Discuss Merle Hodge'S Crick Crack Monkey As a Novel

ISLAND LITERATURES

DISCUSS MERLE HODGE’S CRICK CRACK MONKEY AS A NOVEL DEALING WITH THE CONFLICT OF CULTURES.

Merle Hodge born in 1944, in Trinidad is the daughter of an immigration officer. After studying at the Bishop Anstey’s high school of Trinidad, she obtained the Trinidad and Tobago Girls Island Scholarship in 1962 which led her to the university college of London. She obtained a degree in French and later in 1967 a Master Philosophy degree. Merle Hodge traveled a lot in Eastern and Western Europe and when she returned to Trinidad she started teaching French in junior schools. Later she obtained a post of lecturer at the University of the West Indies. In 1979, she started to work for the bishop regime and she was appointed director of the development of curriculum. In 1983, she left Grenada because the bishop was assassinated and she is now working for the Women and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad.

She wrote the novel Crick Crack Monkey in 1970 where she deals with the theme of childhood in the West Indies. The main protagonist called Tee lives with Tantie who is a working class woman. She later goes to live with her aunt Beatrice and she faces a new and different world from that of her Caribbean world: “Hodge's story is presented through the eyes of a black, lower class girl of Trinidad in the 1950s.” The whole story is one presented from one point of view: Tee’s. She is left alone by her father who goes abroad after the death of her mother and she has to live with her lower class Tantie where she learns about being independent. Later in the story her aunt Beatrice takes her and she then has to adapt herself to the ‘white’ world. She faces a lot of cultural and identity conflict as she does not really know where she belongs or what culture is wrong or right. “However, looking at the story of "crick crack monkey" through the eyes of a young white girl, rather than a young black girl, the reader might see the injustice and the ethnic discrimination that a black person must endure. She would not be accustomed to being called a "little black nincompoop" (Hodge 457), and she would most likely not have to suffer a physical beating with a ruler (Hodge 456)”

Tee becomes the narrator and Hodge guides the reader through an “intensely personal study of the effects of the colonial imposition of various social and cultural values on the Trinidadian female.” Tee narrates the diverse problems in her life in such a way that it is often complicated to split up “the voice of the child, experiencing, from the voice of the woman, reminiscing; in this manner, Hodge broadens the scope of the text considerably.” It has often been seen that the British have used various techniques to influence the viewpoints of the Caribbean people. “The people's self awareness, religion, language, and culture has coped with the influx of British ideals and in coping, the people have changed to appease the islands' highly influential British population.”

Crick Crack Monkey is made to be a novel dealing with the conflict of cultures that Tee has to accept. We first meet Tee when her mother dies and she is portrayed as being surrounded by people. She experiences ‘crowd-scenes’ where she has all her family and friends around her to give her support. At Tantie’s house, she had Tantie’s loud presence and when she was absent she had the presence of other children. This in a way is made to reflect the Caribbean culture where every one is warm and caring and where the people like to stay together and entertain social relationships: “As Yakini Kemp notes, "she [Tee] is moving progressively toward the development of a positive self-image while she resides with Tantie" (24).

Tee is made to be independent and having a voice for herself in the Trinidadian society. She has a confident personality which has been molded by the culture in which she was living. These episodes where Tee is made to be surrounded by the people of Trinidad are made to contrast with the isolation and the loneliness which Tee is made to feel at her Aunt Beatrice’s place: “these scenes set up a contrast to the loneliness the narrator-protagonists will experience once removed from their original environment and placed into a Western or Western-aspiring one. What Marjorie Thorpe has said about Crick Crack Monkey thus can also be said for Bedford's novel: "Throughout the novel Hodge contrasts the warmth and congeniality of Tantie's household with the loneliness and isolation which Tee experiences at Aunt Beatrice's" (36)

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In Crick Crack Monkey Hodge makes the isolation felt by Tee become associated with cultural alienation. She had always been said to belong to an extended family culture where she feels part of the family but the western culture makes her feel out of place and she thus feels alienated from both cultures at a certain point. This alienation process is depicted through the fact that Tee has to move from an Antillean culture to a supposedly European culture: “In this novel Merle Hodge presents the process of alienation by depicting Tee's transition from a typical Antillean tradition to that of a pseudo-European culture.” Tee is made to balance herself between the culture of Tantie who gives her “the promise of staying on with the original culture of the Caribbean islands” and between Aunt Beatrice who gives her a prospect of another culture: “Aunt Beatrice offers the lure of abroad - a culture that Tee slowly becomes familiar with but does not belong to.”

It is seen that, while Tantie and Aunt Beatrice represent different perceptions of cultures which were present in the island, Ma, Tee's Grandma, represents another culture. She is the one who tells the children "'nancy" stories and she is near to the Tee's African roots. Tee visiting her grandmother makes her realize that: "Ma's sayings often began on a note of familiarity only to rise into an impressive incomprehensibility, or vice versa, as in 'Them that walketh in the paths of corruption will live to ketch dey arse”. The three women in Tee’s life makes her realize that each one belongs to a class and a culture which is seemingly different from each other and Tee is unable to even understand the culture of her Grandmother so she becomes alienated from the African culture in a way. She is left with Tantee’s culture and with Aunt Beatrice’s culture where both culture makes her in a way lose her own identity.

In Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey, Tee's education is responsible for her internalization of the European or the western culture. It is found in the novel that even before Tee is made to go and live with her Anglicized Aunt Beatrice she has to learn about their culture where things which she has learned in her Caribbean culture does not exist “Books transported you always into the familiar solidity of chimneys and apple trees, the enviable normality of real Girls and Boys who went a-sleighing and built snowmen, ate potatoes, not rice, went about in socks and shoes from morning until night and called things by their proper names, never saying "washicong" for plimsoll or "crapaud" when they meant a frog. Books transported you always into reality and Rightness, which were to be found Abroad. (61)”

It has often been seen that the colonial education was part of massive artillery to colonize the mind of the people and that this helped to consolidate the colonialists power and culture. It is said that the ‘whole educational apparatus was geared towards cultural domination by consent’ and that in a way it completely destroyed the culture and the cultural education of the colonized people. They were in fact alienated from their own culture through the colonized education and they were made to create an environment where they would desire the Eurocentric culture. This is in a way what happens to Tee who is made to feel alienated from her own culture by the colonial education she is given.

Tee's education thus in a sense puts her in an unbearable state: “since her own world does not have the same cultural referents as the one she is taught to regard as "correct," she is forever trying to "catch up," always seeing herself in terms of a world which can never be her own because it is always elsewhere.” She is always lacking in her acceptance of this culture: “her whole socialization process comes to affirm that however many of the cultural standards prescribed by the educational system, her teachers, or Aunt Beatrice she adopts, she always falls short -- and so do her teachers and Aunt Beatrice, who are similarly caught in a cycle of self-denial and self-hatred.”

Tantie representing the Caribbean culture warns Tee not to get carried by the colonialist instructions and this warning comes in time when Hodge introduces the teacher, Mr. Hinds who “is bent on living an English reality in the face of the facts of the Caribbean because he holds Englishness as the highest value in his life, and so it is not surprising that "[e]everyone knew that Mr. Hinds had been up to England" because he is eager to let everyone know about it. His devotion to the metropolis assumes a worshipful attitude illustrated by his "daily endeavor to bring the boys to a state of reverence" towards a "large framed portrait of Churchill" (24).” He makes the colonial education, the center of his teachings and what he teaches the students does not even include the Caribbean reality that the children are living. He tries to instill the English culture in the students: “from apples to Christmas to snow and the haystacks the children learn about in their school primers -- who do not have any lived knowledge of England, thus attempting to erase Caribbeanness in them as it has been erased in him.”

There is one passage which addresses the issue of language, identity and of culture. Mr. Hinds being irritated with his students says, "'Here I stand, trying to teach you to read and write the English language, trying to teach confounded piccaninnies to read and write. . . . I who have marched to glory side by side with His Majesty's bravest men -- I don't have to stand here and busy myself with . . . little black nincompoops" (29). This in a way reflects the culture which is often adopted by the western world where people think that the way you speak is a representation of yourself proposed by Ashcroft. The students are made to reject their local language to adopt the language of the colonizer and the“use of the language highlights cultural specificity” when the vernacular language is inserted in the novel. The very rendering of the vernacular in written English gives it equal status to "mainstream" English and linguistically symbolizes an act of resistance and a cultural alternative – Creole culture -- that, in the plot of the novel, is marked by a relative wholeness when juxtaposed to Mr. Hinds' and Aunt Beatrice's self-alienation, which is expressed in the above passage through Mr. Hinds' concern with having his students learn "proper" English.

According to Frantz Fanon: “Every colonized people -- in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality -- finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle. (18)” Mr. Hinds is the representation of the colonized man who tries to act white. He creates walls between himself and the children where he is in a way rejecting his own blackness and is trying to make them accept the culture of the colonized through language: “attempting to make them like himself, with language as a primary standard of culture, he also tries to prove his own cultural "redeemability," the possibility of becoming English.” Tantie represents the Caribbean culture and thus she tries to preserve it in Tee. It seems that the culture in which Tee is living is mixed with the European culture and there are many agents of ‘westernization’ which are present in the society. Mr. Hinds seems only to be a puppet who has been employed to prepare Tee for her awaiting life at the household of Aunt Beatrice: “it is for good reason that Tantie warns Tee of such indoctrination in the vernacular, since the vernacular is the only cultural basis for Tantie (and potentially for Tee) from which to launch a defense.”

The novel shows that the children have to go to Aunt Beatrice’s place in order to obtain the proper education and Tantie has to let the children live with Aunt Beatrice. In a way she knows that the colonial education and system is all that matters to succeed in the world. It seems that Aunt Beatrice’s westernized house is the only ‘proper’ place for the children to stay because it contains all the cultural values of the Europeans. At her arrival there it is immediately shown how the world of aunt Beatrice is different when Tee’s and Todan are made fun of because of their clothes and color: “Not only color and features are under scrutiny concerning their similarities and dissimilarities to European beauty standards, but so are clothes, as Tee finds out when her cousins inspect her wardrobe soon after her (second) arrival: ". . .

We are shown how with the phenomenon of “double consciousness," Du Bois' term: “While Du Bois speaks of African Americans looking at themselves through the eyes of racist whites, Tee looks at herself through the eyes of her cousins, who have so thoroughly imbibed a British colonialist world view that nothing appears to exist resembling even remnants of a Caribbean identity.” makes Tee feel aware of her color and of her clothes as compared to her colonized cousins. When Tee had gone to Aunt Beatrice’s place the first time, she used to beat up her cousins and later on when she goes there again she is in a way crippled by her education and through her indoctrination of the standards of the European culture. The first time she had Tantie’s culture fully present in her, she had all her Caribbeaness in her and had not been made aware that she has to judge herself by the standards of others and that the European culture was the scale along which she should judge herself and her achievements: “Tee has already been indoctrinated into standards of "Reality and Rightness" and she recognizes her cousins as being closer to the Anglophile standards instilled in her, quelling the resistance against their denigration that was still available to her when she drew her world view and strength from Tantie's cultural orb.”

In this new world which is different from the world of Tantie, all that represents the African culture is denigrated and shown to be insignificant. Aunt Beatrice in every way makes Tee feels that the white world and culture is supreme and the clothes she had brought is seen as ‘niggery’ and everything connected with Europeans is adorned and there is the example of the photograph of the ‘white ancestress: “Such veneration of "white blood" illustrates that Aunt Beatrice does not merely admire and strive to emulate English culture, but that her Anglophilia is ultimately rooted in racist and Darwinist beliefs in the superiority of bloodlines and "races." Thus, in her eyes, African ancestry in and of itself is a liability, not merely African culturally acquired styles and behaviors. This explains her manic attempt to erase everything in herself, in her daughters, and in Tee, reminiscent of such ancestry”. She is in a way trying to alienate the Caribbean culture in Tee just as Mr. Hinds had tried to do.

Tee is made to feel alienated from the world she used to know. In this new world she is made to feel powerless and she feels that she cannot cope when she has to speak or when she dresses as she cannot and is not fully accepted in this Europeanized world of her cousins: “As Ketu Katrak has said, "Beatrice cultivates bourgeois values that despise blackness in every form -- skin color, speech patterns, food" (66), and this is a legacy from which Tee cannot escape”. She does not belong to the culture of Tantie anymore and nor does she belong to the culture of the Aunt Beatrice ad she only feels torn between the two. This is shown when she cannot accept the food brought to her by Tantie and: “The final scene demonstrates that Tee now lives between the worlds, not belonging to either. Unable ever to be accepted fully into Aunt Beatrice's household and Englishness, she is also alien to Tantie's world.”

Ketu Katrak says that “Colonized people's mental colonization through English language education, British values, and culture result in states of exclusion and alienation. Such alienations are experienced in conditions of mental exile within one's own culture to which, given one's education, one un-belongs." (62) Tee has received an education and a western culture which is very much unlike the culture of Tantie and which in a way makes her feel the dullness of her Caribbean culture and of Tantie’s world. Tee feels alienated and marginalized since the time she has started to learn the European culture and she did not feel this before in Tantie’s household. Tee’s alienation leads her to hopelessness and feelings that she is unworthy of living: “(Thorpe 37): "I wanted to shrink, to disappear. . . . I felt that the very sight of me was an affront to common decency. I wished that my body could shrivel up and fall away, that I could step out new and acceptable" (97). Though she does not actually contemplate killing herself, her self-hatred and eagerness to assimilate are the cultural equivalent of suicide.” Tee is found without a culture and ‘Aunt Beatrice's self-negating and self-hating cultural influence’ on her seems to destroy her identity. Tee is unable to live in both culture and the novel: “thus ends on an ironic note: to save Tee, who is unable to return to the Caribbeanness she has known in Tantie's household through having become socialized in the worship of Englishness, Tantie sends her to the ultimate source of this cultural negation: to the metropolis, to England”

“Hodge goes to great pains to portray the cultural bankruptcy of playing monkey to the Great White Ancestor. In this important respect, the narrative, which in the fiction a mature Tee relates, places considerable vaule on the vulnerable African oral culture that so easily succumbs to the power of the written”. Crick Crack Monkey ending gives us a hope for Tee who goes to London and “The goal of the novel, it seems, is not to idealize a lost African past but to reveal the cultural sovereignty of Trinidad.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Web sites:

BILL CLEMENTE: The A, B, C's of Alienation and Re-Integration : Merle Hodge'S Crick Crack Monkey
http\Clemente.htm

http\crick crack monkey study guide.htm

The Two Worlds of the Child: A study of the novels of three West Indian writers; Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Hodge, and George Lamming
http\Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Hodge, George Lamming.htm

Two Postcolonial Childhoods:Merle Hodge's Crick Crack, Monkey
and Simi Bedford's Yoruba Girl Dan
http \Jouvert 6_1 - 2 Martin Japtok, Two Postcolonial Childhoods Merle Hodge's Crick Crack, Monkey and Simi Bedford's Yoruba Girl Dancing.htm