By Sara Hailstone
Content warning: Death, murder, addiction and drug use, racism, sexual violence, intergenerational trauma
The focus of reviewing Eden Robinson’s 2000 debut novel, Monkey Beach, is to acknowledge and highlight the power of activating textual layers of magic realism in providing a pathway of shamanism and spiritual components of the Haisla Nation throughout the book. Robinson guides her readers on this journey while simultaneously withholding the sacred power of knowing. What cumulates in this traditionally perceived coming-of-age narrative is an understanding of a young female protagonist’s reclamation of a way of being lost to immense colonial folds.
Robinson set Monkey Beach in 1989 in her own hometown of Kitamaat Village, BC. The reader follows the fraught actions of 19-year-old Lisamarie, who learns of her brother’s disappearance and suspected drowning while working away on a fishing boat. Without her parents knowing, Lisamarie sets out on her own to find Jimmy.
While trekking the Douglas Channel alone on an outboard, Lisamarie works through memories of lost loved ones. The reader is pulled through this narrative point-of-view of a close-knit family legacy of death, trauma, suicide, accident, and the immense bonds of love. Triggered, Lisamarie pushes through emotions of drug abuse, rape, and her mental health. Through this narrative weaving and intermingling of Lisamarie’s worldview, Robinson successfully evokes a multi-dimensioned existence of the supernatural, spiritual, and physical. Monkey Beach is a shaman story.
“Contacting the dead, lesson one. Sleep is an altered state of consciousness…To contact the spirit world, you must control the way you enter this state of being that is somewhere between waking and sleeping.”
Thus, Robinson threads throughout shifting timeframes of the present and past with spiritual teachings and conceptualizations of life that in reality transform the structure of the text itself into an awakening process. In combination with the polished execution of elements of magic realism is Robinson’s way of artistically and brilliantly pulling Lisamarie and the reader through a process of essential reclamation and, in my opinion, empowerment.
In connection with the vibrancy of the land itself, Lisamarie’s world is ethereal and vividly layered. Supernatural beings like the B’gwus, or sasquatch make appearances, and she communicates with other Haisla spiritual beings through dreams, visions, and sightings. Lisamarie walks with the dead and the overlaying of an ethereal matrix with the young woman’s confrontation of colonial psychological and Western clinical views of mental illness and personality disorder.
“Contacting the dead, lesson three. Seeing ghosts is a trick of concentration. You must be able to concentrate on nothing and everything at the same time.”
Her grandmother, Ma-ma-oo’s guidance and passing on of Haisla knowledge is also an initiation of shamanism. Lisamarie is instructed in the history of the Haisla people, herbology, walking in the way of the existence of the dead, translating the synchronicity of the appearance of supernatural phenomena and the realization and actualization of her power. “I felt deeply comforted knowing that magical things were still living in the world.” Two strong female characters, the learning and teachings carried out between Ma-ma-oo and Lisamarie prepare her best to journey after her missing brother.
The enthralling and magical components of Robinson’s writing is that the plotline embodies a West Coast mythology of the Spirit Canoe travelling to the Land of the Dead. Lisamarie journeys and navigates spiritual realms fully and risks being lost there. “Never mind about [Jimmy] now. Go back. You’ve come too far into this world. Go back,” she is warned upon reaching the dead’s shores and witnesses her ancestors dancing around a bonfire. Lisamarie is left on these shores at the end of the novel, existing multi-dimensionally, both rooted in the visceral and hooked to the ethereal. Regardless, my interpretation is that she is existing and more fully actualized than before her journey to find Jimmy. “I lie on the sand. The clamshells are hard against my back. I am no longer cold. I am so light I could just drift away. Close, very close, a B'gwus howls—not quite human, not quite wolf, but something in between. The howl echoes off the mountains. In the distance, I hear the sound of a speedboat.” Lisamarie is the plotline incarnate, a keeper of memory, a mediator of worlds, a practitioner of magic, ‘something in between.’