CRICK CRACK, MONKEY (1970)
By Merle Hodge (b. 1944 - ; Curepe, Trinidad)
A Study Guide prepared by Marjorie Renick, 
a student in OSU-Cascades English 458: 
Comparative Literature: Postcolonialism (Spring 2002)
Short Cuts:  STUDY GUIDE Introduction | Characters | Marital Relationships & Relational Terms
Tantie & Beatrice | Hodge & Her Writing 
[Marjorie Renick's additional] THOUGHTS ABOUT CRICK CRACK, MONKEY | BIBLIOGRAPHY

STUDY GUIDE: CRICK CRACK, MONKEY
by Marjorie Renick

 INTRODUCTION 

Although this story appears to be the simple tale of a black child’s school and family experiences, written for a young audience, it is instead a political statement.  It reveals the effects of colonialism and post colonialism on the African population of Trinidad.  Every character, in some way, reveals the true culture of Trinidad.  Merle Hodge uses them and the story to speak to her audience: the common people of Trinidad.  She tells this story of the African women using the Creole language in much of the dialogue.

Trinidad is a beautiful tropical island in the Caribbean that lies north east of Venezuela.   Barbados lies northeast of Trinidad and Tobago; a group of smaller islands named the Lesser Antilles lie directly north.   All are part of the West Indies, the islands of the Caribbean Sea.   Trinidad and Tobago form a twin island Republic and is home to people of African, Spanish, Chinese, British, and French descent. Caribbean Map Caribbean Hotel Association [CHA]  http://www.caribbeantravel.com/   http://www.caribbeantravel.com/about_this_site.html

CHARACTERS

Tee or Cynthia Davis or Cy Cy:  the narrator and the main character in the novel.  Through Tee’s experiences we follow her to schools that teach British culture:  the songs, stories, poetry, and loyalty.  The curriculum has no relevance to the people of the island of Trinidad.  Their culture is unseen, unheard and unrecognized.  Tee leaves school without any pride in her identity, or heritage.  She is thoroughly confused as to who she is and where she fits in.

Tantie or Tantie Rosa:  Tee’s paternal aunt who cares for Tee and Toddam.  Tantie is a poor black lower class woman.  Her big loving generous heart accepts the care of children in need.  She takes Tee and Toddam into her home that is filled with family, friends and neighbors.  The community helps and supports each other and this generous spirit carries a natural exuberance for life.  Poverty, unemployment, and marital instability are conquered with their enjoyment of the food, music, and companionship of the Afro-Trinidadian culture..

Aunt Beatrice:  Tee’s maternal aunt who lives in the city.  Aunt Beatrice represents the Black that has been thoroughly indoctrinated under the British colonial educational system.  She believes that by being “white” in every way she will be able to climb the social and economic ladder.  She is bigoted, racist, and prejudiced, and to her Tee is too black, niggery, uncouth, and below Beatrice’s social level.  Tee wins a scholarship, and to attend the school she must live with Aunt Beatrice.

Uncle Norman:  husband of Aunt Beatrice.  He chauffeurs Aunt Beatrice, says little, and fades into the background.  He is rather a shadowy character as he spends most of his time being absent from the scene.

Bernadette, Jessica and Carol:  Tee’s cousins, the daughters of Aunt Beatrice.  The girls have been raised to spurn their black kin. They are contemptuous of Tee’s color, clothes, speech, and manners.  Carol, who is light is color, is the favorite of her mother and teachers.  Jessica, who is dark like her father, is a burden to Beatrice who fears Jessica will never be a success in her society.

Ma:  Tee’s paternal grandmother lives deep in the countryside.  She is like so many of the lower class women of Trinidad who care for themselves and members of their families.  She collects herbs, fruits, nuts and plants to prepare and take to the weekly market.  She is the keeper of the oral heritage and through her stories Tee learns about her heritage.  Ma is a proud hard working person who accepts who she is and is proud of her own grandmother.

Grandmother:  Tee’s paternal great great grandmother who Ma describes as having walked straight and tall and had a spirit that was never broken.  Ma claimed Grandma would return as Tee had inherited her spirit and strength.  Thus, Ma gave Tee a model to aspire to follow.

Toddan or Codrington:  Tee’s young brother who remains with Tantie after Tee leaves to live with Aunt Beatrice.  Toddan unwittingly reveals Tantie’s male friends to Aunt Beatrice as he recites how all the various uncles fit into their life.

Mikey:  a young male boarder living at Tantie Rosa’s.  In Trinidad, the female relations take care of children when their own mothers’ cannot.  There is no stigma to this and children are often raised in many households.  Tantie brought Mikey home as a baby and he is considered to be a family member.  The young lower class males of Trinidad lacked education and skills and were often either unemployed or underemployed.  Consequently, they find support in their age groups, and there are many gangs both juvenile and gangster.  Mikey and his pals are Tee’s good friends.

Mr. Hinds:  A black schoolteacher in a local missionary school.  The Anglican Church often ran the government schools of the 1950’s, and was supplemented by other Catholic and Protestant missionary schools.  Mr. Hinds is an Anglophile:  His need to be white carries over to his cultural bias against his own people: the children are piccaninnies who are not capable of learning! 

Mrs. Hinds:  who taught Tee’s girls’ class.  Mrs. Hinds was also a subject of British indoctrination and shows no affinity to black children and their need to be taught subjects relevant to their culture and homeland.

Ling:  the Chinese grocer who Tantie deals with.  The Chinese and East Indians were brought into Trinidad as indentured servants after the abolishment of slavery.

Mr. Thomas, Teacher Iris, and Sir:  all part of the teaching staff at the secondary school that Tee attends.  It is a government school that shares a large savannah playground with children of a RC (Roman Catholic) school.  The school children unwittingly carry on the wars of their former European colonial governments as they carry on a terrible rivalry for dominance of the playground. 

Mr. Oliver:  stands guard at the school gate.  He hates children and he looks as despondent and dilapidated as the school buildings.  Both the buildings and his clothes are shades of faded yellow.

Mis’Dorothea:  a large fat woman that brings her wares to sell at the school gates.  Mr. Oliver, with his ranting and raving fails to impress her.  She  wins every round by simply singing hymns, praying and ignoring him. 

Mr. Brathwaite:  the owner of the large estate that adjoined the school.  Every generation of school children had made the estate their place of daring: they stole the fruit and climbed the trees.  Tee’s rich vocabulary of swear words identified her as one of the culprits.  Mr. Thomas, the school principal, was in laughing sympathy with her, as he remembered his youthful raids on the estates.  Sir, the teacher, frustrated by Tee’s undaunted spunk, beats her hands but never defeats her spirit.

Helen:  was the child Tee developed in her psyche.  Helen was fair, proper, had tea at four, wore shoes and socks and did all the things that were normal:  Normal as taught in the school system where normal was anything British.

Elizabeth Helen Carter:  the white ancestress of Aunt Beatrice and Tee’s mother.  Aunt Beatrice gains all her prestige from this woman, and she judges the family according to their skin color.  Tee’s father’s color puts him and Tee far down on Beatrice’s social scale.  Jessica, Beatrice’s daughter, is also dark skinned and Beatrice paints her with the brush of prejudice: lazy, dumb, and black.  Beatrice tells Jessica,  “The darker you are the harder you have to try, I am tired of telling you that!  What you don’t have in looks you have to make up for otherwise!” (Hodge 92).

MARITAL RELATIONSHIPS AND RELATIONAL TERMS

            According to Hyman Rodman, the poor lower class people of Trinidad are bound by the realistic economic condition of their environment.  The males are usually unskilled laborers who are under employed or unemployed.  Consequently, the legal responsibilities of marriage are not attractive to most men.  In Trinidad, the man is expected to support the family.  If this is not possible, he loses the respect of his wife, children, friends and relatives.  The community looks down upon him and he loses self-esteem.  In our society, the father may lose his job, but he is still respected as the father of the family.  This is not true in Trinidad.  Over the years, since the time of slavery there has gradually formed a different kind of marital relationship.  There are three terms that describe this relationship and they all carry varying degrees of responsibility.

            Friendling is the first term.  There is no legal responsibility between the man and woman.  If there are children born to the union, and the woman can prove the parentage, then the man is legally responsible for the children’s financial support.  Friendling is a sexual relationship with out a joint living arrangement.  The partners can be either single or married (common law or legally).  Friendling carries no stigma and is a relationship availed of by either sex.

            Living is the next step of responsibility in a relationship.  There are more Friendling relationships that living relationships and more living relationships than legal marriages.  The living relationship is characterized by shared living quarters.  As long as the man brings home the paycheck and pays the expenses, he is welcome.  In the event he does not, then he is invited to leave and the woman may than begin another relationship with a yet another man.  During the course of a lifetime there can be many different partners.  With lack of money being a big problem, most men want only to have a Friendling relationship.  This way he is free to travel around with his peers and any woman.

            Women prefer marriage as it gives them the right to inherit property and the husband is legally bound to support her.  Because there are so few marriages most people are classed as illegitimate by the law, but not by the community.  The many different marital relationships bring many different sets of children.  The females of the families help to take care of these children.  If the mother must work to support them then her mother or sisters will care for her children.  If the mother takes on another man and has another family the two groups of children are usually raised separately.  The siblings from one father will call the half siblings the out children.  This is not a stigmatization but simply a classification.  The community looks upon all families as equal and legitimate. 

Rodman says, “We might trace the origin of the man’s marginal position in the nuclear family to the system of plantation slavery”(179). “During the days of slavery the master was the child’s sociological father and the mother was dependent upon the system of slavery rather than upon the child’s biological father” (183).

In Crick Crack, Monkey, Aunt Beatrice tells Tee,

“It was so sad when a family could not be a family.  When she was little they’d had to go and live all in different places when their father left their mother, and she’d always dreamt of them coming to live in the same house again”(102).

 When Tee goes home to say goodbye to Tantie she finds that Tantie is now caring for Mikey’s little sister, “two of Ma’s children” (Hodge 122), and Doolarie.  We are never sure of all the relationships but we know that Tantie is the female in the family who is strong enough to bear the burden of caring.  Merle Hodge portrays some of consequences of these marital customs in her poignant, tragic short story “Inez.”  The father gambles with his friends at the same time the mother is pleading for an advance on her maid’s wages.  The rent is over due and the children are hungry.  Her failure to be able to pay the rent leads to her suicide.  She is found clutching her hungry baby in her arms.  The older children are left on a hospital bench to wait for a rescuer.

            The legal system of Trinidad requires the father to pay for support of the children, but the wife is left without any legal rights.  The English, in accordance with their culture, wrote the laws.  Rodman says,

 “As a general rule…the laws adopted in the West Indies were initially created for application to English institutions.  Yet only a small proportion of these colonial populations display a culture pattern, which approximates to that which underlies the English institutions.  For the form and structure of many domestic unions in the West Indies differ fundamentally from those of the majority of English families.  It is very common to find in the lower social class many domestic relationships of varying permanence, which do not satisfy the legal requirements of marriage” (142).

TANTIE AND BEATRICE

Merle Hodge had developed these two characters to display the class and social distinctions that existed in post-colonial society, as well as today’s Trinidadian society.  Her characterizations explore why and how these descendants of the same race are so divided. 

            Beatrice, a fair skinned Black,  lives in a world of adopted attitudes regarding proper gentility, proper manners, and proper speech.  She hides her black blood: denying relations who are darker, speak Creole, and carry on the Afro-Trinidadian customs.  Beatrice strives to rear her children by this emphasis on table manners, social connections, and dressing properly.  Consequently, her relationship with them is miserable.  She cannot gain their respect.  Their spirits recognize Beatrice’s phoniness.  They know she judges their friends by skin color: not character.  Her whole persona is artificial, false and shallow, and she loses both her self respect and her identity.

            Tantie, a dark skinned Black, is warm, loving, caring, and true to herself.  She has no problem with disciplining children: they recognize her characteristics of self-respect and uncompromising honesty.  Hodge’s characterization of Tante is true to the life style and customs of the Afro-Trinidadian heritage.  The women have the ultimate responsibility to raise the children.  The economic conditions of the urban poor have developed realistic approaches to how they can survive.  Generally, the men have little opportunity to obtain gainful employment that will sustain a home and family.  Consequently, men live on the fringe of the female bastion of protection of the young.  The whole community helps care for the children and there is no stigma attached to a mother not being the sole mother figure in the child’s life.  The ugly reality of poverty is accepted.  The community compensates with the joy of company, music and dancing.  Males are all a part of this atmosphere, but they are not readily relied upon.  Consequently, marital relationships are fluid and accepted.  This is part of the culture that divides the fair from the dark.  It is a natural free culture that moves to the rhythms of the African beat.  It is a natural and realistic way to cope with life’s circumstances.  A Calypso selection from Hyman Rodman’s book Lower Class Families: The Culture of Poverty in Negro Trinidad expresses a philosophy of the poor: “Poverty must have its pleasures, my child,” said the old woman, laughing, “Suffering needs singing and drinking, otherwise it feeds on us.  He’s a tough customer, but he isn’t going to make a meal of us.  We’ll eat him up” (Nikos Kazantzakis, quoted in Rodman (203).

           Martin Japtok believes that the Beatrice’s of Trinidad will forever by marginalized in their attempts to assimilate through education as long as they fail to recognize that the culture offered in the British educational system is not their culture.  The British Educational system creates alienation and psychic inferiority. “Hodge has exposed this in her book,” Japtok states.

“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.  Isolation becomes thus associated not only with the state of cultural alienation but also with the West as such.  In the case of Tee, an ‘authentic’ knowledge of Caribbean ness also becomes replaced by ‘false consciousness’ in the form of a veneration of Englishness” (Japtok).

HODGE AND HER WRITING

In the early 1900’s, educated male Afro-Trinidadians left the Island to further their education and themselves in the British Isles.  They were educated in British philosophy, culture, thoughts, and manners.  All their writings reflected this as well as the male point of view.  Their writings were aimed at the educated and upper social class.  There was no reflection of an Afro-Trinidadian cultural identity in their writings.  The blacks of Trinidad were left in a cultural abyss.  The identity reflected in the books, schools, government, and movies was English.  The Colonial educational system in Trinidad failed the black people.  Their history and culture were ignored.    The official language of the country was English: Trinidadians spoke Creole.

            In Trinidad, Creole is a combination of African, Spanish, and English words, and French patois.  Donnell and Welsh write that, ‘creole’denotes the linguistic forms which are closest to dialect or nation language…language systems in their own right, with syntax and lexicons of considerable sophistication” (11).  Merle Hodge was one of the first authors to introduce Creole into her writings.  It is the voice of Tantie and her black community.  This is the way Hodge merged the two languages: English and Creole.  Hodge, and many of the other Trinidadian authors, now incorporate Creole dialogue into their writings.  The goal is to establish Creole as a standard language equal to the English language.

 Hodge’s book Crick Crack, Monkey was a new force in the establishing and the identifying of a true native Trinidadian culture.  She wrote about women, their lives and the effects of Post Colonial education.  It is a story that reflects the racist and the class divisions in the society.   Hodge believes that these divisions were nurtured and fed by the British cultural influences.  She wrote to counter the colonialist bias: “Trinidad and other colonized territories were ‘occupied by foreign fiction.  Fiction which affirms and validates our world is therefore an important weapon of resistance” (qtd. in Booker and Juraga 52).

Hodge uses the female characters of Crick Crack, Monkey to reveal the role of women in the Trinidadian society.  The women of the West Indies have the difficult role of raising families with very little help or respect from males.  In fact, harassment, physical abuse, and lack of respect is the general quality of their treatment.  Their place, in this patriarchal society, is put at even further risk if they become educated.  Higher education can cause them to be alienated from their own people.

Merle Hodge uses all the weapons of fiction to make her political statements.  She portrays the deep divisions of the people by class, race, and economics.  She uses the Creole language to bring into focus the mother language that “can convey the particular range of attitudes and characteristics which are appropriate to that culture’s view of reality” (Lima).

        She depicts the true place of women in the society, and portrays their conflicts in the search for an identity that is respected by, and created for the black people of Trinidad.

THOUGHTS ABOUT CRICK CRACK, MONKEY
by Marjorie Renick

The slaves brought into the new world of the West Indies came from the west coast of Africa.  They were bought and brought from the

Portuguese colonies of Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.  With the help of their own kind they were sold into a horrific experiences of deprivation, mutilation and humiliation. Chained together, they lay like living coffins in the holds of the ships transporting them across the Middle Passage of the Atlantic Ocean.  The slaves came from different countries, and different tribes.  There was a babble of tongues with no means of communication.  The physical sufferings were as much or more that any humans could bear.  There was no shared culture to strengthen them or to give them hope for the future. 

If they lived through the excruciating trip across the Atlantic Ocean, they were then faced with the hopeless environment of alienation.  This was a new land, which they worked under the direction of a white master.  Lost in a world of silence, with no language to communicate with those in the same miserable condition they could only struggled to survive. 

Trinidad was first a colony of the Spanish.  The Spanish brought in white French settlers who also brought in their slaves.  Britain overcame the Spanish in the year 1797, and Trinidad was a British Colony until 1962.  The Africans who worked in the sugar cane, cocoa, and coffee plantations had been there for several generations.  Each year, new and different blacks were brought in, and though they were all the same color, they did not share any binding culture.  The remnants of tribal government, customs of marriage, responsibly for parents or children, and the ritual of a religion were all lost in this babble of misery.  Any new developing culture was negated by the sales, separations and subjugation of the Slaves.  Gradually, as the decades passed, the Blacks developed their own language, Creole: a language that provided them the means to communicate with each other.  The white Colonialists did not understand this language, and the Slaves used it as a tool in their first fledgling efforts to obtain freedom.

Education came after freedom in 1834.  Years had erased memories of their roots.  Some of the blacks eventually gained small pieces of land, but it was always marginal and produced a bare subsistence.  The income was not enough for them to become self-sufficient.  Economically and politically, the blacks were held to the lowest level of citizenship.  Laws, restricting the franchise to vote and ownership of property, prevented most of them from climbing the political, economic and social ladder to full citizenship with the whites.  As they unwrapped themselves from the bonds of slavery they found little to replace their bondage. 

The postcolonial government was the arm of the whites.  There were not enough government schools to educate the people and Missionary Schools were a secondary choice.  It was not until the 1900’s that secondary education was free in Trinidad.  As they strove to break the bondage of political repression they found a voice in the labor unions.  Through pressure and political means the people of Trinidad accumulated, one small step at a time, the privilege of voting.  Finally, in 1976, the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago was formed.  Today, Trinidad’s population is 96% literate.  People can read and evaluate where they are and who they are. 

The population is made up of 48% black, 38% East Indians and the rest are a mixed race, with a very small percentage of whites.  The mixed race “mulattos” has climbed the social and political ladder by being white in speech, dress, and custom preferences, always rejecting their black blood and Creole language.  This population aspired to government employment, but generally only acquired lower level positions.  The blacks that wanted more in life left for Britain, Canada, and the United States.  Many attained a higher education but also found many of the same stigmas as at home.  As they matured and gained self-appreciation, they realized they had to find an identity, declare a full citizenship, and proclaim their culture.  And the pen became the sword:  to lead the people to a self-realization of who they were, how they have become what they are, and where their future lay.

Merle Hodge was the first black native female author to present the people with stories that showed them the truth.  Her writing was objective enough to show the influence of a British culture, and still show the native Trinidadians their loss of self through slavish imitation of a foreign culture.  They were grafted branches of the white tree.  They may have been pruned and trimmed by Colonial masters but the time had come to grow and bloom on their own. She was able to portray the poor black as being the vessel of their heritage.  The qualities of natural love for family, of warmth, of humor, of music, and above all a pride in their blackness and their Creole language.  Leslie Marmon Silko once wrote "that stories make community; make one feel they belong to something.  They can be the theme of transformation, cultural change and shifting identities.”  Hodge, in writing her stories as a modern novel, gives the people their story.  She believes that the act of rethinking and retelling about the past is a kind of a healing process.  Merle Hodge brings all the factions of black Trinidadian society together in Crick Crack Monkey.  She describes Tantie living her free flowing life in the neighborhood with all of her friends and relatives:  the “coolie” child [East Indian], the drinkers, the carousers, her family, all part of this patchwork quilt of Trinidadian life.

Hodge portrays the contrast to Tantie with the picture of Aunt Beatrice whose greatest pride is a white ancestor.  Beatrice epitomizes the culture of whiteness.  You are high on her social scale according to the color of your skin.  She, as Hodge points out, is like most of the educated blacks: who repudiate the one thing that is their heritage: the Creole language.  To be correct you must dress, speak and imitate the white Britons.  Aunt Beatrice is by far more lost than Tantie, who knows and likes herself.

Through the honesty of Hodge, and other female writers of the Caribbean, the people of Trinidad can evaluate the past influences of the Colonial powers.  They can work towards a culture based on their own self worth.  They are establishing Creole as a language equal to English and this language can portray the Trinidadian culture.  It has been said that, “Lost language equals lost world view in many ways since language is inseparable from culture.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY: CRICK CRACK, MONKEY

Booker, M. Keith, and Dubraoka Juraga. The Caribbean Novel in English. Portsmouth, NH:

 Heinemann, 2001.

Berrian, Brenda R.  ”Claiming an Identity: Caribbean Women Writers in English.”  Journal of Black

 Studies, 25. 2 (Dec.94) EBSCOhost Academic Search Elite, 2002.

Campbell, Elaine, and Pierrette Frickey, eds. The Whistling Bird, Women Writers of the Caribbean.

Kingston: Rienner, 1998.

CHA. Caribbean Hotel Association. http.//www.caribbeantravel.com/cgi-bin/gh msg

pl?msg=destination&destination name=Trinidad. [5/8/02].

Dance, Daryl Cumber. "Matriarchs, Doves, and Nymphos: Prevalent Images of Black, Indian, and

White Women in Caribbean."  Studies in the Literary Imagination 26.2 (Fall 93)

EBSCOhost Academic Search Elite, 2002.

Deck, Alice A. Review of Ten is the Age of Darkness The Black Bildungsroman.  by Greta LeSeur.

African American Review 33. 1 (Spr. 99) EBSCOhost Academic Search Elite, 2002.

Donnell, Alison, and Sarah Lawson Welsh, ed.  The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature.  London and New York:  Routledge, 1996.  

Hodge, Merle. “Challenges of the Struggle for Sovereignty: Changing the World versus Writing

Stories.”  The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. Eds. Alison Donnell, and Sarah

Lawson Welsh London and New York: Routledge, 1996.  494-497.

Hodge, Merle.  Crick Crack, Monkey.  1970.  Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000.

Japtok, Martin.  “Two Postcolonial Childhoods:  Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey and Simi

 Bedford’s Yoruba Girl Dancing.  Jouvert 6 (5/17/02):  West Virginia State College, 2001.

http://sociao.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v6il-2/japtok.htm 

Katrak, Ketu H. “This Englishness will kill you.”  College Literature 22.1 EBSCOhost Academic

Search Elite, 2002.

Lehmann, Sophia.  ”In Search of a Mother tongue:  Locating Home in Diaspora.”  MELUS

23. 4 (Winter 98) EBSCOhost Academic Search Elite, 2002.

Lima, Maria Helena.  ”Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Contemporary Critical Perspectives on

Caribbean Women’s Literatures.”  Feminist Studies 21. 1 (Spring 95) EBSCOhost

Academic Search Elite, 2002.

Rodman, Hyman. Lower Class Families: The Culture of Poverty in Negro Trinidad. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Salper, Roberta L.  Rev. of Caribbean Women Writers. Ed. Selwyn R. Cudjoe.  English

Language Notes 30.1 (Sep 92) EBSCOhost Academic Search Elite, 2002.

© 2002, Marjorie Renick - web published with permission

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