Sport in the Black Atlantic

Cricket, Canada and the Caribbean diaspora

Janelle Joseph

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526104946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

An ethnographic study exploring the role of cricket in maintaining cultural connections between Canadians and other members of the Caribbean diaspora.

1

Community

Diasporas are communities positioned at the interstices of (1) a (mythical) homeland or local community where people are from, (2) the location where they reside, and (3) a globally dispersed, yet collectively identified group. These communities are neither homogeneous nor innate. A sense of community, Brubaker (2004) notes in Ethnicity without Groups, is often objectified as a “thing,” something always already there that people “have,” but “‘groupness’ and ‘boundedness’ [are] emergent properties of particular structural or conjunctural settings” (p. 55). Some groups go to great lengths to establish themselves as cohesive and bounded communities. For example, as Brent Hayes Edwards (2001 ) astutely points out, the term “diaspora is introduced in large part to account for difference among African-derived populations, in a way that a term like Pan-Africanism could not … it forces us to consider discourses of cultural and political linkage only through and across difference” (Edwards, 2001, p. 64). A key example of discourses of cultural linkages is the pre-civil war collective self-definitions of the Afro-diaspora, which “often treated Africa as a fallen civilisation to be redeemed by African-American Christians. Self-identification as a diasporic 'people' did not necessarily imply claiming cultural commonality” (Brubaker, 2004, p. 57). The boundaries that diasporic groups construct around themselves shift around the multiple identities people express. Flattening a complex history and complex individuals through a focus on a singular identity as a diasporic group prevents us from understanding the ways in which group boundaries are constantly being (re-)made by people who have experienced the uneven trajectories of ancestry, plurilocal homelands and varied ways of construing sameness and difference.

The Afro-Caribbean diaspora is a community fractured by “disjunctures produced by the diverse intersectional experiences of gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, age, generation, disability, geography, history, religion, beliefs and language/dialect differences” that produce power struggles (Hua, 2006, p. 193). Nevertheless, people who live within these groups develop a solidarity with each other via transportation and communication technologies, economic and social remittances, political rights bestowed upon migrants, and transnational or cultural organisations that permit them to feel close to one another. They conceive of themselves as one community in spite of distance from the homeland or other dispersed group members. Furthermore, their proximity in the place of residence allows for a local sense of community that is not dependent on an elsewhere. This chapter explores the various tactics used by the MCSC members to reify the Afro-Caribbean community, to celebrate blackness and masculinity, and to establish themselves as part of a local community. I delve into their activities before, during and after games that mark them as part of a bounded group.

Liming: creating Afro-Caribbean social spaces and networks

For many of the Mavericks, playing cricket in Canada meant playing in cold weather for the first time. Although their season does not start until May, it might not be more than 15 degrees Celsius at that time of year in Toronto, a big adjustment from the 25–35 degrees Celsius year-round temperatures they were used to. Warlie, a 70-year-old black Barbadian-Canadian, who arrived in Montreal in December of 1968 explains that “In Toronto there’s no ocean to jump in, so the black man plays cricket and dominoes. I can be with the fellas and jus’ relax all summer. Winters are long an’ it’s hard to get used to. I tried to skate once, but the ice cracked, so now we don’t fight it. We not hockey players. Cricket’s our sport.” Warlie describes surviving Canadian winters as a struggle; his story of the ice cracking beneath his skates reflects how insecure and isolated he felt when he first arrived in Canada. He enjoys being active and feels imprisoned by cold weather, since he does not participate in any winter sports. Summers, in contrast, are full of physical activity, friendship and opportunities to relax. As he talks with me, he easily slips between the individual (“I tried to skate once”) and the collective (“Cricket’s our sport”) signalling the sense of community and social connections he developed by playing cricket and its associated activities, such as dominoes. Despite the cold weather, every May the men transform an empty field into a distinctly Afro-Caribbean environment. They recreate the cricket environments of their homelands and their youth through liming, defined by Warlie as “being with the fellas and jus’ relax.”

Liming is a uniquely Caribbean expression that captures the practice of socialising, hanging out, relaxing, or partying, which often involves outdoor eating, drinking, dancing, playing dominoes, chatting and spirited rounds of verbal sparring. Known as the dozens (United States), gaffing (Guyana), picong (Trinidad and Tobago), or keeping noise (Barbados), Afro-Caribbean men and women tease, heckle and mock each other in a friendly manner with a combination of jokes and insults. This way of speaking is described by Abrahams in his text The Man-of-Words in the West Indies as a valued way of expressing masculinity and advancing reputation in outdoor Afro-Caribbean spaces. Rather than the content of their speech, the emphasis on speech using poetry or proverbs, aggressive talk using witty banter, socialising in an antiphonic pattern and using their native patois languages and English accents are keys to communication and characteristic of Afro-Caribbean communication rituals. Patois is not “broken,” “bad,” or a dialect of English; it draws directly from African linguistic structures in combination with the language of colonisers and many expressions are common enough throughout the Anglophone Caribbean for men and women from different nations to communicate with each other. The use of patois or speaking English with an accent in diasporic settings provides for its speakers a sense of identity. The MCSC members keep their culture alive with every word as they discuss their families, local and international politics, dominoes and cricket. As Madan (2000, p. 29) notes of Indian diasporic cricket fans, in “talking cricket,” and “in articulating allegiances and negotiating hybrid spaces, these subjects actually speak their identity as [Afro-Caribbean-Canadians] into existence.” Their joking and socialising are the lived social practices that denote the cricket grounds as an Afro-Caribbean homespace.

Language (accent, style of communication and topics of conversation) is one of the primary signals that Mavericks’ cricket grounds are spaces set apart from mainstream Canadian society. Carrington has noted of Afro-Caribbean cricketers in England, the movement “to create nearly autonomous spaces are an attempt to resist what might be described as the ‘terrorising white gaze’ (hooks, 1992) within public spaces … [W]‌ithin a wider white environment, the cricket club provides many of the black men with a sense of ontological security” (Carrington, 1998, p. 283). Afro-Caribbean cricketers in Canada also create a black space in which they can feel comfortable. The ways they communicate with each other and with visitors from the diaspora while liming on and around the cricket boundary and club social events are examples of their negotiations over diverse conceptions of freedom, which, Noble (2008, p. 90) accurately points out, are not situated strictly within “party politics and political nationalist movements that characterised earlier anti-colonial and civil rights politics. Instead they are increasingly being traced out on the intimate contours of the body and the self” for black people. MCSC members liberate themselves by carving out space in Toronto that is just for “their people.” Through liming, MCSC members are able to renew their sense of local and global community.

As a possible result of their status as visible minorities, ongoing racism in the dominant Canadian culture and relatively small numbers (and therefore lack of ethnically exclusive neighbourhoods), Caribbeans, in contrast to Italians according to a 1991 study, were found to be more likely to use sport to generate an ethnic identity. A statistical analysis of Caribbean and Italian soccer club members indicates that Caribbeans are more highly involved in their clubs as players and as participants in social activities and rely more on their soccer teams “as one key means for sustaining ethnic identity” (Walter, Brown and Grabb, 1991, p. 90). The authors went on to suggest that Caribbean clubs more often encourage “the use of ethnic language or dialect in conversation, and the recruitment of players by members’ recommendations rather than by open competition” (p. 90) to maintain the club’s ethnic links. With fewer organisations, social networks and material and cultural resources at their disposal than other non-racialised groups, Caribbean people are more likely to turn to a sports organisation to shape their identities.

The MCSC games are not merely sporting activities. They bring together family and friends from throughout the Black Atlantic to lime at the matches so they can feel “at home” whether they are in their nations of origin, elsewhere in the Caribbean, elsewhere in the diaspora, or at grounds in Toronto. While some club members emphasise their ways of life and thought as the same as in their homeland – as pure, stable and timeless – this should not, as Hannerz (1997) suggests, invalidate analyses that demonstrate the ways their cultures are creolised and Canadianised. That is to say, they use cricket to maintain black identities, but their status as Caribbeans means they are already embedded in a culture (if not an ancestry) that is a mixture of African, Asian, Indian, European and Middle Eastern. Moreover, their relative permanence in Canada, and in some cases, mixed-race children and families, reveal that their communities are not always so narrowly defined. Nevertheless, in the face of all this mixture, the ongoing naming of MCSC as a black club means that it is used for racialised community making in Canada.

Club members migrated to Canada mainly in the 1970s and 1980s to fill labour shortages and secure an income for their families. While much of their lives were completely transformed upon migration, especially for those who arrived in winter, cricket remained constant. They described joining teams as a saviour in their first months in Canada. In some cases, family members, or friends from work introduced the Mavericks to the cricket community. In other cases, they found work and even family (some cricketers met their wives and reunited with cousins) through their interactions at cricket matches and related social events.

Mavericks, such as Mason, a 72-year-old Barbadian-Canadian, intentionally joined cricket leagues to ease the transition to their new country:

I went to trials for the Trinidad and Tobago team and I didn’t make it, so I say “Let me jus’ come to Canada an’ start my life.” I could have stayed back one year an’ everyone telling me “Stay, you’ll be selected when you’re older.” But I just decide I want to start makin’ money … At that time there were so many jobs here. They were beggin’ us to come. It’s just what you did. Finish A Levels [secondary school exams] and go to Canada or New York or England find work. I get a job and make friends, that’s when I found a cricket team to play wit’, so it seem everyt’ing work out. (Mason)

Erol, a 55-year-old black Barbadian-Canadian, also found league cricket through the interpersonal networks of a tightly knit Afro-Caribbean community:

When I came to Canada first, I eventually hooked up with the West Indian community people and they encourage me to you know, come out and have fun with them. So being new to the country I t’ink that was my – I would say – that was one of the focal points of me getting out and start playing cricket. (Erol)

Mason and Erol, through their new friends, set about playing competitive, recreational cricket in Canada and recreated Afro-Caribbean spaces through their liming practices at games.

For a new immigrant who felt “lost,” cricket offered a sense of familiarity, comfort and security:

I didn’t know that there was cricket played in Canada. I always ask and nobody ever knew … I lived in a predominantly white neighbourhood. That was Ajax and at the time when I came there was no West Indian store. To get a West Indian store you had to come all the way back into Scarborough … You see a black person in Ajax it was like “Oh my god!” … And I remember one day my wife was driving down Baseline [Road] and she saw a big sign, “Cricket plays here” and “Practice on Wednesdays” … So I went and I was the only Guyanese. All Bajans [people from Barbados] and Trinidadians, but it was comfortable, you know? (Reggie)

For Caribbean men new to Toronto, cricket provided instant access to a broader network of Caribbean people. In a Canadian (middle-class) culture that is focused on “inside life” (i.e., life inside homes, cars, workspaces, restaurants, or arenas), cricket offered Caribbean men a reminder of their (working-class) home life where domestic affairs (including cooking and eating), drinking, socialising and physical activities are performed outdoors. Carrington’s (1998) description of a recreational cricket club in England suggests that elsewhere in the Caribbean diaspora, this type of organisation provides the same sense of comfort for its participants, who describe it as “more than a club”; it was significant “in providing a safe space within a wider (hostile) environment for the earlier Caribbean migrants” (p. 284). Upon their arrival in a new country, Caribbean migrants can generate a sense of comfort at the cricket grounds, as they “develop a panethnic Caribbean identity as a result of interacting through these networks with other immigrants from the Caribbean,” inevitably giving their “ethnic identity a transnational focus” (Rogers, 2001, p. 181). Reggie, an Indo-Guyanese who felt isolated in a white neighbourhood, shifted his primary category of affiliation from national group (Guyanese) to regional group (Caribbean) and racial group (black) based on his initial lack of access to other Indo-Guyanese people, the mixed nationalities of his first team members and the predominance of Afro-Caribbean people and cultures in the club.

The summers of 2008 and 2009 in Toronto were among the rainiest in recent memory. It rained at least once almost every weekend from May to September. Nevertheless, the Mavericks went out with their friends to play cricket under dark clouds and grey skies; if and when it rained, they continued to play until the captain decided the risk of injury was too great. At that time, they would call off the game and retire to the grassy area outside the boundary, where cars are parked, to join spectators already engaged in the non-cricket aspect of their weekend rituals: liming. The fact that MCSC members are forced to park their cars on the grass surrounding the boundary means that occasionally the fête (party) atmosphere is punctuated by the sound of a ball cracking a windshield. Men gathered at their cars were then briefly reminded that they were, in fact, at a cricket match. They turned around, heckled a player or two, and returned to their conversations.

Players and spectators brought out coolers full of food and drink, supplied their own lawn chairs and used their vehicles as a sound system, shelter, restaurant and bar as the occasion warranted. In better weather, more spectators came to the games and stayed longer afterwards; however, regardless of the forecast, every weekend, all summer long, at least twenty-two players and a few dozen spectators occupied various Toronto cricket grounds and contiguous parking zones in their efforts to reconstruct home and regenerate their communities. Werbner (2005, p. 745) points out a paradox of multiculturalism: “in order to sink roots in a new country, transnational migrants in the modern world begin by setting themselves culturally and socially apart.” This is the function of liming at the cricket grounds. In most sports, a post-game celebration (or mourning) involving food and drink is standard. It is an inherent feature of the sport of cricket – hours of passive waiting for one’s turn at bat – that allow the Mavericks to lime before, during and after games.

Pre-game liming

Before cricket games have even begun or, in some cases, before their turn at batting, some MCSC players and all spectators were already generating a celebratory, carnival atmosphere through pre-game liming. Burton (1995) explains “carnival” and Caribbean “street culture” as a social, cultural and psychological complex unique to the Caribbean. As a result of slavery with manual labour of the most crushing and dehumanising kind imaginable, it should come as no surprise that the pastimes of Caribbean cultures would place an extraordinary emphasis on carefree vitality and re-humanising celebrations. On their way to matches, whether on tour in a bus or in their personal vehicles, the Mavericks play and sing along with “oldies,” including calypso, reggae and country songs as well as American popular ballads. More recent music styles out of the Caribbean such as ragga and dancehall are not predominant since the Mavericks typically celebrate the music of “their generation.”

While travelling on a bus to a game during a tour in England, one player contributed a Frank and Nancy Sinatra CD and a 1960s rhythm-and-blues CD to the ambiance, and players sang loudly the lyrics to “Saying something stupid like I love you.”. When Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” came on, Warlie, a 70-year-old black Barbadian-Canadian, stood up in the aisle of the bus and serenaded me. His performance included a finale in which he got down on one knee and sang with outstretched arms (not an easy feat for him owing to his ailing joints). “How do you all know these words?” I asked him. “You haffa born early like me!” He replied enthusiastically as he struggled to stand. When I inquired about the most popular artists...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Community
• 2 Routes
• 3 Nostalgia
• 4 Disjunctures
• 5 Diaspora space
• 6 Nationalisms
• Conclusion
• References
• Index