Women Talking

I finished Women Talking last month and I've been thinking about it a lot. It's a novel by Miriam Towes about a Mennonite colony in South America that has experience the trauma of drugged nighttime rapes of the women by the men and boys they love, depend on, and trust. When the book begins the rapes have already happened, have been discovered, and the men are now asking the women to forgive them so they can move on as a community. The women have been meeting to decided collectively if they will 

1) do nothing 

2) leave or 

3) stay and forgive. 

They do not know how to write, they do not speak Spanish or English, they don't have much of a formal education, so leaving is daunting. They invite a man who rejoined the colony after the rapes to document and take meeting notes for them, since they cannot, and he, it turns out, is the narrator of the book. I thought it was an interesting choice to have a male point of view for this, and although he is a sympathetic character towards the women, his deep love and desire for one of them, his being raised in the colony, and his being a man means that you must always as a reader remember that this story is being told through a warped lens. 

This is the narrators recollection of talking with a librarian in Europe, after his family was banished from the colony and after he had received a more mainstream education and a grander perspective outside of the conservative lens of Mennonitism. He is a child, and is explaining that he had stolen something and was still haunted by his actions:  

“I asked if I could put back the stones after god had found me, and punished me. I was so exhausted from anticipating punishment, and I wanted to get it over with.” 20:37 

Why do I feel this way all the time? This seems to be a thing with people from intense religions or abusive childhoods, but I wasn't in either of those things. 

The Librarian also says this later in the conversation: 

“She responded that she could understand why my mother had said what she did, but that if she had been there, if she had been my mother, she would have said something else. She would have told me that I wasn’t normal, that I was innocent, yes, but that I had an unusually deep need to be forgiven, even though I had one nothing wrong. Most of us, she said, absolve ourselves of responsibility for change by sentimentalizing our past. And then we live freely, happily. Or if not all together happily, without tremendous anguish. I would have helped you feel forgiven." 

"Forgiven for what though exactly, for stealing, for drawing naked girls?" 

“No, no, said the librarian. "Forgiven for being alive. For being in the world. For the arrogance and the futility of remaining alive. For the ridiculousness of it, the stench of it, the unreasonableness of it. That’s your feeling, she added. Your internal logic.”  She went on to say, “doubt and uncertainty and questioning are inextricably bound together with faith. A rich existence. A way of being in the world, wouldn’t you say?” 

I would have taken more notes, but I listened to this as an audio book and had to hand transcribe these bits, which took forever. It was a beautiful book, filled with internal monologues and theological, morally argumentative,  and some simple conversational dialogues. There was some Plautdietsch in it too, which is Plain German. I've always thought that the little German passed down the line through my Mennonite family was simply bastardized German, deformed from the game of telephone that is being several generations removed from your country of origin, but I recognized some of the words in my ear. I am not Mennonite, but considering how insular and inbred the culture is, I'm certainly ethnically Mennonite. I may have gotten slightly emotional learning more about people that I come from, even in such dire context. 

It's a movie now, a star studded cast, and I'd like to see it. I'm glad I read the book first.