Caribbean, whose “mouths” were “turned against Kipling” and his “lesser breeds”, but whose “hearts” were not, as they spread “their games, their history, their arts” (2012, 86). The poetic voice reports the apparent similarities of experience for these teachers (“same type of schools […] tidy lawns […] fresh-cheeked wives”), but sets this against their quick turn to talk about “Sunshine, bananas, rum, calypsos / And inevitably cricket”, including references to his cousin, the former West Indies player. To the speaker, this reveals the race-specific reading of him that must haunt the English men, and leaves such men wondering “if their women dream at night / about the things they’ve heard about us” (86). The poem moves to a European frame, or rather, to an English or British resistance to being absorbed within the “diplomacy and tact / Which made them Europeans”—where the English understand themselves to be superior (“In sport, and war, and colonisation”) to those they now seem wedded to politically (the “French, German, Dutch, Italian”). Yet the British still accept the “Ugandian Asians” fleeing Idi Amin’s Ugandan regime, “And sift the rest like us through their Immigration Act” (86). The reference is to the 1971 Immigration Act, which changed the system of gaining entry to the UK by creating work permits rather than relying on the previous voucher scheme. It is here understood as the filtering mechanism for all Black arrivants regardless of their historic or immediate ties to the UK, and stands in contrast to the UK’s acceptance of Asian migrants from Uganda via the establishment of the Uganda Resettlement Board. With this biting conclusion, the poem demarcates Britain’s continuing racial hierarchy and the visibility of this beneath the soft verbal hypocrisy so readily encountered even, or especially, in an educational context. As with Hendrick’s poem, Agard’s “Stereotype”, from Mangoes & Bullet: Selected and New Poems 1972–84 (1985), pins down a long list of clichés and does so by playing with ventriloquisation and performative excess. The poem opens with the statement: “I’m a fullblooded / West Indian stereotype”, and this becomes the refrain that binds together the long list of stereotypes about the Caribbean that the performative voice ironically accepts and claims to embody (38). The speaker’s accumulation of stereotyped behaviours is cast as a response to a ventriloquised,

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seemingly white, interlocutor. This figure is granted no direct speech, but is described through the questions received, as the poem moves from “You ask / if I got riddum”, through “You call me / happy-go-lucky”, to “You wonder /where do you people / get such riddum” (38). The list of stereotypes is long and obvious, ranging from wearing a “straw hat”, dancing to the “beat de drum”, drinking rum, and being able to sing calypso, to “dressing fancy” and “chasing women” (38). There is a rising sense of threat built into the prompt acceptance of the stereotypes, too, as signalled with the lines “if you think ah lie / bring yuh sister” (38). The force with which the speaking voice sends up his interlocutor’s questions and presumptions also grows as the poem develops, with “You going ask!” and “How you know!”, giving way to the speaker’s claim to know what stereotype and thought has been left unarticulated: “Isn’t there one thing / you forgot to ask / go on man ask ask / This native will answer anything” (38). However, instead of a question about sexual prowess, given this seems to be an unspoken stereotype not yet brokered, there is an abrupt turn to cricket—as if the game can substitute for all questions of Black masculinity and cast a genteel cloak over the more exposing stereotypes left hidden. So, the interlocutor is said to ask: “How about cricket? / I suppose you’re good at it?”, to which the speaker declares: “Put de willow / in me hand / and watch me strike / de boundary” (38). With the bat acting as a phallic referent, the aggressive stroke-making reinforces the idea that the missing question was of a sexual nature, and the pushing together of cricket and sex is itself reinforced by the immediate rearticulation of the speaker as “fullblooded”. Cricket is, here, part of a stereotyped understanding of African-Caribbean masculinity, but what stands against cricket, and all reductive stereotypes, is revealed with the poem’s closing punch: Yes, I’m a fullblooded West Indian stereotype that’s why I graduated from Oxford University with a degree in anthropology (38).

The move to create a new stereotype, one that is intended to surprise the reader as well as the interlocutor, one that establishes the man of

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African-Caribbean heritage as educated at the most prestigious of British (and world) universities. Ultimately, then, the poem chooses affirmation over disavowal. Where the other stereotypes were accepted ironically, and, thereby, exposed as false, shallow and restrictive, the final use of stereotype marks all such men as worthy and capable of higher education in its most illustrious forms. This revelation repositions “fullblooded” as passionate, alive and alert, in an educated, articulate and qualified manner, and the move away from creole underscores the register shifts available to the informed and poetic speaker. The rhyme of degree with anthropology keeps Standard English on its toes, we might say, allowing a performance by the poet to play up the three syllables “pology”, as if to signal another degree of a-pology that could be said to inform, or be needed after, the exchange described. Finally, the reference to anthropology— the subject or discipline focused on the analysis of humanity, of human society, biology and behaviour—indicates that there is a professional or expert view of the interlocutor in play in the poem, so that their views, thinking, expectations and questions have, from the start, been taken up by a scholar trained to decipher and examine individual and group interaction as well as cultural values and expressions of cultural belonging. Douglas’ poem similarly uses a claiming or affirming motif that ironically accepts the stereotypes the speaker lists (again, stereotypes similar to Agard’s list), as he declares: “I’m a West Indian in Britain”. However, a short epigraph from James, which reads “All of us [Caribbean people or men] know our West Indian cricketers ” (1985, 12, original emphasis), precedes the poem and seems to be offered as the counterpoint the poem is working against. The poet-speaker ironically declares himself as doing all the things expected of a typical West Indies cricket fan, claiming to “support a cricket team”, to “shout”, bring “booze” and forget his wife, and to buy his ticket from a “tout” (12). The list continues, with a “whole lotta grins” and “shades”; supporting “Lloydy”; hitting a beer can and “some pan” until the “policeman steer”, and, after the game, its “time to celebrate”, to acquire some “liquor” rather than “white man bitter” (12). The poem ends with the speaker thinking of a Caribbean “home”, of carnival and of a long line of West Indies greats—“Worell, Sobers […] / Lance Gibbs, Wes Hall and Rohan Kanhai – to declare that “now even you can’t deny / I’m a West Indian in Britain” (12). The insistence that he cannot be denied his status as “a West Indian in Britain” brings the irony “home”, as it were, making clear that the stereotypes listed are hollow or superficial while simultaneously underlining that, despite

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this, he is still, clearly and obviously, “a West Indian” and in Britain in a manner that cannot be denied, that cannot be taken from him. Using more obvious cricketing vocabulary, Zephaniah’s poem “How’s Dat”, from his collection City Psalms (1992), mobilises a cricketer’s appeal to the umpire for a wicket “How is that?” (often written as “Howzat” to convey the abbreviated shout heard on the pitch) to also ventriloquise other questions. The poem opens with “No Sir / I don’t play cricket”, as if the boy-speaker is answering his teacher’s question about whether he plays the game (Zephaniah 1992, 54). In this context, the “How’s Dat” of the title seems to mimic the teacher’s position: how can it be that this Black boy from a Caribbean family doesn’t play cricket? Yet it also asks: how can it be that the teacher won’t listen to the boy’s rejection of the stereotype? The title also points up a querying of the broader education system, a “how is this still happening” query, as well as a kind of rebuttal from the boy-speaker’s position, in which his preference for maths over sports might be followed by a “how is that?” assertion that asks the teacher—and the education profession, in general—how will they respond to that preference, from this boy. As with Paul Keens-Douglas’ humorous depiction of his own boyhood cricketing incompetence in “Me and Cricket”, Zephaniah’s first stanza details the “One time” the boy tried to play, his close attention to the ball’s every moment and turn, until “Up it cum / A red flash / Lick me finger so hard / I thought me finger would die” (54). The use of a creole idiom, and the youthful sense of detail, fear and injury, bring a comedic lightness to the boy’s narration. While the second stanza maintains a humorous edge, the tone is more combative, and the boy’s inability to defend himself on the cricket pitch is transformed into an effort to defend his own educational position: Teacher tell me I am good at cricket I tell teacher I am not, Teacher tell me We luv cricket, I tell teacher Not me, I want trigonometry Fe help me people, Teacher tell me

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I am a born Cricketer. But I never …… (well only once), I don’t play cricket. (54)

Clearly, this teacher has failed to listen to the boy’s story of cricketing fear, failure and injury. In fact, the assertation that he is “good at cricket” strikes as incompatible with what comes before, and any thought that this might be teacherly encouragement is quickly overridden by the triplication of the teacher telling the boy about his presumed attachment to the game, in an increasingly obvious move into racial stereotyping. The shift to the teacher’s insistence, “We luv cricket”, is not a linking together of the boy and a British authority figure through the game, but is rather the grouping together of all boys and men of African-Caribbean heritage, with “luv” potentially being used to mimic the teacher’s impression of their way of speaking. The repeated shift between “Teacher tell me” and “I tell teacher” reads as a stand-off, not unlike a cricketing contest between bowler and batsman, in which the teacher’s statement is thrown towards, and then batted away by, the boy-speaker. In this way, they appear to be in an unequal, but clearly oppositional pairing in which the boy is working hard to reclaim himself by articulating what he is “not”. There is an explicit struggle over the body of the boy, what it means, stands for and can do, in physical and representative ways. The desire for “trigonometry”, then, is not just a call for maths education, though that is its primary purpose. It also expresses a desire to move out of the binary of opposition that characterises the reported exchange, and into a more triangulated, complicated understanding of relationships and connections. In short, it might suggest a desire to move past the imperial presumption and postcolonial straitjacket that determines the boy’s exchange with the teacher. By the time the teacher suggests the boy is “a born Cricketer”, it is clear that the voice of educational authority is drawing upon clichés about the “natural talent” and physical prowess of Caribbean cricketers, as well as Black sports people generally, and, thereby, erasing not only the idea of skill, practice and professionalism from the success story of West Indies cricket, but also erasing the very possibility the boy should actually learn to do anything and practice for improvement. In the last two lines, the gentle comedic qualification of the boy’s claim to having never played cricket when he concedes, probably merely in thinking given it is in parenthesis, “(well only once)”, is quickly followed by his firm rearticulation: “I don’t play cricket” (54). That this line, first used at the start

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of the poem, comes back at the close, with cricket presented this time with a lower- rather than upper-case C, reaffirms the boy’s effort at selfdetermination in the present—that he has played the game once is less significant to him than that he doesn’t play cricket now, and, therefore, won’t be playing the teacher’s game no matter what the teacher tells him about himself and people “like him”. In a biting poetic example of the rejection of reductive, stereotyped and even miniaturising views of Caribbean people, Markham’s poem “Long Shot”, from Misapprehensions (1995), centres on the “long” cinematic “shot” of a West Indies Test match in a film that “won awards at Cannes” (76). Despite the film’s efforts at “filling in detail, freezing / each shot in pretend close up, talking our heroes / up to size”, the “long shot was an insult”, representing a particular view of the “world obsessed with war and famine”—as if these are the frame of reference for all “black” subjects (76). This was specifically insulting in its concentration on an “acrobatic catch” and “impossible saves on the boundary”, in a conspicuous fetishisation of Black physicality and natural sporting ability, and also in its reference to a mode of “batting and bowling that wins / countries their independence” (76), offering a cliché of emancipatory possibility that the poem rejects because the film makes small the Caribbean people it depicts. As the poetic voice says: “we’re not ants, smudges / of black’n’white in a world too large to care who wins, loses” (76). Markham’s penetrative sense of perspectival bias acts as a neat rejoinder to those living in fear of the threat posed by the very players the film tried to diminish in a bid “to change the name of the game” (76). In this context, we might ask, as James so often did: what is at stake in the minimising of Caribbean cricketers and other Caribbean and Black historical actors, and how readily might we still see such discursive, political and cultural miniaturising in our encounters with popular sporting commentary and critique? This is the note that the coda, to follow, picks up.

Works Cited Agard, John. 1985. “Stereotype”. In Mangoes & Bullets: Selected and New Poems 1972–1984, by Agard, 38. London: Pluto Press. Baucom, Ian. 1999. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Carrington, Ben. 2017. “Playing Home: The Boy in the Mirror as Sportswriter”. Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 48 (3–4): 129–157. Douglas, J.D. 1985. “I’m a West Indian in Britain”. In Caribbean Man’s Blues, by Douglas, 12. London: Akira. Dotti, Alessandra. 2003. “‘Oldtalk’: Two Interviews with Sam Selvon”. In Something Rich and Strange: Selected Essays on Sam Selvon, edited by Martin Zehnder, 124–133. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Hendriks, A.L. 2012 [1974]. “Their Mouths But Not Their Hearts”. In The Bowling was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket, edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, 86. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Hill, Robert. 2013. “C.L.R. James and the Moment of Beyond a Boundary”. The Beyond a Boundary, Conference, University of Glasgow, 9–11 May. Høgsberg, Christian. 2014. C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jackson, Joe. 2016. “English Brother or Not: British State-National Critiques and the Moment of Pressure”. In Beyond Calypso: Re-reading Samuel Selvon, edited by Malachi McIntosh, 120–134. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. James, C.L.R. 1992 [1969]. “Garfield Sobers”. In The C.L.R. James Reader, edited by Anna Grimshaw, 379–389. Oxford: Blackwell. James. C.L.R. 2006a [1968]. “Driving the Ball is a Tradition in the West Indies”. In A Majestic Innings: Writings on Cricket, by James, 215–217. London: Aurum. James. C.L.R. 2006b [1969]. “Learie Constantine”. In A Majestic Innings: Writings on Cricket, by James, 232–244. London: Aurum. James, C.L.R. 2013 [1963]. Beyond a Boundary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. James, Louis. 2001. “Writing the Ballad: The Short Fiction of Samuel Selvon and Earl Lovelace”. In Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, edited by Jaqueline Bardolph, 103–108. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Jensen, Bettina. 2018. Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lamming, George. 1960. The Pleasures of Exile. London: Michael Joseph. Maslen, Elizabeth. 2004. “The Miasmus of Englishness at Home and Abroad”. In The Revision of Englishness, edited by David Rogers and John McLeod, 40–51. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Markham, E.A. 1995. “Long Shot”. In Misapprehensions, by Markham, 76. London: Anvil. McIntosh, Malachi. 2016. “Introduction: On Re-reading Samuel Selvon and ‘Beyond’”. In Beyond Calypso: Re-reading Samuel Selvon, edited by McIntosh, viii–xviii. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. McLeod, John. 2012. “Cricketing Multiculturalism in Caryl Phillips’s Playing Away”. The International Journal of the History of Sport 29 (12): 1791–1804.

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Nasta, Susheila, ed. 1988. Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon. Washington, DC: The Continents. Neal, Sarah. 2002. “Rural Landscapes, Representation and Racism: Examining Multicultural Citizenship and Policy Making in the English countryside”. Ethnic and Racial Studies 25 (3): 442–461. Phillips, Caryl. 1987a. “Introduction”. In Playing Away, by Phillips, ix–x. London: Faber. Phillips, Caryl. 1987b. Playing Away. London: Faber. Phillips, Caryl. 2002a. “C.L.R. James: Mariner, Renegate, Castaway”. In A New World Order: Selected Essays, by Phillips, 152–171. London: Vintage. Phillips, Caryl. 2002b. “Leeds United, Life and Me”. In A New World Order: Selected Essays, by Phillips, 298–301. London: Vintage. Phillips, Caryl, and John McLeod. 2015. “The City by the Water: Caryl Phillips in Conversation with John McLeod”. Interventions 17 (6): 879–892. Rohlehr, Gordon. 1988. “The Folk in Caribbean Literature”. In Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon, edited by Susheila Nasta, 29–43. Washington, DC: Three Continents. Selvon Samuel. 1987 [1957]. “The Cricket Match”. In Ways of Sunlight, by Selvon, 149–154. Harlow: Longman. Selvon Samuel. 1957. Ways of Sunlight. Harlow: Longman. Sindoni, Maria Grazia. 2006. Creolizing Culture: A Study on Sam Selvon’s Work. New Delhi, India: Atlantic. Smith, Andrew. 2010. C.L.R. James and the Study of Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Stein, Mark. 2004. Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Thieme, John. 2003. “‘Oldtalk’: Two Interviews with Sam Selvon”. In Something Rich and Strange: Selected Essays on Sam Selvon, edited by Martin Zehnder, 117–123. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Wilkins, Charles. 2009. “Interview with Caryl Phillips”. In Conversations with Caryl Phillips, edited by Rence T. Schatteman, 118–134. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Zephaniah, Benjamin. 1992. “How’s Dat”. In City Psalms, by Zephaniah, 54. Newcastle: Bloodaxe.

CHAPTER 8

Coda: “Strike After Strike”

Strike after strike after strike Six after six after six Sounded like whips after whips after whips On the backs of the English […] Now a winning beating on Sunday Champion men, champion women (Sandre Lowers 2016)

Champion. We are real champion Champion. We are real champion Don’t vex if your name not call We have to leave time to bat some ball. (DJ Bravo 2016)

“History for the West Indies”. This was Ian Bishop’s declaration while commentating for Sky Sports as West Indies scored the winning runs in the men’s ICC World Twenty20 final against England, on 3 April 2016, held at Eden Garden, in Kolkata, India. The moment was historic. Earlier on the same day, the West Indies senior women’s team had won their first-ever world title, becoming ICC World Twenty20 champions by defeating Australia, the tournament favourites and three-times winners, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Westall, The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65972-1_8

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with just three balls to spare. The men’s victory came from overturning England for a second time in the tournament. It made West Indies the first side to win the competition twice—their previous success coming in 2012. This time they had defeated England in majestic fashion in an earlier group match, with Chris Gayle, the self-styled “universe boss” and “six machine” (Gayle 2016), becoming the first-ever player to score two centuries in the competition (adding to his collection of record-setting achievements). In the final, a harrowing “good for the soul […] bad for the heart” run chase (Alleyne 2016), West Indies restricted England to 155, but in chasing—their choice strategy of the competition—they lost early wickets, including Gayle’s, and were left needing nineteen runs from the last over. Marlon Samuels had steadied the team with a recordingsetting innings, as he had done in 2012, but it was the all-rounder Carlos Brathwaite, coming in at number eight, who bagged the game by hitting “strike after strike […] six after six”, with four consecutive sixes in the final over (Lowers 2016). Celebrations began immediately. The women’s team and men’s support staff rushed onto the pitch. Many sang Dwayne Bravo’s “Champion” track, cited above, and performed the accompanying dance moves; moves that had already been used during the tournament by Bravo and Gayle to celebrate catches, wickets and match wins. As was repeatedly pointed out that night, including by the bowling coach— legendary West Indies pace man Curtly Ambrose—all of this followed on from the men’s Under 19s success in their World Cup in February, meaning that the “double delight” of the senior teams was actually a triple triumph for West Indies cricket at the start of 2016 (The Gleaner 2016). And while warm praise rang out from cricketing circles, no one could claim that this flurry of success was expected—notwithstanding the strong Twenty20 (T20) record of the senior men—or that it was without controversy. Indeed, the Under 19s West Indies team had endured a difficult World Cup (ESPNcricinfo 2016a). They had been roughly and widely criticised as unsporting after a “mankad” wicket helped them defeat Zimbabwe to reach the tournament’s quarterfinals—where a “mankad” is an unusual dismissal that occurs when the non-striker leaves their crease and is run out by the bowler instead of the bowler bowling the ball (ESPNcricinfo 2008). After the final, Shimron Hetmyer, the captain, made clear that his team felt they had won against the odds: “We were not supposed to be champions, but we did it” (qtd. in International Cricket Council 2016). Their senior male peers were plagued by common criticisms of

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their unpredictability, aggressive indiscipline and superstar nonchalance, often couched in terms of a culture of Americanised interest in shortterm gain and excessive wealth linked to a “street” culture of machismo and display applauded in cricket’s short format. In his post-match remarks after the T20 final, captain Darren Sammy said that his team had been galvanised by the attacks they faced, claiming “Nobody gave us a chance” (ESPNcricinfo 2016b). He had explained prior to the game that the criticism surrounding the team—including Mark Nicholas’ pre-tournament assertion that West Indies were “short of brains” (Nicholas 2016a)—was fuelling their collective desire to win (Fidel 2016). (And even though Nicholas offered much praise for West Indies after their win, his earlier comments were strongly remembered [Nicholas 2016b]). After the game, Sammy himself took the opportunity to praise his team, Brathwaite, the immediate coaching staff, and the CARICOM leaders who had offered their congratulations, but at the same time he pointed up the organisational farce caused by West Indies not having an appropriate uniform for the tournament just before it began, and indicating the ways in which the controlling board was still out of step with the support and professionalism they had around the immediate team set-up (ESPNcricinfo 2016b). He also made explicit that while he hoped that such success would help feed into improvements in the One Day International (ODI) and Test status of West Indies, the future remained notably unclear for the team; a winning team, Sammy said, that would not get consistently picked for ODIs or Tests, and did not know when their board might next secure T20 internationals (ESPNcricinfo 2016b). The now late Tony Cozier (2016) had aired similar concerns for the future, including the difficulties of advancing into the senior team, after the Under 19s victory, contrasting the bravery, skill and collective efforts of the winning team with a lack of obvious opportunity to follow. All of this is to say, that even in victory, West Indies players felt the need to explain the attacks and prejudices they faced, and to detail how their cricket was still precarious, offering little sense of how future building might be possible outside the personal successes of T20 franchise contracts for individual players. Yet for all the struggle and long-standing tension between players and board, there seemed a glimmer of significant camaraderie running through each of the West Indies teams, as well as a sense of exuberant defiance and mutual appreciation—including across the teams—in the April celebrations. And despite the media insistence on Gayle’s pivotal role in

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the final, the men demonstrated that others could clearly shine in a bighitting fashion and that they could come from behind to secure important victories (they were 11 runs for 3 wickets at one point). More tellingly, perhaps, there was an explicit effort to reinforce the bind between the Caribbean people and their cricket culture, and to claim the players as part of a regional effort for self-improvement. In an immediate on-field interview, an exhausted Brathwaite referenced the “short on brains” comment from Nicholas, and poignantly insisted that “everything” the team does is “for the betterment of the West Indies” (ESPNcricinfo 2016c), seemingly referring both to the structure and tradition of West Indies cricket as well as the people they represent. The depth and humility he offered struck as sincere—an expression of the political weight and ambition thought to be carried by the region’s cricketers and expressed in their play. It echoed an earlier interview given by Ambrose in 1994. In it, Ambrose made clear the demanding “love” of the Caribbean people and its ability to make their cricketers strong, determined and “hard” in their play (Lazarus 1999, 188–189). Analysing this moment, both Mike Marqusee and Neil Lazarus insist that while such comments might be expected in post-match interviews, Ambrose might also be “right”, in that, for Lazarus, “the claims he [made] concerning the complex and elaborately structured bond between representing players and represented ‘people’ might be warranted” (189). This is because, as Marqusee says, “for many West Indies players there is a living bond with a broader West Indian public” (qtd. in Lazarus 1999, 189). Brathwaite was rearticulating this dynamic, and it seems that whatever strain this “living bond” has experienced—and it has been notably strained over the last two decades or more—its gravity and potential came back into view in 2016. We might want to remember here that 2016 was also happened to mark fifty years—a full half century—since the West Indies were first able to lay claim to being “undisputed champions of the world”, at a time when there was also a balancing of renewed success and concern about what exactly would follow for the players—in playing and financial terms—who were upholding the world-class mantle for the Caribbean (Birbalsingh 1996, 24). This turning point for West Indies cricket was captured (as noted in Chapter 4) in Lord Kitchener’s “Cricket Champions”, a calypso that can’t have been entirely beyond Bravo’s (or his team’s) musical frame of reference. While the T20 victories of 2016 did not bring a notable cluster of cricket poems and songs, as began to emerge after 1966, or that

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came with Brian Lara’s individual world records in 1994 and 2004, their moment was registered in the literary and musical imaginary of the Caribbean. Of course, Bravo’s simple, catchy party track, “Champion”, was shown to be more apt than could have been expected. Its celebration of the Caribbean and Black icons stretched out from Bravo’s immediate cricketing circle of Gayle and Pollard, and the great Lara, to athletes Usain Bolt and Shelley-Ann Fraser-Pryce, to American superstars Michael Jordon and Serena William, on to the political heavyweights of Barrack Obama and Nelson Mandela. It also named Beenie Man and Buju Banton in its listing and marked a love of “soca and dancehall”, of “cricket and football” and a binding together of “Every Trini / yard man / Vincy [and] Bajan”. It would be easy to dismiss this repetitious and frothy track, with its ongoing “Champion, Champion, Champion” shout, Bravo’s original glossy music video, and the branded remake that sees Bravo and Gayle dance among a group of young women in order to promote SKORE condoms (in their self-aware, stereotype-ironising performance). Yet, the way the song became the on-pitch soundtrack of success at an inspiring moment for men’s and women’s cricket in the Caribbean provided a nod to the links between cricket and music that might continue, and that might tap into (more thoughtfully, perhaps) the history, confidence and success that the West Indies cricket tradition carries with it. As briefly noted in Chapter 4, following the T20 successes, Sandre Lowers’ poem “West Indian Champions – Selling Me Cricket” appeared in Jamaica’s The Gleaner, a newspaper that sometimes features cricket or cricket-inspired poems in its arts and leisure content. The poem’s core message is apparent in its title. The piece praises achievements of both the men’s and women’s teams, and confirms that for someone who is “Not much of a cricket fan” their performances “sold” the game to him, and, by implication, those like him, watching and captivated by the manner in which the games were played as well as won (Lowers 2016). Registering how the men’s team “Burst the English bubble!” and secured their “second title in five years”, Lowers moves to Braithwaite’s match-winning performance and casts the player’s strength, repetition and “mastery” in a manner reminiscent of many of the texts, especially the poems, considered in the previous chapters. Readers would quickly recognise its reversal of the violence of slavery, with “six after six”, sounding “like whips after whips / On the back of the English”, and also its redeployment of the saccharine sublime specifically:

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Our West Indians were the masters in the field A crop of sixes, an abundant yield Punished with our West Indian bats Power-hitting slaps that knocked sense into those who doubted. (Lowers 2016)

The ascension into “mastery”, the “crop” of seemingly sweet as well as “abundant” sixes, brought the “slaps” of “sense” to the international crowd of doubters, “country to country”, as if the assault of success for West Indies always needed to hit, and get past (over the line, over the boundary) the world’s expectations and assumptions about their continued weakness—as a team, certainly, but the implication is perhaps also as a region or as a people. But the “Champion men” are matched in the poem with “Champion women”, as Lowers also offers due recognition to the women’s team, especially to Hayley Matthews as “Player of the Match” because of her top-scoring innings, of 66, and to Stefanie Taylor, the West Indies captain as “Player of the Tournament”. Taylor is a cricketing icon in her own right, having led West Indies since 2015, become the second (and youngest) woman to reach 1000 ODI runs, and scoring the most runs in the 2016 tournament itself. Yet the poem strikes an odd note in its praise of this sporting star—who was “Batting out the teeth of [her] opponents” and, thereby, reaching her “time to blush”. The gendered marker of modesty seems ill-suited to a respective and appreciative idiom of sporting praise, nor is it cast as humorous or ironic. It does flash back to Chris Gayle’s controversy comments to a female journalist during the 2016 Big Bash season in Australia (see Chapter 4), which only fuels the discomfort created. The effort at dual praise—for the men and women of West Indies cricket—seems to get stuck, at this point, on the odd insistence on feminising Taylor. That said, the poem ends on a buoyant, collectivising note, congratulating the “Teams […] on executing [their] T20 dreams!” and insisting that a wide Caribbean base of support is “always behind” them, “Bowling in the motivation and batting up the support!” These celebrations, though, as any cricket fan will notice, came via cricket’s shortest format—T20—and it is in this arena, particularly through the international franchises and leagues that have emerged since the early 2000s, that the West Indies male stars have been able to become global sporting icons. It is in the stand-off between T20 commitments, with their large, individual financial rewards, and Test cricket, with its

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expectation of national/regional pride and duty, particularly as demanded by, but also often mishandled by Cricket West Indies (CWI), that has characterised the most recent phase of West Indies cricket. In the wake of Lara, Gayle, in particular, became the mega-star of T20’s international carnival and personal profits, but many others followed in his footsteps, Bravo included. Hilary Beckles’ assessment of the impact of globalising pressures, like the T20 phenomenon, on West Indies cricket tracks the personalities, conflicts and institutional failures that have accompanied the rise of T20 and the failure of West Indies cricket to regain a positive and winning mode of play in the Test arena. But what T20 points up, as many observers understand, is the challenge of the global economic order as filtered through the commercialisation of cricket, and the pulling apart of previous units of collective identification, especially national, or in the case of West Indies, regional-national, teams representing their people in ways that were, and remain, politically invested and historically significant. As Beckles writes in Cricket Without a Cause (2017): “Cash before country”, the organizing principle that erupted, took contestage, and guided the demise of Windies Test excellence is not […] a cricket metaphor. It is the pillar of a post nationalist ordering of everything that reflects the abandonment of the earlier frameworks of nationhood. (197)

It is clear that Beckles sees the falling away of West Indies Test success in Jamesian terms, as indicative of wider sociopolitical and economic trends. He also appreciates, again in a Jamesian fashion, the continuing importance of the Caribbean cricketing tradition for the regional consciousness that was built and maintained in large part through the coming together of cricket and independence, that is, cricket and new modes of political aspiration and achievement, at individual, team, island/territory and regional-national level. Beckles’ work also demonstrates a pragmatic and political intervention in what he sees as the need to develop the consciousness of young players, to enable them to connect with the traditions of West Indies cricket and to carry forward their importance, including their importance for the people of the region. In Cricket Without a Cause, he details not only how the CWI needs reconstituting, but also how the University of West Indies has been helping to raise a new generation of West Indies players, with a new mindset, through its hosting of the High Performance Centre (HPC), which educates as well as trains

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what it hopes will be a generation of “conscious cricketers” who hold the traditions, the “rites” of West Indies cricket, as part of their vision, individual and collective, of what should be important in playing for West Indies, especially in the Test arena (197). Beckles described the “The West Indies Test team on its way to England in 2017”, led by a young Jason Holder, as “a carve-out of the HPC’s first cohorts”, that represented a “conceptual break” from the thinking that “matured in the Lara-Gayle era”, because their “mentoring [was] carefully crafted and their exposure to high performance technical and professional training […] not at the expense of a sense of public purpose” (199). During the 2017 West Indies tour of England there was a clear, mature and balanced sense of messaging coming from Holder’s leadership, and this was widely praised. The Test series was won by England, 2–1, but only after West Indies had fought back to win the second Test, having experienced a heavy defeat in the first. Their success in chasing 322 for victory in the final innings was as thrilling as it was important for reminding England, and cricket watchers generally, that a particular mode of balanced yet purposeful and positive play could still stand as the hallmark of West Indies Test cricket. During the BBC commentary for the game, Fazeer Mohammed, the Trinidadian commentator, not only sang Lord Relator’s calypso “Sunil Gavaskar” (on 27th August), he also composed his own calypso in response to the West Indies performance, celebrating their attitude and style as well as their win. While there were clear notes of nostalgia, and even gimmick, in the way the calypso link was celebrated on the BBC, it reminded everyone of the traditional ties between calypso music and West Indies cricket culture. While the only real innovation—at least for Test cricket—during the 2017 series was the first day/night Test match to be held in England, when West Indies returned to England during the Covid-hit summer of 2020, much was changed. After the tour was put back by several weeks, it only took place because West Indies agreed to a fourteen-day isolation period before their warmup games and, like England, agreed to staying in and playing within “bio-secure” locations, with all matches taking place behind “closed doors” with no spectators. West Indies also accepted an enormous reduction in pay and only a small number of players choose not to make the journey. With much new vocabulary, some new rules and a purely televisual spectacle on offer, the cricket was still engaging, and when West Indies won the first Test, of the scheduled three, anyone watching felt that there might be a new pressure on England coming

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through Holder’s control and leadership. England, though, found ways to win the final two Tests and so West Indies missed out on a series win just as they had done three years early. Despite these tours, and other in between, still indicating that West Indies are not yet at the top table when it comes to Test cricket, both the 2017 and the 2020 visits to England pointed to the ways in which West Indies might not only be able to win again, perhaps even consistently so, but how they might play in a way that reanimates the connection between the game and the Caribbean people, a connection that has played such a significant role in the cultural self-understanding of the region. In recent years the literature of the Caribbean has offered, perhaps quite understandably, far fewer texts dedicated to, or strongly featuring cricket. However, the game’s lasting influence continues to reverberate, and in the same way that Beckles holds strongly to a positive view of the resurgence of West Indies cricket and its political potential, we might also want to think that such a resurgence would bring renewed literary-critical interest in the game and its aesthetic as well as cultural significance. It might also bring a return to the insights, cricketing and otherwise, of C.L.R. James, and his influence on the place of cricket in the Caribbean’s literary imaginary.

Works Cited Alleyne, Barry. 2016. “Two Sweet”. Nation News, 4 April. Online. https:// www.nationnews.com/nationnews/news/79734/sweet. Beckles, Hilary McD. 2017. Cricket Without a Cause: Fall and Rise of the Mighty West Indies Test Cricketers. Kingston, Jamaica. Ian Randle. Birbalsingh, Frank. 1996. The Rise of Westindian Cricket: From Colony to Nation. Antigua: Hansib. Cozier, Tony. 2016. “U-19 Success Heart-Warming in Desolate West Indian Landscape”. ESPNcricinfo, 14 February. Online. https://www.espncricinfo. com/magazine/content/story/972521.html. ESPNcricinfo. 2008. “Stay Grounded”. 17 February. Online. https://www.esp ncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/337502.html. ESPNcricinfo. 2016a. “West Indies Mankad Zimbabwe to Enter Quarter-Final”. 2 February. Online. https://www.espncricinfo.com/icc-under-19-world-cup2016/content/story/968235.html. ESPNcricinfo. 2016b. “Emotional Sammy Disappointed by the Lack of WICB Support”. 3 April. Online. https://www.espncricinfo.com/icc-worldtwenty20-2016/content/story/994925.html.

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ESPNcricinfo. 2016c. “Everything We Do Is for the Betterment of West Indies”. 4 April. Online. https://www.espncricinfo.com/icc-world-twenty20-2016/ content/story/995101.html. Fidel, Andrew. 2016. “‘Short of Brains’ Description Angers Sammy”. ESPNcricinfo, 2 April. Online. https://www.espncricinfo.com/icc-world-twenty202016/content/story/994265.html. Gayle, Chris, with Tom Fordyce. 2016. Six Machine: I Don’t Like Cricket … I Love It! London: Viking. International Cricket Council (ICC). 2016. “West Indies Wins Maiden ICC U19 Cricket World Cup”. 14 February. Online. https://www.icc-cricket. com/news/2016/media-releases/92464/west-indies-wins-maiden-icc-u19cricket-world-cup. Lazarus, Neil. 1999. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowers, Sandre. 2016. “West Indian Champions—Selling Me Cricket”. The Gleaner, 22 April. Online. https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/art-leisure/ 20160424/poems. Nicholas, Mark. 2016a. “Who Will Rain on Dhoni’s Parade?”. ESPNcricinfo, 3 March. Online. https://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/ 977747.html. Nicholas, Mark. 2016b. “West Indies’ Triumph of Imagination and Spirit”. ESPNcricinfo, 4 April. Online. https://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/con tent/story/995027.html. The Gleaner. 2016. “Double Delight—West Indies Men and Women Earn High Praises After Thrilling T20 Victories”. 4 April. Online. https://jamaica-gle aner.com/article/lead-stories/20160404/double-delight-west-indies-menand-women-earn-high-praises-after.

Index

A African-Caribbean, 12, 52, 79, 116, 133, 165, 247, 257, 258, 260 Agard, John, 27, 28, 112, 155, 159–164, 168, 229, 255, 256, 258 Aiyejina, Funso, 77, 82, 90 Alexander, Simone, 194, 219 Anim-Addo, Joan, 28, 114, 115, 194, 211–216, 218, 219 Anthony, Michael, 34, 57–59, 77, 178 Apartheid (South Africa), 15, 132 Appadurai, Arjun, 18 Arnold, Matthew, 196 Art (cricket as art), 54, 73, 75, 93, 94, 99, 110, 162, 197, 230 Austin, H.B.G., 10 Australia (cricket team), 12–16, 50, 65, 96, 112, 143, 148, 212, 265, 270 B Baksh, Elahi, 34, 63–65 Barbados, 8–10, 13, 165–167

Bateman, Anthony, 4, 20, 23, 100, 108, 127, 128, 163 Batsman, 4–6, 15–17, 27, 43, 44, 49, 50, 53, 55, 73, 74, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 93, 94, 97, 101– 103, 107–110, 112, 115–118, 120–123, 125, 127–131, 135, 137–140, 143, 149, 159, 164, 169–171, 174, 177, 178, 181, 182, 186, 235, 254, 260 Baucom, Ian, 19, 249 Beckles, Hilary McD., 3, 7–11, 13, 16, 17, 22, 24, 39, 41, 107, 109, 110, 112, 116, 137–140, 145, 155, 165, 167, 168, 195, 211–213, 216, 271–273 Berenson, Bernard, 72, 73 Berry, James, 160, 177 Bhabha, Homi, 19 Birbalsingh, Frank, 7, 63, 116, 118, 268 Black Power, 15, 71, 94, 95, 101, 131 Black washes, 14, 126, 247

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 C. Westall, The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature, New Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65972-1

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INDEX

Bloom, Valerie, 28, 194, 210 Bonair-Agard, Roger, 28, 114, 115, 131, 134–136, 170–172, 178, 182, 194, 209, 211 Bourdieu, Pierre, 19 Bowler, 1, 4–6, 10, 17, 35, 39–45, 49, 62, 73, 80, 85, 96, 97, 101, 110–112, 117, 122, 124, 127, 130, 143, 159–162, 166, 169, 170, 174, 178, 180, 182, 184, 185, 202, 221, 223, 224, 234, 243, 251, 254, 260, 266 Brathwaite, Edward “Kamau” hurricane aesthetics, 27, 108, 162 nation language, 115, 116, 167. See also Creole “Rites”, 3, 12, 22, 27, 107, 110, 115–117, 119, 121, 122, 143, 155, 160, 165, 166, 272 Bravo, Dwayne, 266, 268, 269, 271 Breeze, Jean “Binta”, 140, 182–184, 186, 193 British African-Caribbean, 229, 230, 247, 255 British Empire, 3, 8, 52, 157, 158, 160, 174, 248 Brown, Stewart, 22, 23, 26, 107, 155 Burton, Richard D.E., 8, 40, 49

Carnival, 20, 87, 94, 104, 140, 169, 215, 258, 271 Challenor, George, 74, 127 Charles, Faustin, 126–130, 163, 240, 243, 244 Christianity. See Muscular Christianity Classics, 3, 7, 34, 77 Collins, Merle, 117, 180, 181 Collins, Patricia, 194 Constantine, Learie, 11, 21, 37, 42, 74, 108, 110, 111, 127, 216, 229–236 Cricket and I (1933), 11, 231 Constantine, Lebrun, 10, 54 Cozier, Tony, 144, 267 Creole, 46, 60, 66, 116, 167, 168, 180, 199, 200, 237, 240, 241, 258, 259 Crowd, 9, 17, 27, 49, 51–53, 61, 73, 80, 88, 92, 98, 100, 101, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113–115, 119–121, 129, 130, 135, 136, 141, 146, 158, 160, 163, 166, 168, 169, 180, 199, 201, 202, 204, 217, 234, 270 Cumberbatch, Archibald, 10

C Caliban, 27, 155, 156, 157, 159–161, 168. See also Shakespeare, William Calypso, 9, 11, 12, 20, 27, 29, 39, 40, 46–50, 92, 94, 107, 109–114, 130, 140, 168, 185, 216, 237–241, 244, 256, 257, 268, 272 Cardus, Neville, 72, 231 Caribbean Voices (BBC), 11, 46, 57, 206 CARICOM, 2, 8, 267

D Dabydeen, David, 123–125, 164 Dave Martin and the Trade Winds, 113 Death, 4, 65, 81, 83, 88, 95, 97, 101, 112, 133, 143, 178–181, 196, 197, 204, 220, 221, 225 Deckard, Sharae, 108, 127, 130, 156, 161 Deonandan, Raywat, 34, 63, 64 Dickens, Charles, 1–4, 6, 17 Domestic labour, 193, 208, 222

INDEX

E Ecology, ecological, 27, 108, 114, 115, 121, 123, 126, 129, 130, 141, 156, 174, 176, 218 Eliot, T.S., 138, 236 Emancipation Act, 3 Empire, 3, 4, 7, 8, 19, 20, 24, 85, 97, 111, 114, 116, 142, 158, 161, 164, 165, 198, 212, 231, 232, 249, 255 Empire Windrush, 236 England (cricket team), 7, 9–15, 20, 28, 35, 37–42, 44, 45, 47, 50, 53, 55, 56, 59, 77, 80, 83, 85, 89, 96, 109, 110, 112, 115, 116, 118, 124–126, 130, 131, 135, 139, 143, 145, 146, 148, 158, 165, 183, 184, 205, 212, 215, 219, 229–232, 234, 238, 239, 241, 242, 245, 247–249, 251–253, 255, 265, 266, 272, 273 English Literature, 3, 27, 155 Evans, Lucy, 22, 55, 91, 92 F Fanon, Franz, 24, 83 Fathers (fathers and sons)/fatherhood, 36, 37, 40, 44, 49, 50, 56, 179, 181, 225 Femininity, 28, 194, 201, 217, 225 Fergus, Howard A., 114, 131, 132, 141–144, 179 Fictional autobiography, 26, 34, 57, 60 Fuller, James, 113 G Gavaskar, Sunil, 272 Gayle, Chris, 27, 107, 123, 147–149, 266, 267, 269–271

277

Gender, 28, 171, 187, 194, 195, 197, 198, 201, 210–212, 215, 221, 247. See also Femininity; Masculinity Gilroy, Beryl, 28, 194, 198, 206 Gilroy, Paul, 27, 108, 123, 128 Gleneagles Agreement, 15 Globalisation/globalization, 7, 140 Goodison, Lorna, 180, 181 Googly/googlies, 28, 156, 181–184, 186 Gray, Cecil, 112 Greenidge, Gordon, 15, 126–128 Greenwood, Emily, 131, 142 Guha, Ramachandra, 44, 45, 53 Guyana, 8, 12, 13, 60, 64, 65, 113, 125, 169, 184, 198, 202

H Harney, Stefano, 58, 77 Hawke, Lord, 10 Headley, George, 11, 21, 50, 65, 79, 97, 127, 236 Hector, Tim, 18, 21, 140, 142 Hendricks, A.L., 28, 256 Heroes/heroic/heroism, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 21–25, 27, 35, 37, 39, 43, 47, 53, 59, 60, 63, 71, 74, 79, 80, 82, 84, 86, 89–91, 94, 107–116, 118, 121–127, 134, 138, 139, 141, 144–146, 149, 164, 179, 185, 193–195, 206, 212, 216, 261 Holder, Jason, 17, 272, 273 Holding, Michael, 14, 135, 136, 162 Hughes, Thomas Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), 36, 164 Hurricane(s), 123–125, 127, 160–163, 218, 219 Hurricane Ivan, 115, 218

278

INDEX

I Illness, 179, 181 Immigrations, 249 Imperial Englishness, 7, 17, 19, 28, 232, 244, 248 Imperialism, 7, 20, 157, 159, 161, 245 Independence, 1–7, 16, 20–22, 42, 44, 57, 64, 71, 89, 94, 97, 100, 116, 132, 156, 175, 204, 212, 213, 215, 230, 232, 261, 271 India (as cricket team), 13, 65, 125 India Premier League (IPL), 16, 147 Indian-Caribbean, 12, 45, 48, 52, 55, 61, 63, 79, 87, 124, 125 Indian-Trinidadian, 52, 87, 88, 98, 104, 238 International Cricket Council (ICC), 13, 14, 16, 17, 113, 138, 265, 266 ICC World Cup (men’s), 14 ICC World Cup (womens), 13, 14, 213 ICC World Twenty20, 14, 17, 113, 265 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 16, 94, 133, 142 J Jagan, Cheddi, 65, 125 Jamaica, 2, 8, 10, 13, 40, 50, 57, 59, 84, 181, 182, 219, 220, 223, 250, 269 James, C.L.R. aunt Judith, 28, 194, 196 Beyond a Boundary, 1, 3, 6, 9–12, 23, 24, 26, 27, 33, 34, 37, 53, 54, 72, 84, 89, 93, 99, 103, 108, 137, 155–157, 194–198, 230, 232, 236, 247 Black Jacobins , 54, 157, 231 Cousin Cudjoe, 35

father, 33, 34, 37, 179 Josh Rudder, 35 Matthew Bondman, 37, 93, 196 Minty Alley, 195, 231 mother, 28, 34, 79, 196 on Constantine, 37, 111, 230–234 on drama, 42, 72, 85, 169 on father-son relationships, 26, 33, 36, 38, 52, 61 on heroes, 79, 80, 109, 213 on movement, 72, 73, 110, 230 on Nelson, 231, 232 on significant form, 72, 99, 100 on Sobers, 79, 101, 107, 112, 137, 235 on spontaneity, 74 on style, 27, 71–75, 79, 82, 93, 107, 122 on Walcott, 12, 120 on Worrell, 12 The Case for West Indies Self-Government , 231 James, Robert, 34 John, Errol Moon on a Rainbow Shawl , 10, 26, 33, 37, 38 John, George, 10, 37, 38, 41–43 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 180

K Kanhai, Rohan, 54, 79, 103, 123–126, 131, 164, 235, 258 Keens-Douglas, Paul, 28, 34, 59, 60, 114, 144–146, 170, 194, 198–203, 206, 259 Khan, Ismith, 34, 47, 61, 62 Kingwell, Mark, 18, 19 Kipling, Rudyard, 158

INDEX

L Lamming, George, 1–6, 9, 50, 157, 161, 236 Lara, Brian, 16, 26, 27, 107, 113, 123, 136–147, 206, 219, 269, 271 Lazarus, Neil, 8, 12, 18, 19, 89, 268 Lloyd, Clive, 2, 14, 15, 216 London, 24, 28, 38, 45, 53, 54, 77, 195, 200, 214, 217, 219, 220, 222, 224, 229–232, 237–239, 241, 242, 244–246, 248–252, 255 Lord Beginner, 109, 110, 112 Lord Kitchener, 12, 112, 268 Lord’s (cricket ground), 53, 109 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 233 Lovelace, Earl Growing the Dark (Selected Essays), 78 Is Just a Movie (2011), 27, 71, 81, 82, 88, 93, 94, 101 Salt (1996), 27, 47, 71, 82–84, 88, 89, 91, 94, 98, 103 The Dragon Can’t Dance, 77, 81–83, 94 “Victory and the Blight” (1988), 27, 71, 92, 99 Lowers, Sandre, 147, 265, 266, 269, 270 M Mangan, J.A., 7, 164 Manhood, 49, 56, 134, 178, 182, 229 Manley, Michael, 2, 7, 11 Manning, Frank, 10 Markham, E.A., 28, 58, 144, 186, 194, 200, 204–206, 255, 261 Marqusee, Mike, 268 Marxism/Marxist, 18, 19, 33, 54, 75, 231, 232

279

Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), 10, 11 Masculinity, 9, 40, 47, 48, 130, 133, 212, 229, 236–238, 244, 247, 257 McDonald, Ian, 22, 131–133, 179, 193 McKenzie, Earl, 34, 59, 99 McWatt, Mark, 26, 34, 57, 60, 61, 135 Mendes, Alfred, 39 Migrations/migrants, 231, 236–239, 241, 243, 245, 247, 250, 253, 255, 256. See also Immigrations Miller, Kei, 178, 179 Mohammed, Frazeer, 146, 272 Morant Bay Massacre, 10 Mother country, 10, 39, 118, 194, 231, 236 Mothers/Mothering/Mothers and daughters, 193, 194, 210, 214, 220–222, 225 Muscular Christianity, 36, 164 N Naipaul, Seepersad, 45, 54 Naipaul, V.S. A House for Mr Biswas , 45, 46, 50, 51, 54 A Way in the World, 54 Half a Life, 55 India: A Million Mutinies Now, 52 India: A Wounded Civilisation, 52 Miguel Street , 33, 44, 46–48, 50, 53, 63, 85 “Test”, 13, 53–55 The Middle Passage, 39, 55 V.S. Naipaul: Letters Between a Father and Son, 45 Nandy, Ashis, 18 Nationalism, 2, 11, 21, 23, 58, 125, 131, 146, 212

280

INDEX

Nation Language, 116, 167. See also Brathwaite; Creole Nelson, Lancashire, 157, 231–234 Niblett, Michael, 76, 84, 91, 92, 94, 97, 129 Nichols, Grace, 27, 155, 168, 169 Nixon, Rob, 157 Nostalgia, 24, 177, 220, 272

O Ormsby Cooper, Eileen, 34, 57, 59 Ove, Horace, 28, 229

P Packer, Kerry, 14, 15, 112 Pakistan (cricket team), 12, 13, 55, 60, 96, 125, 138 Palko, Abigail, 193 Patterson, Orlando, 15, 17, 18 People’s National Movement (PNM), 81. See also Williams, Eric People’s Progressive Party’s (PPP), 65 Phillips, Caryl, 28, 229, 246–253, 255 Plantation, 1, 2, 4, 6–10, 63, 64, 116, 124, 159, 173 Port of Spain, Trinidad, 39, 46, 47, 61, 201, 238

Q Queens Park Oval, Trinidad, 135, 201 Queen’s Royal College, Trinidad (QRC), 34, 44

R Ramadhin, Sonny, 45, 103, 112, 239 Ramchand, Kenneth, 21, 24, 58 Ramkissoon-Chen, Rajandaye, 140, 141, 143

Rastafarianism, 15, 131 Richards, Viv, 14, 15, 25, 27, 79, 103, 107, 112, 128–136, 138, 202, 216 Roach, Clifford, 37 Roach, Eric, 110 Rohlehr, Gordon, 5, 9, 20, 22, 46, 107, 109, 110, 112, 117–119, 155, 237 Rudder, David, 112 S Saccharine sublime, 123, 269 Salkey, Andrew, 56, 115 Sandiford, Keith A.P., 7, 9, 18, 165 Schwarz, Bill, 54, 79, 101 Searle, Chris, 15, 142 Seecharan, Clem, 7–10, 12, 23, 24, 26, 63, 64 Selvon, Samuel, 28, 55, 229, 236–242, 244–247 Sex/sexuality, 58, 182–184, 186, 207–209, 212, 252, 257 Shakespeare, William, 157, 161 Caliban, 27, 155–158 The Tempest , 156, 158 Short story tradition, 26, 34, 55 Slavery, 2, 5, 6, 9, 89, 108, 116, 124, 128, 131, 133, 156, 160, 164, 171, 173, 212, 218, 269 Smith, Andrew, 19, 24, 74, 233, 235, 236 Sobers, Gary, 12, 27, 60, 61, 74, 79, 101, 103, 107, 112, 131, 137–139, 185, 216, 229, 233, 235, 236, 258 South Africa (as cricket team), 15, 16, 132, 212 South Africa (country), 15 Spin, 45, 112, 145, 169, 182, 187, 239 Spontaneity, 74, 95

INDEX

Standard English (SE), 85, 159, 161, 168, 180, 240, 258 St Hill, Wilton, 11, 74, 89, 108 St John, Bruce, 27, 138, 155, 165–169 St Louis, Brett, 74–76 St Lucia, 13 Stoddart, Brian, 7, 17, 18 Stollmeyer, Jeffrey, 35 Storm aesthetics, 218. See also Brathwaite, hurricane aesthetics St Vincent, 13, 202 Style, 4, 9, 12, 20, 22, 27, 46, 58, 63, 66, 71–76, 79–82, 84, 87, 89–96, 98–100, 102–105, 107, 108, 114, 119, 122, 123, 127, 128, 130, 134, 138, 182, 198, 201, 230, 232–235, 243, 272 Sublime, 27, 108, 115, 123, 126–130, 156, 160, 218 Sugar, 8, 11, 62, 64, 108, 119, 123–126, 129, 132. See also Saccharine sublime Surin, Kenneth, 137, 195 Symmonds, Donna, 2

T Taylor, Monica, 13 Taylor, Stefanie, 147, 270 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 36 Thieme, John, 46, 47, 49, 237, 245 Trinidad and Tobago, 8, 13, 16, 26, 33, 37–39, 41, 43, 45–47, 50, 51, 55, 58, 60, 71, 77, 78, 80, 81, 97, 100, 102, 109, 110, 114, 126, 130, 132, 134, 137, 144, 195, 200–202, 216, 230, 231, 233, 237, 238 Troester, Rosalie Riegle, 193 Tunapuna, 34, 61, 103, 247

281

U Umpire, 51, 65, 82–86, 91, 116, 139, 143, 161, 166, 169, 170, 173, 202, 250, 253, 259 University of West Indies, 21, 271 V Valentine, Alfred, 59, 112 “Victory Test Match”, 12, 112, 239 Volcano/volcanic, 129, 130, 141, 143, 144, 174–177 W Walcott, Clyde, 61, 72, 74, 115, 148, 167, 216 Walcott, William, 173 Warner, Pelham (Plum), 10, 132 Warrior/warriorhood, 9, 51, 114, 128, 130, 134, 170 Weekes, Everton, 12, 74, 118, 167, 216 Wenzel, Jennifer, 25 West Indies Federation, 4, 12, 21, 41, 44, 83, 116 West Indies (men’s cricket team), 14, 16 West Indies (under 19s), 266, 267 West Indies (women’s cricket team), 13, 14, 211, 212 Wicket Keeper, 35, 61 Williams, Eric, 62, 81, 92, 132 Williams, Milton Vishnu, 184, 186 Williams, Roy, 28, 195, 218–221 Woods, Joseph, 10 World-historical, 23, 27, 73, 74, 107, 137, 138, 142, 146, 197 World Series Cricket, 112. See also Packer, Kerry Worrell, Frank, 12, 53, 74, 83, 118, 127, 131, 138, 139, 158, 167, 216

282

INDEX

Wynter, Sylvia, 28, 64, 194, 206, 207, 209, 211

Z Zephaniah, Benjamin, 28, 229, 255, 259