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In ‘We Rip the World Apart,’ Charlene Carr Examines a Family Torn by Racial Violence
In a Q&A, the Halifax author talks about racism in Canada, intergenerational trauma and how Black Lives Matter protests sparked the novel / BY Hanna Phifer / February 16th, 2024
Carlene Carr’s new novel has been described as The Vanishing Half meets Brother. With We Rip the World Apart, the Halifax writer has turned out a poignant story about Black immigration, racism and intergenerational trauma, but, in her novel, they are viewed through the lens of motherhood.
Carr’s story begins in 1980s Jamaica, where Evelyn, a white woman, flees political violence and moves to Canada with her Black husband and their son, Antony. In Toronto, she discovers Black men are viewed with suspicion and her fears grow as she watches her husband and biracial son navigate racism and discrimination. Sixteen years later they have a daughter, Kareela, and, after Antony is shot by police at a Black Lives Matter protest, Evelyn’s mother-in-law, Violet, moves in, offering Kareela a link to her Jamaican heritage.
The story is told from the point of view of the three women, toggling between the past and the present, where Kareela, now 24, discovers she is pregnant with a child she is not sure she wants. Inspired loosely by Carr’s family’s journey from Jamaica to Canada, We Rip the World Apart is a look at what binds families together and what keeps them apart.
Zoomer spoke to the author from her home in Nova Scotia about racism in Canada, how racial injustice and violence leave scars that take generations to heal and where she departed from her family history to create a fictional matriarch.
Hanna Phifer: We Rip the World Apart opens with Kareela attending the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Toronto. How soon after those events did you want to write about it?
Charlene Carr: The ideas and questions that led to writing the book came up very shortly after. Suddenly the internet and social media became obsessed with the murder of George Floyd and with learning and understanding about Black lives and their experiences. I started getting messages from friends who were asking me what it was like to be a Black woman in Canada and sometimes apologizing for not asking before, not really understanding. There was just this movement of people finally acknowledging that racism existed, and sometimes in very violent ways. And although it was well-meaning and kind, I remember being really upset by those questions from friends, and thinking, ‘this is something I’ve dealt with my entire life.’
I think this problem is more widespread in Canada, where people would brush off racism and be like: “Oh, no, racism doesn’t exist here.” So I started thinking about how the families who had had someone either killed or abused because of racism would be feeling in that moment where suddenly everyone is acknowledging it. Whereas before, I think a lot of times people either dismissed it or they thought the person who was killed or injured must have done something to provoke it.
I was already starting to think of a book that I wanted to explore Jamaican heritage and immigration. When these two ideas came together, the story really started to take form.
HP: This book is primarily about the intergenerational connection between daughter, mother and grandmother. Can you speak about the influences of your own family history?
CC: Absolutely. My father’s mother died when he was a child, and I know almost nothing about her besides her name. And I just started wondering about my connection with my Jamaican heritage and my Black identity – how that may have been different if there had been this matriarch to kind of guide and be there for my family. The story really started with Violet for me and wondering how she could have affected the journey.
I come from a biracial family as well. My mother and father married in Jamaica. My mom is a Canadian and they left Jamaica the same as Kareela’s family did, around the time of the urban warfare there, came to Toronto and were raising [three] biracial sons [and her, their only daughter] there, and, later on, moved to Atlantic Canada.
So, in many ways, the geographical journey is extremely similar. The timelines are changed. I really wanted to explore that, and specifically these issues of respectability among Black people, as some of them try to assimilate; and just kind of anti-black violence – from a female perspective, as well.
HP: You said you didn’t get a chance to meet your grandmother. Who informed your depiction of Violet?
CC: Violet in the book is not my grandmother; she’s my wondering of how it could have been. My father barely has any memories of her. She died so young, there’s no pictures, there’s no writings. It was really just imagination and a little bit pulled from the Jamaican aunts.
HP: The murder of Kareela’s older brother Antony by police is a huge plot point. Was that also a tribute to the Black Lives Matter protests, or was that based on something that’s happened to you?
CC: No, that came from my wondering about how it would have felt for the families who lost someone, before the world – and more specifically, Canada – really started to take notice. That this is a problem and that police brutality is something that needs to be addressed.
HP: Where do you think your characters’ inability to be vulnerable comes from?
CC: I think a lot of it is fear. Especially Evelyn, the mother: She arguably hid more than anyone else. As a mother, you have an inherent fear for your children because you grow them and they’re a part of you and then suddenly they leave your body. You lose that ability to keep them safe and she’s so fearful, even before her son dies, of what could happen to him.
Then her worst fears come true, and here she has this other child who she worries could come to the same fate, and it prevents her from being able to love in the way she wanted to love, because she doesn’t know if she can handle that kind of grief again.
HP: There’s also this idea of intergenerational healing.
CC: In the novel, there are a lot of silences and it’s those silences that create distance between the family members and in some ways make it near impossible for them to heal. I wanted to show the damage. There would always be those scars, because when we are subjected to racism, yes, there can be healing, but it’s not as if what had happened could be erased. And so I wanted to develop characters that were able to embody hope, eventually, but that still acknowledge the fact that these kinds of brutalities can’t just be glossed over. They can’t be erased. They have lasting effects that are going to affect people generationally.
HP: What did healing look like for these characters?
CC: Without giving too much away, of the ending, it’s when they finally stop keeping silent with each other, when they finally have, whether you want to call it the bravery or the courage or just the desperation to open up and reveal the things that they had been keeping hidden about their lives, about their emotions, about events that they just didn’t speak of. I think that a lot of times that is where healing can come – from being open.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.