'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  Austin C. Clarke seems to me an outstanding writer — outstanding, that is, not only among the brilliant novelists who appeared during the last decade in the West Indies, but outstanding among the writers of the English-speaking world. He has a wonderful ear for the speech of Barbados and a wonderful gift for reproducing it with wit and poetic force. Unlike most writers with this gift, he can also tell a story and construct a novel which is compelling in the delicious revelation of the deviousness of the human heart and the painful humours of the human condition. If he does not hit the reading public like a tornado, I’ll eat all the pineapples Mr. Clarke cares to provide. — Olivia Manning.

  This was written, as I said, in 1964. Olivia Manning was at the height of her career as a novelist. She was married to Mr. R.D. Smith, a producer of the Third Programme at BBC; and it was Mr. Smith who organized a panel consisting of V. S. Naipaul, Anthony Burgess, and me, to discuss Imperial literature. The afternoon of this radio program, I took tea with Olivia Manning and her husband at their home in St. John’s Wood. In the discussion, Naipaul who had a strong liking for the whiskey (the BBC was civilized in their treatment of you in the green room: you could drink and smoke, even during the radio discussion), Burgess was smoking mini-cigars; and Naipaul defended imperialistic literature. He praised Rudyard Kipling. I cannot remember what I said, except that I objected to Naipaul’s obsessive appreciation of Kipling’s novels about India.

  But regarding the eating of pineapples, and the prophesy, I am sorry that it took from 1964 until 2003 to have Olivia Manning’s declaration of my ability come to pass; and more sadly to report that in the long wait for acknowledgement that she saw in 1964, she had died before the cup could be passed to me. This is why my dinner engagement with David, at the Royal Over-Seas League dining room, was such an important event in both our lives. He had at last seen the fruits of his labour; and could now bear witness that Olivia Manning’s testimony had been spread on fertile soil of expectation; and also could claim, that Olivia Manning knew her pineapples.

  But just as David, forty years earlier had not “noticed anything” in the billboard with the golliwog, so too, in 2004, forty years later, no one but me seemed to have been offended by the advertisement of the Jerry Springer opera. I was offended by the erosion, the dulling of my triumph (for to be in London for those two weeks was a recognition; and the recognition was a triumph), the corroding of my image by the reminder that someone sees history in terms of many Notting Hills, and that subliminally, there is still the image of the golliwog. When I look carefully at the photograph of the black man dressed in diapers, with bonnet and pacifier, it is a golliwog I am seeing.

  Thinking about this London golliwog in the advertisement, it has just come back, suddenly, after fifty years, back in the Island, attending Harrison College, the headmaster (acting), Mr. Medford, a graduate of Oxford University in Classics, who taught Sixth Form Classics, and was a brilliant master and scholar, and who, important to state was white, was nicknamed “Golli,” shortened from “golliwog.” And we boys, both black and white pupils, called him “Golli,” not exactly to his face. But we knew, from the fact that other junior masters also called the acting headmaster “Golli” meant that “Golli” himself had accepted the nickname as a term of endearment.

  You wonder then about this thing called racism, and whether it is not the context and the interracial environment in which it is expressed and spoken, that cancels out any intention of racial spitefulness.

  I do not think, however, that the advertisement for tea, and for the opera, placed in popular places in London, during Notting Hill, in 1963, or today, in 2003, is the same thing as calling a white man, living in Barbados, “Golli.”

  Perhaps, Mr. Medford, a Barbadian, got the nickname “Golli” from English university students, when he came up to England to enter Oxford University!

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Austin Husbands, the most beautiful sprinter to watch, as he sliced seconds and seconds off the existing records of the one-hundred-yards dash, and the 220 yards — also run by him as a “dash,” was also my nemesis. He was a sergeant, I think, in the Harrison College Cadet Corps, when I was “court-martialed” at the end of the Walkers Summer Cadet Camp, in 1950.

  I knew, the moment I “went through the wire” and over to Harrison College from Combermere — a wire fence separated the two schools, who were not friends, or friendly during my school days — I knew that I had to beat Austin in the one hundred yards, in order to finish Sports Day as Victor Ludorum. And to make matters worse for me, Austin had a bigger brother, John, who was equally good, but not as beautiful in his stride when he came round the last bend in the 220 yards. Girls, from our sister school, Queen’s College, packed the grounds and the small pavilion, just to see Austin. And Austin was one of the first school boys to wear running shoes. Most of us ran barefooted. The natural way. I would watch Austin in his running shoes, and dream of the time when I would be able to wear the soft black leather shoes with the “sprinter’s spikes” in them, and blaze the track.

  We were not friends. We were not close. Although we were in the Modern Studies Sixth Form at the same time, Austin doing English language and literature and history; and I doing English language and literature and Latin. Austin was a prefect; and the next term, was Head Boy. I was a prefect, and even when I was the most senior prefect — the others having left school — the headmaster, John C. Hammond, Esq, M.A. (Cantab), who was not a friend of mine, and vice versa, refused to give me the expected honour of being Head Boy.

  I am thinking of Austin now, because I had been thinking of Ben Johnson, who to me is the best sprinter Canada has ever had, and will ever have, for a long time, as I do not see anyone on the horizon, so to say, who could replace Ben Johnson. Ben Johnson is a much better sprinter than the other Jamaican; and I lost all respect for Donovan Bailey, when he “dissed” Ben Johnson, just before the 1996 Summer Olympics. It was an unkind cut: unwarranted, in the circumstances. And the circumstances revolve around the fact that Ben Johnson set the pace for all future black Canadian sprinters. This outstanding quality, performance and personality, this comparison Austin Husbands had with Ben Johnson.

  In the obituary notice of Austin’s death, is this paragraph: “And as his brother, Mr. Justice John Husbands recalled, ‘I don’t think Tom Clarke ever forgot that he was beaten by Austin in the 100 yards…’”

  My name in Barbados is written as Austin “Tom” Clarke, with “Tom” as a nickname; but more than a nickname, for I am addressed, formally and informally, always as “Tom.” And it is true that not only have I not forgotten that Austin beat me in the one hundred yards more times than I beat him, Austin’s brilliance at this distance caused me to have nightmares the week preceding Sports Day at Harrison College. I have carried this memory for sixty years. And there was a time, after I came to Toronto, when I could not bear to watch athletics on television, and would turn my eyes away when the half-mile race was being run. I was less reminded of my final failed performance in that race, at Kensington Oval in 1951, whenever I watched the one hundred and two hundred metres than the half-mile.

  What we used to call, in Barbados, during the thirties and forties, “decentness,” is a characteristic which is sadly missing from professional sport, and without belabouring the point, I attribute a dramatic amount of this to Donovan Bailey.

  In 1997, on the 4th of June, there were some responses published in the Toronto Star, concerning Mr. Bailey’s comments on the aborted 150-metre race, promoted as a challenge to settle who was the better athlete, Mr. Michael Johnson or Mr. Donovan Bailey. A convincing majority of persons who responded to the question, “Do you think Donovan Bailey’s comments about Michael Johnson being a coward were in poor taste?” — 56 percent as against 44 percent — said, among other things, quite pointedly, “Donovan Bailey should run with his legs, not his mouth.” This is the sentiment I held, when Mr. Bailey “dissed” Ben Johnson, publicly, concerning Ben Johnson’s offering tech
nical help for Mr. Bailey’s upcoming 100-metre race in the Atlanta Olympics. The race was not only arranged to decide who was the better athlete, it was obviously, and perhaps, primarily set as “nothing more than a publicity stunt that gave both men a healthy wallet.”

  There was a quarrel that erupted around this aborted race.

  Michael Johnson’s coach, Clyde Hart, according to the Toronto Star, said that “From the accounts I’ve read in the Toronto papers, Dan Pfaff [Bailey’s coach] ordered Donovan to go take him out hard and you’ll get him hurt.

  “I have very strong concerns that their runner was instructed to do that. That’s very unprofessional …”

  The irony about this dispute lay in the fact that Michael Johnson went back to Dallas where he was getting “two-a-day treatments” for the pulled muscle that Bailey did not think was legitimate: and soon after, Bailey himself was sidelined with a pulled muscle. It can be said that this was the last we heard of Donovan Bailey, except as a literary critic.

  Regarding the match race between Michael Johnson and Donovan Bailey, there are three interesting views that correct the misconception that I am biased against Mr. Bailey:

  “I realize that Donovan Bailey was rude, but then we are not the ones to who went through all that training, pressure and finally getting cheated by the track configurations. We are not in his position or shoes, so we have no clue how he felt and hence do not know why he reacted the way he did,” wrote Deepti Rampal of Toronto.

  Henry of London, Ontario, said, “Why is it that Michael Johnson can run off at the mouth when it comes to hurling insults at Bailey and his fellow Americans praise and support, while Canadians turn on their own, claiming Bailey’s comments were in bad taste? Surely there are other things in the world to worry about than whether or not the fastest human in the world was a ‘polite’ Canadian.”

  The last word goes to Judy Brydon of Milton: “Donovan Bailey indicated to everyone watching on Sunday that he is no sportsman. He may be an athlete, but to command respect and admiration, one must also practise good sportsmanship. He is obviously unfamiliar with the concept.”

  Professional athletes, wrestlers, boxers, runners, and hockey players use various tactics, bravado, and antics to “psych out” their opponents. This was not a case of that less abrasive taunting.

  Living in a country like Canada, where there is a division, or a difference in point of view, amongst white Canadians and black Canadians — perhaps, I ought to have said, non-white Canadians, a peculiarity, or a point of view that comes out in the watching of sports, principally, and those sports in which historically non-whites have not been known to excel at, this gnawing feeling that I am looking at sports through the eyes of colour and race, and not looking at the competitions from a purely athletic point of view, appreciating the brilliance of the particular athlete, is of some concern to me. I think this is the case more in a society like Canada, and certainly in the United States, than it is the case in Barbados. In Barbados, we were brought up on a diet of cricket that was absolute, and that became a culture of cricket.

  You could hear the crack of the cricket bat when the red leather-bound ball, bowled at lightning speed by the fast bowler, was struck, full, sharp as a cannon-shot through the covers to the boundary. The “covers” is the name of a position on the field. A cover drive, crisp as a fresh soda biscuit. Four runs! You could see the style of the batsman, brandishing his cricket bat, his “willow,” shining from an oiling with linseed oil, which must have added to the clarity and the sharpness of the shot. I can easily see that in the manner the batsman held his “willow” was, metaphorically, a gesture of manhood, a gesture of sexual prowess. He had held his cricket bat, after having driven the ball to the boundary, the way he would have held his penis in another similar act of having scored a boundary. As a matter of fact, in Barbados, the “willow” is the colloquial term for penis.

  So, you would hear the applause of the spectators, men and women, sitting in the pavilion, (if there was one), but mostly sitting on the warm grass of the cricket ground, on benches; a few men on English-style walking sticks, a few reclining on English-made lounge chairs. These men and women, watching a game of Saturday-afternoon cricket, and who were supporters of the home team where the match was being played, would applaud the shot made through the covers by the batsman on the opposing team, as vociferously, as enthusiastically, and sincerely, as they had been clapping at the brilliance of the bowler, a member of their team.

  On this Saturday afternoon, in this game, the bowler is a black Barbadian. The batsman, who has just executed the brilliant cover drive, is a white Barbadian. These attributes, “black” and “white,” that relate to colour, are used here, only because I am writing this reminiscence in Toronto, and also, only to define status and colour and ethnicity, as they relate to Canada, in other words, putting them into the Canadian context. These two attributes were not used back then in Barbados to denote excellence at cricket, or the enthusiasm of your loyalty and support for the batsman, or for the bowler. Those two adjectives were not used to define your support, or your hailing for the particular cricketer, because of his colour; or even his social status.

  In Canada, however, watching sports is, for me, a more personalized and psychologically serious occupation, based upon what Frantz Fanon calls “a historicity” that applies to black people who are “immigrants” or who are, by race, different from the majority of the people in the country where they live. This is particularly the case if the person watching the sport is not white; but is black; and if the athlete he is watching is white. Fanon was a West Indian from Martinique who studied psychiatry at the Sorbonne in Paris. His views on this subject relate specifically to French colonialism and the brutality the French government of Charles de Gaulle used in its attempt to defeat the Algerian struggle for independence. And these views are contained in Black Skin, White Masks: The Experiences of a Black Man in a White World.

  If you are a black person, to be watching sports on television, “ain’t no sport at all, boy!” A black man watching sports on television, such as golf and tennis, finds himself in addition to watching, analyzing, and interpreting more than the serving of aces, and the sinking of birdies, becoming obsessed by the new racially significant expression of excellence in these two sports, which cut across, diametrically, the formally acknowledged cerebral ability of the black tennis player, and the black golfer. It challenges that presumption and the absence of mental expectation of superiority at these “white” sports, a superiority that is attributed normally and historically to white athletes.

  Therefore when I watch Venus Williams and Serena Williams at Wimbledon, or the U.S. Open, or the French Open — as a matter of fact, in a tournament of even less stature, it ceases to be a moment of casual relaxation. It is war. A war of nerves, a war of expectation, and hope, and more than that, the demand, conveyed telepathically, that they win. A war of racially motivated and induced expectation of victory. “They got to beat those white girls, boy!”

  You want Venus to win. And you pick out her victim based upon her race, and her attitude, and her subliminal superiority. And this vindictiveness in the spectator is made all the more malevolent by the comments in the commentary of those commentators who remind us that Venus and Serena win because they use force, serving aces at more than one hundred kilometres an hour. And they contrast the sisters’ style to that of Martina Hingis, “who uses her head.” So, I like especially to see Venus and Serena beat Miss Hingis. Venus therefore stands in the minds of some, for Africa, and blackness, and brawn. Miss Hingis for Europe, and whiteness, and cerebral sophistication.

  But most of all, I want the Williams sisters to demolish Capriati. I wish this on Miss Capriati, because she has the most obvious “class,” “style,” if you like, of all the women players. And although to me, Miss Capriati is identifiably European, she carries nevertheless in her European gait and posture, the anger and demonstrativeness that powders a tinge of blackness on her personalit
y. It must be because she is Italian!

  So, in each event, first round or quarter-final, I want Venus, or Serena, it doesn’t much matter, to defeat Miss Capriati, in all their head-to-head bouts (I say “bouts” deliberately, as to me, they are no longer “matches”), because in my mind, Miss Capriati “looks” black, but of a “high yaller” colouration; and I want the glory to be blacker than that, blacker than a light-skin woman who could pass for white. I want the victory to be black.

  The significance of this kind of black victory, of this way of looking at a tennis match which ceases only to be a match, and becomes a fight, a struggle, a demonstration, lies in the “historicity” of race, and is erupted from the steaming, oppressive vortex of slavery; and of any other kind of colonialism made more complex by racialism.

  When it comes to watching Tiger Woods play golf, it is the phenomenon of having black people united in a sudden attraction — and affection — for a game considered by them, perhaps through exclusion, as a rather childish pastime — hitting a little white ball. Another reason for this almost universal black attraction is that Tiger Woods has not only broken the racist barrier which characterized golf, by integrating the long-standing clubhouses in the American South, but that he is so reliably good at hitting the little white ball to suit his impulse and his technical knowledge of his game.

  There are millions of black people who are cognizant of the socially segregationist history of golf. And the young-enough and the healthy-enough are now invading Canadian golf clubs — and elsewhere in the world where there are black people with their clumsy, unprofessional clubs in their hands — and imitating the swing and the putt of every ball that Tiger Woods strikes, with the same racial cohesiveness and racial intensity as fans who are black, who watched Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali and Jack Johnson symbolize by their fists the desire of the black man to excel. And to beat his white opponent, publicly, in a way that he could not achieve, through the same racism, in other social endeavours. What goes through the mind, the veins, the spirit of the black man, especially his or her living in a predominantly white society, when he watches Joe Louis fight Max Schmeling for the heavyweight title of the world? On whose side, really and psychologically, is the sentiment and the hope for victory in a boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Floyd Patterson? The irony is that although Floyd Patterson is black, he is “white” through the overwhelming support he had from the white society. And this was caused because Muhammad Ali, previously Cassius Clay, came to represent an extremist philosophy and antagonism; and Patterson, white middle-class “decency.” And who can forget the history of racism that exploded, physically, against Jack Johnson, when he fought Sammy Burns in Australia on Boxing Day in 1908? And the blatant racist opinions of Jack Johnson, of the fight, published in international newspapers, including the Sydney Bulletin and the New York Herald, in 1908. During the fight, the arena was filled with shouts of “coon” and “flash nigger” writes Joyce Carol Oates, in a review of Unforgivable Blackness: the Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, “the hatred of twenty thousand whites for all the Negroes in the world,” as the Sydney Bulletin reported, yet the match would prove to be a dazzling display of the “scientific” boxing skills of the thirty-year-old Johnson, as agile on his feet and as rapid with his gloves as any lightweight. I have not gone so far in my sentiments when I watch Venus Williams playing against Miss Hingis, or Tiger Woods playing against the rest of the world. I have simply put my money on Tiger, metaphorically speaking. But I have always been sensitive to the taunts, delicate and sometimes subliminal, that must greet, and must have greeted Venus and Serena, at the beginning of their remarkable appearance on the scene of professional women’s tennis. And how they bore those taunts and slights, including the bounce given to Venus by a European player, is a compliment the high standards with which their father and their mother brought them up, in America.