A Mennonite #MeToo novel
If there is a book that can be most naturally pegged to the nation’s current cultural moment, to the continued pervasiveness of sexual assault, it would be Miriam Toews’ latest novel.
The very title of the Canadian writer’s eighth book, “Women Talking” (Bloomsbury Publishing; 216 pages), can serve as shorthand for the #MeToo movement that was born out of women deciding to begin conversations with each other, and with the world, about hidden experiences of assault. Toews’ new work is indeed centered on the same act, and yet starkly different.
“I had finished writing it at the end of 2016,” Toews says by phone, on the road during her book tour. “I had finished writing it before the #MeToo movement.”
The book takes place within two days and almost solely focuses on a meeting of a group of women in the aftermath of assault. But the setting is a hayloft in a remote Mennonite colony, which, though it is 2009, is almost entirely shut off from the modern world.
Beginning in 2005, women in the colony began waking up in the morning disoriented, bruised and bloodied. They were being raped, purportedly by “ghosts,” as the colony believed, punishing them for their sins. But at the start of the novel, the more than 300 women — from toddlers to grandmothers — who have been attacked over the years have recently discovered that a group of men within the colony was responsible, knocking them unconscious with an anesthetic spray in the dead of night.
In the barn, a small number of the women deliberate on a plan of action while the men are away in the city, posting bail for the perpetrators.
This narrative framework is set up as an “imagined response” to reality, as Toews, herself an excommunicated Mennonite, learned about such a history that had actually occurred during those years in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia.
“These rumors were sort of being spread through the Mennonite grapevine, as it were. We had heard about them and we were talking about them, and we were horrified, of course, like everybody else,” she says. “But, I guess, for those of us who are familiar with these conservative communities, we weren’t particularly surprised.”
Toews wanted to examine why the conditions of this society were ripe for such brutality. In a sense, she wanted to probe the culture she grew up in: one of control that emphasized “silence and shame and guilt and punishment” — elements of her upbringing that she says her writing has always returned to.
In her novel, the voices of eight women perform this questioning among themselves. Toews avoids the scenes of rape and the trials, and instead focuses strictly on them deciding between three options: leave, fight or do nothing. Their conversations often slide into philosophical and semantic queries, as they reconsider the basis of their entire worldview. But we receive their dialogue through the lens of a male character, August Epp, transcribing the meeting.
“I like the idea of women coming together as philosophers, and August, the narrator, bearing witness, sort of being the secretary in a sense — that inversion of roles, that he’s there to learn, to listen,” Toews says.
The circumstances are particular and far removed from modern situations. But its themes of patriarchal hierarchy and violence are frighteningly relevant.
Toews, though, often imbues the novel with warmth and laughter. “We need to believe that things can change, that men and boys and women and girls, we can somehow find a way of living together without violence, without shame,” Toews says.
It is a strain of all her work, a light within the darkness. Toews first began work on “Women Talking” in 2009, but stopped after her sister’s suicide, which she wrote about in her last novel, “All My Puny Sorrows.” Another early book of hers, “Swing Low,” was a memoir about her father, who also took his own life.
“With all of my books, really, there’s that idea that I have when I think of the readers. I think, ‘Well, we can go through these dark times together. You come with me, take my hand, and we’ll go together. We’ll go down. And we’ll go down. And we’ll go down. And it’ll be dark and it’ll be intense, and we can think about things,’ ” she says.
“We can also come out of it at the end. We can come out of it with some kind of understanding, some kind of plan, some kind of hope.”