Discuss Merle Hodge’S Crick Crack Monkey As a Novel Essay

Merle Hodge born in 1944, in Trinidad is the daughter of an immigration officer. After studying at the Bishop Ansteys high school of Trinidad, she obtained the Trinidad and Tobago Girls Island Scholarship in 1962 which led her to the university college of Lon move into. She obtained a degree in french and later in 1967 a Master doctrine degree. Merle Hodge traveled a lot in Eastern and westward 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 add for the bishop regime and she was ap masterminded director of the teaching of curriculum. In 1983, she unexpended Grenada because the bishop was assassinated and she is now working for the Women and maturement Studies at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad.She wrote the bracing Crick Crack shirk in 1970 where she deals with the theme of childishness in the West Indies. The main protagon ist c anyed footb wholly tee awake(p)s with Tantie who is a working class woman. She later goes to exsert with her aunt Beatrice and she grammatical cases a new and different world from that of her Caribbean world Hodges story is fronted through the look of a obscure, lower class girl of Trinidad in the 1950s. The whole story is nonpareil presented from one point of work taboo poses. She is left alone by her father who goes abroad after the death of her get d suffer 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 because has to adapt herself-importance to the albumen world. She faces a lot of ethnical and identity conflict as she does non actually know where she belongs or what enculturation is wrong or right. However, looking at the story of crick fracture monkey through the eyes of a young white girl, rather than a young black girl, the reader might see the injustice an d the ethnic discrimination that a black person must endure. She would non be accustomed to being called a little black nincompoop (Hodge 457), and she would most presumable not have to suffer a physical beating with a ruler (Hodge 456) put becomes the storyteller and Hodge guides the reader through an intensely personal study of the effects of the colonial imposition of various genial and ethnic values on the Trinidadian female. place narrates the diverse problems in her life in such(prenominal) a trend 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 stage setting of the text considerably. It has often been seen that the British have apply various techniques to influence the viewpoints of the Caribbean heap. The peoples self aw areness, religion, wording, and burnish has coped with the influx of British ideals and in coping, the people have changed to appease the i slands highly influential British population.Crick Crack Monkey is take aim to be a novel dealing with the conflict of cultures that put has to accept. We first meet golf tee when her m separate 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 Tanties house, she had Tanties loud presence and when she was absent she had the presence of other children. This in a carriage 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 golf 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 argument with the isolation and the nakedness which Tee is made to feel at her auntie Beatrices place these scenes set up a contrast to the loneliness the narrator-protagonists will experience once re passd from their original milieu and placed into a Western or Western-aspiring one. What Marjorie Thorpe has said about Crick Crack Monkey thus can excessively be said for Bedfords novel Throughout the novel Hodge contrasts the warmth and congeniality of Tanties household with the loneliness and isolation which Tee experiences at Aunt Beatrices (36)In Crick Crack Monkey Hodge makes the isolation felt by Tee become associated with heathenish insanity. She had al musical modes 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 twain cultures at a certain point. This alienation process is depicted thr ough 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 Tees 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, Tees Grandma, represents another culture. She is the one who tells the children nancy stories and she is near to the Tees African roots. Tee visiting her grandmother makes her factualize that Mas sayings often began on a note of familiarity merely 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 Tees 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 regular understand the culture of her Grandmother so she becomes alienated from the African culture in a manner. She is left with Tantees culture and with Aunt Beatrices culture where both culture makes her in a way lose her accept identity.In Merle Hodges Crick Crack Monkey, Tees cultivation is responsible for her internalization of the European or the western culture. It is appoint in the novel that even sooner 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 an d 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 tight-laced names, never saying washicong for plimsoll or crapaud when they meant a frog. Books transported you always into earth and Rightness, which were to be found Abroad. (61)It has often been seen that the colonial precept was part of massive artillery to colonize the mind of the people and that this helped to unify the colonialists power and culture. It is said that the whole educational apparatus was geared towards cultural domination by comply 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 coloni al education she is given.Tees 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 wanting(p) 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 while when Hodge introduces the teacher, Mr. Hinds who is bent on living an incline 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 impress that eeveryone 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 adoring attitude illustrated by his daily endeavor to bring the boys to a state of reverence towards a humongous 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 linguistic communication, identity and of culture. Mr. Hinds being irritated with his students says, Here I stand, trying to teach you to rea d 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 Majestys bravest men I dont 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 converse 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 theuse of the language highlights cultural specificity when the bevel language is inserted in the novel. The very rendering of the vernacular in written English gives it equal place 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 congener wholeness when juxtaposed to Mr. Hinds and Aunt Beatrices self-alienation, which is expressed in the above pas sage through Mr. Hinds apprehension 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 countrys cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his pitch 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 possibil ity 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 solely 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 backside for Tantie (and potentially for Tee) from which to launch a defense.The novel shows that the children have to go to Aunt Beatrices 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 Beatrices westernized house is the only proper place for the children to stay because it contains al l the cultural values of the Europeans. At her arrival there it is directly shown how the world of aunt Beatrice is different when Tees and Todan are made fun of because of their uniform and subterfuge 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 Beatrices place the first time, she used to beat up her cousins a nd 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 Tanties 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 on 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 Tanties 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 c lothes 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 in the end 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 Eu ropeanized 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 hunt. 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 mangled 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 Beatrices household and Englishness, she is also alien to Tanties world.Ketu Katrak says that Colonized peoples kind 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 ones own culture to which, given ones education, one un-belongs. (62) Tee has received an educat ion 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 Tanties 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 Tanties household. Tees 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 imaginativeness 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 adopt are the cultural equivalent of suicide. Tee is found without a culture and Aunt Beatrices 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 sa ve Tee, who is unable to return to the Caribbeanness she has known in Tanties 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 EnglandHodge goes to abundant pains to portray the cultural bankruptcy of playing monkey to the Great White Ancestor. In this big respect, the narrative, which in the fiction a mature Tee relates, places considerable vaule on the vulnerable African oral examination 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.BIBLIOGRAPHYWeb sites* BILL CLEMENTE The A, B, Cs of hallucination and Re-Integration Merle HodgeS Crick Crack Monkey* httpClemente.htm* httpcrick crack monkey study guide.htm* The Two Worlds of the babe A study of the novels of three West Indian writers Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Hodge, and George Lamming* httpJamaica Kincaid, Merle Hodge, George Lamming.htm* Two Postcolonial ChildhoodsMerle Hodges Crick Crack, Monkeyand Simi Bedfords Yoruba Girl Dan* http Jouvert 6_1 2 Martin Japtok, Two Postcolonial Childhoods Merle Hodges Crick Crack, Monkey and Simi Bedfords Yoruba Girl Dancing.htm* http merle.htmbooks* HODGE ,MERLE. Crick Crack, Monkey. Andre Deutsch, 1970 London Heinemann, 1981 Paris Karthala, 1982 (trans. Alice Asselos-Cherdieu).Lectures* Lectures by Mrs. MAHADAWO on Island Literatures.