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35. Monkey Beach.
Contacting the dead, lesson one. Sleep is an altered state of consciousness.
To fall asleep is to fall into a deep, healing trance. In the spectrum of
realities, being awake is on one side and being asleep is way, way on the
other. To be absorbed in a movie, a game or work is to enter a light trance.
Daydreams, prayers or obsessing are heavier trances. Most people enter
trances reflexively. To contact the spirit world, you must control the way
you enter this state of being that is somewhere between waking and sleeping.
Eden Robinson’s debut novel Monkey Beach is a
coming-of-age story that has elements of horror and magic realism, but is
deeply rooted in the writer’s own Indigenous Haisla and Heiltsuk culture. The
education that the narrator, Lisamarie, receives from her uncle and
grandmother on the lands and waters (both salt and fresh) of the Pacific
Northwest is a powerful counterbalance to the trauma of the residential school
that has damaged the community so painfully. And her own search for her
brother, Jimmy, leads Lisa into the past and even—like Dante’s narrator—into
the spirit world of the dead.
Content warning: In the main discussion of this episode, we mention
violence, death, and sexual assualt.
Show Notes.
Eden Robinson: Monkey Beach. [Sadly, not available
on Bookshop.]
Other books by Eden Robinson: Blood Sports, Son of
a Trickster, Trickster
Drift, The Sasquatch at Home: Traditional Protocols
and Modern Storytelling.
The new film of Monkey Beach premieres
Thursday at the Vancouver International Film
Festival.
The CBC recently checked in with Eden
Robinson.
Our episodes on other texts we mention: The Autobiography of Malcolm
X [finally available in audiobook!];
Purgatorio;
Middlemarch;
Iliad.
Tseshaht First Nation commemorates the closing of Alberni Indian Residential
School.
The names of all 202 children known to have died in Vancouver Island
Residential Schools.
An article about WIllie Blackwater, a student who stood up to an abuser at
Alberni.
Next: Petrus Alfonsi: Disciplina Clericalis [translated as The Scholar’s
Guide].
[Bookshop.]
View all episodes
By Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Chris Piuma
4.8
3030 ratings
Contacting the dead, lesson one. Sleep is an altered state of consciousness.
To fall asleep is to fall into a deep, healing trance. In the spectrum of
realities, being awake is on one side and being asleep is way, way on the
other. To be absorbed in a movie, a game or work is to enter a light trance.
Daydreams, prayers or obsessing are heavier trances. Most people enter
trances reflexively. To contact the spirit world, you must control the way
you enter this state of being that is somewhere between waking and sleeping.
Eden Robinson’s debut novel Monkey Beach is a
coming-of-age story that has elements of horror and magic realism, but is
deeply rooted in the writer’s own Indigenous Haisla and Heiltsuk culture. The
education that the narrator, Lisamarie, receives from her uncle and
grandmother on the lands and waters (both salt and fresh) of the Pacific
Northwest is a powerful counterbalance to the trauma of the residential school
that has damaged the community so painfully. And her own search for her
brother, Jimmy, leads Lisa into the past and even—like Dante’s narrator—into
the spirit world of the dead.
Content warning: In the main discussion of this episode, we mention
violence, death, and sexual assualt.
Show Notes.
Eden Robinson: Monkey Beach. [Sadly, not available
on Bookshop.]
Other books by Eden Robinson: Blood Sports, Son of
a Trickster, Trickster
Drift, The Sasquatch at Home: Traditional Protocols
and Modern Storytelling.
The new film of Monkey Beach premieres
Thursday at the Vancouver International Film
Festival.
The CBC recently checked in with Eden
Robinson.
Our episodes on other texts we mention: The Autobiography of Malcolm
X [finally available in audiobook!];
Purgatorio;
Middlemarch;
Iliad.
Tseshaht First Nation commemorates the closing of Alberni Indian Residential
School.
The names of all 202 children known to have died in Vancouver Island
Residential Schools.
An article about WIllie Blackwater, a student who stood up to an abuser at
Alberni.
Next: Petrus Alfonsi: Disciplina Clericalis [translated as The Scholar’s
Guide].
[Bookshop.]
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