Guests, Hosts and Parasites: Deviant Hospitality in Katherena Vermette’s The Break

• Published in: ILCEA
• Main Author: Omhovère, Claire
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: ILCEA 2023
• Subjects: hospitalité; hostilité; migration; lieu; Katherena Vermette; hospitality; hostility; place; First Nations
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.4000/ilcea.16532; https://journals.openedition.org/ilcea/16532

“The Break” is the name given to a strip of empty land in a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Winnipeg, the provincial capital of Manitoba and the setting of Katherena Vermette début novel. It is also the place where, on a winter’s night, a group of assailants caught up with a thirteen-year-old Indigenous girl and 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, the factors that turned into a catalyst for the rape, and a combination of facts which, even as it is slowly revealed, blurs the line between victim and perpetrator. The crime and its antecedents are initially envisaged from within the Indigenous and Métis 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. In The Break, storytelling and story listening both necessitate the taking into account of entropy, i.e. the parasitic interference or white noise caused by transmission, especially when vast distances separate the teller 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 the theory of communication Michel Serres develops while relying on the paradigm of the parasite, an organism that feeds on another without giving anything in return, so as to modelize relations between strangers who occupy the same space without sharing it. Cet article interroge la tension entre hospitalité et hostilité qui parcourt The Break, premier roman de Katherena Vermette paru en français sous le titre de Ligne brisée dans la traduction de Mélissa Verreault (Québec Amérique, 2017). Le titre fait référence à une ligne à haute tension qui traverse les quartiers nord de Winnipeg, là où se sont vues reléguées des populations d’autochtones et de Métis au cours de l’histoire coloniale qui donna naissance à la province. Cette même ...