Women Talking
Miriam Toews
Women Talking
Miriam Toews
Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote religious Mennonite colony, over a hundred girls and women were knocked unconscious and raped, often repeatedly, by what many thought were ghosts or demons, as a punishment for their sins. As the women tentatively began to share the details of the attacks-waking up sore and bleeding and not understanding why-their stories were chalked up to ‘wild female imagination.’
Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. Eight women, all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their colony and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in, meet secretly in a hayloft with the intention of making a decision about how to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. They have two days to make a plan, while the men of the colony are away in the city attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists (not ghosts as it turns out but local men) and bring them home.
How should we live? How should we love? How should we treat one another? How should we organise our societies? These are questions the women in Women Talking ask one another-and Miriam Toews makes them the questions we must all ask ourselves.
Review
Tristen Brudy
Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia, hundreds of girls and women would wake every morning feeling bruised, abused, and battered. This was attributed for many years to ghosts, demons, or Satan himself punishing the women for their sins. The truth was much more prosaic and much more horrifying. It was found that at least eight men from the colony had been using an animal anaesthetic to knock out the women and rape them. The victims were between the ages of three and sixty-five.
Women Talking is Miriam Toews’ fictionalisation of the aftermath of these events, as a group of women from the colony debate whether or not it is possible to carry on living in the community or if their only real option is to leave the only home they have ever known.
Toews’ work is, of course, highly political. It’s interested in the ways that communities and societies tend to undervalue, dismiss, or stifle female labour and women’s voices. The women of the novel seem both utterly foreign – illiterate, deeply religious, and agrarian – and painfully familiar – angry, victimised, and made powerless by a patriarchal society.
It should come as no surprise that this wasn’t an easy read. The subject matter is dark and painful and the writing doesn’t shy away from the brutal realities. However, this darkness is exactly what makes it such an important read and I would urge anyone who wouldn’t be directly triggered by the content to seek out this novel. Regardless of whether you come from an Anabaptist community or the left-leaning inner suburbs of Melbourne, we all need to hear more women’s voices and Women Talking is an outstanding contribution to the chorus.
Tristen Kiri Brudy works as a bookseller at Readings Carlton.
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