CRICK CRACK, MONKEY
Maternal Influence and Exploration of Identity within Crick, Crack Monkey: A Literary Analysis
Caribbean literature, impregnated with the lust of island nature, possesses thought provoking concepts as well as relatable issues concerned with identity and culture. Crick, Crack Monkey, a book of Trinidadian influence, incorporates the linguistics of the island while also drawing from influential authors like Franz Fanon, Derek Walcott and many others. Tee, a young Afro- Caribbean girl, experiences the dualistic cultures and societies of both lower and upper class influence. Tee acts as a Veronica in Heremakhonon, as she traverses through two different cultures in pursuit of gaining acceptance and acquiring self-identity. Crick, Crack Monkey, a product of Caribbean literature, elaborates on maternal figures within Tee’s life that essentially shape her as an individual.
From the beginning of her childhood, emerging into her adolescence, Tee has no stable maternal figures in her life. At a young age, her mother passes away. Tee makes references to the place that her mother had gone after death; she states “It made perfect sense that the place where my mother had gone, Glory, should also be known as The Mother Country” (Hodge 33). These pleasant memories of her mother suffice for the emptiness that Tee feels as a result of the non-existent biological mother. Naturally, the change into adolescence inflicts questioning and the necessity to have a stable maternal. The pubescent mind goes through questioning of identity, whether that is sexual identity, mental and physical identity. Crick Crack, Monkey examines Tee’s internal and external journey to find her identity. According to psychologists, Erik Erikson, “During the adolescent years, individuals are faced with finding out who they are, what they are all about, and where they are going in life. This is Erikson’s fifth developmental stage, identity versus identity confusion” (Santrock 24). As a result of her mother’s death and her father’s immigration to England, guardianship is bestowed upon Aunt Tantie, her father’s sister and Auntie Beatrice, who is her mother’s sister. Essentially, these substitute maternal figures shape the person that Tee becomes.
Maternal roles congeal Tee’s characterization and identity throughout Crick, Crack Monkey. Ma, Tee’s grandmother establishes a foundation for Tee through ancestral ties as well as traditional background.
She couldn’t remember her grandmother’s true-true name. But Tee was growing into hergrandmother again, her spirit was in me. They’d never bent down her spirit and she would come back and come back and come back; if only she could live to see Tee growinto her tall proud straight grandmother (Hodge 21).
Tee relies on her familial association in order to withstand the colonization of Aunt Beatrice’s middle-class influence. Family and maternal presence play an important role in Caribbean culture, such that “families tend to have a matrifocal or matricentric structure” (Caribbean Families-Family Structure). The absence of a paternal figure precipitates the substantial impact of women in Tee’s life. These women shape Tee’s beliefs and also provide her with a resolute history and background, for heritage is something that can not be taken away from any individual. Ma’s character accomplishes this through her revitalization of oral stories and traditions within the Caribbean culture. While heritage does play a vital role in the influences of individuals as seen in the character of Tee, ancestral backgrounds can also be pushed to the side due to feelings of shame and uncertainty. Tee begins to experience those feelings of shame, while she is under the guardianship of Auntie Beatrice. She questions what it would be like if she never had encountered relationships with Aunt Tantie and Ma, stating “At times I resented Tantie bitterly for not having let Auntie Beatrice get us in the first place and bring us up properly. What Auntie Beatrice said so often was quite true: how could a woman with no sense of right and wrong take it upon herself to bring up children, God knew the reason why He hadn’t given her any of her own” (Hodge 107). Tee is experiencing the influence of the “inferior complex” and in response she questions her upbringing.
Many female Caribbean writers focus on the issue of maternal figures shaping ones environment, as well as issues concerning sexuality and identity. Ma’s strong emphasis on Caribbean heritage and background allows familial custom to withstand colonization and diverging cultures. Ma’s Anancy stories represent components of Jamaican and Caribbean culture, which have been passed through the generations through oral tradition. Therefore, Ma consummates tradition and ancestry in order to create a stable environment and identity for Tee in the beginning of the book.
Essentially, Ma’s character is placed within Tee’s life to give her sustenance and to remind her of where she came from, her roots and origination. Tee looked forward to her summers spent with Ma, “Ma’s land was to us an enchanted country, dipping into valley after valley, hills thickly covered with every conceivable kind of foliage, cool green darkness” (Hodge 16). Through this imagery, Tee’s audience is able to thoroughly encounter the nature of the Trinidad Island.
Ma playing the role of grandmother also symbolizes the inveterate ways of the Creole culture as well as wisdom for Tee and her brother Toddon. Tee’s relationship with Ma encourages her to establish an identity. “Ma’s children were the ‘bush-monkeys’ and ‘country-bookies’ (Hodge 17). In this instance, Tee is able to identify with a name and a group that gives her authority, within and outside familial ties. The portrayal of family names and their origin play a significant role throughout the book.
Gay Wilentz’s argument in “Toward a Diaspora Literature: Black Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States,” states that Ma preserves the African culture through her convention of culture. He suggests “it is Ma, the grandmother, whose Anacy stories conjure up a culture carried to the Americas by their African ancestors” (Wilentz 397). The characterization of Ma establishes the significance and the distinction that women play in Caribbean culture.
Ma’s innate nature provides Tee with a foundation for the cultures and societies she experiences. The substantial character’s, Ma and Aunt Tantie, are closely affiliated with one another, and are also linked to Tee through her father’s lineage. Tee’s father is Tantie’s brother. Aunt Tantie plays a significant role in the life of Tee. The author endows Aunt Tantie’s character with the aptitudeto construct and shape the values and social status of Tee, because she represents the leading and dominant guardian in the beginning of Tee’s life: “Tantie’s company was loud and hilarious and the intermittent squawk and flurry of mirth made me think of the fowl-run when something fell into the midst of the fat hens” (Hodge 4). Tee interacts with Aunt Tantie during the first couple years of her life, as a child Tee easily adopts the ways of her surroundings, in her home with Aunt Tantie, Mikey, and Toddan.
Tee’s living arrangement with Aunt Tantie paints a picture of Creole culture and the rural class for the reader. In a way, Tee becomes urbanized growing up in the rural community. There are various instances throughout Caribbean literature when urbanization becomes a central factor in identification. For example, in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, the character Christopher, by association to the Dungle is ultimately connoted negatively because he comes from the slums. Although Tee avoids this particular stereotype, she essentially becomes the environment in which she lives. Aunt Tantie’s maternal nature provides Tee with obvious feelings of nurture and a sense of belonging. Tee fits perfectly into the mold of a self-made character made to care for her brother while trying to figure out who she is and to whom she belongs. While Tee is nourished through her relationships, she also gains a mental and physical toughness from observing her maternal influence, Aunt Tantie.
Tantie raged all evening. An’ she had a mind not to give us anything to eat because allyu belly must be done full wid that bitch ice-cream and sweetie. She raged and rampaged with no indication of subsiding, so that Mikey finally got up and left the house with a loud cheups; she called down curses on his departing figure and then returned to Auntie Beatrice and our escapade (Hodge ix).
Aunt Tantie’s hostile environment ensures the tough skin that Tee inherits. Essentially, Tee becomes a product of the rural class but her intelligence and education sets her apart from the rural class people. While living with Tantie, Tee is able to go to school for the first time in her young life. School was something that she looked forward to, and essentially something that she could identify with. She states “I looked forward to school. I looked forward to the day when I could pass my hand swiftly from side to side on a blank piece of paper leaving meaningful marks in its wake; to staring non-chalantly into a book until I turned over the page” (Hodge 22).
While school played a major role in Tee’s life, through living with Tantie, Tee also experiences the value of one’s speech and how speech is acquired. Language is an important factor in identity. The language that an individual speaks directly associates that individual with a group or a culture. In Wendy Walters’s claim of maternal influence within Crick Crack Monkey, she states that Aunt Tantie’s maternal preeminence also had the ability to influence Tee’s language. She says “The language of Tantie, with whom Tee spends the most time, is loud, raucous, and punctuated by creolisms, curses, and squawks. From her Aunt Tantie, Tee learns verbal toughness” (Walters 159).
As a result of living with Aunt Tantie during the first couple years of her life, Tee recognizes the insignificance of a fatherly figure in her life. Often times Mikey, Tantie’s brother, is undermined as a character although he acts as the father figure in the household. Mikey must live under Tantie’s rules and is complaint to Tantie’s authority. Many of the male figures throughout the book are given little power and submissive roles which distinguished the maternal role and their power in Tee’s life, and in finding her identity and cultural association. Subsequently, Mikey’s indifference alludes to the necessity for a maternal figure.
Tee transitions to the guardianship of Auntie Beatrice as a result of winning a scholarship at The Exhibition Examination. Therefore, Aunt Beatrice is another one of the maternal figures within Tee’s exploration of identity. Tantie incessantly refers to Auntie Beatrice as “The Bitch.” “We had not seen the last of The Bitch. Aunt Beatrice appeared one day stepping up the path in the shadow of a round-bosomed, round-bottomed policewoman” (Hodges 34). Tee has to subvert the fabrications made by her Aunt Tantie, in attempt to adapt to Auntie Beatrice’s culture and society. Under the maternal authority of Aunt Beatrice, Tee is exposed to the middle-class social structure as well as the issue of “whitening the race.”
As a consequence of abiding in the home of Aunt Beatrice, Tee slowly assimilates to middle- class culture, although she suffers feelings of guilt in relinquishing the culture of Aunt Tantie. Aunt Beatrice uses her middle-class prestige in an attempt to change the name of Tee.
Aunt Beatrice always called me ‘Cynthia’, as if I were in school. And she always called Toddan ‘Codington’, and Toddan never knew she meant him. ‘It was your Auntie Beatrice who gave you that name, dear,’ she said to him, ‘when you were a little tiny baby (Hodges 40).
Aunt Beatrice assigns Tee and her brother with these names that sound “more white” than the names that were assigned to them at birth. Names are distinct and innately related to one’s identity. Aunt Beatrice uses this “whitening the race” in an attempt to sculpt Tee’s identity. In Black Skin, White Masks Franz Fanon elaborates on whitening the race, he states “There is a white potential in every one of us; some want to ignore it or quite simply reverse it” (Fanon 30). Aunt Beatrice is an example of the black attempt to bring out the white potential in Tee, not only through changing her urbanized name to a proper name but also in condemning her dress and her speech. “And then she was suppressing the clothes I had brought with me: ‘Do you really like that dress, dear?’ she would suggest to me with a faint turning up of the nose over the broadest of smiles” (Hodges 85). Aunt Beatrice also describes her dress is “niggery-looking.”
Tee also perceives a sense of racial tension while living with Auntie Beatrice. At the school that Tee attends, St. Ann’s, Tee observes how being light-skinned is better than being dark –skinned. Aunt Beatrice displays favoritism to her daughter Carol, and seems to be ashamed of her daughter Jessica, who is dark-skinned. However, when Tee is at St. Anne’s, she is cognizant of the fact that the girls at the school were known to be associated with different organizations as a result of their physical appearance. Tee states, “But then Jessica had always been at St. Ann’s, and she was neither in the choir nor anything else but the Second Company of Guides. I though perhaps this was why I sometimes saw Auntie Beatrice contemplating her with a kind of anxiety, sizing her up from one angle and then from another, and seeming to shake her head in despair” (Hodge 82).
Another instance of racial tensions that Tee experienced while living with Beatrice occurs on a family beach trip. Beatrice wants to plan a dinner for the Silvas, who were upper-class family friends. While Beatrice and Tee are shopping for food, Tee observes Beatrice reactions to the lower-class food traditions and Beatrice’s feelings of inferiority. Tee says “For Auntie Beatrice made 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” (Hodge 99). Aunt Beatrice assumes that the people from the lower-class are not educated and are therefore inferior to the middle-class.
In conclusion, there exists clear evidence that maternal figures within Tee’s life warrant noticeable repercussions, which are exemplified in the way she forms her language identity after influential figures in her life. Fanon makes a statement about the psychopathology of the Black man, which in this instance would be the black women, in stating that,
The authority of the state for the individual is the reproduction of the family authority which has fashioned his childhood. The individual assimilates every authority encountered at a later date with parental authority: he perceives the present in terms of the past. Like every aspect of human behavior, behavior toward authority is something to be learned. And it is learned within a family that can be psychologically distinguished by its specific organization, i.e., by the way in which its authority is allocated and exercised (Fanon 122).
Tee represents the theory that the individual is psychologically affected by parental authority. Tee relates to the women throughout her life, and in turn that makes for the person that she becomes. The conclusion of the book leaves us with a feeling of dissatisfaction. “Everything was changing, unrecognizable, pushing me out. This was as it should be, since I had moved up and no longer had any place here.” She feels that event though she has experienced the cultures of both of her aunts, she still does not belong.
Crick Crack, Monkey says a lot about race, class and identity. Through her experiences, Tee realizes that there is great significance in physical appearance when it comes to being accepted by society, and in her case, family too. At the end of her journey, Tee also learns that although social and class statuses are important in determining one’s place in society, she observes that class status does not benefit the individual in any way. In fact, I feel as if Tee realizes that Aunt Beatrice is living a vain life, in trying to impress those around her and in trying to whiten the race.
Works Cited
1.) Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 2007. Print.
2.) Hodge, Merle. Crick crack, monkey. Oxford: Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann, 2000. Print
3.) Walters, Wendy W. "More Than 'Girl Talk': Language as Marker in Two Novels by Women of African Descent." Pacific Coast Philology 27.1-2 (1992): 159-165. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 3 Dec. 2009.
4.) Wilentz, Gay "Toward a Diaspora Literature: Black Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States." College English 54.4 (1992): 385-405. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 3 Dec. 2009.
Caribbean literature, impregnated with the lust of island nature, possesses thought provoking concepts as well as relatable issues concerned with identity and culture. Crick, Crack Monkey, a book of Trinidadian influence, incorporates the linguistics of the island while also drawing from influential authors like Franz Fanon, Derek Walcott and many others. Tee, a young Afro- Caribbean girl, experiences the dualistic cultures and societies of both lower and upper class influence. Tee acts as a Veronica in Heremakhonon, as she traverses through two different cultures in pursuit of gaining acceptance and acquiring self-identity. Crick, Crack Monkey, a product of Caribbean literature, elaborates on maternal figures within Tee’s life that essentially shape her as an individual.
From the beginning of her childhood, emerging into her adolescence, Tee has no stable maternal figures in her life. At a young age, her mother passes away. Tee makes references to the place that her mother had gone after death; she states “It made perfect sense that the place where my mother had gone, Glory, should also be known as The Mother Country” (Hodge 33). These pleasant memories of her mother suffice for the emptiness that Tee feels as a result of the non-existent biological mother. Naturally, the change into adolescence inflicts questioning and the necessity to have a stable maternal. The pubescent mind goes through questioning of identity, whether that is sexual identity, mental and physical identity. Crick Crack, Monkey examines Tee’s internal and external journey to find her identity. According to psychologists, Erik Erikson, “During the adolescent years, individuals are faced with finding out who they are, what they are all about, and where they are going in life. This is Erikson’s fifth developmental stage, identity versus identity confusion” (Santrock 24). As a result of her mother’s death and her father’s immigration to England, guardianship is bestowed upon Aunt Tantie, her father’s sister and Auntie Beatrice, who is her mother’s sister. Essentially, these substitute maternal figures shape the person that Tee becomes.
Maternal roles congeal Tee’s characterization and identity throughout Crick, Crack Monkey. Ma, Tee’s grandmother establishes a foundation for Tee through ancestral ties as well as traditional background.
She couldn’t remember her grandmother’s true-true name. But Tee was growing into hergrandmother again, her spirit was in me. They’d never bent down her spirit and she would come back and come back and come back; if only she could live to see Tee growinto her tall proud straight grandmother (Hodge 21).
Tee relies on her familial association in order to withstand the colonization of Aunt Beatrice’s middle-class influence. Family and maternal presence play an important role in Caribbean culture, such that “families tend to have a matrifocal or matricentric structure” (Caribbean Families-Family Structure). The absence of a paternal figure precipitates the substantial impact of women in Tee’s life. These women shape Tee’s beliefs and also provide her with a resolute history and background, for heritage is something that can not be taken away from any individual. Ma’s character accomplishes this through her revitalization of oral stories and traditions within the Caribbean culture. While heritage does play a vital role in the influences of individuals as seen in the character of Tee, ancestral backgrounds can also be pushed to the side due to feelings of shame and uncertainty. Tee begins to experience those feelings of shame, while she is under the guardianship of Auntie Beatrice. She questions what it would be like if she never had encountered relationships with Aunt Tantie and Ma, stating “At times I resented Tantie bitterly for not having let Auntie Beatrice get us in the first place and bring us up properly. What Auntie Beatrice said so often was quite true: how could a woman with no sense of right and wrong take it upon herself to bring up children, God knew the reason why He hadn’t given her any of her own” (Hodge 107). Tee is experiencing the influence of the “inferior complex” and in response she questions her upbringing.
Many female Caribbean writers focus on the issue of maternal figures shaping ones environment, as well as issues concerning sexuality and identity. Ma’s strong emphasis on Caribbean heritage and background allows familial custom to withstand colonization and diverging cultures. Ma’s Anancy stories represent components of Jamaican and Caribbean culture, which have been passed through the generations through oral tradition. Therefore, Ma consummates tradition and ancestry in order to create a stable environment and identity for Tee in the beginning of the book.
Essentially, Ma’s character is placed within Tee’s life to give her sustenance and to remind her of where she came from, her roots and origination. Tee looked forward to her summers spent with Ma, “Ma’s land was to us an enchanted country, dipping into valley after valley, hills thickly covered with every conceivable kind of foliage, cool green darkness” (Hodge 16). Through this imagery, Tee’s audience is able to thoroughly encounter the nature of the Trinidad Island.
Ma playing the role of grandmother also symbolizes the inveterate ways of the Creole culture as well as wisdom for Tee and her brother Toddon. Tee’s relationship with Ma encourages her to establish an identity. “Ma’s children were the ‘bush-monkeys’ and ‘country-bookies’ (Hodge 17). In this instance, Tee is able to identify with a name and a group that gives her authority, within and outside familial ties. The portrayal of family names and their origin play a significant role throughout the book.
Gay Wilentz’s argument in “Toward a Diaspora Literature: Black Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States,” states that Ma preserves the African culture through her convention of culture. He suggests “it is Ma, the grandmother, whose Anacy stories conjure up a culture carried to the Americas by their African ancestors” (Wilentz 397). The characterization of Ma establishes the significance and the distinction that women play in Caribbean culture.
Ma’s innate nature provides Tee with a foundation for the cultures and societies she experiences. The substantial character’s, Ma and Aunt Tantie, are closely affiliated with one another, and are also linked to Tee through her father’s lineage. Tee’s father is Tantie’s brother. Aunt Tantie plays a significant role in the life of Tee. The author endows Aunt Tantie’s character with the aptitudeto construct and shape the values and social status of Tee, because she represents the leading and dominant guardian in the beginning of Tee’s life: “Tantie’s company was loud and hilarious and the intermittent squawk and flurry of mirth made me think of the fowl-run when something fell into the midst of the fat hens” (Hodge 4). Tee interacts with Aunt Tantie during the first couple years of her life, as a child Tee easily adopts the ways of her surroundings, in her home with Aunt Tantie, Mikey, and Toddan.
Tee’s living arrangement with Aunt Tantie paints a picture of Creole culture and the rural class for the reader. In a way, Tee becomes urbanized growing up in the rural community. There are various instances throughout Caribbean literature when urbanization becomes a central factor in identification. For example, in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, the character Christopher, by association to the Dungle is ultimately connoted negatively because he comes from the slums. Although Tee avoids this particular stereotype, she essentially becomes the environment in which she lives. Aunt Tantie’s maternal nature provides Tee with obvious feelings of nurture and a sense of belonging. Tee fits perfectly into the mold of a self-made character made to care for her brother while trying to figure out who she is and to whom she belongs. While Tee is nourished through her relationships, she also gains a mental and physical toughness from observing her maternal influence, Aunt Tantie.
Tantie raged all evening. An’ she had a mind not to give us anything to eat because allyu belly must be done full wid that bitch ice-cream and sweetie. She raged and rampaged with no indication of subsiding, so that Mikey finally got up and left the house with a loud cheups; she called down curses on his departing figure and then returned to Auntie Beatrice and our escapade (Hodge ix).
Aunt Tantie’s hostile environment ensures the tough skin that Tee inherits. Essentially, Tee becomes a product of the rural class but her intelligence and education sets her apart from the rural class people. While living with Tantie, Tee is able to go to school for the first time in her young life. School was something that she looked forward to, and essentially something that she could identify with. She states “I looked forward to school. I looked forward to the day when I could pass my hand swiftly from side to side on a blank piece of paper leaving meaningful marks in its wake; to staring non-chalantly into a book until I turned over the page” (Hodge 22).
While school played a major role in Tee’s life, through living with Tantie, Tee also experiences the value of one’s speech and how speech is acquired. Language is an important factor in identity. The language that an individual speaks directly associates that individual with a group or a culture. In Wendy Walters’s claim of maternal influence within Crick Crack Monkey, she states that Aunt Tantie’s maternal preeminence also had the ability to influence Tee’s language. She says “The language of Tantie, with whom Tee spends the most time, is loud, raucous, and punctuated by creolisms, curses, and squawks. From her Aunt Tantie, Tee learns verbal toughness” (Walters 159).
As a result of living with Aunt Tantie during the first couple years of her life, Tee recognizes the insignificance of a fatherly figure in her life. Often times Mikey, Tantie’s brother, is undermined as a character although he acts as the father figure in the household. Mikey must live under Tantie’s rules and is complaint to Tantie’s authority. Many of the male figures throughout the book are given little power and submissive roles which distinguished the maternal role and their power in Tee’s life, and in finding her identity and cultural association. Subsequently, Mikey’s indifference alludes to the necessity for a maternal figure.
Tee transitions to the guardianship of Auntie Beatrice as a result of winning a scholarship at The Exhibition Examination. Therefore, Aunt Beatrice is another one of the maternal figures within Tee’s exploration of identity. Tantie incessantly refers to Auntie Beatrice as “The Bitch.” “We had not seen the last of The Bitch. Aunt Beatrice appeared one day stepping up the path in the shadow of a round-bosomed, round-bottomed policewoman” (Hodges 34). Tee has to subvert the fabrications made by her Aunt Tantie, in attempt to adapt to Auntie Beatrice’s culture and society. Under the maternal authority of Aunt Beatrice, Tee is exposed to the middle-class social structure as well as the issue of “whitening the race.”
As a consequence of abiding in the home of Aunt Beatrice, Tee slowly assimilates to middle- class culture, although she suffers feelings of guilt in relinquishing the culture of Aunt Tantie. Aunt Beatrice uses her middle-class prestige in an attempt to change the name of Tee.
Aunt Beatrice always called me ‘Cynthia’, as if I were in school. And she always called Toddan ‘Codington’, and Toddan never knew she meant him. ‘It was your Auntie Beatrice who gave you that name, dear,’ she said to him, ‘when you were a little tiny baby (Hodges 40).
Aunt Beatrice assigns Tee and her brother with these names that sound “more white” than the names that were assigned to them at birth. Names are distinct and innately related to one’s identity. Aunt Beatrice uses this “whitening the race” in an attempt to sculpt Tee’s identity. In Black Skin, White Masks Franz Fanon elaborates on whitening the race, he states “There is a white potential in every one of us; some want to ignore it or quite simply reverse it” (Fanon 30). Aunt Beatrice is an example of the black attempt to bring out the white potential in Tee, not only through changing her urbanized name to a proper name but also in condemning her dress and her speech. “And then she was suppressing the clothes I had brought with me: ‘Do you really like that dress, dear?’ she would suggest to me with a faint turning up of the nose over the broadest of smiles” (Hodges 85). Aunt Beatrice also describes her dress is “niggery-looking.”
Tee also perceives a sense of racial tension while living with Auntie Beatrice. At the school that Tee attends, St. Ann’s, Tee observes how being light-skinned is better than being dark –skinned. Aunt Beatrice displays favoritism to her daughter Carol, and seems to be ashamed of her daughter Jessica, who is dark-skinned. However, when Tee is at St. Anne’s, she is cognizant of the fact that the girls at the school were known to be associated with different organizations as a result of their physical appearance. Tee states, “But then Jessica had always been at St. Ann’s, and she was neither in the choir nor anything else but the Second Company of Guides. I though perhaps this was why I sometimes saw Auntie Beatrice contemplating her with a kind of anxiety, sizing her up from one angle and then from another, and seeming to shake her head in despair” (Hodge 82).
Another instance of racial tensions that Tee experienced while living with Beatrice occurs on a family beach trip. Beatrice wants to plan a dinner for the Silvas, who were upper-class family friends. While Beatrice and Tee are shopping for food, Tee observes Beatrice reactions to the lower-class food traditions and Beatrice’s feelings of inferiority. Tee says “For Auntie Beatrice made 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” (Hodge 99). Aunt Beatrice assumes that the people from the lower-class are not educated and are therefore inferior to the middle-class.
In conclusion, there exists clear evidence that maternal figures within Tee’s life warrant noticeable repercussions, which are exemplified in the way she forms her language identity after influential figures in her life. Fanon makes a statement about the psychopathology of the Black man, which in this instance would be the black women, in stating that,
The authority of the state for the individual is the reproduction of the family authority which has fashioned his childhood. The individual assimilates every authority encountered at a later date with parental authority: he perceives the present in terms of the past. Like every aspect of human behavior, behavior toward authority is something to be learned. And it is learned within a family that can be psychologically distinguished by its specific organization, i.e., by the way in which its authority is allocated and exercised (Fanon 122).
Tee represents the theory that the individual is psychologically affected by parental authority. Tee relates to the women throughout her life, and in turn that makes for the person that she becomes. The conclusion of the book leaves us with a feeling of dissatisfaction. “Everything was changing, unrecognizable, pushing me out. This was as it should be, since I had moved up and no longer had any place here.” She feels that event though she has experienced the cultures of both of her aunts, she still does not belong.
Crick Crack, Monkey says a lot about race, class and identity. Through her experiences, Tee realizes that there is great significance in physical appearance when it comes to being accepted by society, and in her case, family too. At the end of her journey, Tee also learns that although social and class statuses are important in determining one’s place in society, she observes that class status does not benefit the individual in any way. In fact, I feel as if Tee realizes that Aunt Beatrice is living a vain life, in trying to impress those around her and in trying to whiten the race.
Works Cited
1.) Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 2007. Print.
2.) Hodge, Merle. Crick crack, monkey. Oxford: Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann, 2000. Print
3.) Walters, Wendy W. "More Than 'Girl Talk': Language as Marker in Two Novels by Women of African Descent." Pacific Coast Philology 27.1-2 (1992): 159-165. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 3 Dec. 2009.
4.) Wilentz, Gay "Toward a Diaspora Literature: Black Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States." College English 54.4 (1992): 385-405. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 3 Dec. 2009.
