ABSTRACT

James’s subversion of the canon shows that cricket, like any cultural symbol or practice, possesses a degree of fluidity of meaning. Apparently a sport indelibly inscribed with ideas of Englishness and empire, cricket was nevertheless subject to revision at the peripheries of that empire, and was eventually re-articulated as an instrument of colonial and postcolonial subjectivity and agency. In the former British West Indies and its Diaspora, the legacy of James gave rise to a significant tradition of Caribbean cricket literature, including a particularly rich body of both oral and written cricket verse. One particularly resonant example of this genre is ‘Cricket’s in my Blood’ from Days and Nights in the Magic Forest (1986) by the Anglo-Trinidadian author Faustin Charles. Along with two other cricket poems in this collection – ‘Viv’ and ‘Greenidge’, which celebrate two of the greatest West indies batsmen of recent times, Vivian Richards and Gordon Greenidge – Charles uses the metaphor of cricket in order to explore the ambiguities of Caribbean identity within the context of postcolonial context: Rising to conquer, propelled by a gift And a hunger. The ball swerves, lifts, and strikes Widens with pain and anguish Breaking heights beyond the sun, And the light circles all, Screaming in the extremity Of lives laid out bare in the height of sacrifice. 2