Merle Hodge Biography

Caribbean novelist, born in Trinidad, educated at the University of London. She travelled widely in Europe before becoming a lecturer in French at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. Her novel Crick Crack Monkey (1970) is set in rural Trinidad, and traces the growth of the narrator, Tee, through childhood to maturity. Close family relationships within a stable rural community exist uneasily beside a middle-class world in which feudalistic values of race, colour, and class provoke unsettling but familiar Caribbean preoccupations with issues of personal identity and cultural nationality. These preoccupations are blended with warmth and humour that suggest a vision of tempered compassion. Hodge worked for the ill-fated Bishop regime in Grenada, but returned to Trinidad after it was overthrown. Crick Crack Monkey remains a novel of vibrant social manners and gratifying optimism despite its lack of recognition outside the Caribbean.