Think Piece

“Identity may be defined as the individual characteristics, style or manner that is fundamental to a person and by which that person is recognized. Identity is influenced by personal choice but also by society through existing social and cultural situations.” Girvan 2001 states in a nutshell that there is no such thing as Caribbean identity rather there are “many cultural identities co-existing within a society and more so in the region.” Regardless of that statement, Caribbean identity is as real as the meanings we give to our experience. It is not fixed but contextual. Caribbean people organize themselves around certain institutions and in ‘Tanti at the Oval’, that institution is sports; cricket. Not only that but language and linguistic tells of the history of Caribbean people, it is their way of interpreting the world. There is a rich cultural mix and linguistic tradition coming out from language in the form of ‘creole’ native to Caribbean people; the language used throughout ‘Tanti at the Oval’. Creole stretches across ethnic divides, political divides and even geographical divides.

As aforementioned, ‘Tanti at the Oval’ is centered on West Indian cricket;

“The game would have come to these isles with the British in 1797 and would have been unknown to the Spaniards, they being more occupied with the bulls, and the French who would have been taken up with balls. Be that as it may, what we do know is that in 1896 there was a Cricket Club by the name of the “Sovereign Cricket Club”, whose pavilion stood in just about the middle of the Grand Savannah, now the Queens Park Savannah.”

more specifically a ‘big match going on Trinidad versus the combined islands’ The excerpt focused on the clear distinction between the preparations made by Tanti Merle and the narrator for the big match and immediately the reader is nudged for reasoning of such, possibly some aspect of Caribbean history. Tanti Merle and the narrator would have lived in two different...