Women Talking

creating the world that we want.

This post has taken me a while to write. I had so many thoughts to sort through and I also want to offer a CW: for religious abuse & sexual assault. I’m going to try and catch some of my scattered thoughts and weave them together: a memoir, a novel about an isolated mennonite community, evangelicalism, and of course a tarot card!

"Our freedom and safety are the ultimate goals, and it is men who prevent us from achieving those goals. But not all men, says Mejal. Ona clarifies: Perhaps not men, per se, but a pernicious ideology that has been allowed to take hold of the men's hearts and minds.” Women Talking, by Miriam Toews

1. It’s been raining a lot these days. I’ve spent a lot of time indoors cleaning and organizing which helps me to listen to audiobooks so I am flying through my TBR¹ list! I’m currently listening to Women Talking, by Miriam Toews, and it has sent me down a dark rabbit trail. The novel centers a group of women from a secluded mennonite colony called Molotschna who debate leaving their community. It’s a deeply unsettling story, as it is based on true events about brutal attacks against women and girls in an isolated community in Bolivia. It’s chilling to imagine being in such a cloistered community, illiterate, unable to speak the language of the people around you, and dependent on the very men who have hurt you. The tenants of patriarchal religion have created a world where the women come to realize they have less rights and comfort than the livestock. The book is set over over two long days as the women meet secretly to discuss their plans for survival. Their options are: 1) do nothing 2) stay and fight, or 3) leave.

   

   Scene from the movie adaptation of Women Talking, the women meet secretly in a barn loft to discuss what to do about their situation.

2. When I was a child, my family was a part of the Evangelical Church. I use capital E, Evangelical, because we didn’t belong to just one church community, and I experienced many different flavors of American Evangelicalism through my childhood and adolescence. Some of the churches were missions based and had international flags lining the halls and a big world map inside the front doors. Some of them were charismatic with hours-long worship services, prophetic prayer circles, worship bands that would play the same song over and over stirring the crowd into an emotional froth. One church we attended had people raising their hands in passionate surrender during worship, shouting AMEN and That’s right!, while another had men in sharp suits and women in dresses with their hands calmly clasped on their tidy, pious laps. We attended churches with bulletins and written prayers, tiny pencils to draw doodles in the margins and distract us bored kids, and we attended churches with spirit-led prayers that would beseech God while quiet piano music played in the background and the earnest sincerity would bring tears to your eyes. But even as I worshipped in and attended many different churches, one thing remained the same: the only people I ever saw at the pulpit preaching, teaching, or praying were men.

3. The movie version of Women Talking was just released last year and directed by Sarah Polley. I recently read Polley’s memoir, Run Towards the Danger, and was deeply moved by her writing. Polley’s memoir is (in her words) really a series of short, connected essays from different seasons of her life. She writes about her experience as a child actor, about her tumultuous young adulthood (assaulted by an older man in the industry), the death of her mother, and about the difficulties of a high risk pregnancy. A theme of her memoir is how corrupt men in power can cause ripple effects of harm, and how oblivious and numb they can be to the vulnerable people around them. She begins with her life as a child actor and the paradox of that experience. Yes, she had many amazing opportunities (world travel, meeting interesting celebrities, etc) but she also had many moments of fear and uncertainty that none of the adults seemed to notice or care about. She was constantly passed between adult carers but everyone expected her to behave and work like a tiny adult. And no matter what happened to her, it always seemed as though the grace was given to the adult in the situation. One director told her later, you just seemed so mature for your age, I had no idea that was such a scary situation for you! Each of her stories highlights moments of danger and uncertainty, usually at the hands of men, and how she was left alone to make sense of her world.

4. One of the churches I attended as a child had a program called Evangelism Explosion in which adults could attend a class with actual curriculum for how to witness (share their faith) with people in their lives (unsaved family members! neighbors! post office employees! cab drivers!). The class included lessons, scripts, and role-playing. Even though I wasn’t old enough to attend they would often advertise the class during the regular church service and this was usually done with a short dramatization. One of the short plays was about a woman sharing her faith with the neighbor over the fence between their yards (imagine if Wilson was a Bible-thumping evangelical - lol), and another was about a man on a business flight witnessing to his seat mate. It was abundantly clear that it was our responsibility to share the message of God’s Love² with strangers, and if we didn’t those strangers might succumb to an afterlife of eternal pain and torture. Then the service continued with whatever prayers or songs were left, and we’d go out to Bob Evan’s for lunch. I was left alone to make sense of this world.

5. In Women Talking, men in the community used animal tranquilizers to knock out women and girls in their own beds and then assault them at night. The next morning the women would wake up groggy and bruised with no memory of the night’s terrors. The bishop suggested that they were being attacked by demons, or perhaps it was punishment for secret sin. When the truth was finally revealed, the perpetrators were taken by the police to a nearby town, but the men of the Molotschna sold livestock and went together to bail them out. The women were instructed that they must forgive the men, or risk excommunication. The Evangelicals I know would be shocked and horrified by this story. They would comfortably place this community in a different category - a backward, old-fashioned religion that is nothing like their belief system. They would shut their eyes to the ways patriarchy is a primary tenant of their own faith.

6. Even though our family attended many different kinds of churches through my childhood, I landed in a small church in high school that felt very nurturing and warm and I made some of my closest friendships there (some still to this day). But even here, there were no women in charge - except a few of the wives having positions with youth or marriage ministries. The only women I learned from were the mothers of my friends who were (don't get me wrong) lovely, kind, understanding women, but who were also fighting their own battles. In my adulthood I learned that two of these friends had incredibly narcissistic and abusive fathers and when their mothers finally found the courage to leave them they found very little support from the church. One of the men had a restraining order, but the other was allowed back to the church and my friend (his daughter) was told by an elder that she was not being forgiving enough. She never went back to that church.

   

   A collection of Emperor cards: magical nature tarot (L), Illuminated tarot (top), wild unknown tarot (R), and biddy tarot (bottom)

7. The Emperor card has historically been the Father³ energy of the major arcana. He comes right after the Empress (or Mother) and is the yang to her yin. The Emperor is traditionally a kingly figure on a throne with a scepter in one hand and a globe in the other. It’s also a fire energy - personal power burns like a fire in the gut. This card is about stability, structure, wisdom, authority and power. Patriarchal religion claims these positive qualities: we protect you & yours from eternal damnation, we offer stability in a world that is chaotic and confusing (sin nature explains it all!), we offer capital T Truth in the perfect word of God (wisdom that can never be questioned or refuted), and we offer safety. The Emperor offers protection and stability to his empire, but we all know what can happen when power becomes corrupted. Slavery. Occupation. Colonization. Abuse. In the shadow aspect, a king or emperor or father rules with domination. We’ve witnessed first-hand how the corruption and grasping for power by the Evangelical church over the last several decades is leading to hatred, control, and violence. It’s the reason I left, and haven’t looked back.

8. I didn't just go to Evangelical churches, I also attended Christian school. In middle school I remember learning about the natural order of the family and how the family was a symbol for the Church and her relationship to God. There was an overhead projector (I can still remember that warm dusty smell) and a plastic sheet that had an image of umbrellas: each umbrella got smaller showing the cascading order of importance, like a reverse nesting doll. The largest umbrella was CHRIST, the next was FATHER, the one under that was MOTHER, and finally CHILDREN. The Father’s tasks were to lead/protect/provide, the Mother to teach/nurture the children, the Children to love/obey the parents. In this way it reflected the order of Christ - Pastor - Church. The Father/Pastor was directly under God and everyone else was under him. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that my family and church were not as fundamentalist as many - we did not live in a cloistered community, women were not required to wear dresses and head covers, we “thought for ourselves” - hell, I could be anything I wanted to be. I could be an astronaut, or a CEO, or a teacher, or a missionary! I could read the Bible for myself (unlike the illiterate women in Toews novel), and I could even listen for the Holy Spirit to inspire and speak to me. But I could not, under any circumstance, read the Bible for myself and teach a man.

9. On one hand I understand the appeal: if you’re the umbrella right beneath the God-umbrella…you’re basically God. You are getting your authority straight from The Authority. Talk about power! But men aren’t God, men aren’t perfect. And when that power begins to rely on control to “keep” power - well, you get the world we’re living in. In Women Talking, the story is narrated by a man named August Epp. He left the community (excommunicated with his parents when he was a child) but had returned as an adult and was working as school teacher to the boys of Molotschna. He was able to read and write in English, and so one of the women asked him to keep minutes for their secret meeting. Some people criticize Toews (all the 1 star reviews on Goodreads) for the choice to make the narrator a man. But in my opinion, August’s story helps to illustrate how patriarchy hurts everyone - including men. I won’t give any spoilers, but we learn how everything from his unjust banishment, to the fact that he is a teacher (not a hard-working farmer), to his physique, that living under the yoke of patriarchy is heavy for everyone.

10. The women of Molotschna meet in the loft of a barn owned by an old man in their community (he’s too old and senile to travel with the other men into town). And in one scene he climbs the ladder and asks them what they’re plotting. “No, says Agata, there’s no plot, we’re only women talking.” In the loft are multiple generations of two families that have been brutalized, and the familiarity and tenderness is felt between them. They braid each others hair, bring each other soup and instant coffee, they debate and argue and old wounds are aggravated. They quote scripture to each other, they laugh and tease. They sing hymns. They stoke the fires of each other’s inner power. It is that fire that will give light to their path and what decision they have to make. The Emperor card is also a card of action, creating the world we want to see. How do we want this archetype to exist in our world? What does it mean to wield power in a way that honors all perspectives, that comes from collective wisdom and not The Authority? How can we shift the stories we tell around power and come together around love instead of violence? How do we as a society, listen when women talk?

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Phew. Thanks for reading. I appreciate you being here. I don’t know if I’ll write another post next week, I’m pretty drained (and so far, I’ve fallen short of my “post on Tuesday” goal anyway) but I wanted to give you a little heads up about where I’m headed. So far I’ve been writing about books I’m reading and the random topics they bring up for me. Starting on the spring equinox (in just 12 days!!) I’m going to be doing a decan walk. This is following the 36 decans of the astrological year and the corresponding tarot cards⁴. If you are not familiar with this calendar (and I am most certainly a novice!) it won’t change much about my writing here, except that I will not draw cards randomly as I have been. I’ll still weave in books I’m reading, or seasonal tidbits that make me happy.

1. Currently listening to/reading: The Whalebone Theatre // fiction, The Old Ways // nonfiction, and A Boy Called Bat (with my kids).

2. The script for the “Steps to Life” reads like a chick tract (if you don’t know what that is, congratulations). I was going to link to Evangelism Explosion’s INTERNATIONAL (insert eye roll) website, but decided this is my blog and I don’t need give them more eyeballs. Google if you want.

3. I read the cards with these gendered interpretations in mind, but do not ascribe gender to the cards themselves. Any human can have Emperor energy, and in fact this was a card that I pulled as a personal support card for 2023 - to me, this means I need to trust my own inner wisdom and authority. This card supports me to permission myself when I am experiencing self doubt and to trust that I know what is best without outside (paternal) approval. It’s also a reminder to take practical steps toward a goal, not just think and think and think about it.

4. The intro to this essay by T. Susan Chang gives a good overview of “reading the decan” and is also where I got my inspiration.