"I don't like cricket, oh no, I love it" - Fire in Babylon (2010)

I do not know how many Americans, when they hear the word cricket, still think of the insect that chirps its heart out (mostly at night). But if you google the word cricket, the first results you will see are for the sport that is not widely known here. Except through immigrants who have come from countries where cricket is king. Or queen.

Cricket was unavoidable in Pakistan. Even if you were not a fan of the sport, you could not help but hear about it on the news, read about it in the papers. In the mid seventies, which is the period I remember the most, we had a great team, with Mushtaq Mohammad as the captain. There was Zaheer Abbas, Asif Iqbal, Sarfraz Nawaz, Wasim Raja, Wasim Bari, Majid Khan, Mushtaq's brother Sadiq, and of course the unforgettable Imran Khan, among others. Javed Miandad appeared on the scene as well, and was simply marvelous.

I know I watched a number of matches, but the one that really stands out for me is the series between Pakistan and India in 1978. I recall how this was more exciting that year than any of the other matches because it was the first time we were playing against India after seventeen years. Bishen Singh Bedi was the captain of the Indian team at the time. The great Gavaskar was there. And it was Kapil Dev's debut - damn good one too. And Pakistan won the series thanks to some awesome batting by Majid Khan and Miandad, among others, and the fast bowling of Imran Khan and his fellow bowlers! We were in school, and radios were forbidden but one of my classmates smuggled one in anyway. I think just as I did with the "rumble in the jungle" between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, I feigned illness during one day of the series.

When watching cricket, I did not focus on any other team but Pakistan. Names like Botham, Lillee, Richards, Boycott, I remember, peripherally, as opponents. And let me tell you, if I had known more about Vivian Richards between 1974 and 1979, which was the last time I would watch a cricket match on television, he would have toppled Imran Khan as my favorite cricketer!

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This past weekend, I was switching channels, and was shocked at seeing cricket on ESPN classic. What is this? I thought. What my eyes continued to see was not only entertaining, but incredibly inspiring.

Fire in Babylon is a 2010 documentary about the West Indian cricket team of the seventies, captained by Clive Lloyd. This team is remarkable not only for overcoming the perception of "calypso cricketers" - cricketers who were entertaining, but not winners - but also for how Lloyd brought together a group of men from different countries in the Caribbean (Jamaica, Guyana, Antigua, Barbados . . .) to form what would become the longest winning cricket team in the history of the sport.

Horribly stung from their defeat by Australian fast bowlers in 1975-76, Clive Lloyd and his team are determined never to lose again. The West Indian bowlers develop their style of fast bowling as well. However, it seems that certain factors come into play when the Windies decide to practice fast bowling. The manner in which they do it is seen as brutal and intimidating, and they are criticized for it. As Andy Richards points out, nobody complained when the Australians did it. It is not difficult to understand why the West Indians would think they were being singled out, when there were other fast bowlers on other teams. And given the colonial history, and how West Indians had been perceived in years past, it is not unrealistic to think that race played a factor.

Another ignominy was on the part of the English captain in 1976: Tony Greig's remark that they were going to make the West Indians "grovel". This remark made at a time when racism was still very much a part of British society, and apartheid was in full force in South Africa.

Greig and his teammates paid dearly for that remark when the West Indians crushed them.

This is a team that not only played the game for the sake of the game, or their livelihood, but for a much bigger picture. They played to show that they were men who were no different than their white counterparts, they played to increase social awareness, and to give their compatriots all over the world a sense of pride. They would not grovel. They would not give legitimacy to state-sponsored racism.

But there were West Indian players who did agree to play in South Africa at the height of apartheid. One of those players was the fast bowler Colin Croft. These players were denounced by the cricket board, by their people. Colin Croft was one of the players who got a lifetime ban from the Windies team. He did not return home after the South African trip. The film shows the disgust and anger of some of his former teammates. Michael Holding asks, "What is wrong with the color of our skin?" upon hearing that the players would be given "honorary white" status.

Vivian Richards, the fearless batsman was the target though. Richards was given a "blank cheque". If he considered it even for a moment, he refused. He talks about how Desmond Tutu gives the team a message from Nelson Mandela thanking them for their part in the struggle against apartheid. What could be more affirming and just awe-inspiring than a message from the imprisoned Nelson Mandela?

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One of the other interesting things about the documentary was the commentary from journalists and personalities from the Caribbean. I wish I knew who the one Rasta was who made remarks like Viv Richards was "rastarized", how he was the "real deal", and quoted Bob Marley from "Pass it on": "Live for yourself and you will live in vain. Live for others, you will live again." Had I seen the film from the very beginning, I would have known his name.

I have heard someone say that Bob Marley's songs/music were not protest songs/music. I do not know how one cannot see protest or affirmation in many of his songs. Bob Marley and the West Indian team of Clive Lloyd were traveling the same path.

I loved how history, culture, struggle, and sport were all tied together in this. There probably could have been more about some of the cricketers' lives, what brought them to the game, but this is great enough. This is still relevant, and important to remind those who are still playing that there is always more to the sport than just the match.

I loved the lyrical way in which some of the former players, some now commentators, like Michael Holding, spoke, and the patois that escaped understanding, but still you get a glimpse of the differences between the cricketers - and the things that held them together.

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I have been away from cricket for decades. Every once in a while, if I went to the Bombay Cricket Club in Portland for a meal, there would be cricket on television. I remember trying to explain the rules to an American and feeling incredibly perturbed at having forgotten so much.

This was an excellent reminder of what I have missed for so long. If you have a chance to catch it on ESPN, again, or on Netflix - you don't have to know much about cricket to watch it!

Fragments

Note: I have written of these things before, I am sure. But by way of apology, while the content of this looks familiar, the telling of it is never the same. 

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It seems to me that in this still very young century - the 21^st that is, with all its technological advances and the behemoth we know as the internet – so many of us as humans remain at a certain level of evolution (a certain politesse prevents me from substituting evolution with a less kinder, gentler word). It apparently does not matter whether we live in the 21^st century or beyond, if we make it there. The way in some of us treat one another or react to one another is still as some would do in the 19^th century, in the 15^th century, perhaps even earlier. And when we look back to those times and think, ah! We are so much better, there is still considerable cause for concern. We are still hurting, killing each other, even, over religion, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

In Fiddler On The Roof, Tevye says something to the effect that an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth would leave everyone blind and toothless.

Is this truly the kind of world in which we want to live, grow, create? A blind and toothless world where decisions for many of us are made by people who are so disconnected from us?

I spent the first six years of my life in America, in Minnesota. At a time when so much was happening in the country, I was ignorant of the horror that was Vietnam, the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. My mother would tell me years later that my parents had seen the latter shot on television. I cannot imagine the shock they must have felt, they both admired Robert Kennedy.

I did not know what was happening outside of the apartment building in which we lived. Perhaps my preoccupation(s) consisted more of being able to walk, and be in the open air. Until I was three years old, my parents carried me much of the time, and when my youngest brother was born, it was my father, when we were out. There is a photograph of us standing outside, perhaps in a parking lot, and my father helping me to stay on my feet, my little arms stretched upward as he held those tiny hands. Why could I not walk until I was three? Spina bifida contributed to that

I knew very little, if anything of Pakistan when we returned in 1970. And for a while, we had a tiny enclave of America: an American family living to the left of us, another one living to the right of us. One of my allies, playmates until her family left as well, was American. So there was always this connection, this exposure to more than one culture. Growing up around Fisher-Price toys and dollhouses, Nancy Drew mysteries as well as desi dolls made out of cloth or some other material and dressed up in bridal red. We left America, but America never really left us as my older brother and sister continued their education in an American school located in the beautiful hills of Murree, around 1973 or '74.

In 1971, after what had been a long period of time during which the people of what was then East Pakistan were fighting for their rights, and their independence, war broke out between West Pakistan and India. I was seven. It was December, but I had no real recollection in later years of what the month was, or the days. All I really remembered was taking shelter in the hospital. The first day when we were all preparing for what was to come, some of us kids were in Central Supply, folding gauze into neat large squares for bandages and watching them being sterilized in the autoclave. I thought that in some way I was contributing to the war effort, but not many if any war casualties arrived in our hospital. Even the one that I thought for years was a casualty, was not.

My brothers had told me that they had seen a dead body. I wanted to see it too, because I always wanted to do EVERYTHING my brothers did. So I begged my very reluctant aunt, and cousin, both nurses, to take me where it was. In supposed stealth, we went to this dimly lit room that had a gurney in the center of it. For a few moments we gazed at the figure, covered in white from head to toe, until one of them began to unfurl the sheet. Before I could even see the man's forehead, my father and what may have been a group of interns entered the room and we were in big trouble.

A while later, he explained why he reacted as violently as he did. I took that as an apology and forgave him, but what happened in that room would never be separated from the fear and violence of the war.

Before the war, and after the war, India was viewed by many in Pakistan as the enemy. I have to say that I could never see one of our neighbors in that light. We were not raised to view anyone, let alone Indians, as us and them. The fact that certain prejudices were still held, that certain boundaries were still kept was another matter, but we were not raised to think negatively of Muslims, or of Indians. My parents were born in India in the 1930's, and became Pakistanis overnight in August of 1947 by virtue of their families remaining where they were. It is not that they rejected the fact that they had this new nationality thrust upon them. It is that they do remember what it was like to be Indian for a short while. They also knew of the danger, the violence that was happening if not in their own villages, then in neighboring ones, or cities, the border and elsewhere.

As a small child in Rochester, Minnesota, I had no concept of what racism was. Or discrimination. It was not until many years later that I learned that one of the patients my father was going to tend to there did not want to be treated by a “nigger”. That did not stop my father from talking to him, and ultimately being able to tend to his care.

In Lahore, Pakistan, the city where I was born, and to which I returned, I was beginning to learn how differences between people could cause divisions, and bad feelings. At home, I was around wonderful Muslims who treated us as if we were one of theirs. At school, it was a different story. I do not know if some of the animosity towards me was because I was Christian, I was langRi, or I was just an insufferable person. But in that school, I heard the word issayee flung as a slur for the first time. And later on, when an argument ensued between two girls, afghani was used in that same vein, to diminish the girl who embraced that identity. Those were telling moments in learning how ignorance does more than other a person. It dehumanizes them.

I have great memories of Lahore, and I have bad memories of Lahore. The same can be said of any city by anyone, I suppose. But for those of us who have seen our countries change drastically as a result of revolutions or coup d'etats, countries where secular or somewhat secular societies were overrun by religion, memory takes on a different meaning.

Lahore is still home. It is perhaps much less of one, given that I have not been there in a very long time and it is far from the city that I remember. But it is still home.

I have gotten into arguments with certain people, Indians in particular, who think it is utterly ridiculous that I, a Christian, a minority in Pakistan, a group that never has reached anything beyond second-class status even with the advancements a number of Christians have made there, should still have any love left for the country of my birth.

I do love the Pakistan of my childhood, the Lahore of my parents' younger years that is described to me, the home of my maternal grandparents. I saw in all those much more hope for the country. Until 1977. And it is difficult to separate that vision, romantic at times, realistic at others, from Pakistan as it exists today. Some in America hear the progressive voices in Pakistan, unfortunately somewhat less than the extremist ones, but they do exist. I try to be more hopeful that the progressive secularists will prevail. I try to be hopeful that what is done in Pakistan is more for the betterment of all Pakistanis regardless of creed or ethnicity and not always in reaction to India. In this case, I tell Master Yoda, trying is all I can do . . . .

Dawn in Paris

The previous day, I enjoyed watching a documentary on PBS - Paris The Luminous Years:  Towards The Making Of The Modern. It originally aired almost a year ago but I had not seen it before, and watching just a few minutes, I was drawn in to the lives of the artists and writers who called Paris their home. I loved re-visiting Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company. And seeing the works of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Derain, Braque, and many others.

I learned of the modernist movement through Romance Language literatures (French and Spanish) at first, but later mainly through British literature. It remains one of my favorite periods because of the break with the past not only in terms of writing, but art in all its forms, whether it was the stream of consciousness of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, or the effects of industrialization in the novels of D.H. Lawrence and his depiction of relationships. Or the cubism of Picasso and Braque.

This documentary mainly focuses on Paris, and its importance in shaping the direction in which modernism was moving. Also other than Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein who were incredibly influential in the span of time of the "luminous years" (1905-1930), most of the artists discussed in this film are male. We learn of the relationships between artists, between artists and their champions. Would Ulysses, shocking for its time, have been published had it not been for Sylvia Beach? It was during these years that Americans as different as Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes and Josephine Baker also arrived in Paris.

It also explains the roles that cafes played in the life of these artists, and of Paris altogether. I found it eye-opening to learn that public gatherings were interdit in Paris during a certain period of time and it was in the cafes where artists arranged to have their work exhibited, or meetings were fixed. Hubbubs of artistic and political discussions and ferment, I do not know that that has changed in Paris all that much where cafes are concerned.

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What also came to mind while watching the documentary was the book I chose as my project for my Feminist Criticism class: Writing For Their Lives: The Modernist Women 1910-1940. Djuna Barnes is not mentioned in the documentary, but she was also in Paris in those luminous years and had met and interviewed James Joyce. She also became a friend of Gertrude Stein. Writing For Their Lives analyzes the works of women writers such as H.D, Bryher, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore among others and how they fit into the avant-garde modernist movement. Many of these women also befriended one another, supported one another, were lovers and inspirations to one another. These are not writers that one sees often in the canon; it was great to see how these women were no less ground-breaking than their male counterparts like Joyce. I have yet to read Women of the Left Bank, but I can say that Writing For Their Lives is also an important work in examining Modernism.

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I have yet to see Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, and its back to the future theme by going back to the Lost Generation. As I watched Paris The Luminous Years, and the reactions to the "new" (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Ulysses), I thought about the time we are living in today. A time in which supposedly modernism is dead, and that which followed. Is what replaced it any better? I cannot say for certain, but what I do hope is that there is still something we can learn from the modernists. Think of how often we still quote some of them, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, from lectures to characters in television series. I hope we never reject some of the artists, thinkers, writers completely as we continue into the future.  

Addendum to previous post . . .

Rather than deleting the introductory post -- I just thought I would add that there may be exceptions to being "hateful" (like "reacting" to certain Republicans), but I shall attempt to be more balanced in my anger and/or criticism.

Welcome back, your dreams were your ticket out . . .

And so it begins . . . again. A new blog. Back on Blogger.

Most of what I write is about films - particularly old (classic) films. Or books. Or whatever is on the brain. I try not to get too personal about myself (or anyone else for that matter. I do learn from experience every so often), though you may think you find me in what I have written on any given day.

A friend of mine told me that no one reads blogs anymore. I don't know if that is necessarily the case, but even if it is, writing is all love and some therapy. If you happen to gaze upon this page, I promise you won't turn into stone. Everyone must get stoned, I suppose, par baraye mehrbaani, if you do plan on metaphorically throwing stones, try a little peace and understanding first. We all have opinions - we can all voice them without being hateful. I know we can!