Toews, Miriam, Women Talking.
Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, Canada, 2018
A successful novel
doesn’t hatch like an egg, pecking it’s way through a shell and
emerging while your back is turned. I can hardly imagine the
complexity of decisions Toews dealt with before putting pen to paper
for Women Talking. Obviously, both subject and audience
influence style, diction, narrator, format, even font, no matter what
fictional writing is being visualized, created and published. But as
with other novels by Toews, additional considerations come into play
because an ethno/religious minority is being mined for the subject
material and a reading audience with roots in the appropriated
minority will quite naturally challenge such a novel on the basis of
verisimilitude.
Women Talking
jumps sideward in imagination from a criminal case in a conservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia. Eight men in the colony
were found guilty and are serving long prison sentences for anesthetizing sleeping
women with a Belladonna derivative and raping them. While awaiting
their trial in remand (in the novel) the leadership have gone to
Santa Cruz to arrange bail for the charged men, and that’s when
some of the affected women meet clandestinely in a barn to decide
whether or not to flee the colony permanently or to stay and attempt
a reconciliation and the setting of a new direction for the colony.
I
find the commissioning of the male teacher to take minutes of the
proceedings of the women’s meetings . . . in English . . .
puzzling. A narrator is needed, of course, but for me this choice
created unnecessary problems that opting for an omniscient,
third-person narrator might have eased. Even a woman involved in the
meeting serving the novel as first-person narrator could have worked
well. Who narrates the story is entirely the author’s choice, of
course, but this choice is crucial and in order to render August Epp
a believable narrator, a convoluted story of banishment, a time in a
British prison for stealing a policeman’s horse, permission to
return to the colony and veiled reference to his infatuation with a
pregnant victim of the rapes is all a “bridge too
far” for this reader.
And
then there’s the language/culture bridge that needed to be
constructed first. The narrator in Women Talking is
a decently educated, English-proficient character and is written by
Toews as able to render the low-German conversation of the women
believably, both in tone and content. Considering that the female
characters are all illiterate and uneducated, have been treated as
chattels by authoritarian men their whole lives, understand only the
Low-German language--which is long on domestic vocabulary and short on
almost every other application--the novel loses verisimilitude for
knowledgeable Mennonite readers. I am a Low-German speaker, grew up
in a nearly-homogenous, comparatively-liberal Mennonite community,
remember well from my parents and grandparents how Mennonite women
once functioned in a patriarchal Mennonite culture and find Toews’
meeting-scenarios as foreign as if her women were rabbits in
Watership Down.
Granted, I’ve no on-the-ground experience of the colonies of
conservative Mennonites in Bolivia, but through my historical
interests, have come to know their origins, their agricultural
practices, how church is conducted, etc. (Interestingly, my roots and
the roots of the colony Toews is portraying thread back to the same
colony in Ukrainian Russia: Chortitza. Her choice of Chortitza—the
original ‘Old Colony’—and Molotschna
as Bolivian colony names could certainly have benefited from more
historical research.)
But,
to be fair, a novel establishes its own parameters; it’s a branch
of what’s called “poetic license.” In a skilfully devised novel
(like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale,
or George Orwell’s 1984, or
Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness)
the scenario in which the plot happens is devised to allow readers a
“suspension of disbelief” about the author’s
sometimes-fantastic inventions and to read and enjoy the story by
walking with the author into an imaginary world. It’s possible that
readers who are not Mennonites, are not knowledgeable about
Mennonites, might read Women Talking
as occurring inside a believable, imaginary world where men are predominantly authoritarian and often violent; women and girls are universally treated as chattels and knowledge and education are
threatening and therefore forbidden. To make this determination, a
different reviewer is needed.
(In the book, three pages of reviews of Toews’ work are all effusive in their praise and most
display the standard vagueness and hyperbole that smacks of a
fraternity, a mutual-adoration society of authors, publishers and
reviewers hoping to sell books and reputations. Such fluff in
any publication shouldn’t
be confused with serious commentary; most such accolades are easily
composed by people without even having read the book they’re
praising.)
I
won’t go here into the question of cultural appropriation, at least
not in any depth. Toews has been accused of fostering—either by
intention or design—a stereotype, in this case of the dysfunctional
backwardness in the world of “Mennonite,” and in the process
omitting an essential rider, namely that the name “Mennonite”
embraces highly differentiated cultures scattered worldwide and the scenarios represented in a few of her novels are outliers.
On
the other hand, perhaps all those who identify as Mennonite
have good reason to examine and re-examine their faith and culture
and to deal with the fact that under a common rubric with Mennonites
around the world, eight men are serving time for raping their
co-religionist sisters. And when I crossed into Mexico some years ago, suspicions focused on me because of my Mennoniteness in consideration, I assumed, of colony Mennonites involvement in drug smuggling.* If such a purpose is served, then Women
Talking may someday sit proudly
side by side with Peace Shall Destroy Many
on any Mennonite or
non-Mennonite bookshelf.
* You might well wonder how Mexican border guards would recognize my Mennoniteness. As in Ashkenazi Jewry, Europe-rooted Mennonite ethnicity is intertwined with certain surnames: Epp, Friesen, Klassen, Dueck, Toews, etc. These names are typical of South and Central American and Mexican colonies as they are of Mennonite-settlement communities in Southern Manitoba and the Saskatchewan Valley, for instance.
P.S.:
As far as I know, the narrator, August Epp, and I, George Epp, are
not related.