SUNDAY 4 MARCH, 2018 – UWI TODAY
15
MEMORIES – BOOK REVIEW
The gritty texture,
the assiduously ambiguous
counterpoint of colonial experience is bound to be one
of the major themes of the ex-colonial writer. In fact,
it doesn’t help much to suggest that it is a theme. It is
as much a part of his physical and nervous structure
as the pancreas or the lumbar ganglia. And among the
saddest occasions in West Indian writing are those
when the experience ceases to be a part of the person,
or is forbidden to be a part of the person, and becomes
instead an assumption, a bogus cross running with
what is merely the ketchup of suffering.
Unfortunately, the exceptions are rare: Derek
Walcott; John Hearne, in his last novel in particular;
George Lamming, at least by honourable intent; Vidia
Naipaul in
“The Middle Passage,”
Vic Reid in the early
part of
“New Day.”
Mr. C.L.R. James’ new book now obliges us to
think again about what we have so easily taken for
granted, and it sets a fresh and original standard in
analysis and discussion. He makes ‘being a colonial’
a human experience as opposed to the casual free-
masonry of crowded verandahs.
One is alert immediately to the fatuity (in the
West Indies, of all places) that he has “mixed politics
with cricket” and so it is worth outlining his central
thesis—or rather central perception.
Important cricket makes demand upon genuine
and creative human skill, skill of a kind that promotes
and defines emotion.
A courageous and highly illuminating account of
some forty years of Trinidad cricket obliges the reader
to reflect on his previously held views of the ecology of
independence and self-respect, and it is to say the least,
refreshing water in an arbitrary desert, to have people
like George Headley and Learie Constantine accorded
creative status. History ought to make the appropriate
stresses and consign Sir Alexander Bustamante, and all
his air-hostesses, to a squalid footnote. He happened,
is about as much as one can regretfully say.
One hears hollow, saintly laughter at the entrance
to the Spanish Town Cathedral.
Mr. Jamesmakes theWest Indies into a community
that has lived and endured and that is coming to a fertile
consciousness of itself, not a sort of plaything that local
politicians invented. At May Pen a West Indian ought
to cringe into the nearest bar. In Mr. James’ company
he can take rewarding stock of himself.
But it isn’t at all easy to expose for investigation
the centres of Mr. James’ discussion because he has
one of the instinctual skills of the significant writer:
experience is presented as a whole, is seen as a unity of
identity and not a blank terrain for arbitrary guerilla
raids. We feel with him the inevitable conflict of
loyalties, the nexus of decision in a society in which
you who are the society are obliged to feel that you are
there on sufferance—your skill wanted but not you
wanted, your bat wanted, but your face not required
in the proper clubs.
Mr. James could have scaled the greasy pole of
colonial ambition: scholarship, University, lawyer,
member of the legislative council. But fortunately for
us, qualities of mind and a sort of visceral integrity
kept the man in the society or at least detained him
in total commitment to its problems.
More than
a Game
Beyond a Boundary
C.L.R. James
Hutchinson 25/-
B Y B I L L C A R R
Reprinted through the courtesy of
“Public Opinion.”
From Pelican December 1963-January 1964
Cricket remained his central passion and Mr.
James is subtle enough and generous enough to
recognise that in a colonial society skills are not just
skills—they are the compass bearings of identity. The
Word was made flesh and people like George John,
Wilton St Hill and Learie Constantine emerge with a
magnanimity of stature and symbolic worth that makes
Hugh Shearer look like a pawnbroker’s assistant.
But perhaps the most valuable thing about Mr.
James’ book isn’t the record—we can figure that out for
ourselves. It is the quality of the recording, the certainty
you have that not a feeling is invented nor an attitude
vamped up. When he tells us, for instance, how he felt
disposed to challenge Nye Bevan when he heard Nye
expending a deal of satire on a public platform at the
expense of the public school ethic—that tight-lipped
commitment to the exigencies and decencies of the
game. One is moved that Mr. James should have felt
as he did and one reverences his subtlety of analysis.
His own adherence to that very ethic gave his cricket,
and his vision of cricket a moral outline that could be
filled with what was real—the way you actually felt,
the person you actually were. And at no time does
he make a feeling seem like a reflex. For instance, we
can, most of us, imagine how the Trinidad cricket
clubs were organised across the colour spectrum. But
it requires Mr. James to get us to feel this for the first
time, to get us to realise the full quality of the hurt,
the bewilderment. And he makes manifest the irony
of the situation: the total Puritan commitment, the
ethic imposed, was met not by the lightskinned clubs
but by the darkskinned ones. The Negro players had
two things to depend on—the integrity of their skill
and the arbitrary generosity and perception of the
superior clubs.The superior clubs didn’t have anything
to depend on—they were simply there and that was
enough.
Mr. James leads us inevitably until that moment
when the festive encounter between [Ted] Dexter
and Frank Worrell at the Oval is the guarantee of
essential independence, of an inner growth, at least,
to manhood. As the West Indian spectators fell on
to the pitch it was manifest that more was involved
than a game. A black man and an Englishman met
in the amity of generous victory on the one side and
honourably conceded defeat on the other. That was
what being yourself looks like.
Mr. James has written one of the rare books since
1949 and what one admires is not the learning he
displays, which is at times a little arbitrary, not the
historical generalization which often remain little
more than themselves, but the creative resilience and
tolerance of spirit, the frankness of self-exposure,
the recognition that his experience is significant not
merely because it is his but because it is the focus of
the experience of a society. You don’t feel in his writing
the pressures of self-importance, the complacency
of supposed originality. Mr. James’ sensibility is the
translucent medium through which we contemplate
the living of a people. His book is indispensable
reading before we move on to the
“Middle Passage.”
The two don’t contradict each other—they comprise a
unity. The difference is the resignation of the one, and
the bright-eyed juvescence of the other.
A courageous and highly illuminating
account of some forty years of
Trinidad cricket obliges the reader to
reflect on his previously held views
of the ecology of independence and
self-respect, and it is to say the least,
refreshing water in an arbitrary
desert, to have people like George
Headley and Learie Constantine
accorded creative status.
