“Sometimes you give up. That’s the way it is when your mourning.” (Ma-ma-oo,Robinson, P.290)
We all have our own unique ways of coping with the things that hurt in our lives. With me, I prefer listening to music and going on long walks. The characters in Monkey Beach turn to very different alternatives such as abusing drugs and alcohol.
When Lisa’s grandfather (Ba-Ba-oo) was physically abusing her grandmother, Ma-ma-oo sent both Uncle Mick and Aunt Trudy to residential schools. As Tab states, “Mick and mom went, and it fucked them up.” (Robinson, P.254)
As a result of the torture from the school, Uncle Mick became a ‘chain-smoker’ having one cigerette immediately after another to releive his stress. It seemed to me that he held a lot of his grief inside and never really told any one how he really felt about his horrible experience. He felt that no one would or could come close to understanding what he went through. Holding how he felt in, lead to a very dramatic outpour of emotions:
“What’s wrong?”
“Wrong, What’s right?”
“He’s gone crazy.” Uncle Geordie said.
“Crazy? I’m crazy? You look at your precious church. You look at what they did. You never went to a residential school. You can’t tell me what i fucking went through and what i didn’t.”
“I wasn’t telling you anything!” Aunt Edith said. “I was saying grace!”
“You don’t get it. You really don’t get it. You’re buying into a religion that thought the best way to was us white was to fucking torture children.”
(Robinson,P.109-110)
He mellowed up after this inncident but he should have talked to someone about his feeling’s and eventually he may have been able to move forward with his life.
Aunt Trudy took a worse road then Uncle Mick. She took to heavily drinking and partying. She figured she could drink her pain away but that clearly didn’t work as she was more miserable then she would ever have been if she had handled it a better way. The abuse she underwent in resedential school, not only effected her life but hurt everyone around her. She started dramatic attention-grabbing fights with Aunt Kate and pointlessly yet consistantly screamed and bossed Tab(itha) around. Tab understood that she was very drunk, and didn’t say anything to the horrible things said to her, but when Lisa snapped back at something rude said to Tab, Aunt Trudy called her a bad name but hadn’t remembered a thing the next day. To top all of that, she violently attacked her ‘fiance’ Josh, smashing a beer bottle over his head, and pushing him down a set of stairs, therefore breaking his leg. This effected both Josh and Tabitha, as they were dismissed from the reserve.
Lisa Marie didn’t go through the horrible experience of a residential school, but the loss of who seemed to be three of the most important people in her life. Her Uncle Mick, grandmother (Ma-ma-oo) and her brother, Jimmy.
With all the emptiness in her life from her missing family members, she took to endless partying which included drug and alcohol abuse. She consistantly smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol beverages with her poor choice of friends. A lot like Aunt Trudy she tried to drink her pain away but only made it continuesly worse. She ended up cutting all of her hair off as to what she called ‘a way of mourning’ and smoked a lot of marijuana. She did this all to forget, but remembering is an important way of coping. She should have realised her family wouldn’t have wanted her to take to these poor decisions, but to of wanted her to remember them throughout her life and live on, happy and sucessfully.