Assimilation and cultural identity in Merle Hodge's Crick Crack, Monkey

Crick Crack, Monkey

Crick, Crack Monkey, by Merle Hodge is a fantastic example of what is known as a picaresque novel in which an outsider experiences a life of trial, trying to assimilate and fit in, despite the challenges of their existence as an outsider. The character Tee

Cynthia Davis) is the outsider and her goals are met only in contrast to her own cultural beliefs. The work challenges Tee's cultural beliefs as she is confronted with the colonial experience, and this is especially true with regard to her education, which begins after she becomes a member of her aunt Beatrice's household. Her aunts loyalty to the colonial rulers and her belief that her whiteness, rather than her culture will be the only manner in which she can and will succeed in life. (Hodge)

Beatrice's personal disdain for Tee, and everything she comes from, demonstrates her inability to accepts and embrace her own Trinidadian culture and her blackness, both of which she believes Tee to be to dependant upon. Aunt Beatrice is the first female role model that Tee encounters that denies her understanding of admiration and character of a woman.

This exposure and need to fit into the demands of the colonial household dramatically changes Tee as she molds her character, often against her better judgment to meet the expectations of her household and the culture it has placed her within. (Hodge) picaresque novel is essentially an ironic presentation of a chaotic society by an outcast of that society. Characteristically, the outsider gives a first person perspective of his life experiences in the double voice of the experiencing "I" of the child and the narrating voice of the remembering adult. His aim in writing is twofold: first, to show how difficult it is for an outsider to gain respectability in a society that has only contempt for him and his culture, and second, to satirize the false values of a society of which he is a victim.

Thomas 209)

Due to the contraindications of the challenge of an outsider, following personal beliefs about the way in which one should live their life and the way the world confronts those standards.

A picaresque vision is ironic because in attempting to satirize the false values of the dominant class, the narrator/protagonist inadvertently assimilates the very values he detests... Frequently the minority group suffers discrimination at the hands of the ruling class because of differences of ethnicity, religion, and culture.

Hodge 208)

Tee is a young lady who must conform to the cultural demands of her new home and though she shrinks from such behavior she is also profoundly affected by it.

Tee, begins, in her aunts home to reject the cultural history that had previously been her only understanding of the world, though with secretive contempt her conformation becomes increasingly visible in the work. According to her aunt, and the other members of the household she is to black and backward and to win Beatrice's respect Tee begins to transform herself to met the ideals that any other child would not have to face. Tee recognizes that her position as a member of Beatrice's own family gives her a consideration that results in even greater disdain as Beatrice herself would like to both mold and reject that which cannot conform to her own beliefs in her whiteness and her upper middle class civility. Tee must conform to the standards Beatrice has set for her own children, who have little respect for their mother but still conform in action, dress and language.

The most concrete example of the change within Tee after she begins to assimilate the British colonial culture, is through her own demonstration of an alter ego, she calls Helen. Helen, is what Tee thinks of as the perfect English girl and she attempts to emulate the behavior of this stereotyped child as she begins to read the literature of the colonial world, a great deal of which at the time dealt with propriety and standards of the social world of the colonial, but not the Trinidadian culture. Helen, dresses and plays the part that Tee believes to be the best example of the literary British girl.

Her attitude is one of disdain for her culture, and though her Trinidadian role models do not accept the new attitude of Tee, as Helen, their rejection of her is somewhat practical rather than personal. (Hodge 90)

Tee developed Helen as a whole person, with memories and a history that included a fictional involvement with Beatrice's coveted white ancestor.

Helen "spent summer holidays at the sea-side with her aunt and uncle who had a delightful orchard with apple trees and pear trees in which sang chaffinches and blue tits;" she "loved to visit her Granny for then they sat by the fireside and had tea with delicious scones and home-made strawberry jam." Tee thought, "She was the proper me." (90)

Though it must be said that Tee was probably protecting her true self by creating an alternative personality, which bore the brunt of bother her successes and failures in trying to conform to her new household and educational and social standards. Tee protected her own psyche by emulating her new roles as another, rather than as a personal failing of her own. In this way Tee could continue to be, at her core the Tee who was a part of her Trinidadian family.

Tee focused her attention away from her own world, through her alter ego, Helen and through Helen she began to revere the ideals of the colonial society, a culture that had disdain for anything indigenous or colorful and hoped for all people, both civilized and uncivilized to look outside their own culture for all guidance with regard to society. Helen believed that 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. (89)

Tee does a remarkable job affecting her new beliefs in the demands of Beatrice's household and yet in the long run she does not succeed. Tee become trapped between the ideal of colonial society and the reality of her born culture.

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)

She does not fit in anywhere. She cannot return to her life in Tantie's household and she can never truly meet the expectation of Beatrice.

In the end she is sent to her father in England, to save her from Beatrice's indoctrination of self-loathing but also to further her advance into the world that will become her own, the world of the wandering soul with no real home, trapped between the ideals of two worlds and never fully inside either.