Think Piece

Kendall Perez

Tutor: Aakeil Murray

Foun 1101 Caribbean Civilisation

25 September 2014

Think Piece: Tanti Merle at D Oval

The narrator of this piece, Paul Keens Douglas, is a Trinidadian born playwright, performer and writer who spent most of his childhood and teenage years in Grenada before returning to his country of birth. Over the years he wrote a number of short stories and poems using dialect, and basing them on current and local events of the time to assist audiences with identifying with his characters. This particular short story involves the antics of the main character, Tanti Merle, from her preparation to her actual behaviour at a cricket match involving the Combined Islands and Trinidad at the home of cricket in Trinidad, the Queens Park Oval. Though this piece is comical, my goal is to extract the underlying issues regarding patriotic pride, gender ideology, perceived social status and the role of woman in Caribbean society, Caribbean language, the role of cricket in Caribbean society, the significance of colours as it relates to Caribbean people to identify in my opinion the real message of the story.

Patriotic pride is astutely portrayed by the main character in two distinct situations when the same question ‘where yuh come from?’ is asked. One must note that despite Tanti Merle living in Trinidad her devout nationalistic pride lies with the country of her birth, St Vincent and this she displayed by not just saying, ‘I’m from St Vincent’ but by giving the taxi driver a history lesson about her country of birth.

In December 1997, Violet Eudine Barriteau, Director, Centre for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, Cavehill Campus, Barbados wrote:

In spite of expanded opportunities for women to participate in the public, archaic and ideological relations of gender prevent the majority of women from exploiting these. Some women also subscribe to maintaining antiquated notions of appropriate roles and gender identities....