Past as Presence and the Promise of Futurity in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach

Abstract

This article employs the comparable theoretical frames of Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo)’s “achronology” and James Phelan’s “anachrony” to examine the role of haunting in Eden Robinson (Haisla/Heitsuk)’s Monkey Beach. Focalized through the perspective of Lisamarie Hill, a developing medicine woman, the novel portrays Lisa’s struggles to envision a future beyond her own present, marked by the intergenerational abuses of the Port Alberni Indian Residential School. As a move away from previous studies of communal traumas, in which a victim’s link to past harm annihilates the idea of a livable future, I read haunting in Monkey Beach as both rooted in the past but gesturing towards a projected future. By locating Lisamarie’s futurity as created in the autonomous renegotiation of her bodily violations, an act initiated in her encounter with ghosts, I argue that Monkey Beach produces an ethical, multi-vocal narrative enabled by surrogate storytelling.