A Mennonite Woman Speaks Out

More Talking About Women Talking

From a 2019 meeting sponsored by Mennonite Women USA in which Mennonites and Anabaptists from all over the world gathered for healing and discussion of gender

Below the dragonfly is a guest-post by my friend and fellow SStacker Jennifer Sears (Si Omnia Ficta). While I was working on my WT post (Feb. 11th), I had a number of conversations with her about the book and movie; we really differed but I found her point of view compelling. Jennifer is Mennonite, and while she doesn’t conform to type, she is deeply rooted in that culture, which informed her opinions about WT in an interesting way. Even though my post and the comments on the subject have been pretty exhaustive, I thought you would be interested to hear what she had to say, so I invited her to write about it here:

Women Talking, the movie by filmmaker Sarah Polley and the book on which it is based by Miriam Toews, has generated discussion, praise, and derision. It’s an important story, and the questions raised are complex.  Is the critical response to these works justified, or are people praising “messages” they think should be praised? And, has the way we talk about and depict complicated issues of power and women and sexualized violence become stultified and programmatic?

To be clear, I was raised in a liberal Mennonite community in northern Indiana that is not at all a fundamentalist one. My father was a Mennonite minister who supported and encouraged women in shared church leadership and was actively involved in restorative justice work, prison reform, support for asylum seekers, and gun buy-back programs among other programs that supported his and the church’s belief in non-violence. My sisters and I lived and dressed like most people in fashion-plagued Indiana, listened to Quiet Riot on boomboxes while we drove to Mennonite youth conferences, and went to public schools.

My family also comes from the migration of Amish and Mennonites who came from Europe to the east into Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries.  Miriam Toews’ ancestors and the Old Colony Mennonites migrated with a later diaspora that came through Russia, settling in states farther west in the United States and parts of Canada, eventually moving from place to place in Central and South America, with agreements from those governments that continue to allow them isolate, self-govern, avoid military conscription, and school or not school as they wish.

This is a hugely oversimplified sweep of a 500-year history. The point is when Mary says in her article, “Most contemporary Mennonites do not live like this; I am guessing that they would find it hard to grasp what it would be like to live this way,” she is right in my case, though I know something of the culture such a society might evolve from. And these Colonies have long been on my radar. On a road trip through Mexico, my family did a tourist stop in one of the Old Colonies there. My older sister did a two-week homestay in an Old Colony Mennonite community in Mexico, similar to the community featured in Carlos Reygadas’ 2007 film “Silent Light” which Miriam Toews appeared in. My brother-in-law did a year of service in a colony in Paraguay. I do have a sort of frame of reference that non-Mennonites likely don’t have.

For me, the discussion is complicated by the “otherworldly” setting in the remote and isolated Old Colony Mennonite community in Bolivia. The director of the movie, Sarah Polley, decided to make the setting of the movie vague. Women Talking, the movie, does not mention Mennonites or Bolivia, though a map is shown. Her desire was to make this a metaphor of sorts for other disempowered women.  But for some readers and viewers raised in wider Mennonite communities, the culture portrayed is so specific.  By specific I mean: discussions of pacifism and other tenets of Mennonite faith; foot washing;  the way the women address each other in their close community and the intentional blurring of individual identity; the hymns the women sing or that are heard in the soundtrack (weirdly, I recognized all of the songs in the movie, though not all in the book) and the way the women impulsively fall into song to express themselves; the shy, even dopey “perpetual” smiles on some of the women and August, the movie’s primary male character; the focus on work and perseverance; and the emphasis on simplicity and practicality while addressing spiritual and physical matters.  (I confess I even did that very annoying Mennonite-thing of fact-checking the headgear. The movie’s portrayal, it appears, is more accurate than the cover of the American hardback edition)

One aspect lost in the movie that is central to Toews’ book and central to the understanding of this community’s seemingly odd existence is the emphasis on the Christian concept of “being in this world but not of it.” (Gospel of John, I believe, but theologians can correct me.) In the book, August’s narrative refers to this early and then explicitly on page 9 when he says to the librarian who asks where he comes from that he comes from “a part of the world created to be apart from the world.” The librarian tells him that in a way he was raised to believe he does not exist in body, that his corporeal existence is a “perversity.” This anguish for August parallels and intensifies the more extreme situation these women must navigate.  The concept returns throughout the book and again explicitly at the end, page 215, when August imagines Ona saying to him, “What good is it to be alive if you are not in the world?” This emphasis in the book, lost in the movie, highlights one reason why these women have ended up where they are and gives them more depth, showing the reader the tightrope of being and non-being that has kept these women where they are for so long. 

photo by Lisa Wiltse-Corbis

Many within the Mennonite community remember well when, in 2009, the “ghost rapes” in the Manitoba Colony in Bolivia broke in traditional and Mennonite media outlets in the United States and Canada and the devastating numbers and details emerged. And as Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, one of the journalists who covered the story in 2011, discusses her recent article in Time, the real situation in the Bolivian Old Mennonite colony continues to evolve. Like the men in Women Talking who have left to post bail to bring the men back to the Colony so the women can forgive them, some community members are working to get the men out or to reduce their jail sentences. Patterns of sexual violence, incest, and physical abuse are likely continuing in the patriarchal community. It’s also possible some of the men in jail are being wrongly accused. How and should this affect how we read the book and watch the movie?

Importantly, is this crisis specific to this specific community of Old Colony Mennonites or is it widespread? Toews has spoken out against the patriarchal structures of her fundamentalist community of Steinbach in Manitoba. The other Old Colony Mennonite communities who also self-rule could easily be struggling with these issues. Or not. And does it work to apply this truly specific environment to speak for women in other oppressive settings as Sarah Polley’s movie, suggesting a fable, attempts to do?  Perhaps not. And yet, because this specific situation is so extreme, urgent, and conceivable to me, I am not altogether put off by the possible external agenda of either the movie or the book or the sometimes overly obvious imagery in both.

August the Humiliated or August the Saint?

So how do we look at the one man from the colony who has remained with the women? Mary suggests, “It seems that the film is more invested in humiliating its one male character than adhering to its own psychological sense.”

For me, the character of August (who also steals pears like his namesake Saint Augustine, the internally anguished Christian scribe) shows how men can be traumatized by such a patriarchal environment. Those familiar with Toews’ other writing also know that his character is drawn from her father, a schoolteacher in a fundamentalist Mennonite community in Canada who was maligned by the community in similar ways. (Toews’ earlier book Swing Low is heartbreaking.) One of the women in the hayloft abuses August––weak, bad at farming, of a nervous or sensitive disposition. He has been humiliated by the men in the colony since he was a kid. The book suggests that he was raped in prison when he described to other inmates how thinking about the shape of a duck’s bill made him happy. Of this he says, “There are crimes. And then there are crimes. I have since learned to keep most of my thoughts to myself.”

But for me, the focus is not on his humiliation. August mirrors the women. He has escaped their world and lived on his own terms (unlike his mother who dies). The women (and the reader or viewer) also know by the story’s end that he is suicidal, as some of them are or have been, and that they have saved him.

It is also August with his outside learning and sensitivity to their situation who brings the underlying notion of their existence there to the forefront. In the middle of the book he contemplates, “Migration, movement, freedom. We want to protect our children and we want to think. We want to keep our faith. We want the world. Do we want the world?” Here, August turns the historical notion of “being in the world, not of it” into grounds for the women’s departure. “If I’m outside it, my life outside it, outside of my life, if my life isn’t in the world, then what good is it?”

Yes to the absence of the men!

In her post, Mary wonders if the authorial decision to have no men present aside from August would diminish or “displace” the women. She also suggests that more understanding of how the love between men and women does exist in this setting would add to an understanding of the larger problems addressed in the film.

I find the conceit of the book and the movie, this compressed 48-hour period in which no men from the colony are present, dramatically tense and so skillfully set up, I didn’t want to see the men, aside from the necessary intrusion of Mariche’s brutal husband Klaus. (In the book, there is also the presence of the bumbling Koop brothers from another colony.) I don’t sense the men’s absence was chosen because the writer or filmmaker thought that having men there would diminish the power of the women. Though love between some couples no doubt exists in the Old Colonies, the men in this story have all betrayed the women by wanting to post bail and bring the rapists home so the women can forgive them. Unfathomable.

If the men were present, the women’s deliberation and ultimate realization that they have to leave (they worry they will commit murder or violence if they stay) and their questioning about the integrity of the forgiveness they are being pressured to provide couldn’t happen. The mere act of being “women talking” and thinking aloud is revolutionary in their circumstances. They realize the only way to maintain their faith is to leave. If anything within this 48-hour time frame, I want to see or hear more from the “do-nothing” women led by Scarface Janzen, who becomes more dramatic in the film version with the glowering eyes of Frances McDormand.

Bodies, shame, sin

Even contemporary, non-fundamentalist Mennonites, and many religious groups beyond Mennonites, still struggle with any discussion of the body at all, let alone discussions of sex or sexualized violence. Perhaps the notion of “being in this world, not of it” contributes to that discomfort. And Pacifist values can get perverted into inaction. Desire to avoid conflict, which is not a true expression of the practice of non-violence, can lead to the silencing of and anger at those who wish to expose uncomfortable truths within any community. Some Mennonites were angry at Toews’ exposure of this problem within the “Mennonite experiment” as she curiously calls it in the book. (Toews’ article in Granta, “Peace Shall Destroy Many,” discusses the experience of addressing angry readers and the bigger dangers of not exposing problems.)

As Mary says, denial “can be as destructive as evil acts and denial is far more common.” The women in Women Talking are so ashamed of what happened to them, they didn’t want to tell their own family members. Uneducated, they are more able to believe Satan had done it or that it was the repercussion of some evil they committed. It may be easier for them and for their families to deny the violence that has happened and may continue happening. Uneducated, they don’t learn to think critically. In the movie, August says that rubber is not used on the wheels of the buggies because it would enable them to leave too quickly. Not thinking critically and not being educated in general serves the same purpose of keeping them where they are.

In the summer of 2016, I went on a European Amish Heritage Tour organized by a Mennonite tour organization, co-led by the historian John L. Ruth. I was with a group comprised of people with Amish roots and actively practicing Amish who had received permission from their elders to get their photographs taken for passports and cross the ocean by boat to join the tour.

Together, we were all humbled by the stories of those young Anabaptist men and women who surrendered their lives in the 1500s for their religious beliefs. But about a week into living and eating with these reserved but fun-loving tourmates, I began to see with some discomfort how they had not learned to think critically and the limitations their lack of larger historical or political context for understanding the world placed on them. They listened placidly. They accepted the facts provided to them by the tour leaders. If questions did arise, they were rarely voiced. Or had they been taught not to have or voice them? The young women also solemnly believed everything I said, which was unnerving. Until that trip, I never realized how often I use sarcastic humor, expecting the listener to understand the opposite. They didn’t have that context or faculty. (Though many of them, male and female, were funny in other unique ways.) This was during the 2016 election season, and one occasion the young women asked me if Hillary Clinton, who they’d been told was in a “war against Christianity,” would send people to their houses with guns if she was elected. One young Amish man, an aspiring writer within his community, learned I teach English and wanted me to confirm that the greatest American poem was “Casey at the Bat,” which must be in one of their school readers. (An additional, irresistible note on context, when my sister stayed with a family in one of the Old Colony Mennonite communities in Mexico, they expected her, being American and not Canadian, to know how to play the accordion.)

To be clear, the Amish are different historically and in tradition from the Old Colony Mennonites. They are not nearly as isolated from the wider society. They learn English and do educate boys and girls (though typically not beyond eighth grade) and women and men can both be schoolteachers. But the short time I was with those young women made me realize how truly vulnerable they are. If these heinous acts should happen to them, I understand how they might, as the Old Colony Mennonite women, initially believe it was something they’d brought on themselves if a severe community leader told them as such.

But I can also imagine how they might band together with the older women to find a way out. I can imagine these women leaving to protect their children, leaving together––not to integrate themselves into the larger world––but to create a religious community of their own. It is indeed a “wild” dream or speculation, a choice that in the case of the Old Colony Mennonites would possibly even bring their own demise. In Toews’ book, the women are possibly walking into a fire.

So, is there something uncomfortable about the possibility that this movie asks us to “feel good” or even triumphant watching women leave their abusers and their larger abusive situation, knowing the women in the “real situation” likely won’t? In an interview on Between the Covers, which aired when the book was released in 2018, Toews discusses her desire for the possibility of hope that women living in this or similar situations might find some way to a safer life in or outside of the community.

In the book and the movie, there is a story of the migration of butterflies and dragonflies. The leaving and the getting somewhere takes three generations. In the real story in Bolivia, Casa Mariposa (translated as Butterfly House) is a safe house or shelter in Bolivia available for women who choose to leave the colony. I can’t help but think this connection may be intentional.

And, as an artistic vision, while it may be uncomfortable, I don’t think it is irresponsible to suggest the impossible if the world of the book and movie supports the somewhat fantastic or unlikely outcome. For me, it is strange, at the very least, to pretend it’s not a Mennonite community as Polley’s film seems to do. I think using the facts that are present could even make the situation more universal rather than the reverse. In this way, the book is more successful and perhaps more honest in my mind.

Within my own milieu, some of my mother’s friends, mostly Mennonite, are going to see the movie. Others are not for a variety of reasons. Among those of my generation I’ve talked too, most are reading the book or going to the movie when they can. The larger Mennonite community has been working through cases of sexual misconduct and abuse in its institutions and private spaces for decades, which will no doubt continue. These artistic renderings provide opportunity to continue to discuss these important ongoing issues, however uncomfortable. One of my sister’s friends commented on the use of the hayloft as being important because as everyone knows, haylofts are where many cases of sexualized violence happen. Though in Women Talking, the houses that become “tombs” in August’s recording are where these violent acts occur, the collective assumption the phrase “everyone knows” is disturbing. Women are talking.