Summary
Lisa is still reflecting on a memory of school at the time when she was often being bullied. One day, one of Erica’s friends, Lou Ann, threatens to beat her up, so preemptively she punches Lou Ann in the nose and gets detention. Later, Frank and his friends follow her home and they invite her to hang out with them. She becomes part of their clique and earns a new untouchable status at school. This isolates her even more from the girls. It is soon going to be Lisa’s 12th birthday and she discourages her mother from arranging a party with her cousins, as she has not told her mother about her social ostracism. Instead she has a small get-together and invites Frank and other boys, which shocks her mother. Her father gets her a kitten.
Her mother starts cutting hair for local women when the family is in a tough place financially. Lisamarie goes to her Ma-ma-oo’s house, where she finds her grandmother unusually tired and pale. They watch TV together and Lisa hears something strange out on the porch. On her way back home, she runs into Screwy Ruby, an old lady who is rumored to be a witch. Lisa asks if she can teach her how to be a witch, and Ruby says she is a “bad girl.” Lisa’s kitten Alexis is a fantastic mouse hunter and even starts to go hunting outside, one time bringing in a bird. Jimmy is worried the kitten will kill the crows he loves, so they decide to keep her inside.
Back in the present, Lisamarie is passing Costi Island on her boat and explaining how the coast of British Columbia is made up of “drowned mountains” and how early explorers encountered the Haisla people but had trouble pronouncing their words, which consist of sounds that don’t exist in English. We are taken to a scene where Lisa as a child is with her grandmother, who tells her more memories about her parents and about Mick, who did many similar things as Lisamarie when he was a child. Lisa tries to ask Ma-ma-oo about her conflict with Trudy but she changes the subject.
Lisa starts to notice that Frank sometimes gives her a strange look while they are playing with their friends. Close to Christmas that year, Lisa’s cousin Tab returns to visit. She is now wearing a “biker-chick black” style and has a tattoo. She sleeps over at Lisa’s house and gets scared in the middle of the night when the kitten jumps on the bed. Tab tells Lisa she is lucky that her parents just pretend that Mick never died, while her mother has been constantly drunk since his passing. The next day, Tab gives Lisa her first joint to smoke. Aunt Trudy calls, furious, because Tab has actually hitchhiked up to Kitamaat without her permission.
Lisamarie is at Ma-ma-oo’s house and she tells Lisa about shapeshifters, which existed in the past when there was less of a rigid boundary between animals and humans. Animals could talk at this time. Now, only medicine men could become animals. She tells Lisa many old Haisla stories, but says that to really understand the stories, one must know the Haisla language. Ma-ma-oo says she will teach Lisa a new word every day, but Lisa still feels discouraged that she will ever fully learn the language. Lisamarie then speaks again about contacting the dead, and how it requires stillness, awareness, and not having expectations. She also says that if this does not work, one must assess their willingness to speak with the dead and see if they have any fear in doing so.
In the present, Lisa stops the boat so she can go pee in the woods. She meets a young white man who is eager to talk to her. He gives her a pack of cigarettes. On her boat, she thinks back to smoking with her friend Pooch and going to his house with Cheese. Pooch lives with his grandmother and has decorated his room in all black with gothic objects. Cheese explains that witchcraft is how the Haisla survived against their enemies. Lisa reads a spell for communicating with the dead in his voodoo book and later tries the spell three times. The third time, she is met by the little man, who this time is hanging by his neck from a rope. Then she has a vision of crows in a circle outside her window, where one dead baby crow with a missing wing is cradled by Jimmy and then flung upward, where it turns into a dot and disappears.
Lisamarie is not sure what her vision means and worries that it might imply something bad for Jimmy. She knows by now that every time the little man appears to her, a tragedy happens. She follows Jimmy around all day to make sure he does not get into any accidents, which annoys him. Later, at school, she is very upset and tells Frank, Pooch, and Cheese about her visions. The boys vow to help her protect Jimmy, which results in them insisting to be around Jimmy for the next three days. When nothing happens to Jimmy, Lisa starts to doubt the accuracy of the little man. Then, Lisa’s kitten goes missing and Lisa can’t find her anywhere. Her friends come over with a Ouija board to consult the dead about it. When asked about Alexis, the pointer keeps spelling out “meat.”
On Valentine’s Day, Lisamarie receives a Valentine's Day card that seems to be in Frank’s handwriting, but she has a hard time believing it could be him. She decides to ignore it. She is emerging into womanhood, developing body hair, but yet to receive her period. Frank also is starting to go through puberty as well. Lisa does not get the typical flirtation between boys and girls and much prefers to hang out and smoke with her male friends.
One morning, Lisamarie is awoken by the little man, who she screams at angrily. Later that day, she receives news that Ma-ma-oo has had a heart attack. She is okay, but has to stay in the hospital for a while. It affects the family deeply, as they all have to take care of her as she returns home and learn how to do CPR should she ever suffer a heart attack again. Lisa thinks about how no one is familiar with how their body works until something goes wrong. Ma-ma-oo is happy to have Lisa around as she recovers.
Analysis
A strange and foreboding tone characterizes these pages of Monkey Beach. There are the strange sounds on Ma-ma-oo’s porch, the vision of the crows, the witchy Ruby, and a kitten gone missing without any trace. Throughout the book, mysterious things happen that Eden Robinson does not directly provide explanation for, more so leaving it up to the reader to decipher, or not. After all, one of the themes the author is exploring here is how certain things in life cannot be explained in the normal means of language. This point is underscored in Lisamarie’s narration about how the Haisla vocabulary is impossible for most English speakers to pronounce.
The Haisla language also comes up when Ma-ma-oo is telling her granddaughter different legends, noting that the full meaning of the stories cannot be fully translated through English. This is an important metaphor for the mysterious events interspersed throughout the book; Lisamarie does not fully know what to make of this magic, understanding to some degree that it is a force beyond her control. This is demonstrated when she does the voodoo spell and has the vision of the little man and Jimmy holding the injured crow. She expects the next day that something bad will happen to her brother, but we are shown how the spirit world is not as predictable as we would like to think. In fact, something bad has happened to Jimmy—his present disappearance—just not within the timeline that Lisamarie expected.
Lisamarie’s interweaving of historical fact about the Haisla people helps to give a greater context for their traditions and beliefs. We learn how explorers came and attempted to convert many of the Native people to Christianity. It worked on many, but some Haisla, such as Lisa’s medicine woman great-grandmother, resisted conversion. In this way, we see how colonization has resulted in many of the former traditions to go more “underground,” the stories and language being lost. This makes it more difficult in the present day for those with “gifts” like Lisa to know how to use them.
Certain parts of the narrative start to make more sense as the events of the novel unfold, such as Ma-ma-oo’s heart attack. We now better understand why Lisa keeps talking about the anatomy of the heart. After the heart attack, Lisamarie realizes that most adults do not take their knowledge of health seriously, and thus it seems she has been familiarizing herself with the science to provide a sense of control or safety against the illness and death that seems to strike her family members so suddenly.
Conversation with the dead continues to be a big theme in this part of the book, as shown through the use of the Ouija board and Lisamarie’s attempt to cast a spell that will connect her to the dead. There is also a snippet of text where a narrator who we can presume to be Lisa describes how in order to best contact the dead, one needs good concentration. Robinson seems to be contrasting the mode of ritual that is frequently discussed with the often hectic, unconscious, and distracted lifestyle that many characters in the book lead, as they get mixed up in the indulgences of modern culture. It is only Lisa’s grandmother who lives a more grounded lifestyle, deeply connected to nature and the old ways. The moments the two spend together are the most peaceful in the book, and they seem to mutually benefit from each other’s company, especially after Ma-ma-oo’s heart attack. Ma-ma-oo also serves as a link to the past, to history, often imparting stories about deceased family members to Lisamarie, which helps Lisa better understand her family.
In this section, we also see Lisa grappling with her burgeoning womanhood. A lifelong tomboy, she does not quite know how to deal with her changing body and the way her friend Frank has taken a liking to her. Puberty has only seemed to complicate relationships between boys and girls, and Lisa longs for friendships and activities free of the added social pressures. In some ways, she is very much still a child in the way she plays and does not take responsibility for her life. In another way, she is doing adult things like smoking and engaging in voodoo spells; things of which she is still too young to understand the consequences.
