backstory
The miseducation of Merle Hodge Trinidadian writer Merle Hodge began her career by publishing what would become a beloved Caribbean classic, Crick Crack, Monkey, in 1970. Five decades later, as she prepares to publish her third novel, Hodge tells Andre Bagoo what took so long — and what drives her interest in capturing the often confusing experience of Caribbean childhood on the page Photography by Mark Lyndersay
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t may be hard for some to picture it, but Merle Hodge was once a schoolgirl. Before she became a doyenne of Caribbean literature — her 1970 debut Crick Crack, Monkey is now considered a classic; Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat calls her “a giant” — she was like one of the children in her books. Each of her novels is an elegant précis of the distortions wrought by colonialism in pre-Independence Trinidad. In that Trinidad, school is no gateway to enlightenment: it becomes the conduit by which the subject is disciplined and punished. “During my student days in England, I went to Denmark from time to time, and worked in a children’s home,” Hodge tells me, in reply to emailed questions. “When we took the children for walks in the woods, they could tell you the name of every tree, flower, or weed along the way. When we read to them from their storybooks, I saw that the stories were peopled by characters who looked just like them. “All of this was in sharp contrast to my childhood experience,” she continues. “These children had a strong sense of who they were, and what that meant. Nobody was suggesting to them that they would be better people if they were somebody else, somebody from a different place. Crick Crack was, to a large extent, a looking back at my childhood from this vantage point.” It is a vantage point relevant to all Hodge’s work. After Crick Crack, Monkey came the novel For the Life of Laetitia (1993); an influential manual on grammar, The Knots in English (1997); and now, fifty-one years after her debut, One Day, Congotay, scheduled for publication in September 2021 by Peepal Tree Press.
