Actual memory of the news of five missionary men being killed by Waoranis in the jungles of Ecuador in 1956 is, by now, confined to sixty year-olds and older. The occasion was called “Operation Auca,” Auca being a pejorative among neighbouring tribes for the Waoranis. Five missionary families lived scattered among the Quichua aboriginals whose contact with the Catholic and later Evangelical missions had been established earlier. The five families were connected, some by a Wheaton College education, and their goal was very distinctly to reach the Waoranis for Christ.
Feeling a compulsion to make a move to that end, the five men—Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming and Roger Youderian landed on a sandbar in the mission plane and commenced making forays by plane over a settlement of Waoranis, dropping gifts. Some records have Jim Elliot shouting Waorani words into the jungle on a megaphone. The intention was to trek in to a settlement, thinking that the gift drops—including photos of the five men—would have allayed any fears the Waorani might have of these particular outsiders.
It was not to happen: for some reason, the Waorani attacked the men and destroyed the plane. Theories exist for the attack including the possibility that the pilot, Nate Saint, panicked and shot and killed one of the Waorani men and the attack avenged his death. The primitive lifestyle and the violent aggression toward threat among the isolated Waorani was well known; Shell had abandoned attempts to establish oil exploration in the area after Waorani killed a number of their workers.
To write a novel with the events of the killings and the surrounding ripple effects in families and in supporting churches has to have been a daunting task for award-winning author, Joan Thomas of Winnipeg. There was no shortage of historical records to help piece the facts of the case together, which she has done skillfully. But while family and churches related to the events live on—as in this case—a particular art is needed in keeping the line between fiction and fact clear to readers. Thomas has appended an explanation of her strategy in doing so . . . at the end, but I still kept looking up people and places and events in the historical record as if I were reading a journalistic accounting.
Both fiction and journalism—I have to remind myself—exist on a continuum between proven fact and creative invention; neither live solidly at either of the poles. Obviously, the story has been told and retold in different ways depending on the observers’ viewpoints.
In one description, “Operation Auca” is seen as the moving hand of God beginning a plan whose end would be the Christianizing of the Waorani people. The five were obedient servants to the call of God and their sacrifice was covered by Jim Elliot’s maxim, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Their deaths spurred many young people into mission work, we’re told.
Another way of describing it would point out the unbelievable naivete of these five missionaries who misjudged the nature of the Waorani community’s outlook and counted on the miraculous hand of God to protect them and then to draw the Waorani to himself through them. Anthropologists have said that the Waorani had likely never seen a photograph before the gift drops and that these miniatures of human faces would have frightened their animist sensibility and would probably have the opposite effect to that intended.
And then there’s Five Wives, in which neither viewpoint is touted. Thomas has written the novel more with the “this, that and both,” non-binary approach. Characters are allowed to be naive, intelligent, courageous or cautious as people are. Quite clearly, the characters in the narrative have something in common: they follow the bidding of their Lord to the letter as they read it, not unlike an infantryman obeys his superior officer. A critic might say—as Thomas does in the novel—that once you ask for God’s hand in some things, you begin to see God’s hand in everything. Many could find cause to scoff at this; Thomas doesn’t.
Five Wives let’s in the certainty/uncertainty sub-theme in the imagined interactions among the central characters of the story. For Jim Elliot and Elizabeth (Betty), as well as for Peter Fleming and Olive the certainty/uncertainty starts early in their relationships when the men are initially certain that God is calling them to remain single in order to better fulfill their mission tasks. It’s only after another signal (from God) that they both find assurance that marriage is—if not the best way—a good, God-approved way to proceed. The decision to embark on the “Operation Auca” likewise raises doubts in the minds of the five wives who go back and forth between “God will protect them,” to “it’s too soon, so too dangerous” and “if it’s God’s will, then who are we to stand in the way?”
This sub-theme plays significantly into the core theme of the book. Characters never become unified enough in their purpose to erase doubts about each other. Marj Saint, wife of the pilot, is decidedly ambivalent about her role in the marriage and mission (in the novel) beyond being a breeder of children and a keeper of the household, but after the death of their husbands, her participation with Betty in continuing the work of converting the Waorani either belies her frustration with her subservience to “men,” or else it releases the potential in her to do what the “men” only hoped to do. Again, Thomas leaves sorting out motives to the reader.
Economic-corporate greed, finally, is revealed in all its ugliness in the isolation of the Waorani on a reserve so that oil exploration can proceed unhindered. The knowledgeable reader won’t be surprised by this latter development; it’s simply a more recent case of corporate/government colonialism with indigenous cultures being sacrificed in the process . . . again with the—probably unintended—cooperation of religious zealotry. A reader can hardly be blamed for reading into the history of missions to indigenous Ecuadorans the conclusion that evangelical Christianity finds destroying a culture and habitat of many in order to save as many as possible from unimaginable perdition in the next life a noble trade-off.
One of many poignant aphorisms Thomas comes up with goes something like, “Don’t assume that the people to whom you’re relating are just people who tried to be like you . . . and failed.” The Waorani didn’t wear clothes in their isolated state; more recent photos of life on the reserves shows them in jeans and T-shirts. It raises for me a question of the morality of missionaries offering salvation for the soul while in effect accompanying it with an entire cultural package. A “to be born again is to become like us” syndrome.
The major missionary effort lingering after the massacre of the five men had to do with Bible translation into the Waorani language. To hear words of an isolate language is one thing, to practice and practice the pronunciation is another, to devise a system of phonetics or syllabics is yet another, to learn what utterances roughly mean is yet another, but the highest hurdle in this learning is semantic: what are the accompanying conventions of communication that can’t be written down? What are the connotations of things that white North Americans can’t know because they are bound into centuries-old cultural habits and assumptions? For instance, how do you convince a people that they need to be saved from their sins if they have no concept of sin, and evil comes at them as spirits lying in wait in their environment, possibly carried in by strangers? What do you call Jesus if they have a similar-sounding word that means “tree,” or “water?”
Five Wives won the Governor General’s Literary Award for 2019; an earlier book, Reading by Lightning also won several less prestigious awards and nominations. Thomas’ prose is fluid and expressive, the complexity of her subject with its present to past to present transitions is expertly handled and her principal characters—particularly two of the five wives and the sister of Nate Saint—are economically but precisely drawn. The writing certainly makes Five Wives deserving of praise; the content so evocatively handled only adds to its appeal.
Thomas indicates in her post script that the narrative after the events of “Operation Auca” and its immediate aftermath, are complete fiction. The involvement of descendants of the principals in the making of a film (an actual film was made) I found too sparse to merit inclusion. Any criticism I might have of Five Wives would be in this area; I could have done without “the speculative present” altogether, but such are the considerations that have to be made when writing novels based on “actual events.” Novel means new. Perhaps a different genre name would be in order when, for instance, we pick up Miriam Toews’ Women Talking or Rudy Wiebe’s The Mad Trapper.
I’m not a fast reader, but I finished Five Wives in record time. It’s a compelling story, well told. I borrowed a copy through the Wheatland Regional Library system but had to wait three months before it became available. If you borrow it and find a small jam stain on page 220 or thereabouts, that would be me.
Thank you for an amazing review of Joan Thomas’s book” Five Wives”. I read it shortly after it was published (purchasing it after she did a reading at McNally Robinson). My husband, Hardy, and I spent two decades in the DR of Congo where he worked on a Bible translation in one of the trade languages (Kikongo ya Leta). I found Thomas’s account completely credible, also your comments on Bible translation in paragraph 13. I especially identified with the personal relationships between the missionaries, and wondered how Thomas could come up with such an authentic account, not having been in missions herself!
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