Storifying Caribbean Cricket: Voice and Perspective in Paul Keens-Douglas’s “Tanti at de Oval”

Paul Keens-Douglas, renowned Caribbean storyteller, has related various tales on the game of cricket. “Tanti at de Oval”, a notable representation of sport in literature, is a fictionalized narrative of an actual 1975 regional cricket match played at the Queen’s Park Oval, Trinidad. Each is a famous sporting and speech event with the latter, also published as an illustrated book, imaginatively chronicling and couching the former in joke, humour and Trinidadian Creole. Claire Westall describes Keens-Douglas’s story “Me an’ Cricket” as “an interesting example of the meeting point between oral and scribal traditions”—a characteristic feature of his oeuvre—and points to Cynthia James’s affirmation (Child Lit Assoc Q 30(2), p. 170, 2005) that he “played an important role in the reclamation of a local folk voice and the literaturisation of creole orality” (The shorter form(s) of the game: cricket, childhood and the Caribbean short story. In: Evans L, McWatt M, Smith E (eds) The Caribbean short story. Critical perspectives. Peepal Tree Press, pp. 128, 2011). “Tanti at de Oval” is as much about the unnamed homodiegetic narrator and the eponymous Tanti Merle as it is about cricket, a sociocultural institution in the Caribbean. This essay analyses discursive strategies such as titling, repetition, sports commentary as embedded discourse, and complementarity of visual and written codes in exploring how the interplay of voice and perspective is encoded in and contributes to the successful rendition of the story.