Writings and Themes
To date, Merle Hodge has written two novels: Crick Crack, Monkey(1970) and The Life of Laetitia, published more than two decades later, in 1993.
Hodge's first novel, Crick Crack, Monkey, concerns the conflicts and changes a young girl, Tee, faces as she switches from a rural Trinidadian existence with her Aunt Tantie to an urban, anglicized existence with her Aunt Beatrice. With Tee as narrator, Hodge guides the reader through an intensely personal study of the effects of the colonial imposition of various social and cultural values on the Trinidadian female. Tee recounts the various dilemmas in her life in such a way that it is often difficult to separate the voice of the child, experiencing, from the voice of the woman, reminiscing; in this manner, Hodge broadens the scope of the text considerably. Cultural appropriation, when those who are colonized appropriate the culture of the colonizers, is exemplifed in the story of Crick Crack Monkey.
The Life of Laetitia (1993), the story of a young Caribbean girl's first year at school away from home, was well received, one review calling it "a touching, beautifully written coming-of-age story set in Trinidad".
Hodge has also published various essays concerning life in the Caribbean and the life and works of Léon Damas, including a translation of Damas's collection of poetry, Pigments.
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“Even in my own writings I cannot always recover the meaning of my former ideas; I know not what I meant to say, and often get into a regular heat, correcting and putting a new sense into it, having lost the first and better one. I do nothing but come and go. My judgement does not always forge straight ahead; it strays and wanders.”
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