MERLE HODGE Writer and social activist working for change

MERLE Hodge, author of the popular Crick, Crack Monkey and The Life of Laetitia, visited Jamaica last week, where she spent seven days participating in various events involving women and children.

While here, she was invited in to speak at a life of Louise Bennett celebration held at the University of the West Indies (UWI), and she also took the time to participate in a ‘Parenting without abuse’ seminar staged by the Women Resource and Outreach Centre.

Here, one of her emphases was on encouraging community members to stop thinking that children need to be beaten to be controlled.

Born in Calcutta Settlement, Trinidad in 1944, Hodge was educated in the island until 1962 when she left for England to study French at London University. After graduating she travelled to Europe, Africa, Senegal and Gambia.

In 1970 she published her first novel (Crick Crack Monkey). She took a teaching job in a school in Port-of-Spain where she taught English, French and West Indian Literature. In 1993 she published her second novel.

In the 70’s she spent four years lecturing French at UWI, Jamaica. Hodge currently lecturers at UWI, St Augustine.

She has co-ordinated seminars, written several short stories for children, essays, articles on Caribbean family, Caribbean language, women’s issues, and education.

all woman caught up with her and spent a few minutes with the writer and social activist.

all woman(aw): Say Crick Crack Monkey and most Jamaicans know immediately who you are. But you may not be known here as a social activist. Tell us about your work in this area.Merle Hodge(MH): Yes, well that is about a half of my life! (Laughs). In Trinidad I work with a woman’s organisation. I am a convenor, I am one of the founding members of the working women’s group, the long name for it is Women Working for Social Progress.

aw: What are some of the things this group does? We started out in the area of structural adjustment. We did some work on women and the economy and we also did a lot of work on domestic violence. We tried to sensitise people on the whole syndrome of domestic violence, which for everybody just means men hitting women, but it really should include the beating of children. But a lot of people don’t see it that way, they didn’t think that was at all comparable, they thought hitting of children was for discipline, that it was necessary.

MH:

So we decided to start socialising children because tradition has been that all of us started off being beaten in the homes as children and that in turn contributes to domestic violence. We are socialised into thinking that violence is a means of solving interpersonal problems. Because when you were little parents hit you when you got them vexed, so each time somebody gets you vex you hit them. So we feel that the answer to a conflict is a lash. Many times the boys who are involved in violent crimes are the ones who got hit more.

aw: What is one of your main concerns for the family? One of the things I am very interested in is that whole thing of not making children feel that if they do not live in a house with their mother and father – in a nuclear family – then something is wrong with them. We have other traditions in the West Indies. Very often the household ends up being the older generation, adults, siblings and the younger children and those children are raised by everybody.

MH:

We have to stop putting out the idea that a family that is not a nuclear family is dysfunctional by definition. It isn’t! I think the great majority of those families are functional in that they successfully socialise children. We only hear about the ones that go wrong. The news is about all the boys who didn’t have a father and have become criminals but a lot of boys whose fathers did not live in their homes are not criminals. Then there is what people insist on calling ‘single parent’. I have a child and I don’t have a husband, and to call myself a single parent would be the height of ungratefulness because I didn’t parent my child alone – I had sisters, friends my mother, father aunt everybody and he is a well-balanced child. It is not the action of the man, it’s your attitude towards it that will make the difference in the child’s life. If you tell the child ‘yuh worthless like you father’, it sets up the child to be angry with the man. You should bring children up to understand that their family is the group of people who take care of them.

Everytime somebody says that the problem with our men is that there isn’t a strong male presence in the home, they insult to women. It is an insult to all the women who have successfully brought up children, because it says that a women can’t bring up children.

aw: Do you think that West Indian literature has evolved or deteriorated since the 70’s when you wrote Crick Crack Monkey? It has evolved tremendously. One of the remarkable things about it is that there has been a real expansion of writing by women. In fact, from around the ’80s until now it is women writers who are ‘West Indian literature’ you might say. They have dominated. What was seen as the golden age of West Indian literature was what was produced in the ’50s and it was mainly men writing. But the women suddenly came up.

MH:

aw: Do you think children these days are better off or at a disadvantage because of the introduction of technology such as video games and cartoons, and the fact that they seem to spend less time reading? I don’t think they are better off at all. I think they have lost touch with themselves. I mean we had colonialism, we got rid of colonialism and now we have a new type. This one is harder to fight. It (technological development) is a form of oppression. I don’t know what will happen when they get big because they have not developed a relationship with the outdoors. They don’t go out in the yard and play and interact with nature. When we were growing up, we used climb trees, now the big yard is there and they are sitting inside playing those foolish games. Our children are being kind of taken away from us.

MH:

They go into those games and they are in an artificial environment and they start to think that that is the real world. We need to let them interact more with the family and the neighbourhood. On one hand it (technology) has strengthened our awareness but on the other it is affecting our children. I mean we don’t want to be seeming to force them to do anything but as parents I suppose in a way we have to gently force them to interact with the outdoors more.

aw: Tell us a little about Merle as a child. As a child I read a lot. I started writing when I was quite young. I wrote some little children’s books and illustrated them. When we were children we did not see images of ourselves in books or in any film, if you saw black people in a book it was “native”. We didn’t see ourselves in any positive way in film and literature. All the books were about white children. So when I started to write as a child I started to do a sort of counter thing, I wrote about things I saw around me like my grandmother’s house and the yard. There was something (a book) I did when I was in primary school. My father kept that, I don’t know where it is right now. Then when I was a teenager I wrote other things.

MH:

I grew up in what you would call an extended family. My grandmother played a large role in our upbringing. I consider myself to have had a very happy childhood.

aw: If you could change one thing throughout the Caribbean region, what would that be? Leadership. Leadership of the Caribbean countries are by people who don’t really understand democracy. They don’t understand about getting people to participate, to involve people in decision and actually building structures that would allow people to have a say in the running of the country rather than just going out to vote and then going back home. And then we call that democracy. That is foolishness, people should participate in the running of their country, not on the outside of decision making.

MH:

-husseyd@jamaicaobserver.com