The turn of seasons provoke memories, and at times nostalgia. Maybe it is because they recreate, in such short time, completely familiar conditions of existence. Sounds, smells and sights produce a sensory overload that mimics memories. I find there is something playful about the act of remembering this way: summer is taunted by autumn leaves, winter by spring blossoms. It is mischievous and fickle, like the poet’s pen that uses such symbols to good – if redundant – effect. In Cape Town, the seasons follow the course of capriciousness, as any visitor will tell you. But in Zambia, they are easier to distinguish from one another. They are brokered by two acts of providence: the first rains and the last rains. All other acts of god revolve around these two points, from planting seasons to the onset of myriad tropical diseases to political agitation. There is something in the cyclical nature of the seasons that structures our experience of life, that creates a sense of rhythm bordering on the poetic, and violent, and redundant. At times we forget that. [1]
Sport, I think, is a good way to get a grip on the rhythm of seasons. Many sports limit themselves according to the natural elements, like tennis and cricket that struggle to be played outside of summer. Others, like football and rugby, are 'winter sports' that could be played in the summer, but in Anglophone countries will not because they then compete with summer sports. Like with any cultural forms, these distinctions are the products of contested histories. Seasonal distinctions, along with the rules of 'global' games, were mostly codified during 19th-century industrial Britain, set against the backdrop the industrial revolution that pitted the ruling classes against the industrial and rural labouring classes in economic and cultural terms. In doesn't take much to imagine what sport meant, and means, in these terms; especially when they only went global after a quarter of the world's population was under British imperial rule. [2]
Taking note of this history, many popular sports may seem quite Victorian in their form. The most obvious is probably cricket, which is played in full whites, contains a break in play called 'tea', and has sporting terminology rife with Victorian-era sentiments (think of the moral undertones of the term 'maiden', which describes an over without a single run being scored, in a sense 'untouched'). However, sports do not simply reflect history, they also embody them. They occupy multiple cultural and symbolic spaces in public life - at once (and at odds), I am thinking here of strawberries and cream at the Wimbledon final, or of the Samba-esque - 'Ginga' - style of Brazilian football played religiously in favela streets. The difficulty of speaking about sports across time and space - to the extent that what is considered a 'sport' is never stable - reflects how interwoven the threads of culture, history, and sport are. [3]
However, there are relationships that cut across these different cultural forms, in spite of their unequal histories. On the one hand, this is a function of the fairly consistent rules of playing a sport, at least at the institutional level; for example, football across the world is translatable because of the adoption of a standard set of rules, from North Korea to Zambia, and cricket is understood as lucidly in California as it is in Afghanistan (I think, at least).[4] On the other hand, and outside of it as a translatable form of entertainment or spectacle [5], there is a ‘play' within sports that produces its own subjectivity, its own lightheartedness and competitiveness, and at times its own forms of democracy and injustice. These subjectivities, within and across different sports and produced in many different ways, allow us to speak with one another without the need to constantly translate our experiences. Sport becomes a theatre where the politics and culture are quite literally 'played out'. Sport is the great equaliser.
I wanted to talk about cricket when I first started writing this blog. For me, the end of summer translates as the end of cricket. My Saturdays have cleared up, no longer spending time driving across Cape Town, and cooking up half-baked theories about cricket, and how the world revolves around it, and oh how glorious the sun is giving me heat stroke (one has much time to lyricise during a cricket match). But upon reflection, it seems to me that the seasons strike the timbre of a metaphor, not only fact. Seasons are formulaic, constantly reproducing the same movement of the natural environment [6], whether it is the subtle capriciousness of the Cape or the dogmatic dramatism of Zambia. Sports are too, by staying true to their forms, their 'rules of play'. It is within the limits of redundancy that we create our own passages of joy and play. It could be a walk amongst the auburn plane trees in the leafy suburbs of Cape Town, or harvesting inswa after the first rains in Lusaka. It could be spending a day of cricket wondering about only god knows what on a large oval field, or playing football in the compound near you. These experiences, disparate and fleeting, for a moment ground us in the common language of playfulness, allowing us to speak across and to one another.
In my view few things are as enjoyable as passing time, and knowing what may take place has taken place a thousand times before.
Postscript; or a preface to A Love Letter to Cricket
I have been meaning to write a 'Love Letter to Cricket' for a while now, and part of the reason for this blog was to sketch out a framework for that. Maybe I failed in that intellectual task, but in speaking about the seasons and sports I recalled the poem below. I wrote it a while ago. It was a reflection on cricket and some 'thing' deeper. I couldn't quite figure out at the time what that 'thing' was or is, but maybe that isn't the point. On rereading the poem, I 've come to realise how influential my childhood was in shaping my love of cricket, [7] the passion for which I have since tried to rationalise in a number of ways. As a child I was awed by the grace of the game. I still am.
the pavilion
along the way
to a Methodist boarding school
my peers gathered at the pavilion
in tradition watching
white hats against white slacks
maybe we can be redeemed
in the way children play
dancing around
and alighting their souls
in spite of the homes their parents burnt
along the way, an Indian summer dragged us
from fields of carelessness to manhood.
like the monsoon
come on time, but too early
for a soul to travel back in time.
Notes
[1] Although, I’d like to point out that large parts of the historical canon have, with periods of varying intensity, taken the 'structure' of geography and nature seriously. I'm thinking here of Fernand Braudel's pioneering historical surveys of the world of the Mediterranean, which popularised the term 'longue duree' - essentially privileged the 'long' (almost ahistorical) histories of geography over other, shorter, forms of histories centred on events.
See: Fernand Braudel. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, 1972
[2] Although, these sports were not only spread through colonialism. For example, in Italy, the spread of football was brought over by British expatriates. The first football clubs in Italy were actually cricket and football clubs, where the team played cricket in summer and football in winter. From there, football spread like wildfire across the country.
[3] Anyone interested in what this undertaking might look like, must read David Goldblatt's The Age of Football, 2019.
[4] There is a cricketing anecdote, though, I find quite telling of the possible limitations of this, or at least the possibilities of limitations in a pre-globalised world. Cricket journalist Scyld Berry amusingly narrates umpiring a cricket match in the remote north-eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea, where the local counting system does not extend beyond 3. Here, the game can never really progress beyond the most basic level. The logic of the game still remains, although it cannot be quantified according to numbers. His conclusion is that without numbers, cricket just resembles a 'middle practice', without any real point, or excitement for that matter.
Scyld Berry, Cricket: The Game of Life, 2015, pg. 242.
[5] The practice of sports being confined to certain seasons presents a problem for increasingly profit-driven sporting consortiums. For in order to generate revenue, an ideal situation would be to play sport all the time. However, these enormously wealthy entities have found a way to capitalise on the 'lull' of the off-season. Through the investment of the public in international speculation - for example, in the 'transfer windows' of European football clubs, where much of the football-loving public think and talk about who will go where etc. - you can be your own play-pretend club owner.
[6] Increasingly punctuated, it is true, by major out-of-season weather events caused by global warming. Slavoj Zizek notes how "The lesson of global warming is that the freedom of humankind is only possible against the background of a stable environment (temperature, the composition of the air, sufficient water and energy supplies, and so on): humans can 'do what they want' only insofar as they remain marginal enough, so that they don't perturb the parameters of life on earth." This does leave an interesting, if subliminal, question of metaphor here: if the season is slowly being broken down as a concept, what of other 'forms' will break down with the imminent destabilisation of the 'natural' environment. I am not able - perhaps more importantly, do not want to - answer this question.
Slavoj Zizek, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight, 2018, pg. 33.
[7] To give context to the entire piece, perhaps I must explain that for me, sports and seasons are so intimately linked because I went through a Southern African schooling system modelled on the British, where each season has its own portfolio of sport, usually around 3 or 4 strong. I mostly played cricket in the dry season (summer in South Africa, winter in Zambia) and rugby or football in the wet season (winter in South Africa and summer in Zambia).
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