So, I’ve got to be honest: I don’t really feel like writing tonight. I was sick all weekend (a three-day weekend I took with plans of recuperating in an introvert way, after a month of extroverting). I still have a face full of mucus. It’s snowy and cold out. I started a new cross-stitch! (I don’t want to do anything except cross-stitch right now.)
But I’ve established a pattern, or I’ve tried to, of always sending out a newsletter on Tuesday mornings, which usually means writing them Monday nights. And, while I mostly began this newsletter as a fun way to track all the books I wish I had time to read, part of the reason I write this is to make sure I’m writing every week. I’m still establishing the habit. If I skip a week, what’s to stop me from skipping two, three, or quitting writing altogether? Dramatic, I know, but the thought has brought me to my laptop tonight.
Still, I don’t have any books in mind to feature. Sure, there are always books I wish I were reading, but nothing I haven’t read is particularly is inspiring me tonight. There is this one book, a book I recently finished reading, that has been pinging around my brain ever since beginning it.
Women Talking by Miriam Toews (out April 2nd) is a novel inspired by real events. There is a Mennonite community in Bolivia where women and girls were waking up sore, groggy, and bloody with no recollection of what happened in the night. They had been drugged and raped. This went on for years, from about 2005-2009, with the men of the community blaming the devil or the women themselves—suggesting it was the ‘wild female imagination’—until a man was caught breaking into one woman’s bedroom. He confessed and revealed the names of other men in the community who had been committing the same acts of violence night after night.
Toews, an ex-Mennonite, heard about these women and could not stop thinking about them. She wondered what happened next, how the women went on to cope with this betrayal. Women Talking is her an attempt at an answer. The novel takes place over two days; it is the minutes of a meeting between two families of women, written by a man named August—none of the women are able to read or write.
In the Mennonite community, according to Toews, you cannot go to heaven if you have not forgiven or been forgiven. So, in this scenario, the women of the community were expected to forgive the men or no one would get into heaven. While the men of the community are in the city, posting bail for the accused, the women sit in a hayloft and talk, trying to decide what to do.
Is it accurate to say that at this moment we women are asking ourselves what our priority is, and what is right—to protect our children or to enter the kingdom of heaven?
Women Talking is incredible. It is a thorough exploration, a deep examination of authority, forgiveness, volition, trauma, and language. I found it fascinating how Toews and her characters focus on language, on word choice, meaning, clarity. They often argue over word choice, debate the meaning of words spoken, insist on clarity of language. They are about to make possibly the most significant decision of their lives—likely they are rarely given the space to make many decisions at all in their patriarchal community—and they bicker over the meaning of the word “fleeing.”
Language is a tool, a weapon, a savior. Language is something to trust, to grasp, to depend on. Language is something to control in a world that is quickly spinning out of your grasp. Language is something that can reshape the women and their world.
These women are having to reinvent themselves. They’re needing to define themselves. Who are they? Whether they would put it in these words or not – probably not – they’ve never been given any agency, they don’t have a voice, they’re essentially prisoners in their colony with no rights. They’re expected to serve the men, and that’s their role. So they essentially have to figure out who they are as individuals, and then how they’re going to live. But also how to love again, how to trust, how to laugh. These are things that these women are doing as they’re talking in the loft. (National Post interview with Miriam Toews)
It’s interesting that a book so focused on women is narrated by a man. There’s no real need for a written record of their meeting—the women can’t read or write. August, once excommunicated from the colony, recently, grudgingly allowed to return, is invited to take the minutes by one woman, Ona, not because she thinks they’ll need them, but because she thinks he needs them, needs a distraction, a purpose. Honestly, I’m still working out why his perspective forms the frame of the women’s conversations; what purpose does he have for the reader?
I’m still mulling over much of the book. All I’ve written about is language, but there is so much more, obviously, to think on. Their winding, thoughtful conversation poses questions about love, forgiveness, and obligation that I’ve never had to consider.
If it has been decided by the elders and the bishop of Molotschna that we women don’t require counseling following these attacks because we weren’t conscious when they happened, then what are we obligated, or even able, to forgive? Something that didn’t happen? Something that we are unable to understand? And what does that mean more broadly? If we don’t know “the world,” we won’t be corrupted by it? If we don’t know that we are imprisoned then are we free?
This is the kind of book that I read with a pen in hand, bracketing passages on nearly every page; it’s the kind of book I want to re-read—I know there’s so much more to parse through, think on, discuss. You wouldn’t necessarily think a book so unfathomably sad would have that effect. But Toews poses so many questions in these pages, I wonder if the answers aren’t buried within them as well.
When we have liberated ourselves, we will have to ask ourselves who we are.