The Break

I've always loved the place my girl calls the Break. I used to walk through it in the summer. There is a path you can go along all the way to the edge of the city, and if you just look down at the grass, you might think you were in the country the whole way. Old people plant gardens there, big ones with tidy rows of corn and tomatoes, all nice and clean. You can't walk through it in the winter though. No one clears a way. In the winter, the Break is just a lake of wind and white, a field of cold and biting snow that blows up with the slightest gust. And when snow touches those raw Hydro wires they make this intrusive buzzing sound. It's constant and just quiet enough that you can ignore it, like a whisper you know is a voice but you can't hear the words. And even though they are more than three stories high, when it snows those wires feel close, low, and buzz a sound that is almost like music, just not as smooth. You can ignore it, it's just white noise, and some people can ignore things like that. Some people hear it and just get used to it.

One winter's night under a full moon, Stella is soothing her crying baby and sees through the window that someone is being attacked in the adjacent snow-covered Hydro-field she refers to as the Break. With her husband working the night shift, she's reluctant to intervene and risk putting her family in any danger, but as she begins to fear that she's witnessing a gang rape, Stella calls 911 to report the crime. Four hours later – long after Stella watched as the victim staggered away from the now bloody scene – two police officers finally arrive in the mostly Native neighbourhood in Winnipeg's north end; and while the young Métis cop seems eager to take Stella's statement, his older white partner dismisses the whole event as gang on gang violence and beneath official concern. After this shocking opening, The Break rewinds to the events leading up to the attack, and through the rotating perspectives of ten different narrators (mostly women and girls, but also the Métis cop) as they describe the aftermath (and eventually, circling back to the actual attack itself), the reader is given an intimate view into to what it means to be urban Native women today: the history and surrounding culture that weigh them down and the family and inner community that prop them up. I was often in tears reading this book – not because it was mawkish or manipulative but because I connected to the humanity of the characters – and while I don't think it was quite expertly crafted, I admire what author Katherena Vermette has achieved and revealed here. 

On the one hand, Vermette's treatment of white people seems rather harsh – the older white cop is cartoonishly fat and lazy, stuffing his mouth with fast food and using racial slurs for both the Natives in the story and his own partner; white hospital staff are likely to dismiss a Native woman with a head injury as a self-harming drunk; young Native girls need to be fearful of a white man driving past too slowly in his car – but on the other hand, this may exactly represent the situation faced by the Native population in Winnipeg. It was therefore interesting to see that many of the Native women in this story chose white partners who (other than the Métis cop's abusive father) all seemed like decent men (also interesting that so many of the Native men retreated to the bush, unsuited to city life and domestic demands). I did find it noteworthy in this novel that no one was really blaming the white culture for what happens; and while there are gangs and alcoholism and broken families in the Native community that can be implicitly blamed on the aftereffects of colonisation, the narrators are real people, not agentless victims, and they take responsibility for the decisions that they make.

The best part of The Break is the four generations of women who come together in support of the victim(s) of the attack; no personal experiences could ever prepare one person to make sense of such evil and it takes an entire family of damaged individuals to provide healing for all. Most of the narrators were fascinating – from the fading old Kookum to Phoenix, the hateful gangbanger – but if I had a complaint, it's that many of the middle-aged women felt interchangeable (and hard to keep straight). Stella was a really interesting character, and although she had distanced herself from her Native roots, she found herself acting as a keeper for all of the stories that had been told to her since her own mother's early death (a role that her white husband didn't really understand).

The bar. The hospital. The street. The back lane. It wasn't a night out anymore. It was a timeline. Her mom wasn't a person anymore. She was a story. And it all didn't matter anyway. When Stella knew everything she knew the details weren't even all that important – it was what it meant that mattered. It meant that it was all her mom's fault. All her mom's fault. Her mom was dead and it was all her own fault. For a long time, that was all that really mattered.

In a CBC Radio interview, Vermette explained her impetus for writing this novel: People don't understand what it's like to not be able to walk around your neighbourhood or have all of your friends have a molestation story in their childhood. If people don't understand that you have to show that. That's what books are supposed to do. With The Break, Vermette definitely did achieve this goal, and insofar as she had me frequently in tears as I connected to her characters, she achieved it without making me feel defensive or attacked (which I frequently do feel as a member of the dominant Canadian culture when reading Indigenous Fiction). The Break is the kind of book that creates understanding and attracts allies, and that's no small feat for a first time novelist.

Governor General's Literary Awards (English Fiction) Finalists 2016:

Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates

Anosh Irani : The Parcel
Kerry Lee Powell : Willem de Kooning's Paintbrush

Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Katherena Vermette : The Break

*Won by Thien; not my favourite (that distinction goes to this book, The Break), but not really a surprise. 

2016 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize nominees:

Michael Helm for After James
Anosh Irani for The Parcel
Kerry Lee Powell for Willem de Kooning's Paintbrush
Yasuko Thanh for Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains
Katherena Vermette for The Break

 I would give it to The Break.

*And in the end, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize went to Thanh for Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains.