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'Women Talking' : A novel about Mennonite women refusing to be silenced

Carol Loewen

'Women Talking' : A novel about Mennonite women refusing to be silenced

The forced forgiveness. The isolation. The shaming of victims. Factors that have led to cases of sexual assault and coverup among some conservative Mennonites and Amish, which my colleagues and I documented in our recent Post-Gazette series, “Coverings,” are hardly limited to our areas of focus in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

The worst known case is in Bolivia, home to several remote Mennonite agricultural colonies, where members preserve their religious separatism, German dialect and horse-and-buggy lifestyle. In 2011, several men in one of the colonies were convicted for a vast series of rapes.


"WOMEN TALKING"
By Miriam Toews
Bloomsbury  ($24).

The perpetrators assaulted at least 130 women and girls in nighttime raids, first knocking their sleeping victims unconscious with a veterinary anesthetic. Initial suspects were ghosts or demons, but eventually the human perpetrators were caught and confessed.

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Acclaimed Canadian author Miriam Toews, herself of Mennonite background, confronts these atrocities in her remarkable new novel, “Women Talking.”

The real-life scandal burns through nearly every page — from the petty despotism of the bishop (who, like the real one, says the women don’t need counseling because they weren’t awake when assaulted) to the stories of the women who bear their rapists’ children and the small children who carry their venereal diseases.

“In the year after I arrived,” says the narrator, “the women described dreams they’d been having, and then eventually, as the pieces fell into place, they came to understand that they were collectively dreaming one dream, and that it wasn’t a dream at all.”

What makes this traumatic narrative bearable is in how the women find their voices and their way forward. The novel is set just after the arrests and before the trial, when most of the men go to town to bail out the rapists. During that interval, eight women gather in a hayloft to talk about their options.

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They represent three generations from two families, all survivors of multiple rapes, all indignant at the colony’s patriarchal order that failed them. The stakes are high. The women will be expected to forgive their assailants once they’re bailed out — per the elders’ interpretation of their Mennonite religion. Its magnanimous tradition of nonresistance, forged amid the religious violence of 16th-century Europe, has been used in modern times to force victims to reconcile with abusers.

If the women won’t forgive, they can expect exile — from the colony and, they’re told, from heaven. Still, the women can’t find it in themselves to forgive. One of them asks if some forgiveness can only be offered by God, who surely wouldn’t expect it from the parents of a savagely violated child.

The women consider another option: staying and fighting the attackers and their enablers. But the women still hold to their Mennonite pacifism — even though one has already taken a scythe to the assailants who raped her, infected her toddler and drove her sister to suicidal despair.

A final option is to leave. But the illiterate women have never even seen a map. “We don’t know where to go,” says one. “We don’t even know where we are!” says another. At one point, one of the colony’s old dotards asks suspiciously what’s going on. Nothing, one of the participants tells him; it’s just “women talking.”

Yet such talk is revolutionary. The women even voice a manifesto of equality and education for women and a religion of love not fear.

Narrating all this, surprisingly, is a man — August Epp, who has his own traumatic history. August knows that when he was born, due to the circumstances of his conception, the attendants threw his mother’s uterus out the window. The backstory of this cruel hypocrisy unfolds only later.

August and his parents are expelled, something the sin-conscious boy thinks is due to his stealing a neighbor’s pears. His “confessions” will remind readers of that famous pear thief, St. Augustine. Both guilt-wracked men experience healing grace through their saintly mothers, but it’s hard to imagine either of them writing the other’s book. August’s mother Monica assures him he’s a “child of a God — a loving God, in spite of what anybody said.”

August grows up in Britain, educated but eventually abandoned and tormented in prison. He returns to Bolivia to see the childhood friend he adores, Ona, now pregnant from rape. Theirs is not so much a love story as a story of love.

Before the women begin talking in the hayloft, Ona recruits August to record their “minutes.” The purpose is unclear until the end, when August finds his own calling, one of teaching a new generation of young men about these bold, remarkable Mennonite women.

Such women are talking in real life, too, and we’d all do well to listen.

Peter Smith is the PG’s religion editor: petersmith@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1416; Twitter @PG_PeterSmith.

First Published: August 2, 2019, 2:00 p.m.

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Miriam Toews, author of "Women Talking."  (Carol Loewen)
"Women Talking," by Miriam Toews.
Carol Loewen
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