Women Talking: Fast and Loose With the Truth (Part 2)
This is part of a four-part series. Read Part 1. Read Part 2. Read Part 3. Read Part 4.
Origins
Like Miriam Toews, I am the child of Mennonite parents. From what I’ve gathered, several generations ago both our families came from somewhere in or near Russia, but after arriving in Canada, my ancestors, like many other Mennonite immigrants, made an exilic detour to the warm south, whereas Toews’ parents settled and stayed in Canada.
My father grew up in a colony like the one depicted in Women Talking and many of the members of my church grew up in similar colonies in Mexico, Belize, Paraguay, and Bolivia. In my role as a pastor, I sit on the board of a Mennonite denomination that does mission work in this exact region of Bolivia. I have been in the area myself, including time spent in these colonies. I also have a decent grasp of the Low German language (and I become semi-fluent when I spend time in Low German-only environments).
My expectation was that as I read Women Talking, I would be reading a story of people who can reasonably be described as my people. As it turns out, my expectations were far from fulfilled.
Positive
I admire the aspirations of the author. Imagining and then depicting Old Colony women as having both a voice and agency over their own fate is good to see. This is sorely lacking in South American Mennonite colonies where there is indeed much verbal, physical, spiritual and sexual abuse, most of it committed by men against women.
The book and movie get the visuals mostly right, although clothing mandates can vary from colony to colony and (rather surprisingly) brightly coloured dresses are not uncommon for younger women and girls, which is something you don’t see in the movie.
It was also entertaining to see some of the delightful idiosyncrasies of the Low German language and its often creatively unique terminology in print.
But that is about where the positives end, and among the several aspects of the book that are wrong, they can’t be passed off as “a bit of stretch” but must be said to be completely fabricated.
Names and Naming
First, it would have been very easy for the author to give her characters names that reflect those commonly issued in the colonies. There you will not find, as you do in the book, people named August, Monica, Balthasar, Salome, Julius, Ingersoll, etc. Mennonites are very strict about names and repeatedly use the same names on principle.
In these colonies, there is a narrow list of first names (John, Peter, Isaac, Abe, Margaret, Anna, etc.) as well as last names (Friesen, Peters, Froese, etc). They are so strict about this that when a child dies, often the next child born of the same gender will be given the same name. These interesting naming practices themselves could have been used as engaging material for the book and would have given it a greater ring of truthfulness.
These naming conventions continue into the present. I live in a small town that has for decades received Old Colony Mennonites seeking to escape the poverty and colony religious system in South American countries. In our town, it is not enough to simply say someone’s first and last name because these first and last names - sometimes both at the same time - are shared by numerous others.
Elevated Dialogue
The dialogue depicted between the women is unlikely in its content and construction. Toews tries to explain this in the novel by saying that before she left the colony, August’s mother, Monica (she should have tried Abe’s mom, Margaret) ran a secret school for the girls in which she taught them, among other things, ancient Greek poetry. Ok, but where did Monica obtain this deep knowledge of the world? It’s a plot device that serves the desire of the author to inject a philosophical flavour into the women’s conversations instead of dignifying the intelligence of the women by depicting the uniqueness of their real-life conversations.
This same character, August, has a backstory that is an example of unintended humour in the book. When August’s parents were excommunicated from the colony, they moved to England where August received a university education and participated in political activities for which he was imprisoned. It makes for an interesting backstory but the probability of anyone following such a path out of an Old Colony Mennonite community is minuscule to nonexistent.
The women in these colonies are by no means witless, but they are largely ignorant of anything that exists outside their colony. The vast majority of both men and women in these colonies are extremely hard-working - something that Mennonites always seem to become known for in whatever part of the world they plant themselves. Because of this, there is precious little time to indulge in philosophical debates, and even if there was, the literacy rate in these colonies, especially among women, is close to zero.
Again, this doesn’t mean they are stupid or unintelligent. That’s far from reality, but their deep knowledge is not broad knowledge.
This is part of a four-part series. Read Part 1. Read Part 2. Read Part 3. Read Part 4.
In future instalments, I will address pacifism, the Low German language, how the movie version measurably redeemed the book, and finally, an appeal to those who want to help the real-life victims of the true story.