*Monkey Beach*
*by Eden Robinson*
~ Nandakishore Varma
They are called the "First Nations" in Canada and native Americans in the USA: the original inhabitants of the continent who have been reduced to a pitiful existence through violence, disease, and systemic oppression by the invading Europeans. They are the victims of a centuries-long, systematic and well-planned genocide. Deprived of their land, environment, livelihood and culture, they eke out a miserable existence on the fringes of the society: their youth getting mired in violence and drugs, with the women facing the threat of rape on a regular basis. They are the "inconvenient Indians" of Thomas King.
In our Post-Modern world, the voices of the marginalised are slowly being heard through their own tongues. This is not the privileged liberal leaning back in his chair and being sorry for the underdog. These are the narratives of the downtrodden people, loud and bold, clamouring to be heard.
Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach is a classic example of subaltern literature. At once a mystery and a coming-of-age story, it has got elements of fantasy and magic realism woven into the narrative. This is the tale of Lisamarie Michelle Hill of the Haisla tribe, tomboy and rebel, who has the gift of the second sight which many of her people are endowed with.
Lisamarie is a resident of Kitamaat, a small village in British Columbia. As the story opens, we are plunged into a disappearance: Lisa's kid brother Jimmy is presumably lost at sea.
> If you are pointing in the right place, you should have your finger on the western shore of Princess Royal Island. To get to Kitamaat, run your finger northeast, right up to the Douglas Channel, a 140-kilometre-long deep-sea channel, to its mouth. You should pass Gil Island, Princess Royal Island, Gribbell Island, Hawkesbury Island, Maitland Island and finally Costi Island. Near the head of the Douglas, you’ll find Kitamaat Village, with its seven hundred Haisla people tucked in between the mountains and the ocean. At the end of the village is our house. Our kitchen looks out onto the water. Somewhere in the seas between here and Namu—a six-hour boat ride south of Kitamaat—my brother is lost.
Jimmy is a professional swimmer - once he was an Olympic contender - and a person for whom the sea is a second home, so this seems impossible. Jimmy's mother and father fly down to Namu to join the search. Soon, Lisa starts off on her own in a speedboat, headed for Monkey Beach where a dream has told her that Jimmy is currently located.
Lisa's story is told in flashbacks along the ride. She starts out as a problem child, becomes a rebellious teenager, and ends up as a full-fledged social outcast. She is influenced by her Uncle Mick, who was a tireless warrior for the Indian cause; he celebrates Lisa's indiscipline as the true activist spirit.
> “She’s got to know about these things,” Mick would say to Dad, who was disturbed by a note from one of my teachers. She had forced us to read a book that said that the Indians on the northwest coast of British Columbia had killed and eaten people as religious sacrifices. My teacher had made us each read a paragraph out loud. When my turn came, I sat there shaking, absolutely furious.
> “Lisa?” she’d said. “Did you hear me? Please read the next paragraph.”
> “But it’s all lies,” I’d said.
> The teacher stared at me as if I were mutating into a hideous thing from outer space. The class, sensing tension, began to titter and whisper. She slowly turned red, and said I didn’t know what I was talking about.
> “Ma-ma-oo told me it was just pretend, the eating people, like drinking Christ’s blood at Communion.”
> In a clipped, tight voice, she told me to sit down.
> Since I was going to get into trouble anyway, I started singing “Fuck the Oppressors.” The class cheered, more because of the swearing than anything else, and I was promptly dragged, still singing, to the principal’s office.
> Mick went out and had the teacher’s note laminated and framed. He hammered a nail into his wall and hung the note in the centre of the living room. He put his arm around me, swallowed hard a few times and looked misty. “My little warrior.”
If Mick has gifted Lisa with his activism, she gets the gift of the second sight from ma-ma-oo, her paternal grandmother, who can talk to the dead and comport herself comfortably in a world where the unseen exists side-by-side with the seen.
> Ma-ma-oo brushed her hair back and opened the bottle of Johnnie Walker. She said some words in Haisla that I didn’t understand. She passed the bottle over the fire, which popped and sizzled.
> “This is for Sherman,” she said, placing it carefully near the centre of the flames. “You’d better appreciate that. Say hi to your ba-ba-oo, Lisa.”
> “But he’s not here,” I said.
> “Yes, he is,” she said. “You just can’t see him, because he’s dead.”
As the tale unfolds, it becomes a fascinating chronicle of Indian life, both old and new. It's the tale of a young girl growing slowly into adulthood, but at the same time, it's the tale of a people who lived in total sync with nature before they were cruelly sidelined by a race who went by the principle that nature was gifted to them by their god, for their pleasure. Mick is the present, and ma-ma-oo, the past.
Sasquatch alias Bigfoot (or "b'gwus" in Haisla), the giant monkey-man of North American and Canadian folklore, is central to the story as the symbol of a dangerous force existing just beyond the curtain that hides the invisible world from the visible. It's he who gives Monkey Beach its name.
> In a time distant and vague from the one we know now, she told me, flesh was less rigid. Animals and humans could switch shapes simply by putting on each other’s skins. Animals could talk, and often shared their knowledge with the newcomers that humans were then. When this age ended, flesh solidified. People were people, and animals lost their ability to speak in words. Except for medicine men, who could become animals, and sea otters and seals, who had medicine men too. They loved to play tricks on people. Once, a woman was walking along the shore and she met a handsome man. She fell in love and went walking with him every night. Eventually, they made love and she found out what he really was when she gave birth to an otter. The old stories, she explained, were less raunchy than they used to be. There was a beautiful woman who was having an affair with her husband’s brother. She and her husband were paddling back to the village after trading their oolichan grease for seaweed. Just off Monkey Beach, they stopped and he pissed over the side of the canoe. She lifted her paddle and clubbed him. While he was in the water, she used the paddle to hold his head under until he was still. Thinking he was dead, she paddled back to the village and told everyone he drowned. But the next day, when the wife and the husband’s brother went back to hide the body, they found large footprints in the sand. Worried he might be alive, they followed the trail into the woods. They discovered the man—transformed into a b’gwus—who then killed his adulterous wife and brother. But to really understand the old stories, she said, you had to speak Haisla.
In the end, the mystery of Jimmy's disappearance is solved. But is it really the end of the tale? Or only the beginning of another?
The reader is left to guess.
A really beautiful piece of literature.
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