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| C.L.R. James |
by Selma James, The Mail & Guardian
Fifty years ago, after a March in the United Kingdom as cold
as the one just gone, my husband CLR James's semiautobiographical Beyond a
Boundary appeared as the cricket season opened. Reviews were favourable but
none even approached the incomparable (and antiracist) John Arlott's in Wisden,
"the cricketers' Bible".
It was the almanack's centenary edition (April 19 1963),
itself a national event: "[The year] 1963 has been marked by the
publication of a cricket book so outstanding as to compel any reviewer to check
his adjectives several times before he describes it and, since he is likely to
be dealing in superlatives, to measure them carefully to avoid over-praise –
which this book does not need … in the opinion of the reviewer, it is the
finest book written about the game of cricket."
It is hard to know from this extraordinary accolade that the
book could not at first find a publisher. In desperation, CLR asked his friend
George Lamming if he could help. Hutchinson had not long before published
Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, a great novel, and he used its succès
d'estime to sell CLR's manuscript.
Years later I learned it was Lamming who had named it –
almost. He had proposed Beyond the Boundary, which the publisher changed to
"a" for no reason we could agree with. "The" challenges all
boundaries, not just cricket's – a true description of the book.
It was a book CLR had to write. He understood the game, he
believed, in ways most experts did not and could not. He considered himself
more scrupulous about the game's technique and how it grappled with team
dynamics, skills, players' concentration and the psychological war between
batsman and bowler, batsman and fielders. And he saw the game not only as it
was played but as it was lived – and for West Indians like himself that meant,
first of all, a colonial society stratified by race and class. His unblinking
description of the shades of status among cricket clubs cuts like glass.
Because he was clever and literary, CLR could join the club
of either the lighter- or the darker-skinned cricketers; he confesses having
chosen the former. "So it was that I became one of those dark men whose
'surest sign of … having arrived is the fact that he keeps company with people
lighter in complexion than himself'. My decision cost me a great deal … by
cutting myself off from the popular side, [I] delayed my political development
for years."
Crucial figure
Establishing early the interconnection between cricket and
race and class divisions opens the way for Beyond a Boundary to fulfil its
author's full purpose: to draw out other startling connections – cricket and
art, life in ancient Greece, even rewriting English social history with
cricket's great WG Grace as a crucial figure.
As startling as his connections is the light he sheds on
each – not only cricket but every subject benefits from shattering boundaries.
We are invited to reject the fragmenting of reality, and to see its diverse
interconnections without which we are prevented from ever knowing anything
fully, including our own reality. What do they know of cricket, or anything, if
it is walled off from every other aspect of life and struggle?
CLR approached each area with the method of thought learned
from Marx and Hegel, and from his study of history. He considered it impossible
to think in a disconnected or artificially linked way. But dialectical thinking
depended on attention to detail. In cricket, his foundation was its technique.
Beyond a Boundary demonstrates that profound connections can
be grasped by a popular sporting audience. Here, cricket was CLR's touchstone,
but he had been doing the same with many subjects for years.
When the manuscript was near completed, CLR was invited to
return home after 26 years away. He spent four years working to end colonial
rule and bring the islands together in a federation. The independence came, but
the West Indies Federation failed. What stayed "federated" was the
cricket.
Imperial past
But this great cricketing nation, with a primarily Afro- and
Indo-Caribbean population, had always been captained by a white man. CLR, now
editor of the Nation, Trinidad's ruling-party newspaper, seized the moment. The
man to captain was Frank Worrell, a great batsman, a great cricketing mind and
an extraordinary human being. But Worrell, though middle class, was black. CLR
plunged in with front-page editorials, cricket facts and so on. CLR's
penultimate chapter describes the campaign with zest. It upset those who
thought challenging the racists who had always governed was too Marxist and
would lead to "communism".
But we won, and the day after, Prime Minister Eric Williams,
aiming to placate the anticommunists at his party's annual conference, said:
"If CLR James took it upon his individual self to wage a campaign for
Worrell as captain of the West Indies team …" That's all I heard.
Williams's words were drowned in a roar of applause and shouts and celebration:
a piece of the imperial past had gone.
Beyond a Boundary was part of a movement. Soon after, the
anti-apartheid boycott swept across every sport and a Black Power salute from
the Olympic podium shook the world. Campaigns against discrimination, including
sexism, in sport are no longer startling. Alas, what sportspeople contend with
on the playing field is still cordoned off from injustice beyond the boundary –
from stop and search to benefits cuts and disabled people orchestrated by
Paralympics praise.
The book opened a new chapter in sports writing and inspired
Joseph O'Neill to write Netherland, a novel dissecting American society whose
touchstone is the cricket brought by immigrants to New York. The 2001 film
Lagaan, about an Indian cricket match, is a wonderful example of the beauty and
truth that emerges with a judicious mix of cricket and class struggle.
Everywhere, we are confined by boundaries but we struggle to
break out.
