Women Talking - Miriam Toews. A Review

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.