Starting the conversation about ghost rape
Miriam Toews’ extraordinary new novel “Women Talking” is bound to get readers to explore some fundamental issues
They were called “ghost rapes.” You might remember them. About a decade ago, an isolated sect of Mennonites in Bolivia made headlines around the world when a group of men were convicted of secretly sedating then raping women and girls in their community as young as 9 years old.
“I don’t like this term, the ‘ghost rapes,’ because it really demeans and belittles exactly what happened, the severity and the gravity of it,” writer Miriam Toews says in an interview. “Ghosts weren’t raping these women; men from the community were.”
The trial offered a rare and sordid glimpse into the lives of these people, an event that inspired Toews’ compelling new novel “Women Talking,” which came out Tuesday. Initially, some male members of the community, she says, dismissed the horrific assaults as “the result of wild, female imagination.”
“These Mennonite communities, these colonies, are self policed. This was one of the few, few times that the cops were called in, and from what I understand, it was basically to protect the men from revenge attacks, etc. So my book is an imagined response to these attacks and the questions that (the women) have and the choices that they’re faced with.”
As the book begins, most of the men in the community are away in the big city dealing with the court case, leaving the women to experience an unusual bit of freedom.
With no men around to silence them, they are able to talk freely — to meet and decide how they’re going to deal with the situation.
Over two days — they only have two days until the men return — they meet in a hayloft, one of the few private places they know, to wrangle over three choices: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. They also have three things they want to achieve: to protect their children, keep their faith, and think.
These apparently simple choices give plenty of scope for the women to explore some fundamental issues that concern us all: What is freedom? What is forgiveness? What does it mean to be a good Mennonite — or, broadly, to live by your principles?
“Women Talking” is no ordinary book, and even before hitting the shelves it’s got people, not just women, talking.
Some who received advance copies, including Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, have placed it firmly in the camp of feminist books that will become part of a canon that questions the patriarchy.
“This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel … could be right out of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’” enthused Atwood on Twitter.
“I have yet to read a more scathing indictment of patriarchal violence,” wrote Laura van den Berg, author of “The Third Hotel.”
“It’s hard to say what I make of it,” Toews says about this early reaction. “I don’t really think in those terms. I write the book that I need to write, and people — readers, marketing people, reviewers — will describe it in their own way.”
The women in the hayloft dispute the idea that they are part of a resistance, or that they’re trying to develop a manifesto — political words that make some of them bristle. Yet that’s exactly what they’re talking about. “Women Talking” becomes a lesson in the historically pacifist Mennonite people, and the revolutions and massacres that drove them from Russia to Canada and then South America.
“Especially the older women, they don’t want to think of themselves as revolutionaries,” says Toews. “To them that means armed, violent and sinful.”
The women, in the end, make their decision. One of the characters, Salome (pronounced, Toews corrects me laughingly, SAH-loam after a friend of her mother’s, not Sah-lo-MAY as in the bible), uses some of the men’s tactics to keep the women quiet. “Certainly the idea of spraying women in their sleep with an animal anesthetic and then raping them is wrong,” says Toews. “But what (Salome) did? It’s just another question, and I’m curious. Hopefully it’ll create some kind of discussion.”
That discussion might include questions that hit home for today’s #MeToo movement, such as, is she corrupted by power? Or is she simply using the means at her disposal to get by in a world that she has to live in but had no voice in creating?
Interestingly, the book is narrated in the first person by a man named August. The conceit is that the resulting book is the “minutes” of the meeting.
A man taking down the words of these women, all things considered, seems a strange choice. But Toews points out that most of these women, while not unintelligent, are uneducated and illiterate. And the language they speak, Low German, is unwritten. She needed a character who was able to write and translate, and whom the women could trust.
The creation of August is also a way for her to show that men suffer under the pressures of an authoritarian system. “What is it to be a man in a community like this? Certainly August is considered suspect because he’s a teacher, he’s a bit effeminate, he’s not like the other men of the colony and he’s mocked.”
Despite its weighty subject matter, “Women Talking” is not without humour — though that’s no surprise to those who know Toews’ writing.
“All My Puny Sorrows,” her fictional yet autobiographical last book about her sister’s suicide, was brimming with humour that helped lighten some of the darker themes and moments. That one won the Writers’ Trust fiction prize and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. She’s also won other awards, including the Governor General’s Award for her novel about growing up in a Mennonite community, “A Complicated Kindness.”
She opened up, in “Puny Sorrows,” channels to talk about mental illness, suicide and assisted death. In “Complicated Kindness,” ways of talking about growing up in and rebelling against a restrictive society.
“These are my people, essentially, and I’ve been to these colonies and I grew up in the original Russian Mennonite settlement in Canada, the most conservative Mennonite community in Canada,” says Toews. “I’ve seen the damage that this authoritarianism and fundamentalism can do.”
But she points out that there are beautiful things about the Mennonite religion: ideals including pacifism, charity and collective living. While she is a secular Mennonite herself, she misses the singing. “I enjoyed inserting those songs, the hymns and the prayers, too, and even the scripture — some of the beautiful scripture — into ‘Women Talking,’ ” she says.
In the end, this is a personal story. “I had an amazing childhood,” she says. But as she grew up, she started seeing “the hypocrisy, the uncharitableness, the lack of freedom, the lack of voice, the lack of agency, especially for girls and women, the rules, the culture of shame and silence and guilt and punishment.”
Against these things, she says, you either end up toeing the line or fighting. “And I suppose I’ve been fighting for a very, very long time now.”
Toews, now 54, recently became a grandmother for the second time. She lives in Toronto; her mother lives here, too, and is an elder for a “very liberal, very nurturing, very supportive” church.
The women in the loft are based on women she knows. These are, after all, her people. As to the book, “I’d say it’s just a bunch of women talking, about important things, things that are very, very profoundly important to them.”
Despite the intention not to be political, there is an imperative about the book that illustrates what good art is and should be: because she wrote the book, Toews and I are talking about it. And so we, too, are talking about these issues — art imitates life.
“Women Talking” becomes an invitation for the rest of us to engage in dialogue and ask some fundamental questions of ourselves.
And, perhaps, to laugh and keep fighting against hypocrisy, uncharitableness and a lack of voice, especially for girls and women.