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

Abstract

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.