MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 18 April 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
There are some people I have never met in the flesh, but whom I have only read, for whom I have the highest regard. One such person is Ian McDonald whom I know from his poetry as a literary critic of the first order. It is this body of knowledge and insight he brings to cricket and other subjects. He and I do not come from the same view of the world, but I read everything he writes because he is so intent on honesty that I always learn, however much I may disagree in the end.
And another such is Leroi Clarke, the very fine painter from Trinidad who uses the language, with such colour and line, that every word seems new, making his literary point with painterly strokes.
He wrote a piece recently which I can’t get out of my head at all. First of all he was writing on Philip Simmonds, the T&T and West Indies player. The headline of the piece itself was most interesting. I am almost certain, that Leroi Clarke chose it himself. The headline was this: Philip Simmonds: Stammer of a Greater Quest. What did it mean? It was not words thrown together for their own sake or for their sonority. What then did this very fine artist see in Simmonds which I did not see? I was content to label Simmonds as one of the best “Team Players” I have ever seen playing for the West Indies. But his failures convinced me he was not a Test Player. Yet he was among Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year, for 1996, and Wisden is the Bible of Cricket. OK I said, Phil Simmonds is a County and Red Stripe “bully”, but not a Test Player. And with that I consoled myself. Not a Test Player, but the best Team Player.
Then Derrick Michael, one of the truly great cricketers of the region, but who is unknown to the region, he having emerged in Antigua, in 1954–55 when the Leewards were outside the pale of West Indian cricket, a rare batsman, in terms of timing, placement and range of strokes, with that almost indefinable something called “style” and which today we refer to as “class”, besides, Derrick Michael is still the best slip fieldsman I have ever seen, to Anthonyson, to my mind the best fast bowler, who never played for the West Indies; Yes, Derrick Michael told me, only last week, that he would have selected Phil Simmonds on his West Indian side, his statistics notwithstanding! I had to stop and take note. Was Phil Simmonds representative “of a greater quest”? At any rate did he symbolise that? Was I missing something, being guided by that modern guide – statistics?
Then I read Leroi Clarke! Let me give you what he says. But let me warn you in advance Leroi Clarke is no ordinary user of the English language. Here then is Leroi Clarke, writing in the Trinidad and Tobago Review one of the most significant Caribbean publications of this or any time.
“There is much more to cricket” writes Leroi Clarke, “than making plenty runs, no less is bowling, fielding and the applause of winning! Cricket can be an open field of possibilities through which the people along with the players who represent them tarry to complete a self, an authentic self, that awaits them. Cricket then not as a surface game but, cricket as an art, the art of creating a self, creating a people, a languaging of something that is possible in us.”
What a fine phrase, a languaging of something that is possible in us. Cricket gives expression to the potential of a people, making new actualities, possible!
There are shades, in fact, intimations of the great philosophers Husserl and Heidegger here, the idea of life as the search for authenticity. But we will not pursue that here. But this definition, or rather, re-definition of cricket as a field, “an open field of possibilities” whereon “the people along with the players who represent them tarry to complete a self, an authentic self,” is as insightful as it is incisive. It is West Indian and can only be West Indian.
What a remarkable phrase, “tarry to complete a self, an authentic self.” The sense of waiting leisurely, as ’tarry’ conveys, “to complete a self” follows, and not just any self, but an authentic self. You dear reader can imagine what that meant to me after the experience of the Fourth Test here against India, when the people “tarried” for three whole days without play, rain or not rain, and yet they “tarried”. Why did they tarry? Were they seeking to complete an authentic self, through “the players who represent them”? Is not the West Indian team the only truly representative institution which represents the West Indian people, and which they themselves authenticate by their commitment to it, when they seem committed to little else? Nothing else represents them like cricket, when all other forms of representation reduces the term to parody.
Football thrills us, but we do not invest it with the meaning and import we give to cricket. CARICOM we know of, but it does not draw on our loyalty. Few of us, if any, who shop, shop for CARICOM goods first, and all else after. CARICOM is abstract. The politicians we vote for, we may even clap and cheer them in political season. But since the 70’s, since the era of structural adjustment, they are treated as some kind of inconvenience which we must endure. But it is cricket, not the Market, which seems to us like “an open field of possibilities.” There we look for some new affirmation amidst the encircling gloom.
So far so good with Leroi Clarke. He continues, right after the passage quoted, this way:
“Caribbean space is in jeopardy of losing itself to rumour and imitation, of throwing by way of misuse and alienation of its true potential the possibility of a new conscience that can offer the world the new order that is being sought.”
I have read volumes about the Caribbean but I have never seen it expressed better; The dialectic of the modern Caribbean – the unity of opposites – the “jeopardy” in which we now live of a new colonisation through “imitation” of Market societies. And at the same time, the reverse, the possibility of creating a new conscience that can offer the new order that is being sought.”
What evidence do we have that the Caribbean is pregnant with that “new conscience”? Let us not take cricket. But the other institution – Carnival. People are evermore prepared to spend their money, get the most elaborate costume, without any thought of gaining money from the exercise, but in order to show what we are capable of in design; in execution of that design, to display the leaps of imagination we are capable of not only in Mas, but in song and dance. And money is not the primary consideration, as in everything else. The world has few occasions like a Caribbean Carnival. The world, the everydayness of the world, getting and spending, stops at Carnival for the celebration of the creative human spirit. That is the uterus of a new conscience to me at any rate.
I myself I am going to make a big leap. But not a leap into the unknown, but into the known. How do we know the people of the world are looking for a new conscience that can offer the new order that is being sought?
Let us take a look at the Heaven’s Gate Cult. It is well to look at those 39 people, and say 38 of them were brain-washed by One. That is the simplistic pseudo-psychology by which America explains everything. It is true that the 39 of Santa Fe, killed themselves. In pursuit of what? Literally, being at a higher level. They were certain life at the end of the destination of the Spaceship had to be about more than getting and spending.
I want to go further. I do not know whether the spaceship picked them up or not and whether Do and Ti are reunited in the godhead. In fact that does not concern me at all, at all. What concerns me is what is known and knowable.
For we do know that they dressed alike, ate alike, they were highly efficient, that they had a comfortable existence designing Web-sites for various clients. They, so to speak, mastered the new information technology. They may have lived a nomadic existence moving from place to place, scared like hell of the State, but they were technicians of cyberspace, and therefore terribly modern. Note well they saw the modern monster state, as the enemy, which induced their paranoia.
What can we discern in all this. That these people, young and old, wanted a life of equality above all else. They probably went to extremes to cut their hair alike, to wear alike etc. etc. But the underlying fact is, they practised equality – on earth. They worked. No doubt performing different tasks individually. But the money they derived they used for the whole group. For this, this sense of togetherness, in meaningful work, in daily solidarity one with another, and with the group as a whole they were willing to give up everything else, in their past life! And they did not see this quest for equality and fraternity as a sacrifice. They saw it as a better way of being in the world.
They abjured sex. They even castrated themselves. But was this not a reaction to a society – indeed a world – which seems preoccupied with sex? Put another way, a world where sex has become a commodity, in truth, the commodity of commodities. Sex as a commodity sells everything else, from pins through tyres, to tractors. Everything is sexy – and therefore, good. The world consumes sex in a variety of ways and is consumed by it. It, the purely animal aspects love sex, has become the be-all and end-all, in a world that can offer no satisfaction at work or through work, or even away from work. Even children, who live by the imagination, inventing play, are bored stiff most of the time. There is nothing worthwhile to do, before or after more sex. Little wonder then that these Heaven’s Gate people recoiled from sex. They stepped outside the world of continuous consumption. The world of endless shopping malls, and going to the Mall for want of something better to do. The world of consumption as an end in itself and for itself. They rejected it root and branch.
Yes, they were other-worldly. Seeking salvation from this world in the Other World – to which the space-ship would have hurtled them. But they were as Other-worldly as the majority of people I know, who hope to be saved from the ills of this world if not through death, at least after death, for sure. There they will find no hierarchies, no racism, no sexism, for freed from their “containers” – the body – these things no longer matter. Lust, greed, corruption, poverty, oppression, all left behind, now they have attained “the next level” – the higher level.
But the over-riding fact is the people of Heaven’s Gate wanted equality, meaningful work in fraternity, fraternity in the sense of being useful to themselves and at the same time to Others. That is, not caring about others in their spare time or in between time. But as a matter of everyday, every minute existence. Nor did they want it as an isolated group in Babylon. In short they wanted a new world order, with Leroi Clarke’s new conscience. Or put another way, with a “new human nature.”
OK then point made? No, not completely. The Heaven’s Gate people at any rate, dramatised this need for a new order, a new conscience, by their death. They are known the world over, as Do and Ti or Nincom and Poop, or Bo and Peep. What they really wanted, a life of equality with the most advanced technology serving human needs and human creative development, has been obscured under the welter of pseudo-psychology, about who was homosexual and guilt-ridden in consequence, and who was not.
What has all this got to do with Phil Simmonds, whom the cynics will say made three ducks all in a row, or some such thing but in whom Leroi Clarke sees something quite new. And not just new but essential to Caribbean becoming.
So here goes Leroi Clarke again.
“For a spirit the likes of Simmonds there is only unease and disquiet when definitions threaten to bridle it; when conventions are blind to the open anticipations of future where life leaps and bounds in the fashioning of new horizons ... His is therefore a voice of protest, its style is to alarm (us), it addresses the deeds of dislocation of the spirit of man to his god-self and that of man to man.”
Phew! was my response to that. I readily confess I did not see any of this in Phil Simmonds cricket. I saw a man who would spare no human effort in the field to back up the team, or even to do the super-human. But bat in hand Phil Simmonds looked diffident to me, often undone by his own diffidence, than the skill of the bowler. But in the field he was a tyro. He exuded the feeling, even at the worst of times, that we could always come back from the brink of defeat. Truth to tell this “anticipations of future where life leaps and bounds in the fashioning of new horizons,” I saw in Chanderpaul, especially in the Second Test, in Australia, when he cut loose and made for an hour or so the impossibility of victory seem possible. I even anticipated it. But then one brute of a Shane Warne delivery turned dream into nightmare, eerie nightmare.
But Leroi Clarke is more on the ball to me when he says that Simmonds has this “singularity of disposition to self-effort that radiates, electrifies his team-mates and brings the wider community to its edges where new horizons appear if only briefly.” Selectors do not however measure such in selection. Runs made and wickets got, are the measure.
But Leroi Clarke will have none of that. By no means. He says that “Simmonds’ instinct for the game – the whole game – has no match. That instinct stems from the stirrings of deeper meanings that are willed to qualify its own existence, but more subtly our own, a Caribbean people. It is for this that Simmonds plays cricket – a fight on behalf of the liberation of the authentic nature of Caribbean man.”
And that is not all. Leroi Clarke says that Simmonds “belongs to a special tribe of Man, among whom is a breed called imagists, constructivists – yes, reconstructivists of the fallen human spirit.”
I readily confess that at the end of this, I said OK, play Simmonds and bat him at no. 6.
The point is, I am certain as the sun rises in the morning, that Leroi Clarke did not write this about Simmonds because he was Trinidadian like him. He wrote it because he saw something which I did not see, and which Derrick Michael also saw.
The point is not so much Simmonds, but it is this idea of a particular West Indian personality type, who are the “reconstructivists of the fallen human spirit” which intrigues me no end.
That our spirits have fallen, after the drastic collapse of the Federation, after the failure of independence, after the wayward meanderings of CARICOM lost in a sea of pointless communiqués, mere prattle without trade and therefore, without work, let alone meaningful work in fraternity, is not in doubt. Lara threatened to lift us up. Then he too fell into the morass, structurally adjusted by McGrath round-the-wicket, and his own subversions in pursuit of unbridled ambition. But genius is often petty. Lara will come again.
But I want to return to Leroi Clarke. He has something in store for you.
“After all that” writes Leroi Clarke “I must forgive you, if you erred in believing I was praising a great batsman in Phil Simmonds – No! I was attempting via a medium in which he is quite able to alert us to a more profound happening that is being ignored and alienated – the presence of Philip Simmonds that embodies with great faith and feverish zeal, the untold truth of Caribbean man.”
Simmonds embodies “great faith and feverish zeal” qualities distinctly absent from the West Indian polity.
The point I want to make it is in cricket, that the perceptive among us discern new possibilities. Leroi Clarke’s point is important. It is not the exceptional like Lara, or Viv Richards, or Curtly Ambrose, it is in the ordinary, the bits and pieces players, like Simmonds that we must see the new. For it is the ordinary too, by their extraordinary and new characteristics who are the daily reconstructivists of the fallen spirit, which is ours now. Got the point?
In other words, he Leroi Clarke, like the great historical thinker before him, Vico sees the isolated acts, attitudes and characteristics of the individual on a cricket field. Not in antithesis to the larger purposes that hold us together in society, but as fulfillment of them. May Phil Simmonds “great faith”, “feverish zeal,” his “singularity of disposition to self-effort that radiates and electrifies his team-mates and brings the wider community to its edges as new horizons appear” become flesh on more than the cricket field. In politics and economics, as in cricket, it would be more than the cradle of a “new conscience”. It would be a new order. In that sense and with that prospect, this pointless drifting in which we now live, would seem like a mere stammer, a pause, in a greater quest.
Last updated on 30 May 2022