The acquaintances from her childhood are now ‘raucous niggery people’, ‘coolies’. The prospect of a visit from Tantie distresses her, and memories of home bring her shame and embarrassment. As she becomes fully integrated into the world of Aunt Beatrice, her words and actions reflect the very values and attitude, which at first horrified her. Though Tee is repelled by her aunt’s perpetual smile, the exaggerated importance she gives to knife and fork in eating, her discriminatory attitude to ‘coolies and niggers’, her emphasis on form and status, and the denial of her past and her assimilation into the middleclass in her shifting moods, Tee eventually begins to adopt this style of life – not without intense feeling of shame, guilt and remorse. Though Tantie warns not to be affected by such a colonialist indoctrination: “… jus’ you remember you going there to learn book do’ let them put no blasted shit in yu head,” this advice doesn’t seem to help. And this is a legacy from which Tee cannot escape. Marrying the narrator’s father was a “misdemeanor” if it weren’t for that father, the narrator too might have had fair skin.) Thus, the novel consistently reveals the quality of life in those two cultural and social classes.Īs a result of the sudden switch, Tee is made to feel utterly inadequate when it comes to speech, color, features, and dress. Beatrice tells Tee that her mother Elizabeth was 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”. However, much later in the novel readers discover the source of the conflict between Tantie and Beatrice. (The fight for guardianship, which generates opposition between the world of Tantie and Aunt Beatrice, results in hatred between them, so Tantie always refers Aunt Beatrice as “the bitch”. At this moment in the interest of high-schooling, Tantie decides to let Tee stay with her Aunt Beatrice, who has been trying to “kidnap” the child repeatedly, insisting that only her house provides the “proper” environment for her deceased sister’s child. Tee’s winning scholarship is celebrated with pride and joy with the family and friends even lighter-skinned maternal Aunt Beatrice is invited for the event. Tee wins scholarship as she completes middle school. As Yakini Kemp notes, “She (Tee) is moving progressively toward the development of a positive self-image while she resides with Tantie.” And the dramas of everyday life, even the death of her mother and emigration of her father to England are absorbed in sociability. Her life in this environ appears happy and content. “Tantie’s company was loud and hilarious.” And if there was no company in the house, Tee mingles with other children, or spends time at her grandmother’s house, where the whole multitude of children lives. Here Tee learns urban skills, such as independence and sticking up for herself. And her father immediately emigrates, leaving Tee and Troddan, her brother, with his sister Tantie, a single, urban lower-class aunt. It is a story of Tee, the narrator, growing up in Trinidad. This novel ruminates the conflicts of life and changes a young girl, Tee, faces as she switches from rural Trinidadian existence with her Aunt Tantie to an urban Anglicized with her Aunt Beatrice.Ĭrick Crack, Monkey starts with the funeral of the protagonist’s mother. Crick Crack, Monkey has been called the first major novel published (in 1970) by a black Caribbean woman, Merle Hodge.
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