World Cup Identities

Remember two weeks ago I reminded folks that there are at least three main dynamics behind the enthusiasm of Caribbean people for selected World Cup teams? In short - football and self-identity – or a combination of the two.

There is another reason why we may extend support to a team. But at the current rate, T&T and Jamaica have too much work to do to get anywhere close to World Cup qualification in the near future and the others have even more remote ambitions/capabilities.

But, back to reality. The more knowledgeable would have as their first choice the teams that display the greatest skills on the pitch. They know the players. They can name more than three of them on their team of choice, complete with personal and team stats.

These people can also further validate such support through intimate knowledge of the major leagues in Europe and faint but sometimes reasonable acquaintance with what happens in Asia, Latin America, Oceania, and Africa.

But most of the rest of us also have other, non-footballing, reasons to assign support - or a combination of fair knowledge of the sport and a sense that the tournament is much more than a game.

One criterion does not automatically preclude the next. I have a close friend, let’s just call him PR, who backs teams “with more people who look like us” while knowing full well that footballing skills are often lodged in far more monochromatic teams of another hue.

That is where the other question of domestic and international politics enters the field of play. For instance, had Russia been involved in the current tournament, there would have been chaotic scenes at our bars. NATO, US and EU geo-politics, (non-playing) left- and right-wing posturing would have been on open display.

(By the way, did anyone of you note nominally socialist Russia’s defiant defence of free market conditions regarding the price of oil recently?)

This is not to say that legit connoisseurs of the game would also not have sentimental attachments to one team or the other. Those who lived and worked and were schooled in the UK were there, openly or quietly, backing England in front of their Windrush branded screens.

The English commentators who could not contain their enthusiasm, my Trini/UK friend in Colorado, Sycophantic Manu Bro (PR), Shifty OG, and the guys assembled at a Kingston hotel last Saturday still drying tears.

There are also those who fancy a North American destiny and mourned the early departure of the US team … and to a lesser extent, Canada’s.

I also know others who hold to the myth of German “efficiency” and the dated reputation of their impregnable (footballing) defence.

In short, emotions are difficult to attend to at the height of football passion; especially since there is also the question of self-identity. Take today’s match, for instance.

How more conflicted can anyone, from among us be when France (with so many players who look like us and names we know, and the magical Mbappé) comes up against the identity-conflicted Morocco in a World Cup semi-final?

Yes, two weeks ago I called the names Mbappé, Tchouaméni, Dembélé, Koundé and Konaté when declaring second-choice preference for France to win the tournament.

But, like so many others, completely missed the metaphorical opportunities made available by a determined Morocco team that keeps Palestinian flags in its kits and whose Sofiane Boufal described its win over Spain as a win “for the Arab world.” Contrarily, his coach promptly retorted that his team flies the flag of African football high.

It’s a country as much captured by global institutional arrangements – part of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) grouping to capture its duality - African/Islamic – as we are as an incidental attachment to “Latin American and Caribbean” groupings within the UN and other systems.

Yet, in the African/Islamic sense, Morocco is not Senegal or Cameroon - who beat Brazil 1-0 on December 2 - without the current passions now associated with Morocco in T&T.

Interesting, isn’t it? Today’s World Cup semi-final between France and Morocco brings together two teams that tell the story of international affairs in ways we in the Caribbean understand very well.

Yes, it’s football. Yes, there are issues associated with how global administration of the sport is conducted. But football and identity have merged in a hitherto unlikely place. We’re used to that here.

The Tempest and our times

Hopefully, people are noting that amid pervasive sadness and endemic turbulence, our writers, filmmakers, visual and performing artists are producing at a dizzying rate and, in the process, offering sharper awareness of possibilities and glimmers of hope.

The much-maligned young are leading the way in alleviating the multi-dimensional impacts of a failed generation. People still intent on promoting a notion of the same “good old days” that installed the brittle social, economic, and political infrastructure for all we now endure.

None of this is an attempt to diminish the magnitude of the challenges we face, or to suggest an easy solution. Or even to entirely dismiss past gains. But there are real questions related to viability and sustainability whose answers, if there are any, we cannot escape or resist.

There are civilisations far greater than ours over time that have declined, decayed, and eventually disappeared.

One of these days, I propose to put to anyone who pays attention, the suggestion that the required recalibration in how we think, and act threatens convulsions with tsunamic implications for the way politics, religion, law, medicine, engineering, journalism, and public thought and action are currently conducted.

Responses to the incidence of flooding tell us all we need to know about how societies are sometimes prone to self-delusion and myth.

Earnest, truthful interventions will find little space for any of these institutions and vocations in their current conditions. A complete rethink of our engagement of development will become necessary to assure that something resembling a future as a sovereign state remains on the horizon.

For sure, we are not alone in this. Our neighbours are similarly challenged, and we would do well to note the dramatic decline of highly touted exemplars further away. In the end, we may all have to encounter these challenges together, as is the case with resolving the climate crisis. To a great degree, we are not.

But, back to this glimmer of hope thing. I cannot recall a time when creative powers of this magnitude have emerged to counter false assertions of hopelessness. Follow Franka and Soyini and Barbara-Anne and Laura around and you will not survive half their itineraries – and they cover limited ground.

Music, books, art, drama, and dance are everywhere you turn. For some of us, emerging from the Covid cocoon has been slow and deliberate.

For me, there have just been Ramleela, the Independence and other art exhibitions, pan has resumed (and I have followed from some distance … but not for long), and the stages are coming alive with the sounds of music, poetry, and drama. Last Saturday there was UWI DCFA Jazz.

There are at least half a dozen new Caribbean books to acquire and read. And that is only by the folks I know and follow closely as friends and colleagues.

I had in fact initially thought about focusing today exclusively on the National Theatre Arts Company’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, under the expert direction of Belinda Barnes. Because both the substance of the play and the space it provides for contemporary interpretation offered an opportunity to help us understand where we stand in 2022 T&T.

In the end, I suspect Belinda chose a less potentially contentious path. The plot, of course, (don’t feel bad, I could not remember much of it either) is so riddled with twists and turns there would have been multiple opportunities to exploit the numerous metaphors that awaited.

The task fell to the “narrative links” represented by two re-purposed Roman deities and one Greek goddess who become storytelling washer, obeah, and market women.

Island spirit, Ariel, was magnificently played by Syncytia Bishop and lead character, Prospero, by veteran Nickolai Salcedo on the evening I attended.

This is so much of our current crises and trials in The Tempest. There was a young talented cast to interpret this on stage, and to provide the links. This provided an irresistible opportunity that was not fully exploited, in my view, though the main principles were touched.

An overthrow and subsequent island exile. Insecure leadership. Magic (or the need for it). Vengeance. Rage. Love. And an eventual resolution.

All of this as our days of floods, continued violence, political intrigue, and cynical exploitation of grief and suffering continue.

There is something in the way the play’s surprising, non sequiturial conclusion (as presented on stage) raised questions of the kind we currently confront that are not easily dismissed.

NTACTT’s rendition, complete with original music by Nickolai Salcedo and others, supported by the National Steel Symphony Orchestra, helped take us on a journey we dare not fail to navigate.