Claire Omhovère

 

Claire Omhovère (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3/EMMA)

claire.omhovere@univ-montp3.fr

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“Guests, Hosts and Predators: Deviant Hospitality in Katherena Vermette’s The Break”

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“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. When seasonal visitors came to be replaced by settlers and settlers turned into permanent residents, the dual relation between hospitality and hostility evolved in response to the colonial dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that welcomed some population groups to stay while rejecting others as internal threats to the national project. The Break opens on an extraordinary description of the vacant lot that is quite distinct from a standard exposition scene introducing the setting necessary for a plot to unfold. For its poetic and political impact, Vermette’s prologue relies on the trope of “the break,” a metaphor that condenses three layers of signification at least, major ruptures in the lives of the characters, discontinuities in their occupation of space and breakdowns in family transmission, including through storylines. 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.

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Claire Omhovère teaches at University Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3 where she is affiliated to the research group EMMA (Etudes Montpellieraines du Monde Anglophone). Her research is broadly concerned withperceptions and representations of space in postcolonial literatures with a specific interest in the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of landscape writing in settler-invader colonies such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

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She is the author of Sensing Space: The Poetics of Geography in Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Peter Lang, 2007) and she has edited L’Art du paysage (Michel Houdiard, 2014), which gathers the translations and critical presentations of a wide selection of essays on landscape from the English-speaking world.