Cricket and the arc of a changing world
“You can’t really understand West Indian cricket unless you understand West Indian history,” says Simon Lister, deftly switching between superfan speak and history expert. Lister is a 55-year-old cricket fan and writer. His three books, Supercat, an authorised biography of Clive Lloyd, Worrell: the Brief but Brilliant Life of a Caribbean Cricket Pioneer, and Fire in Babylon: How a West Indies Cricket Team brought a People to its Feet, are utterly focused on one topic: Caribbean cricket.
Lister’s most recent book is a biography of the first black captain of the West Indies, Frank Worrell. “The arc of Worrell’s life intersected with the arc of a changing world,” he says. Cricket originally was introduced as a form of subjugation and conformity, played exclusively in the Caribbean by white British soldiers. But it was subverted when black West Indians began to play and dominate the game, becoming a force of change.
Simon Lister. Pix by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
Lister explains how the West Indies Federation developed in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s advocating for self-determination from the British through the unity of the Caribbean islands. Although the federation failed, with the islands ultimately gaining their independence individually, that moment in history was crucial for the creation of a Caribbean identity and resistance to British control. Cricket, says Lister, was front and centre in this story.
“The idea (of a West Indies federation) was going to fail but for a brief period it coalesced with the West Indies being led by a black captain for the first time and playing such brilliant and beautiful cricket around the world,” he says. West Indian historians have written about how their history and culture was violently erased by colonialism leaving them no political or social role models in their national consciousness. Figures of authority, from teachers to judges, to priests and police officers were all white. So it was, explained Lister, that unlike Britain where politicians and generals became icons of the nation, in the West Indies it was cricketers; Gary Sobers, Leary Constantine, and especially the first black captain, Frank Worrell were the islands’ national heroes.
Lister explores Worrell’s life, through his struggles with the “colour bar” as segregation was referred to in the West Indies, his move to Britain, his cricketing career and his strong but mostly private criticism of racial discrimination. Worrell’s relative conservatism when talking about race, from a modern point of view, can be misunderstood as “disguising.” But this is where Lister says understanding the context of cricket in personal life and vice versa is paramount. He researched the norms of the time and the booming success of West Indies cricket under Worrell’s captainship to present as authentic a picture of the man and his politics as possible. “The characteristics that made Worrell such a brilliant captain and made him acceptable not only within his own community but the worldwide cricket community – which was largely white –was his skills as a diplomat,” Lister concludes, “and I think he had the acuity and emotional intelligence to realize that if he was going to take West Indies to a different place he had to do it slowly and he had to do it thoughtfully.”
Given the intimate link between West Indian cricket and its social and political life, it comes as no surprise that it features heavily in the federation’s cultural products. Filmmakers, writers and musicians have been drawn to cricket creating a cultural ecosystem around the game. Lister thinks this is powerful and something to be encouraged around the world, and in Sri Lanka.
But teams like Sri Lanka and the West Indies are facing a new threat, he says. Asked what the crossroads of the game is today – the way racial discrimination was in the 1960’s – his answer is money. “There’s massive financial inequality in the game driven by this axis of India, Australia and England trying to take cricket into a different stratosphere,” laments Lister, “I fear that West Indian cricket – I’m talking about Test cricket – will be excluded from the table in 10 to 15 years.”
Being left in the dust would be a tragedy and irretrievable loss. As a biographer of cricketers, he has no delusions about cricket’s dark past but he doesn’t want the beauty that emerged from that history to be lost. “If you see a player, a West Indian player, playing for a franchise, and the most defining characteristic is the soft drink or the packet of crisps logo he has on his front that doesn’t really mean anything to anyone,” he says. “But if you could say that man represents me, I identify with that person, because I can see where he’s come from, which is really what West Indian cricket was about in in a lot of ways, for 50 years, then those are important things in people’s lives.”
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