“The most common way for people to give up their power is by thinking that they don’t have any” – Alice Walker (epigraph, The Break)
Photo by Brendon Thompson on Unsplash
Katherena Vermette’s book, The Break, is real. Curled in my reading chair with one of my mother’s scrap quilts wrapped around my legs drinking Darjeeling Green Tea (so smooth), I am struck by how real the characters are. It is woven with the perspectives of many people. Although the book feels like it is about the strength of women and community and love, I found it interesting that the only two male characters that are developed reflect Canada now. The relations between colonials and First Nations are taking the headlines from speech by Justin Trudeau in front of the UN General Assembly to committees for residential schools and missing and murdered indigenous women. The two police officers, Officers Scott and Christie, are the two sides of that story.
Officer Christie is a personification of beliefs that seem to pull at current affairs. When he first shows up in the story, he is bored, curt and uninterested. To him, it is just another “nates” fighting “nates” story. Through Christie, I can hear conversations in coffee shops and around lunch tables as Canadians in cities and towns speak about the First Nation headlines: higher than average suicide rates; higher than average drug and alcohol addictions; run down housing communities; social assistance-ne’er-do-well. Christie is mild prejudice shows in his lack of effort to investigate the events. He refers to his partner, Tommy Scott, as May-tee. I can hear him saying something like, “I am the least racist person in the world. Look, I like the guy.”
And Tommy Scott, is First Nations. He is trying to fit in to the colonial world. His wife wants to embrace the Pomp and Circumstance of Indigenous pageantry, without seeing the underbelly. Tommy is learning to speak up. He shyly indicates his heritage on his employment forms. He is conscious of how he presents himself to his superiors and his colleagues. It is through Tommy’s perseverance that Christie begins to listen. He begins to hear the story that is playing out through the crime. He steps in and helps.
Is this the story of Canada?
The Break’s storyline is a fictional depiction of Trudeau’s speech:
“Our efforts to build a better relationship with Indigenous Peoples in Canada are not only about righting historical wrongs. They are about listening, and learning, and working together. They are also about concrete action for the future. The reconciliation we seek has lessons for us all. We can’t build strong relationships if we refuse to have conversations. We can’t chart a more peaceful path if the starting point is suspicion and mistrust. And we can’t build a better world unless we work together, respect our differences, protect the vulnerable, and stand up for the things that matter most…” (http://bit.ly/2EhJFUj)
With a hint of lost blossoms, Strawberry Rose tea reminds me that nurture and environment create a life more than biology and ancestry.
When I was talking to friends about the book I was reading, The Lonely Hearts Hotel, by Heather O’Neill, I said that I felt compelled to keep reading because the author used good words. I felt bad continuing also. It was like a car accident on the other side of the highway. Even though it doesn’t affect you, everyone slows down to watch. And it gets into your head when you explain to everyone how traffic was. I felt so far removed from Rose and Pierrot that I didn’t think I could understand them.
“We all struggle with contradictions. Contradictions are marvelous. If you don’t believe that everything contains contradictions, then there is very little you can understand. We know ourselves by embracing what we are not. We become good by taking evil head-on.”
“Exactly!” exclaimed the clown. “You can’t have land without water. You can’t have water without land.” (page 218)
The story is about me, though. It is about everyone who has struggled to become more of who you are.
“It’s going to be wonderful,” Rose exclaimed. “All these paintings where he sticks a nose on a cheek and an eyeball on a forehead. He captures the modern condition. All our thoughts are fractured. Everything is a dead end. You have to look at something from all angles at once to see it from the inside out. Not just be obsessed with the obvious, stereotypical way of looking at something, you know? To make things appear as they really are.” (page 208)
Rose and Pierrot are placed in pitiful circumstances at the centre of a labyrinth and they are told to find their way out. (Indulge me for a moment…a poetic metaphor came to me as I was thinking about this book) Wrong turns and right ones, they couldn’t know which way they were heading until they looked back to see their path. They/we can sometimes go back over the same trail to discover where they/we need to go. When we think about the path, we discover that all the turns were the right ones to get us to where we are right now.
Rose couldn’t put a finger on what had happened to her. But she had fallen from grace. That was the most surprising thing. Because she had not realized that she had been in a state of grace. She had at least figured that as an orphan she had been born with nothing to lose. When you fall from grace, time passes quicker. Time begins to make sense. It moves in a linear fashion. It begins to trickle through the hourglass. It no longer belongs to you. (page 361)
Our labyrinth doesn’t come from us making a choice to step inside it. It comes from us standing in the middle. We start with who we are. We gather wisdom with each turn that we can use or not. If we can get out, we will have all that we could be and the possibilities are wide open.
Or we keep wandering around, feeling like… “the best we can hope for from life is that it is a wonderful depression.” (page 380)
If our life is like a labyrinth, I wonder if there is a string that we can follow to make better choices, or maybe there are different coloured strings that can lead us to different places.
Rose and Pierrot picked up the different strings of those that would have them follow their path. They couldn’t know until they had walked along the path whether it was the right one or not.
Allowing for art to imitate life, what string are you following through your labyrinth? Do you need to find a different one? How close are you to having wide open possibilities for becoming? It might just be a couple of steps. Take them.
