By Sonya Liu
Spam, introduced to the United States by Hormel Foods in 1937, has always represented sameness—whether by its uncanny shelf-life or unchanging recipe. Although it is now globalised and “enjoyed in fifty countries worldwide,” Spam’s homogeneity preserves its status as an “American MEAT ICON,” as recognisable as “Elvis, blue jeans, or baseball” (Spam; DeJesus 1; Johansson Dahre 2). It unifies and distills America into a can—or, at least, this is the narrative that Hormel Foods sells. The Canadian Indigenous author, Eden Robinson, however, challenges and undoes such narratives in her modern-Gothic novel Monkey Beach. When her Haisla characters—First Nation peoples residing in British Columbia—eat Spam, they uproot it from America, overturning Spam’s homogeneity to reveal its colonist history. In Monkey Beach, Robinson reshapes Spam into a food of rebellion: it is a food which speaks of difference, whether it be between parent and child, colonial legacy and Indigenous culture, or past and present.
For Lisamarie Michelle (Lisa), the narrative voice and main character in Monkey Beach, Spam is a forbidden food. “[G]round up and disguised,” ostensibly pork shoulder with ham yet somehow still a “mystery meat,” Spam is distrusted by Lisa’s parents (Dahre 3). Her parents rule that it can only be eaten “on the boat,” as they have adopted the modern, North American attitude that Spam is “an embarrassment … too salty, too fatty, too over processed to be eaten in these enlightened times” (Laudan 66). It is precisely this “too salty, too fatty, too overprocessed” nature which welcomed Spam into circles of deprivation and poverty, making it the “cheap [food] of the urban poor” (Laudan 66). Because of this, Spam is incongruous with the vision Lisa’s parents have for their daughter; they hope she will achieve upward social mobility as “a doctor or lawyer or whatever,” kept away from a lifetime of labour on a fishing boat (Robinson 216). For Lisa, however, Spam only becomes more enticing when it is restricted to being eaten on the boat, fried until crispy, and “served [with] hash browns and ketchup” on the open water (17). Spam’s forbidden nature is a source of Lisa’s joy. Like her grandmother, Ma-ma-oo, who defies her prescribed “forbidden list” of foods after her heart attack, Lisa relishes her forbidden Spam as an act of rebellion, akin to her habit of smoking (186).
Lisa’s consumption of Spam places her in the same social category as her Uncle Mick, whose fridge is full of “[n]othing but Kraft” (31). Lisa’s mother heartily disapproves of Mick’s lifestyle, bemoaning, “[h]ow does he stay healthy?” (94). For Lisa’s parents, Mick’s embrace of convenient, instant food represents his bachelor lifestyle—his refusal to “settle down, […to] find a woman, […] marry her, [and] have kids” (94). Thus, when Jimmy, Lisa’s brother, calls her “Spam Queen,” he uses this title to emphasise her rejection of their parents’ plan, which her desire to drop out of school to “work in the cannery” embodies (272; 216). As such, Spam becomes shorthand for Lisa and her parents’ incompatible visions of her future because it marks their present-day difference—a division which will only increase as they move forward in time. If we move backwards in time, however, Spam stands as a dividing symbol and stretches this difference into the past creating a parallel history: it postulates an alternative to Spam’s origins of colonial exploitation and extraction.
Spam’s presence in Kitimat, the village of the Kitamaat where Lisa and her family live, is a product of colonisation. Spam became a “part of Kitimaat’s foodways” through settler-colonialism’s claim of Indigenous unceded traditional territory, which “devastated spawning grounds,” and deprived the Haisla community of the resources they needed to live (Cooke 40). When Lisa eats Spam with an illicit joy, she drowns out this colonial narrative and history. She offers the legacy of Spam another resonance and gives it another meaning by deconstructing the “rigid categories of Indigenous versus non-Indigenous [foods],” a recurring pattern in Monkey Beach (Cooke 39). Similarly, Uncle Mick’s wife, Cathy, nicknamed Cookie, subverts the colonial legacy of fry bread; fry bread, also known as bannock, was introduced by Scottish fur traders to Canada, and adopted by Indigenous peoples after the Canadian government displaced them from their lands, cutting off their traditional food sources (Colombo 1). When Cookie declares, “You honkies want women to be like cookies [… but] I’m fry bread, you bitch,” she chooses fry bread to encapsulate her Indigenous lived experience. Cookie overwrites bannock’s colonial disempowerment into a transgressive model of womanhood, transforming bannock into her alternative for the cookie’s sweet, compliant and over-sexualised femininity (Robinson 116). Likewise, Lisa makes Spam inseparable from her childhood experience of travelling to Monkey Beach on the Lulu. Here, Spam blurs with the summer days stretching into September, the water “so pure [you] see straight down to the bottom,” the hunt for cockles (18). Moreover, with Monkey Beach as “the setting for family stories about B’gwus,” Lisa’s association entangles Spam into Haisla mythology, transforming a violent colonial past into sunlit memories of “Haisla foodways [and] familial connections” (Lane 165; Cooke 41).
In their first trip to Monkey Beach, Lisa learns associations of childhood innocence and family security; not only a component of a nutritious meal (at least, when served “with hash browns and ketchup”), Spam ‘performs’ “familial connections” (Long 121). Uncle Geordie contributes “roasted marshmallows,” and Aunt Edith “canned crabapples,” while Lisa’s father fries the Spam (Robinson 17). The final product, their meal, is a community effort. Thus, Lisa’s decision to bring a “can of Spam and bag of marshmallows,” when she returns Jimmy to Monkey Beach, is an intentional reminder to Jimmy to recall their family ties and the simpler world of their childhood to save him from self-destruction (267). However, Lisa’s gesture with Spam only serves to mark the difference between the two trips; this time, it is not fried, but rather “roasted […] over the fire” with a stick stuck through the can—there are no hash browns or crabapples in sight. Without their surrounding family, Spam loses its ‘forbidden food’ status, now a sad crown to the “[t]wo days of nothing but marshmallows, berries and cold coffee” (268). It has lost that illicit childhood pleasure, safety or comfort; as such, Spam draws the line between childhood and adulthood in failing to restore Lisa’s and Jimmy’s innocence. In this sense, when Jimmy labels her “Spam Queen,” he overlays the trials of her coming-of-age onto Spam, redefining its transgressive nature from a childhood forbidden food to the violations of an adult world. He infuses Spam with the transgressions committed against Lisa—such as Cheese’s betrayal when he drugs and rapes her—and the acts of transgression she commits upon others and herself: the bender she takes on in Vancouver, her abandonment of her cousin, her neglect of Jimmy himself. In this, Jimmy draws the Spam preserved in Lisa’s sunlit memories into their present, distorting and changing it to fit Lisa’s adulthood.
As they have grown up, Lisa and Jimmy have also grown apart; their respective treatment and reactions to Spam reflect this. Lisa treats Spam with nostalgia, whereas Jimmy balks at it: “You’re not going to eat that, are you? […] Do you know what’s in there?” (268). Yet, from an outsider’s perspective, removed from the emotions of family ties, their division is not unexpected, for its roots were apparent in their childhood trip. Jimmy was responsible for this initial trip, begging to be taken to Monkey Beach because “that’s where the b’gwus are” as he desperately wanted the thirty thousand dollars The Globe was offering to “anyone who got a picture of a sasquatch” (15). But it was Lisa, not Jimmy, who caught sight of the b’gwu, “a tall man, covered in brown fur [with] a wide, friendly smile,” and having done so, immediately realised “the impossibility of sharing this experience” (Robinson 20; Lane 165). Her ability to see beyond our conventional world binds her to the spirit world while Jimmy remains within the secular community. Yet, despite this difference, the trip closes on the intimate picture of Jimmy “curled into” Lisa, returning to their connection (Robinson 20). Likewise, the second trip ends with their sibling intimacy, in Lisa’s shining memory of Jimmy, “smiling, excited, telling [her] how [the whales] moved like submarines, and how the water looked so much more magical when they were swimming in it” (273). It is this image of difference Lisa treasures—this experience of Jimmy’s which lies beyond her reach. When Lisa and Jimmy share the “can of Spam,” Spam simultaneously marks their difference and their care for each other, both co-existing side-by-side (267).
By challenging and undoing the homogeneity of Spam, Robinson articulates the tension that structures Monkey Beach. Spam embodies both familial ties and personal rebellion, both colonial legacy and resistance, both connection and difference. Such dual coexistence is necessary to reconcile Lisa’s world of violence, abuse and heartbreak with its alternative face: the love which pushes Lisa away from her parents, the love with which Lisa grieves Ma-ma-oo and Mick, the love which sends Jimmy out to sea. All this, quietly brought together by a can of Spam.
Work Cited
Colombo, John Robert. “Bannock.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, ed. Dunne, Brad. 2006. www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/bannock.
Cooke, Nathalie and Shelley Boyd. Canadian Literary Fare. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023.
DeJesus, Erin. “A Brief History of Spam, an American Meat Icon.” Eater, 9 July 2014. www.eater.com/2014/7/9/6191681/a-brief-history-of-spam-an-american-meat-icon.
Johansson Dahre, Ulf. “SPAM A LOT: Why SPAM Is Not (All) Unhealthy Food—SPAM as Political and Cultural Resistance in Hawaii.” Feast and Famine: Exploring Relationships with Food in the Pacific. Lund University, 2012.
Lane, Richard J. “Performing Gender: First Nations, Feminism, and Trickster Writing in Eden Robinson’s ‘Monkey Beach.’” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), vol. 9, no. 1, 2003, pp. 161–71. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41274219.
Laudan, Rachel. The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage. University of Hawaii Press, 1996.
Long, Lucy M. “Learning to Listen to the Food Voice,” Food, Culture and Society 7, no. 1, 2004, pp. 118–22.Spam, “What Is SPAM® Brand? | about SPAM® Brand.” www.spam.com/what-is-spam-brand.