“An Act of Female Imagination”: Women Talking by Miriam Toews
CW: rape, sexual abuse
It was the feminist poet Adrienne Rich who said that women’s connections to each other are “the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.” Feminists have always known that patriarchy is designed to divide and conquer -- to keep women from, well, talking: to each other, and about the violent acts (or the specter of them) that produce their submission and compliance.
Miriam Toews’s novel Women Talking is based on real events: the repeated drugging and raping of over 150 women and girls in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia over the course of four years. (In 2018, there were reported to be 140,000 Mennonites in Bolivia, most of German and Dutch descent. According to the BBC, their colonies are “agricultural powerhouses” for the Bolivian state.) The real-life Manitoba colony, fictionalized as the Molotschna colony in Toews’ story, broke into the news starting in 2009 when a group of men was reported to the Bolivian authorities for rape. The course of testimony in court revealed not only the scope of the crimes and the number of victims (of all ages), but also that the rapists used animal anesthetic to drug their victims before then tying them up and raping them. In 2011, seven men were convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison, along with an eighth man who supplied the drugs. The story, of course, doesn’t end there; advocacy from within the colony has complicated matters in recent years, as members use religious freedom as grounds to demand the men’s release and the colony’s ability to forgive on their own terms.
To make a work of art about the horror of the rapes themselves would be one thing. What Toews has done is not that. Rather, she has made an exquisite frame for these acts -- and a frame for justice for these survivors, and for all survivors of sexual violence.
Her first act of framing is a prefatory author’s note, in which Toews describes the real-life events on which her book is based. In it, she calls her story “both a reaction through fiction” and “an act of female imagination.” I have to guess that this latter turn of phrase is a reference to a major 2013 VICE story on the rapes, in which the journalist writes that men in the colony referred to the women’s reports as “wild female imagination.”
Toews’ novel is indeed a feat of imagination, but so are her characters’ grapplings with the aftermath of their abuse, and in particular, their options going forward. This is the second act of framing on Toews’ part: she centers the entire book on a two-day period of deliberation among a group of women in the colony. As she tells it, when the eight perpetrators were discovered, the colony leadership planned to take matters into its own hands, but “it soon became apparent that the men’s lives were in danger” when one was attacked with a scythe and another was hanged to death. Now, the men have been sent to the city to be arrested, “for their own safety, presumably.” The women are determining what to do, as word reaches them that this exile is temporary. They conceive of three possibilities:
Do Nothing.
Stay and Fight.
Leave.
Here is where Toews’ master stroke must be revealed: her narrator. The story is told from the point-of-view of a man. “My name is August Epps -- irrelevant for all purposes, other than that I’ve been appointed the minute-taker for the women’s meetings because the women are illiterate and unable to do it themselves,” his narrative opens. Indeed, the women’s illiteracy is emphasized here not only through his introduction but through the fact that their three options, listed above, were in fact drawn pictorially: Do Nothing, as a horizon; Stay and Fight, as figures facing off with knives; and Leave, as a horse drawn from behind.
August is a former member of the colony whose family was excommunicated and exiled when he was ten years old. Now an adult, he has renounced his parents and returned to Molotschna as an English teacher (for the boys). August lives in a shed because he is single and still somewhat of an outsider. But he has a friendship with one woman, Ona Freisen, and it is Ona who asks him to come listen and take notes during their deliberations. “Minutes of the meeting,” August calls his document, which begins with his own personal narrative and then becomes his description of the conversation that unfolds during June 6 and 7, 2009.
As readers of this blog will know, I like to go on and on about narrative framings of this nature. The indirect approach Toews has taken to reflecting these survivors’ subjectivities is intentional. Instinctually, we can think of August as another patriarch, mediating the testimonies of the victims. Sure, he may not be calling their stories “wild female imagination,” but he doesn’t have to -- indeed, he doesn’t have to weigh in at all on the actual crimes. Instead, he simply has to reflect the words, body language, and interactions of the deliberators.
But Toews is up to even more with her male narrator. In a story that is apparently about the violence experienced by women whose evidence is indirect and testimonial, the question of whether or not the attacks happened is a foregone conclusion. I should specify: that for a crime attributed by the community to demons, to Satan, or to ghosts, the book never questions the fact that human men in the colony committed the rapes. The biases up for scrutiny are not the women’s, nor the colony elders’ (all men). The primary bias before us is August’s. The book is a study of that bias, that agenda, which both obfuscates the matter at hand and, perhaps, shapes it.
And so this becomes a book not about women talking, but about men listening. Can August really hear the women talking? Can we?
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