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Caribbean Children’s Literature and the Environment
The symbiotic relationship between Caribbean literary and environmental theories
and criticisms is still emergent in the Caribbean though a growing compendium of
theories and analytical approaches in the fields of postcolonial and cultural studies
address the Caribbean environment of Caribbean literary texts as separate sites. Few
Caribbean studies generally show how environmental issues are addressed in Caribbean
literary production, such as few exploratory sketches that analyze Caribbean children’s
and young adult literatures and their environments. For instance, Jaqueline Lazu’s
“National Identity, Where the Wild, Strange and Exotic Things Are; In Search of the
Caribbean in Contemporary Children’s Literature” (2004), deploys postcolonial theory to
observe a “constant negotiation” (Lazu, 195) in the formation of Caribbean identities as
expressed in Caribbean young adult and children’s literatures, and to argue that an
understanding of this confluence of environment and identity formation is pivotal to any
study of Caribbean 21st century global cultural relations, “within the ideological contexts
of race, colonial and postcolonial history, and contemporary asymmetrical power” (200).
In light of these conditions and the quality of our current environmental existence due to
the devastating human imprint on our world, there is an urgency to view children’s and
young adult literature set in the Caribbean with an environmental criticism and/or critical
lens.
Postcolonial scholarship provides us with insight about how any study of the
diasporic self needs to be investigated within the ideological contexts of race,
colonial and postcolonial history, and contemporary asymmetrical power
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relationships between cultures…similar models can be applied to children’s
literature and all cultural production aimed at young consumers (200).
The late luminary, Edouard Glissant opined that the dialectic between Caribbean
ecology and culture had not yet been brought into productive relation. He argues that the
Caribbean “landscape is its own monument: its meaning can only be traced on the
underside. It is all history” (1).Departing from this to argue that environmental
decolonization is necessary for Caribbean survival, I analyze how environmental issues
are coded as cultural and historical narratives in Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack Monkey
(1970) and Nicholasa Mohr’s Going Home (1986). In these narratives, ecological issues
become new paradigms to offer the next Caribbean generation another avenue for the
process of cultural and historical decolonization.
The locally-based Trinidadian author, Merle Hodge and New York based Puerto
Rican of the diaspora author, Nicholasa Mohr are strategically paired for comparative
analysis across Caribbean language traditions, with an eye to an English language
pedagogy that builds Caribbean-wide environmental awareness, which is particularly
needed in Puerto Rico. First, these Caribbean women writers vary approaches in their
narrative perspectives and representations of their particular Caribbean island’s
ecological landscape, from both local and exilic locations, and the effects of these
environments on children as they grow up. Second, they offer comparative historical,
cultural, and linguistic advantages to reveal links and specificities between these Hispanic
and Anglophone Caribbean countries and to differentiate how they use environmentalism
as trajectories for the construction of children’s literatures. Third, the two novels provide
a plethora of literary examples that invoke the natural environment, and hence provide an
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interpretation or hermeneutics that embraces theoretical positions borrowed from both
literary and environmental praxes. Lawrence Buell charts the future purpose of ecocriticism to view “environmentality as a property of any text” (25). Glissant in Poetics
of Relation notes the function of the environment of storytelling itself, albeit in
masculinist terms observing:
Clearly, one of the places engraved in Antillean memory is the circle drawn
around the storyteller by the shadows of night. On the borders of this ring the
children who will relay the word are beside themselves. Their bodies are hot with
the fever of day; their eyes grow larger in this time that does not go by. These
children understand nothing of the formulas, nor do they catch allusions, but the
man with the stories speaks to them first. He is quick to guess when they will
shiver, wide mouthed in terror, or laugh to cover up their fear. His voice comes
from beyond the seas, charged with the movement of those African countries
present in their absence; it lingers in the night, which draws the trembling children
into its womb (39).
Hodge and Mohr as Caribbean storytellers offer varying portraits of the Caribbean
environment that tap into the idea of multiple perspectives of Caribbean histories,
cultures, and environments. In both Crick Crack Monkey and Going Home, the authors
demonstrate how children are empowered to develop their identity, take solace, or
validate their place in the world through their presence and interaction with the natural
environment. Nature functions in these novels as a sustaining force of culture and
identity. The two novels depict physical movements from the Caribbean islands to
diasporic locations, albeit in different directions and/or for different purposes. Hence, for
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example, at the end of Crick Crack Monkey, the protagonist prepares to move to London,
while in Going Home, the young girl at the start of the novel takes a trip to Puerto Rico
with her family from their home in New York City. Although there are many differences
in what leads up to each journey, each narrative incorporates the natural environment to
tell its’ story. Furthermore, while each child is on her individual journey, they both have
adults that embody the natural environment and become their “nature guides”. These
guardians possess experiential environmental knowledge and thus are able to help the
young adult protagonists develop their identities and negotiate their ways through the
world. These guides represent a Caribbean environmental consciousness and ethic that
offers alternatives to the otherwise seductively alienating value systems advertised by
metropolitan Europe or America.
In both novels, the young girl’s narration begins in an urban setting. Felita in
Going Home is a Puerto Rican twelve year old born in New York City. Her parents
joined the Puerto Rican diaspora in the 1950’s. Mohr begins the novel with the three
siblings learning that they will take their first family vacation to Puerto Rico. Felita’s
great-uncle, Tio Jorge will also be returning to his home town Barrio Antulio, where he
plans to retire. Felita will remain with him in the countryside for the rest of the summer
after her parents and brothers return to New York. Her playtime before the vacation is
typical urban play that moves from city parks to her block and alleyways. Felita is
conscious of weather and environment at the first island family dinner in a San Juan
urban neighborhood. She thinks,
As I sat on the steps watching the action a strange feeling came over me: I felt
like I had been here before. Then I realized that in so many ways it was just like I
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was back on my own street. The traffic, the grown-ups and kids hanging out and
the ice-cream truck were so much like home. But here everyone spoke Spanish
and being outside was real easy. You didn’t have to go up and down the stairs or
go in and out of big buildings. Also there were so many plants and trees around
that it felt and smelled like I was in the park (86).
Likewise Cynthia, who is known as Tee in Crick Crack Monkey, is staying in her
Tantie’s house while her father is away. In response to a family struggle over
guardianship Tee describes,
The very next day we were hustled off to Ma away away up in Point
d’Espoir…when we came back it would be time for me to go to school…The
August holidays had already begun, so that all the multitude was there. Our
grandmother was a strong, bony woman who did not smile unnecessarily…she
did not use up too many words at a time either except when she sat on the step
with us teeming around her, when there was a moon, and told us ‘nancy stories.
If the night was too dark or if it was raining there was no story-telling- it was
inconceivable to her that one should sit inside a house and tell ’nancy stories. At
full moon there was a bonus and then we would light a black-sage fire for the
mosquitoes and sand-flies and the smoke smelt like contented drowsiness (15).
Both girls remark on how nature enables a comfortable sense of place. Tees’s
description, illustrates Glissant’s quote as she is drawn in as one of “the trembling
children into the natural world’s womb” by a storytelling tradition invoked by the novels
title except in Hodge the storyteller is a female elder. Similarly, their recognition of the
space they inhabit supports Buell’s discussion of place and space, where placement
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allows for a dialogue between the person and the environment (62). He defines place
reaching “in at least three directions at once- toward environmental materiality, toward
social perception or construction, and toward individual affect or bond- [which] makes it
an additionally rich and tangled arena for environmental criticism”(63). Buell cites
Walter (1988) saying, “A place is seen, heard, smelled, imagined, loved, hated, feared,
revered” (63). Most essential to the role of Children’s literature and theory, as well as an
echo of Glissant’s description of the storyteller is Buell’s reference to Bowman (1993)
and Bhabha (1994) establishing that “Story and song are often vital to the retention of
place-sense (64).
This dialogue with space is seen in how Felita’s Puerto Rican family on vacation
experiences the changing place while on their way to Tio Jorge’s countryside village.
They ride on the new “superhighway” built in 1969 but “after awhile all the large
factories and apartment buildings of San Juan” (96) disappear and they apprehend the
countryside. Felita describes, “Flamboyan trees that my abuelita (now dead) told me
about… in full bloom…such a brilliant red…it looked like parts of the countryside were
on fire”. Felita’s father reminisces, “this still reminds me of my childhood all the animals
running loose” as they “begin to climb higher and higher into the mountains” (92). As
they arrive Felita’s brother Tito asks,
How does it look to you now Papi? Different and yet a lot the same. I mean there
are so many more people living in these here parts today. When I was a boy you
could see open country for miles. There wasn’t a house in sight. Entering Barrio
Antulio papi drove over a bridge. Underneath we saw a narrow river. The main
part of town was just a paved road with several stores, a garage, a restaurant, and
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a few houses. We’re going further up where Tio is, about less than a mile outside,
the village. Some village, [Tito says]“there ain’t even a movie or a plaza or
nothing! [he exclaims]Tito look[ing] disappointed. [Papi] stopped the car in front
of a small house that was painted pink with a blue trim. When we got out of the
car, a rooster came over and stood across the road looking at us. Yayo [the
rooster] was handsome. He had a brilliant red comb and long shiny black feathers
sprinkled with red tips and specks of dark green. It looked like he sparkled in the
sunshine… I called out to him. Quickly papi jumped in front of me (96).
The differences in how each young girl arrives to the country reflect a cultural and
historical identity that mirrors the specifics of each respective island. Theoretically Buell
asserts that “For contemporary environmental criticism… place often seems to offer the
promise of a “politics of resistance” against modernism’s excesses- its’ “spatial
colonizations” (Oakes 1997:509) (65). Felita’s first experience in the country as she
reaches out to the rooster is deflected out of caution and fear. In contrast, Tee arrives at
Ma’s house and is in a familiar safe place within the year cycle. She is aware of this
space in terms of identity with her grandmother’s ways and movement outside as well as
indoors. Tee describes her introduction to a cultural and historical storytelling that can
only exist under the moon amidst the smells and senses in order to be completely
understood. Hodge presents an insider’s perspective of urban and rural Trinidadian
environment. Her descriptions are situated in concrete everyday life.
“Ma’s land to us was an enchanted country, dipping into valley after valley, hills
thickly covered with every conceivable kind of foliage, cool green darknesses,
sudden little streams that must surely have been squabbling past in the days when
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Brar Anancy and Brar Leopard and all the others roamed the earth outsmarting
each other. And every now and then we would lose sight of the sea and then it
would come into sight again down between trees when you least expected to see
it, and always, it seemed, in a different direction; that was frightening too. We
went out with ma to pick fruit, she armed with a cutlass with which she hacked
away thick vines and annihilated whole bushes in one swing. We returned with
our baskets full of oranges, mangoes, chennettes, ma bent under a bunch of
plaintains that was more than half her size. Ma had a spot in the market on
Sunday mornings, and she spent a great part of the week stewing cashews,
pommes-cytheres, cerises, making guava-cheese and guava jelly, sugar-cake,
nutcake, bennay-balls, toolum, shaddock-peel candy, chilibibi…” (16).
Family connections take on a different dimension for Tee in the country. The
environment is Ma’s economic ally. The rhythm of her life is a dialogue that feeds Tee
literally as well as spiritually. Furthermore, the internal struggles and tensions in both
islands’ historical and cultural reality from the perspective of diaspora experience shift
from rural to urban as well as abroad. Tee describes “gang-warfare” with “the division
usually… between those who were kept by Ma and those of us who didn’t really live
there. Ma’s children were the ‘bush-monkeys’ and ‘country-bookies’ and they in turn
made it known to us how deep their longing for the day when we would all depart so they
could have their house and their yard and their land to themselves again”(18). Tee
includes herself in “the vacation batch” and admits to the pain of “those fiends” living
and playing all year round in the yard and going on expeditions into the land with Ma.
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Later Tee will join the Trinidadian diaspora in England. Yet she is grounded in her
connection to her grandmother. Her everyday chores, provides a foundation for her to
draw strength from as her life will move further away from Point d’Espoir.
Mohr, in contrast to Hodge, presents a Puerto Rico that is torn between the past
and an uncertain present. Puerto Rico continues to negotiate overtly colonial definitions
of nationhood and this is reflected in how adults, who would serve as guides for younger
generations to the natural environment, experience the place. Felita and her family
engage in [a] diasporic comparison or tension between New York City and Puerto Rico.
Approximately four million Puerto Ricans live stateside, which exceeded the population
in Puerto Rico for the first time in 2003. Tio Jorge is one of the returnees to the island
who laments losses and alienation. Nothing in Puerto Rico remains as he remembers it.
Neighbors anger him by putting up fences and using guard dogs for security. Likewise,
earlier while the family is visiting Old San Juan, Felita remarks on how much her parents
and uncle feel Puerto Rico has become gentrified like “a fancy neighborhood in New
York” (88). Tio Jorge reflects a rigid nostalgia for the Puerto Rico countryside. His time
in New York City has marked him so that he is controlling and yearns to freeze time by
focusing on ownership of nature as an object. Mohr never describes his place amidst
nature outside of labeling or collecting in order to display his collection pastime in a
book.
As analysis of just these select passages from these works indicate, eco-criticism
allows for the understanding of how a child or young adult reader creates their own
meaning of their world while recognizing the elements of the environment that inform
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their construction of meaning. According to Karín Lesnick-Oberstein, editor of
Children’s Literature New Approaches (2004), children’s literature should engage the
reader in an exploration of their world. Likewise children’s literature criticism should
offer new approaches, “that [do] not rest on – or re-introduce overtly or indirectly– the
real child, but moreover a wider real of which [she] is a part” (19). Rather “aspects of
critical interest” (19), such as the environment, “are focused on in order to analyze with
respect specifically to those areas [and]problems” (20) the manner with which theory
and children’s literature do engage in a dialogue. Lesnik’s introduction states that a key
debate within children’s literature criticism is an assumption that emphasizes the “child
reader” as static. As in psycho-analysis, she argues “not knowing” is essential to
“meaning… continually being created within new approaches to children’s literature
criticism” (20). Eco-criticism serves as one of these approaches for thinking about
children’s literature that “provide[s] examples of how a criticism that does not rely on the
real child might be formulated” (20).
Both Hodge and Mohr engage the first person narrative point of view to create an
atmosphere of believability and verisimilitude through the changing perspectives of the
maturing protagonists as they narrate their own stories. Other issues covered by an ecocritical analysis of these works are:
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How the environment helps Felita negotiate her uncle’s impression of an
empirical view of nature.
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How local prejudices against return diaspora migrants are perpetuated and
experienced.
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How female characters recuperate ancestral history, particularly her female
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lineage as embodied by female elders.
Through children’s literature, history and culture supports how we interact with
nature so as to honor and sustain its role in forming children lives. Each of these authors
describes a Caribbean place as beautiful and engaging, seen through the eyes of these
young girls. They experience change through their relationship to a specific place as well
as forge relationships with others through their interaction in a place of community.
Having said this it is the ethical responsibility of academia and public school pedagogy to
study Children’s literature set in the Caribbean in order to better understand the ever
evolving relationship between history, culture, and the physical environment.
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Works Cited
Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and
Literary Imagination. Malden:Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.
Deloughrey, Elizabeth M., George B. Handley, and Renee K. Gosson. Caribbean
Literature And The Environment: Between Nature And Culture. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia, 2005.
Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Hodge, Merle. Crick Crack Monkey. New York: Heinemann, 1970. Print.
Lesnik-Oberstein, Karin. Children's literature New Approaches. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004. Print.
--------“National Identity: Where the Wild, Strange and Exotic Things Are: in Search
of the Caribbean in Contemporary Children’s Literature.” Jaqueline Lazú.
Mohr, Nicolasa. Felita. New York: Puffin Books, 1979. Print.
Mohr, Nicolasa. Going Home. New York: Puffin Books, 1986. Print.
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(For Reference page 1-DO NOT READ Aloud)
Postcolonial scholarship provides us with insight about how any study of the
diasporic self needs to be investigated Within the ideological contexts of race,
colonial and postcolonial history, and contemporary asymmetrical power
relationships between cultures…similar models can be applied to children’s
literature and all cultural production aimed at young consumers (200).
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