A West Indian lesson in symboling
By Dr. Winford James
April 25, 2004
Brian C. Lara, in his magical turn at the crease in the final test between England and ourselves, has provided parents, schoolteachers, coaches, and other mentors of the young a fabulous opportunity for teaching the power of signs and symbols, particularly their ability to lift and empower our sense of ourselves. In scoring 400 not out against a team that had sadly trounced his undoubtedly talented team in the previous three tests and against a country that had created us as labour and plaything, he lifted our spirits, renewed our self-belief, set the foundation for another renovation of our cricket, stimulated our capacity for metaphor and other meaning-making mental devices.
He is, unquestionably, supremely gifted in his cricketing (especially batting) intelligence, but he didn't - couldn't - do it single-handedly. He needed, and had, all kinds of bases and supports. The collaboration of Gayle, Sarwan, Powell, and Jacobs. The batting trueness of the St. John's pitch. The same bowlers that had humiliated him with unpredictable bounce on the other pitches. A rare moment of taunting euphoria on the part of England - team, posse, and country. West Indian spirits plummeting in a bottomless pit. The believing call of history. The unresolved question of who was the greatest of contemporary batsmen. And when he did it, he transported us into a jubilation that released our meaning-making juices.
The Newsday has captured some of that meaning-making for us in two consecutive Brian Lara specials on April 13 and 14 which, among other things, feature ads from locally-based companies. The ads have clearly been put out to congratulate and honour Lara, but the companies grab the opportunity to promote their products by expressing an association with him. More precisely, they associate Lara's achievement with their merchandise or service to get us to think that the latter is of the highest quality just as Lara's 400 not out undoubtedly is.
Let's look at some of them.
Bee Wee reinterprets its acronym BWIA to mean Brilliant West Indies Achievement, placing it above a foregrounded picture of Lara striding triumphantly off the field with a raised bat, and one gets the meaning not simply of a brilliant Lara achievement, but of BWIA being a brilliant West Indies institution and service. KFC tells us that Lara was 'original, spicy' and that he 'gave those bowlers a perfect roasting', transferring three characteristics of its chicken (originality, spiciness, and roastness) to him, interpreting his 400 not out as 'a perfect roasting' of the bowlers, and, thereby, making us think that they roast chicken as perfectly as Lara bats. Indeed, they strengthen the meaning by labeling Lara 'a kindred spirit'.
The TCL group, which uses the slogan 'one Caribbean, one company', speaks of Lara 'cementing Caribbean history', drawing the metaphor from the fact they see themselves as the only company that caters to the cement needs of the region, and associating their provision of cement for the building needs of the Caribbean nation with Lara's knock uniting the Caribbean. T&TEC uses the metaphor of power, exulting that Lara is a 'powerhouse of talent' and extending the metaphor with notions of 'energy of cricket' (which flows through Lara's body), 'light' (which lights up our world), and 'brightness' (which Lara has brought to our lives), T&TEC clearly seeing Lara as a metaphor of its performance in Trinidad and Tobago. Crix (Vital Supplies) is suitably ideophonic in both its name and in the word 'CRACK', which it juxtaposes to a picture of Lara pulling delightfully for a boundary, the shot symbolic of the spectrum of shots that made up his 400, Lara 'break[ing] dey back]' just like the consumers of Crix biscuits break the latter's delicious backs.
Republic Bank, 'We're the One for you', is starkly subtle. They are content with showing Lara cutting majestically to the boundary under the words 'The power of One', the bank and Lara united in exemplary performance, both singular on the plane of excellence. Angostura, for their part, wastes no time on subtlety: they simply take a simile and compare Lara to their aromatic bitters, with the claim that both excite the world. And Carib, one of the sponsors of our team on the current tour, creates an honour guard of opened bottles of Carib beer that makes us think that Carib not only salutes Lara but made way for, or enabled, his performance, Carib not content to stay merely as the beer of West Indies Cricket, but as the beer of unparalleled cricketing performance.
It is Lara's 400 not out, created as it was against an extremely depressing background, stimulated this profusion of innovative language, making people not only look for connections with their own states of affairs but, more importantly, seek uplift, revivification, and reconstruction in the open-ended power of metaphor and other meaning-making devices.
This opportune release of language is an excellent resource for parents, schoolteachers, coaches, and other mentors of young people.
Archives / Winford James Homepage / Previous Page
^^ Back to top
|