Storytelling and Cruelty: A Review of Miriam Toews’s Women Talking
Any ripped-from-the-headlines premise faces the question of distance: How can an author access real events faithfully and effectively without further violating the people who experienced them? In recent years, a number of novelists have adopted varying degrees of remoteness in their fictionalized accounts of highly publicized female trauma. Emma Cline’s The Girls sidesteps the lurid and well-trodden ground of the Manson Family murders to meditate on gender and identity; Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny takes a more literal approach to a recent child murder in New York, changing superficial details while tracking each intimate step toward the act itself. Now, with Women Talking, Miriam Toews presents another perspective, drawing on an uncharacteristically gruesome inciting incident to craft an ambitious novel that circumvents shock value in favour of a subtler rumination on language and power.
Based on the true story of "ghost rapes" in a Bolivian Mennonite colony, Women Talking begins in the wake of an appalling discovery: a small group of male colony members have been using animal tranquilizers to rape hundreds of women and girls in their sleep. Worse yet, after years of dismissing the women’s complaints as fantasies or the result of demonic possession, the rest of the colony’s men have set off to raise bail money for the newly jailed rapists. In their absence, a number of women gather in the loft of a barn to vote on how to respond. But despite their frequent pulls back into the drudgery of chores and childcare, the women take a surprisingly metaphysical stance over the course of their furtive two-day debate, covering everything from the meaning of personhood to the potential for love in patriarchy to the healing and destructive capacities of narrative. Reared on scripture, these are women attuned to the power of the Word—and it’s in her close attention to language that Toews elevates their suffering beyond the grim confines of her fictional Molotschna colony.
Reared on scripture, these are women attuned to the power of the Word—and it’s in her close attention to language that Toews elevates their suffering beyond the grim confines of her fictional Molotschna colony.
In a broad sense, Women Talking shares an arc with Toews’s best-known novel, A Complicated Kindness. Both narratives present a choice between the repressive but known quantity of a small religious community and the dangers of an alien outside world. But while Kindness’s narrator, Nomi, comes to her decision internally, here the women’s choices are laid out for a vote: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. Ironically for a novel so preoccupied with words, Women Talking opens with a trio of corresponding illustrations—an empty horizon, a man and a woman holding knives, and the rear end of a horse—meant to serve as visual aids for the largely illiterate women. Displayed opposite a blank page, the stark, cartoonish drawings hold a sinister humour that resurfaces in the voice of August Epp. Gone is Nomi’s defiant teenage snark; in its place is the grim, self-effacing wit of a man “irrelevant for all purposes” beyond his place as meeting minute-taker. Here is where Toews makes her boldest choice, filtering the subjugated women’s debates through yet another male voice. But August doesn’t quite fit into the ranks of Molotschna’s domineering men. Excommunicated at a young age only to return after a prison stint in England, he occupies an ambiguous place in the community, using his teaching degree to ensure the colony’s boys learn English. Perhaps her narrator’s gender and relative worldliness allow Toews a distance that encodes her inability to speak for the story’s real victims. In any case, the women’s apparent need for a man to plot their escape from men is only one of the novel’s many fruitful contradictions—and if it provokes some initial indignation, so much richer the eventual harvest.
Among the starkest contradictions in Women Talking is the clash between the women’s fierce intelligence and the unthinking subservience expected of them in colony life. Much time is spent debating their own humanity: do they have more in common with the animals that share their second-class status, or the men who have used their higher position to inflict inhumane suffering? While the question features throughout their conversations, a subtler nod to their liminality appears in the form of names. Like Kindness’s stifled Nomi/No Me and All My Puny Sorrows’s diminished Elf (nickname of Elfrieda von Riesen), Molotschna’s characters find their struggles written into their very identifiers. While the names Autje, Ona, and Salome will read as quite exotic to a North American audience, the most common women’s names, Ruth and Cheryl, belong to a pair of horses. This sly blurring of lines is Toews at her best: empathetic, darkly funny, and keenly aware of the power of language to draw and negate boundaries.
Women Talking is a deeply felt novel, employing sparse physical detail to devastating effect.
August, too, is haunted by contradictions beyond his gentle maleness. Given how badly the women have been betrayed by their husbands and brothers, his origin story—one mired in abuse of power—holds few surprises, and emphasizes the tenuous link between social status and moral authority. His is a tale of punishment and compassion, loyalty and abandonment, jail and birdsong. Even the crime for which he was imprisoned features a strange clash of rustic and modern in the form of an urban police horse—an apt symbol, for horses back in Molotschna are hopeful figures, beasts of burden whose silence holds their masters’ dreams and sorrows. Accordingly, in the novel’s climax, the women draw inspiration from the silence of animals, another nod to the link between oppressed parties, and to the distinctly Christian power of the meek.
Alongside Toews’s skillful deployment of silence is an acute attention to language in all its intellectual and emotional capacity. Even positioned firmly outside the events of the women’s trauma, Women Talking is a deeply felt novel, employing sparse physical detail to devastating effect. Take Toews’s description of Greta Loewen, the eldest victim:
The knuckles on Greta’s hand stand out like knobs, like desert buttes on a cracked surface. Her false teeth are too big for her mouth, and painful. She removes them and sets them down on the plywood … When Greta had cried out, the attacker covered her mouth with such force that nearly all her teeth, which were old and fragile, were crushed to dust.
One of the novel’s only explicit references to the attacks, it’s a visceral image echoed a hundred or so pages later when Klaas Friesen, Mariche’s brutal husband, turns up with a rotten molar. Such callbacks are all the more resonant for their scarcity. And there is more than just despair to be found in Molotschna’s physical realm: hair and its various coverings form a hopeful motif, with inseparable teenagers Autje and Netje binding theirs into a single braid, and free-spirited “devil’s daughter” Ona running with her headscarf pushed back. Such moments of solidarity and defiance mitigate what could otherwise be a monotonous bleakness. While her concerns transcend the bounds of her insular setting, Toews draws deeply from the twin wells of storytelling: the ticking clock (a strict two-day countdown keeps even lengthy digressions suspenseful) and a rich, if restrained, specificity.
Much of the dialogue in Women Talking is marked by the same restraint. “[O]ur inability to read or write puts us at a great disadvantage in any negotiation over the interpretation of the Bible,” notes the kindly Ona during one heated biblical debate, an understatement both heartbreaking and blackly funny in its simple truth. At another point, Salome, whose three-year-old daughter counts among the victims of the nighttime assaults, declares a discussion about the definition of the word “love” to be “Meaningless! Particularly in this fucking context!” Lodged in the midst of a typically dry and cerebral debate, the burst of profanity is stirring for its rarity. These are women raised to choose their words carefully. Even the practical Agata takes care to “luxuriate on the proper name for what is ailing her” (an edema). Throughout the book, the women distinguish between love and obedience, preference and obligation, power and authority, feeling and being. After a lifetime of voicelessness, insisting on precise language becomes something of a crusade. Theirs is anything but a Problem That Has No Name.
Do victims hold any responsibility for re-educating the next generation of men? What does love mean within a social structure predicated on inequality? Who, or what, is to blame for rape other than its perpetrators?
It’s in this very naming, however, that Toews occasionally falters, drawing too readily from a vocabulary that can be difficult to swallow in such a backwoods setting. Take the following diatribe, delivered by Salome:
The entire colony of Molotschna is built on the foundation of patriarchy (translator’s note: Salome didn’t use the word ‘patriarchy’ —I inserted it in the place of Salome’s curse, of mysterious origin, loosely translated as ‘talking through the flowers’), where the women live out their days as mute, submissive and obedient servants. … We are not members … we are commodities. (Again, a translator’s note about the word ‘commodities’: similar situation to above.)
Translator’s notes aside, these sorts of sophisticated tangents—and there are many—lend a distractingly modern tone to much of the dialogue. Terms like “exhortation,” “common denominator,” and “pernicious ideology” can make the barn seem more like a university classroom than a meeting place for illiterate women raised under strict fundamentalist rule. At times, Toews’ reliance on the bookish August as interlocutor seems less like a necessary distancing from her subjects and more like a refusal to engage with them on their own terms. (There are less abstract problems with August, too—how, for example, is he writing these long-winded digressions by hand in real time, as he claims to be?)
Yet for all that Women Talking can push the boundaries of plausibility, it’s in the women’s winding discussions about love, duty, and freedom that Toews finds broader relevance. Do victims hold any responsibility for re-educating the next generation of men? What does love mean within a social structure predicated on inequality? Who, or what, is to blame for rape other than its perpetrators? Placed in a setting alien to most readers, these questions jar in their familiarity. Even the phrase “not all men” makes an appearance, albeit without the hashtag. Newly aware of the danger in casting evil as a force outside human control, the women seek to flip a toxic script of blind obedience. For “the twin pillars that guard the entrance to the shrine of religion,” notes August during a rare prayer session, “are storytelling and cruelty.”
Storytelling and cruelty: Both are familiar concepts in rape culture. Any discussion about rape is also a discussion about language. Seduction and coercion, no means no, rape and “rape-rape” (to invoke Whoopi Goldberg’s controversial phrasing), words have the power to validate and silence, to support and repress. Most importantly, words build and sustain cultures, a fact never far from the surface of Women Talking. There are no hazy bedroom scenes to be found in these pages, no bloody sheets and colluding glances between the pews. Like Emma Cline in The Girls, Toews focuses not on the marketable horror of her premise but its lingering aftereffects and the broader cultural narratives they reflect. Some readers will likely consider this evasion a form of shying away, but in refusing to commodify the survivors’ suffering, Toews positions herself firmly in their camp. The result is a novel all the more intimate for its remoteness—perhaps the most rewarding contradiction of all.
