‘Tee,’ ‘Cyn-Cyn,’ ‘Cynthia,’ ‘Dou-dou’:
Remembering and Forgetting the ‘True-True Name’ in Merle Hodge’s
Crick Crack, Monkey
Joyce Zonana
Trinidadian writer Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey has been called “the first major novel published by a black Caribbean woman” (Maes-Jelinek 177), “the first major novel by a post-colonial West Indian writer to problematize and emphasize questions of difference and the quest for a voice” (Gikandi 14). Appearing in 1970, “far in advance of any recognizable Caribbean feminist tradition” (Cobham 46), it has been credited with “ushering in a new era in the writing of women in the English-speaking Caribbean” (Cudjoe 43). Indeed, one of the first collections of Caribbean women’s writing—Her True-True Name edited by Pamela Mordecai and Betty Wilson—took its title from a key passage in Hodge’s novel. Yet Hodge’s work has failed to achieve the attention it deserves; it is my hope that this essay will introduce the book to a wider audience and demonstrate its relevance for explorations of migration and identity in the specifically Caribbean context of the African Diaspora.
Writing from an unspecified vantage point as an adult, Crick Crack, Monkey’s endearing first person narrator—variously called “Tee,” “Cyn-Cyn,” “Cynthia,” “Ma Davis,” and “Cyntie”—dryly recounts her experiences as a child in colonial Trinidad, from the day of her mother’s death until the eve of her departure for the “Mother Country,” England. Deceptively simple, the short novel offers an understated but pointed critique of a world that teaches the narrator to be ashamed of the “ordinaryness” and “niggeryness” (105) of her Afro-Caribbean identity, insisting that she value instead the “Reality” and “Rightness” to be found only in books or “Abroad” (67). Torn between her working-class dark-skinned Tantie who calls her “Tee,” and her middle-class, lighter-skinned Auntie who calls her “Cynthia,” the narrator can find no authentic self—no proper name—of her own. Yet while the novel’s plot offers no alternative but migration to the young girl’s dilemma, the text’s narrative strategies reveal the adult narrator’s creative resolution of her conflict, suggesting that her voluntary passage from Trinidad to England teaches her to value the elements of identity preserved by her ancestors during their involuntary Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean.
As Simone Alexander has argued, the European “Mother Country,” the African “Motherland,” and the Caribbean “mother’(s) land”—an “extension” of the Motherland—provide a useful framework for understanding the fictional autobiographies of Afro-Caribbean women writers, including Paule Marshall, Maryse Condé, and Jamaica Kincaid (4). Hodge’s work is no exception, though in Crick Crack, Monkey, the Caribbean “mother(’s)land” cannot unproblematically be associated with the African Motherland. It is, rather, a complex and conflicted new land, with legitimate ties to both Africa and Europe (and Asia, in the case of Trinidad)—a place in which an indigenous, hybrid, “sovereign” identity is in the process of being formed (Hodge, “Challenges” 203).
In the words of Martinican novelist and critic Edouard Glissant, Caribbean identity cannot be contained by the “fixed Being” of what he calls the “Sameness” of European ontology and epistemology. Instead, it partakes of a “Diversity” that “establishes Becoming” (98). Because “reversion” to the Africa before the Middle Passage is impossible for the Afro-Caribbean subject, and because “imitation” of the European colonial culture inflicts “insidious violence,” it is only “diversion” that can lead the Caribbean self “somewhere” (Glissant 16-22). Yet, as Glissant insists, “Diversion is not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by reversion: not a return to the longing for origins, to some immutable state of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement, from which we were forcefully turned away” (26).
Thus, the Caribbean writer will not deny trauma by relying on what Dominick LaCapra calls “conventional” or “redemptive” narratives structured by the biblical model of “Paradise, Fall, History . . . and then redemption” (156); instead, practicing the “art of Diversion” (Glissant 85), she will write “experimental, nonredemptive” texts that work to come to terms with trauma (LaCapra 179). Crick Crack, Monkey is such a text, showing that the atrocities of the Middle Passage, slavery, and colonialism remain facts that cannot be denied or undone. The Caribbean subject must move forward, not back, creating a complex modern identity that neither clings to nor refuses the African past. As Silvio Torres-Saillant writes in Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature, “the colonial condition has turned the Antillean man or woman into an existential migrant, a person who wanders between worlds, between spaces, between traditions” (32).
The narrator of Crick Crack, Monkey is herself a migrant, shuttling between different spaces and oscillating among a variety of competing identities. The novel is structured as a series of migrations: first, that of the narrator and her brother from their parents’ home to that of their paternal aunt, “Tantie”; second, that of their father to the Mother Country, England; third, the children’s “capture” by their maternal aunt, Beatrice; fourth, their periodic journeys to their grandmother Ma’s home in Pointe d’Espoir; fifth, the journey of Tantie’s ward Mikey to the U.S.; sixth, Tee’s voluntary migration to Aunt Beatrice’s house; and finally, Tee’s anticipated journey to England. Each of these migrations—with the exceptions of Tee’s visits to Ma’s land—constitutes a rupture, a break in being for the young girl and her brother, and each is accompanied by linguistic and psychological shifts in Tee’s identity.
As a very young child at home with her Tantie Rosa, “Tee” experiences a sense of belonging and unproblematic, unselfconscious selfhood. With Auntie Beatrice, with whom she lives while attending secondary school, “Cynthia” is at first dislocated and alienated, yet in time she comes to be ashamed of her earlier identification with Tantie’s world. Tee/Cynthia also experiences other worlds that give rise to other identities—the idyllic, sensuous landscape associated with her grandmother “Ma,” and the idyllic entirely mental landscape she encounters in books. If the African Motherland associated with Ma and the Mother Country limned in books are extreme ideals, the contrasting realms of Tantie Rosa and Auntie Beatrice represent the conflicted but all too real aspects of the “mother(’s)land” that approximates, blends, and transforms those ideals.
The novel begins with young Tee and her brother Toddan posted at Tantie’s window, awaiting their mother’s return from the hospital, where she has gone to deliver a child. “‘We gettin a baby!’” the children shriek to all passersby (1). But the mother dies, and Tee and Toddan become the center of a tug of war: “‘We will take the children,’ somebody said firmly, in a voice like high-heels and stockings . . . . ‘Look at you, you aren’t fit!’” (2-3). These are the words and voice of Aunt Beatrice, condemning Tantie, with whom the father wants the children to stay. “There was much talk of ‘that woman’ and ‘that bitch’ who wanted to get us,” the narrator recalls (4). But soon her father goes away “to sea,” and the children remain with Tantie.
Much later in the novel we discover the source of the conflict between Tantie and Beatrice. Beatrice tells Tee that her mother Elizabeth was a fair-skinned “beautiful little girl” who might have taken her to England by the people “up on the Grange”; instead she was adopted by “low-class” Godparents who lived in “the bush” (90). Marrying the narrator’s father was a “misdemeanor”; if it weren’t for that father, the narrator too might have had fair skin. Still, Auntie wants to raise Tee and her brother, to give them a “quality” life and, not incidentally, to win from them the love her own children deny her. For Auntie’s three daughters, having learned their lessons all too well, have turned their backs on her as they work to be accepted by “nice” society.
In the aunts’ struggle to raise the narrator, Hodge dramatizes the struggle between competing models of identity and modernity for Caribbean individuals as well as for Caribbean nations. Tantie Rosa is an emotionally expressive, sexually independent woman who is happy to be who she is. She serves as a loving foster-mother for the narrator and her brother, as well as for an older boy, Mikey. And she speaks in a colorful Creole—her very name in the novel, “Tantie,” evoking the French base of Trinidadian Creole. She is, in fact, one of the “self-possessed” Caribbean women Hodge admires, “women who did not seem to pattern their lives after the rules laid down by nice Trinidadian society, by the church or the storybooks” (“Challenges” 208). Aunt Beatrice, on the other hand, is a restrained and repressed married woman who carefully enunciates her formally correct Standard English sentences in her effort to be accepted by “nice” society. As Tee/Cynthia moves between their two worlds, she finds herself torn not only between their different value systems but also between their two forms of language.
While living with Tantie, young Tee listens to the singing of a drunken neighbor, “‘Gimme piece o’ yu dumpling Mae dou-dou’” (1); she hears her aunt lambasting Mikey, “‘An’ before you look to help-out yu mother an’ she forty-nine chirren no yu prefer siddong on yu arse wid them long wu’tless young men down at that bridge’” (5); at the bridge with the “cream of Santa Clara’s unambitious” (6), she follows a discussion of Westerns: “‘An’ then the other guys reach, an’ then, ol’-man, then yu jus’ see Red-Indian falling-dong all over the place – ba-da-da-da-da – pretty, boy, pretty!’” (9). In this environment Tee has days of glory, days when
it was the long, long walk with the sun all around and stinging and blurriness rising from the road and the smell of asphalt, and the road soft under you toes and the grass at the sides no cooler and just when it was getting too much we’d turn off the road and plunge between the bushes and down down the precipitous path to the water. (6)
As she describes such moments, the adult Tee’s language falls into the rhythms of Creole, the same rhythms she reproduces when recording Tantie’s speech in free indirect discourse: “what she ain’t tell that bitch is what she forget” (13).
In Aunt Beatrice’s realm, on the other hand, Tee is introduced to the formalities (and hypocrisy) of Standard English. She overhears her Aunt chastising a servant who calls a dress a “frack”: “‘If you can’t speak properly when you speak to these children then don’t bother to say anything at all!’” (38). Purchasing supplies at a country market, Beatrice makes “a systematic effort not to understand a word of what the shop-people said to her, and when she spoke to them it was loudly, slowly and emphatically, with much pointing and sign-language” (99); her daughters’ voices “arch” through the house as they talk on the telephone: “‘so well I said well dorling why don’t we just go and pick the others up orfterwards . . . ” (89).
Discussing the title of her novel, Hodge explains that “the word monkey is meant to have all the associations of aping and imitation” (Balutansky 657). Aunt Beatrice’s world is the “monkey” world, the “make-believe” colonial world in which children of the African Diaspora seek to deny their own selves in a desperate effort to take on the attributes of the colonial master. As V.S. Naipaul puts it, “In the pursuit of the Christian-Hellenic tradition, which some might see as a paraphrase for whiteness, the past has to be denied, the self despised. Black will be made white” (63). Beatrice is a victim of the “alienation” Frantz Fanon attributes to the Caribbean person deformed by the “constant effort to run away from his [sic] individuality” (60), in quest of a constantly elusive identification with the master that often takes the form of imitating the master’s speech.
The distinction between Creole and Standard English is fundamental to the experience of Caribbean peoples. Jamaican writer Mervyn Morris notes that although Creole is the “language of feeling,” the “most intimate language,” Caribbean literature still privileges Standard English (9). Guadaloupan Maryse Condé argues that Creole languages are the “first example of the Caribbean syncretic culture,” and reminds us that “language is power: who names, controls” (102). And Helen Pyne-Timothy, in an important article on “Language as Subversion in Postcolonial Literature,” catalogues numerous ways in which Creoles can function positively for Caribbean writers. First, they “assist in the creation and recreation of an identity” distinct from that of the colonizer; second, “they assist in the reclamation and the recording of a history which is separate from that of the Master”; third, “they create a nexus” between oral and written traditions, allowing both community and individual voices to be heard. Additionally, Creoles may “provide subliminal linkages to the slave past and the African ethos” (10). Hodge herself foregrounds the importance of using Creole languages to express the distinctive Caribbean worldview: “we speak Creole, we need Creole, we cannot function without Creole, for our deepest thought processes are bound up in the structure of Creole, but we hold Creole in utter contempt” (“Challenges” 204). In Crick Crack, Monkey she uses the interaction between spoken Creole and Standard English to demonstrate her narrator’s self-division
Allied to the distinction between Creole and Standard English is the distinction between spoken and written culture, between oral folktale and written literary text. Thus, if the title of Hodge’s novel points to what Glissant calls the “insidious violence” of imitation, it also has its roots in the very oral culture the European colonial masters (and their Caribbean imitators) sought to destroy. The title echoes the words sung at the conclusion of a “’nancy-story,” one of the ubiquitous Caribbean folktales that take their collective name from Ananse, the spider-god of West African folklore who “survived the middle passage” (Jonas 51). These folktales, “outlawed by and in” colonial education institutions, celebrate the “artist-creator” trickster figure whose “subversive activity” is deeply “interrogative of the Anglo-inherited written culture” (Tiffin 56-7).
In Crick Crack, Monkey, Tee is told ’nancy-stories by her grandmother, Ma—always at night, always outdoors, under a moon. “If the night was too dark or if it was raining there was no story-telling—it was inconceivable to her that one should sit inside a house and tell ’nancy-stories” (15). In Hodge’s second novel, For the Life of Laetitia, a schoolteacher shocks his students by expressing interest in their “moonlit world of people who were half beast, half spirit or half god,” explaining that the Tales of the Greek Heroes “were just somebody else’s ’Nansi stories” (52-3), and writing the names of “these beings whom we knew” on the board. “What would they be doing up here in our high-school literature class?,” the narrator wonders (53).
The narrator of Crick Crack, Monkey recalls:
And when at the end of the story she said ‘Crick crack?’ our voices clambered over one another in the gleeful haste to chorus back in what ended on an untidy shrieking crescendo:
Monkey break ‘e back
On a rotten pommerac! (15)
In evoking this rhyme in her title, Hodge signals her interest in exploring “orature for the symbols and organizing principles” of her written text (Cobham 47). She may also be invoking the “trickster spirit” as Caribbean Muse, a practice Joyce Jonas suggests is common among Caribbean writers (53). Glissant offers yet another possible gloss on the novel’s title. “In a great number of folktales heard during childhood,” he reports, “the storyteller tells about receiving at the end of the story a kick in his bottom that hurled him into his audience” (84). The oral storyteller becomes one with his or her audience, abandoning a position of mastery, all self-importance lost in self-mockery. Such a stance is particularly appropriate for a novel whose narrator reveals herself to be anything but a “master” of her own identity.
Tee is first brought to Ma’s land after her temporary capture by Auntie Beatrice. This capture, a miniature migration that evokes the forcible seizure of Africans by slave-traders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, occurs when “The Bitch”—Tantie’s name for Beatrice—arrives in a car offering sweets and smiles to the children. “‘Well how would you like to go for a nice drive in your Uncle Norman’s car?’”, she offers, and while Tee is skeptical, Toddan enthusiastically accepts (12). Upon their return, Tantie is furious: “‘we had jus’ nearly get we arse kidnap!’”(14); the next day she packs the children off to Pointe d’Espoir, to stay with Ma, their paternal grandmother.
This migration brings Tee to an “enchanted country” (16), a timeless realm where the “air smelt brown and green, like when the earth was being made” (20). She imagines that the characters of the ’nancy tales—“Brar Anancy and Brar Leopard”—“roamed the earth” in just such a place (16). In this almost mythic world, the children become Ma’s “acolites” (20), and Ma herself is endowed with the solidity of earth. “She rose at a nameless hour,” Tee says, “and in my half-sleep I saw a mountain shaking off mist in one mighty shudder and the mist falling away in little drops of could” (18). Imperceptibly, the narration shifts from a description of one specific visit to Ma’s land to an evocation of all the visits, year after year. “All the holidays at Pointe d’Espoir were one August month,” the narrator says as she remembers days when time seem “fix[ed] into eternity” (19-20).