Vermette – and her characters – is a Metis,one of Canada's Indigenous people,andThe Break is largely about intergenerational trauma and intergenerational abuse in her community. It quickly becomes clear – and this is no spoiler – that both the victim and the perpetrators are part of the same community.
Intersectionality in fiction?"I hope so. I feel that my responsibility was to Indigenous people,to indigenous women,Metis women who I'm representing."
Vermette grew up in a marginalised community that she based the book on:impoverished but also neighbourly. There was a lot of gang involvement,a lot of risk,children often vulnerable and in danger.
"There was violence,gang violence and others who committed assault. I always wanted to understand that saying'hurt people hurt people'– to understand what brings a person to commit such harm to another person.
"The answer was they were harmed through their lives more often than not and they took it out on others."
Vermette,who earlier in her life studied criminology and the criminal justice system and worked in advocacy and social services,says the situation for the Metis in Canada – she sees parallels with Indigenous Australians – is both bleak and optimistic. There is an ongoing national inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women –"we have literally thousands,as well as men and young people"– looking at different systemic issues,but there is also a resurgence in identity,language reclamation,and encouraging programs for young people.
"We have a huge number of children in foster care and the vast majority of those children are in non-Indigenous foster homes. Indigenous children make up 15 per cent of the population but 95 per cent in the foster system."
She has a direct experience of family tragedy – her 14-year-old stepbrother Donovan disappeared and was eventually found dead months later in Lake Winnipeg – that fed into her work.North End Love Songshas one particular poem,November,about his tragedy and more that deal with the racism faced by Metis,whileThis River focuses on two Indigenous people,one of whom is Donovan,who vanished.
"It was an incredibly traumatising thing to lose our brother and you're retraumatised over and over with the process of trying to find him. Then finally we were actually fortunate in a lot of ways – a silly word to use in the devastation – but his body was found and we were able to have the funeral and ceremony to say goodbye. But so many families of missing people don't;it's an ongoing thing."
The Break is narrated by 10 distinctly voiced Metis characters,most part of the same family:the aforementioned Stella;Emily,the girl assaulted;the voice of her dead mother,Rain;her aunts,Paulina and Lou;her grandmother Cheryl;the policeman Tommy Scott;two others girls,Phoenix,and Emily's friend,Zegwan,and briefly Kookom,the ageing family matriarch.
As a reader Vermette likes novels written from multiple points of view,but she found actually writing one drove her crazy.
"When I started the book,it was probably about five voices,but when I got stuck I would just go back to the beginning and create another character and start the cycle all over again,which is not the way you should write a novel."
At times she found some of the characters too much:Stella,for example,she says,is in such a spiral of vicarious trauma."Sometimes I had to leave her and go off to someone else,someone like Kookom who was comforting,or least Cheryl,who had some fight and vinegar."
The careful structure reflects an Indigenous concept,the restorative justice circle.
"Our model is modelled after the Anishinaabe people and in that when someone commits harm to another person and community,they tell their story,they tell why,and everyone else in the circle tells how that act harmed them."
Although the story Vermette tells is bleak,it is not unremittingly so. There is some residual optimism,even hope. As Paulina says to Cheryl at one point:"We're f---ked up,not f---ed."
And as their creator she wanted to give some relief to the characters about whom she cared so much after all that she had put them through. She includes inThe Break another Metis ceremony,a sweat. It takes place in a darkened space with a kind of fire pit piled with hot rocks that gradually heat up and involves songs and chants.
"It is a very healing ceremony and I wanted to write that carefully and being very respectful of the traditions. I know in the times of my life when I've entered the lodge,it's been very healing."
Vermette grew up close to the Red River in Winnipeg's North End,but when she was a young mother lived by the Break in a house similar to Stella's.
She had always wanted to write but spent many years switching careers and doing different jobs."It was an indicator that I should just write the damn book. It's taken me a long time to get there."
She says her brother's disappearance and death have informed all her creative work – poetry,film and novel.
"Where you grow up,when you come of age,that's the nourishment that feeds your adult self. When you're starving you go into adulthood starving;when you're traumatised you go into adulthood broken."
She has another book of poetry due out soon along with the second volume in a series of graphic-novels,The Girl Called Echo,about a 13-year-old Metis girl living with a new foster family.
She won't be writing another novel or making another film in the immediate future because of the emotional impact she has had with already,but she does anticipate more fiction. Anyway,she says she likes messing around with different genres and mediums.
"I think I use poetry and fiction differently. Those two books (The Break andNorth End Love Songs) do really feel like partners because they are very much that kind of coming of age story.The Breakis very much a fictionalised version,it's not real in the way poetry feels more like it's telling my story and telling what I'm seeing. Fiction is a kind of way of making new truths or finding the truth."
The Break is published by Allen&Unwin at $29.99. Katherena Vermette is a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival.mwf.com.auThe Age is a festival sponsor.
She appears at the Brisbane Writers Festival in September.bwf.org.au