Monkey Beach, by Eden Robinson
Monkey Beach tells the story of a girl growing up in the small First Nations community of Kitimaat on the west coast of British Columbia. The story is told in a series of flashbacks while the protagonist, Lisa, waits for news of her brother, whose fishing boat has disappeared.
During the flashbacks, you get a sense of what life was like growing up in a First Nations community as a backdrop to Lisa’s everyday life which isn’t that different from stories we’re all familiar with. She struggles to give school appropriate attention, she wants to be noticed by boys, she loves the outdoors and she bickers with her parents. However, some things stand out that differentiate her experiences:
- she is date-raped by a boy within her circle of friends and seems to accept it as a matter of course (unless I missed something here)
- her uncle (who’s “not quite right”) and one of her aunts were sent to residential school and suffer some kind of PTSD symptoms as a result
- another uncle won’t accept government assistance when times are particularly tough because it would require him to give up his status, and presumably any benefits that they are getting for that.
- Lisa is threatened with physical violence by a car load of “white boys” who obviously believe their behaviour will go unpunished because she is native
- there are several references to the spiritual beliefs of her family, particularly her grandmother
Again, this is not the heart of the story, it’s merely a framework. Because of this, it adds a sense of relate-ability to what life for this community is like, since it gives us familiar paths to navigate while exposing us to unfamiliar.
My only complaint is that the last 1-2 chapters seems to very suddenly dive very deeply in the spiritual world in a way that I found difficult to follow. It was also inconsistent with the amount to which this played a part in the rest of the book, without any clear reason as to why.
Rating: Borrow it. It’s an easy and enjoyable read, and will open doors to other First Nations writers, who I believe are highly under-represented in Canadian Literature.