Boundary buster commemorated
By Mike Marqusee
[The Hindu, July 1 2007]
http://www.mikemarqusee.com/index.php?p=249#more-249
It's rare that a fashion item makes the slightest impression on me, but I
have to confess to being childishly delighted by a purchase I recently made
over the internet. It's a tee-shirt emblazoned with CLR James's
ever-pertinent rhetorical question: *What do they know of cricket who only
cricket know?*
The tee-shirt is the latest product from PhilosophyFootball.com, "sporting
outfitters of intellectual distinction", a do-it-yourself enterprise
offering a line of handsomely designed sportswear bedecked with pearls of
wisdom from Marx, Galileo, Pele, Bakunin, Bobby Moore (captain of England's
1966 World Cup winning team), Jean-Paul Sartre ("In football, everything is
complicated by the presence of the opposite team"), Albert Camus ("All that
I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football"),
Manchester United manager Matt Busby ("Winning isn't everything. There
should be no conceit in victory and no despair in defeat") and George Best
("I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just
squandered").
The whole point of PhilosophyFootball is the unlikely mingling of thinkers
and doers, observers and performers. CLR James fits precisely in that nexus.
James brought to the study of cricket the same high-energy intellectual
engagement, wide range of reference and fertile imagination with which he
also tackled organising share croppers in Missouri, analysing ancient
Athenian democracy or debating black self-organisation with Trotsky.
"What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?" James' motto opens his
masterpiece, Beyond a Boundary, published back in 1963 to little acclaim and
a mere handful of reviews. Since then, the book has crept gradually into
wider circulation and now enjoys the status of a literary classic. But it
remains a one-off, a mix of memoir, theory, history, polemic, wide angle and
close-up, sublime and eccentric. Among its many distinctions, Beyond a
Boundary is a genre-maker and genre-breaker. Even today it's difficult to
classify, leaping as it does from Trinidad to Lancashire, WG Grace to Learie
Constantine.
James campaigned for West Indian independence and was a key figure in the
development of the pan-African movement. But this critic of empire had a
soft spot for imperial culture. Readers coming to Beyond a Boundary for the
first time are always puzzled to find cricket's most eminent Marxist singing
the praises of the English public school ethos. The aphorism on the
tee-shirt is itself an adaptation of a line from Kipling: "And what should
they know of England who only England know?", from an 1891 poem entitled
"The English Flag" in which Kipling mocks the empire's foes: "The poor
little street-bred people that vapour and fume and brag, / They are lifting
their heads in the stillness to yelp at the English Flag!"
CLR James was subjecting popular culture to serious scrutiny decades before
the field acquired academic legitimacy. As a radical democrat and social
scientist he refused to take seriously those forms of history that
habitually excluded this vast field of human endeavour. In particular, he
argued that it was impossible to understand the politics of the West Indies
unless one also understood cricket, and impossible to understand cricket
unless one placed it in that larger context.
Yet James would have had little patience with much of the scholarly study of
popular culture these days. He was not a cataloguer of soap operas or
decoder of advertisements. He took cricket seriously, perhaps too seriously,
as an art form, and he insisted on rigour of argument. Just because the
topic was cricket or calypso was no reason to cease demanding the highest
intellectual standards in addressing it. And he applied those standards at a
time when then the very idea of a serious book about sport – not nostalgia,
not whimsy, not statistics – was a decided novelty.
CLR prophesied West Indian cricket dominance long before that dominance was
fully established on the field of play. What would he have made of its
current eclipse? How would he have explained the sheer miserableness of the
West Indies' Test performances during this English summer?
In the past decade, a great deal of ink has been spilled on this subject,
and various theses propounded to account for the wilting of one of world
cricket's most attractive, distinctive regional cultures. Most of these fall
apart under examination. Too often the starting point is that the twenty odd
years of West Indian greatness were the norm from which recent performances
are a deviation. But perhaps what really needs explaining is not why West
Indies are currently so mediocre, but how it was that a population of a mere
6 million, divided into a dozen nation-states, could ever have achieved and
sustained supremacy in a global sport in the first place?
Which brings us back to CLR James, who saw in West Indies cricket a tool of
aspiration, collective and individual, a level playing field in which the
victims of colonialism could, for a moment at least, shape their own
destiny. What's clear is that cricket under current conditions – globalised,
corporatised, television-dominated - no longer serves effectively as that
type of tool, at least not in the West Indies.
