Trinidad and Tobago / All works
Novel
Crick Crack, Monkey
Merle Hodge · 1970
Synopsis
Now grown up, Cynthia, whom everyone calls Tee, tells of her childhood in Trinidad. Her mother dead and her father gone to England, she grows up with her aunt Tantie, who speaks Creole and lives among the poor. A scholarship sends her to a reputable secondary school and to the home of her aunt Beatrice, who has lighter skin and strives to resemble the Anglicised bourgeoisie. At school, she is taught the superiority of the British Empire, and Tee comes to despise her origins, to the point of looking down on the aunt who raised her.
Context
Published in London by André Deutsch, the book made its author the first Black woman of the Caribbean to publish a major work of fiction, and it ranks among the classics of West Indian literature. Tee narrates in such a way that the voice of the child living through events can hardly be separated from that of the woman remembering them. Critics see in it a Trinidadian culture caught between a British school that condemns Afro-Caribbean values and divisions of colour and class within the Black population itself; others read it as a satire. Alice Asselos-Cherdieu translated it into French for Karthala in 1982.
Who it is for
For those who want to see the colonial school through the eyes of a girl torn between two aunts and two worlds.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as a classic of Caribbean letters, it is studied for its portrayal of colonial education and of colour prejudice.