March 12, 2020 29
justice, some consensus version of
right and wrong. I mean, nobody
‘gets her story told.’” She makes
air quotes.... “What happened,
happened. You have to figure out
how you’re going to live with it.”Set in a fictional Mennonite colony
called Molotschna in Bolivia, Toews’s
Women Talking begins after the dis-
covery that at least three hundred
Mennonite women and girls were anes-
thetized and violently raped while un-
conscious by eight men in their colony.
The novel is based on real events that
took place in the ultraconservative
Manitoba Colony in Bolivia, where
eight men raped some 130 women over
a period of four years.
Through the narrator, August Epp,
an outcast who recently returned to the
colony and a victim of abuse himself, we
learn that a rape occurred “on average”
every three or four days, and that the
women were blamed by the elders for
their wounds or told they’d imagined
them. “In the year after I arrived,” Epp
says, “the women described dreams
they’d been having, and then eventu-
ally, as the pieces fell into place, they
came to understand that they were col-
lectively dreaming one dream, and that
it wasn’t a dream at all.” The culprits
were apprehended (as they were in real
life) when one woman stayed awake all
night and “caught a young man prying
open her bedroom window, holding a
jug of belladonna spray.” Mennonite
men normally police themselves, but
one woman (whose toddler daughter
was discovered to have an STD) at-
tacked a rapist with a scythe, and a
group of men had accidentally killed
another. So Peters, the bishop of the
colony, asks that the eight culprits be
imprisoned by the local authorities for
their own safety.
The novel opens with the other men
of the colony on their way to bail out
the rapists, “and when the perpetrators
return,” Epp writes,
the women of Molotschna will
be given the opportunity to for-
give these men, thus guarantee-
ing everyone’s place in heaven. If
the women don’t forgive the men,
says Peters, the women will have
to leave the colony for the outside
world, of which they know nothing.
The women have very little time,
only two days, to organize their
response.The novel is the story of their delib-
erations over those two days. It is also
the story of how those deliberations
are mediated—first by the narrator,
who writes minutes of their meeting in
English at the request of Ona, one of
his childhood friends, and second by
the women’s heady, idiosyncratic argu-
ments, which transcend their subordi-
nation and illiteracy. Eight women from
two families take the matter up in se-
cret; they meet in a hayloft belonging to
a senile Mennonite and, after washing
one another’s feet, start debating. The
women initially define their options as
Do Nothing, Stay and Fight, or Leave.
But the conversation digs past the pres-
sures of the present into philosophical
first principles: how to argue, and on
what basis. When the prickly Mariche
observes, for instance, that staying and
fighting would mean betraying their
vow of pacificism—and would require
them to forgive the men anyway if
they wanted God’s forgiveness—Ona
wonders if coerced forgiveness counts:
“And isn’t the lie of pretending to for-
give with words but not with one’s heart
a more grievous sin than to simply not
forgive?”
The women are isolated by design.
They do not know how to read, they
speak no language other than Plaut-
dietsch, a Low German dialect, which
makes the Leave option almost un-
thinkable; they cannot so much as read
a map. Their theological knowledge
comes exclusively from the men whose
crimes they are now expected to forgive.
They know this, and they’re willing to
tackle the epistemological uncertainty
of leaving. The women have consider-
able practice achieving precision on
improvised terms. Neitje, one of the
younger girls, may not know math, but
she is the “reigning champion of know-
ing how much of anything—flour, salt,
lard—will fit into any given container
so that nothing and no extra space is
ever wasted.” Scarface Janz, one of
the women who votes for Do Nothing,
is “the resident bonesetter, and also a
woman known for having an excellent
eye for measuring distances.”
Sexual abuse also isolates the vic-
tim, this too by design. What’s strik-
ing about Women Talking is both how
clearly the scale of the assaults enables
unexpectedly communal discussions of
a post-traumatic future and how hard
it is to reach a consensus. The novel
dwells (gently, lightly) on how different
people approach living in society after
being attacked. The women struggle
to build a shared set of terms without
letting trauma simply flatten their dif-
ferences. When the elderly Agata cites
Ecclesiastes, for instance, Salome—the
avenging mother who attacked the at-
tackers with a scythe—is unimpressed,
both by the citation and because of the
paucity of relevant biblical passages
involving women. Stymied, they turn
to prosaic animal analogies closer to
home. Greta, another elder, observes
that her beloved horses fled an aggres-
sive dog. They “don’t organize meet-
ings to determine their next course of
action,” she says. “They run.” When
one woman laughs and objects that
they are not animals, Greta says, “We
have been preyed upon like animals;
perhaps we should respond in kind.”
“Do you mean we should run away?”
asks Ona. “Or kill our attackers?”
Salome asks.Interpretations like these proliferate,
and so do debates about the interpre-
tations. Agata tells Greta that she has
in fact seen horses confront and kill
their attackers. She volunteers a story
about a mother raccoon who lost three
babies to a dog and avenged them by
leaving three others for him as bait.
Two days after the dog’s disappear-
ance, its owner came home to find “one
leg from his dog, and also the dog’s
head. With empty eye sockets.” Greta
asks sarcastically whether this means
they should leave their most vulnerable
colony members to be dismembered.
“What the story proves is that animals
can fight back and they can run away,”
Agata replies.
These are the provocative and some-
times frustrating arguments the women
talk their way through while sitting on
milk buckets, lighting cigarettes, braid-
ing one another’s hair, bickering, anddreading the return of the men. The
decision must be arrived at through
shared philosophical and theological
parameters that they’re developing
even as they evaluate how the attack
has changed things, and how much. At
the beginning, they have a common
theology. By the end, though they have
reached an accord, one of the oldest
will announce that she is no longer a
Mennonite.
Rarely, in the course of these philo-
sophical discussions, is the question of
pain confronted directly, but mutilated
bodies function as a basso ostinato. The
skin between a girl’s socks and the hem
of her dress reveals chigger and black
fly bites and scars from “rope burns or
from cuts.” A woman’s finger has been
“bitten off at the knuckle.” And yet it
feels unfair to group these details in
this way, so careful is the novel in intro-
ducing such images only when they are
strictly relevant, and without sensation-
alism or comment.
One of the most important charac-
ters, Ona, keeps a pail next to her to
vomit in; she is pregnant. We discover
this consequence of her rape on page- We will not learn that her sister
Mina hanged herself until page 57—or
that at the funeral, Ona herself slid the
kerchief around her sister’s neck down
an inch to reveal the rope burns. Or
that the cause of her suicide was not
simply finding her daughter Neitje’s
unconscious body smeared with blood
and shit and semen after one of the at-
tacks, but the bishop Peters’s insistence
that it was the work of Satan. At an-
other point, the grandmotherly Greta
removes her painfully large dentures,
and we learn that when she had cried
out during an assault, “the attacker
covered her mouth with such force that
nearly all her teeth, which were old
and fragile, were crushed to dust.” We
learn, too, that “the traveller who gave
Greta her false teeth was escorted out
of Molotschna by Peters, who then for-
bade outside helpers from entering the
colony.”
If Toews clarifies the smallness of
the world these women inhabit, their
radicalism sometimes far exceeds our
own. At one point Ona, who says she
“doesn’t believe in authority, period,
because authority makes people cruel,”
will suggest they formulate a mani-
festo. Its provisions are modest: “Men
and women will make all decisions for
the colony collectively. Women will be
allowed to think. Girls will be taught to
read and write.” “What will happen if
the men refuse to meet our demands?”
Greta asks. “We will kill them,” Ona
says. The two younger girls “gasp, then
smile tentatively.” (Ona’s resolution
collapses.)
There is dark humor: one woman
volunteers that she had a dream of find-
ing a hard candy in the dirt and want-
ing to wash and eat it. Before she could,
a two-hundred-pound pig pinned her
against the wall while she screamed.
“That’s ridiculous,” says Mariche. “We
don’t have hard candy in Molotschna.”
There are terrible moments: some of
the women blame Mariche for not stop-
ping her husband, Klaas, from beat-
ing her and her children; she is beaten
again during their deliberations, and
partly because of them. Salome, the
mother of the toddler with an STD and
guardian of her dead sister’s daughter
Neitje, is blamed by Neitje herself for