| Summary: | International audience “The Break” is the name given to a strip of empty land in the North End of Winnipeg, the provincial capital of Manitoba and the setting of Katherena Vermette’s début novel (2016). It is also the place where, on a winter’s night, a thirteen-year-old Métis girl is raped her within earshot of the neighbouring houses. The novel’s choral composition relies on alternating viewpoints to throw light on the assault’s circumstances, and the relations which, even as they are slowly revealed, cause the line between victim and perpetrator to blur. The crime and its antecedents are initially envisaged from the perspective of the Indigenous community, but the characters’ lives are also replaced in the wider context of the colonial history that has shaken the foundations of home and homeland for Canada’s First Nations. When seasonal visitors and partners in trade came to be replaced by settlers and the newcomers turned into permanent residents the relation between hospitality and hostility evolved in response to the colonial dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that welcomed some while rejecting others regarded as threats to the national project. The Break begins with an extraordinary description of place that must be distinguished from a mere exposition scene, namely the presentation of a setting in preparation for a plot that will quickly come to eclipse it. For its poetic and political impact, Vermette’s prologue relies on a metaphor that condenses the discontinuities interrupting the lives of the characters, their occupation of space, but also the transmission of stories between successive generations. In The Break, however, storytelling requires taking into account the entropy – the parasitic interference or white noise – that is part of transmission, especially when vast distances separate the sender from the audience invited to listen in. To understand the various regimes and functions of hospitability in Vermette’s novel, the essay will be relying on Michel Serres’s theory of the parasite as a ...
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