The Gothic Landscape in Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach: Cultural Negotiations between Native and Non-Native Knowledge Systems

Edward Said observes that earth is in effect one world, in which, empty uninhabited spaces virtually do not exist. Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography (7). This paper will set out to demonstrate that in Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach the Kitamaat/Haisla reserve can be understood as what Mary Louise Pratt calls a contact zone, a space of colonial encounter cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations (4). I will argue that Monkey Beach articulates the Kitamaat/Haisla landscape as a site of contest between Native and non-Native worldviews, that is, a space negotiated and struggled over where these disparate realities intersect. While scholars such as Katja Sarkowsky have explored the role of the contact zone in promoting transcultural negotiations in the novel more broadly, this paper is interested in the gothic framework as a strategy of space construction that mediates conflicting worldviews. I will argue that the negotiation between Native and non-Native knowledge systems is only made possible by employing (and ultimately challenging) the gothic modality, which constructs a strategically ambiguous landscape that merges geographical and metaphorical dimensions, displacing rational levels of experience associated with the colonial discourse as the sole claim to comprehensive knowledge of the empirical world. Through a gothic framework, Robinson therefore produces a negotiated space that enables geographical space to become simultaneously secular and mythical, and thus produces a space where Native and non-Native knowledge systems can co-exist.Before turning to cross-cultural negations achieved through the novel's gothic modality, let us first establish space as a site of cultural and material struggle. The novel begins with Lisamarie Hill, a young Haisla woman, providing her reader with a verbal describing the west coast of British Columbia. The novel unfolds as she travels down the Douglas Channel in a speedboat in search of her brother Jimmy who is missing at sea. As Lisa makes her way through the channel, the reader is confronted with flashbacks of Lisa's childhood, marked by her attempt to cope with the death of various family members as well as her attempt to manage the perception of spirits associated with the land, which all link together in reference to a verbal map:Find a of British Columbia. Point to the middle of the coast. Beneath Alaska, find the Queen Charlotte Islands. Drag your finger across the map, across the Hecate Strait to the coast and you should be able to see a large island hugging the coast. This is Princess Royal Island ... [on] the edge of traditional Haisla territory ... the village has been called Kitamaat... even though it really should be called Haisla ... If your finger is on or Terrace, you are too far north. If you are pointing to Bella Coola or Ocean Falls, you are too far south. If you are pointing in the right place, you should have your finger on the western shore of Princess Royal Island ... near the head of the Douglas Channel, you'll find Kitamaat Village, with its seven hundred Haisla people tucked in between the mountains and the ocean. At the end of the village is our house. Our kitchen looks out onto the water. Somewhere in the seas between here and Namu - a six-hour boat ride south of Kitamaat - my brother is lost. (Robinson 4-5)Following Michel de Certeau, Sarkowsky observes that, in the above description, Lisa conflates two strategies: the map and the itinerary (328). The as a colonial construction arranges conceivable places such as Prince Rupert and Oceans Falls in relation to one another to not only transform the world according to colonial needs and desires, but also, argues Paul Carter, to transform spatial extension (geographical objects) into spatial text (objects that can be read), bringing physical space into the realm of communication (328; Carter 50). …

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