Cultural Critique Through Mennonite Writing

The Mennonite church is, to some degree, the one unifying experience between most people writing Mennonite literature, and there is a huge diversity of reactions to it, from wholehearted support to piercing criticism. Because of this, I will show through three examples from A Cappella, a collection of Mennonite poetry, that one of the most common messages in Mennonite writing is a critique of Mennonite theology and traditions. To do this I have chosen three poems are connected through their theme of Mennonite women's experience.

The first poem that shows this message is “I am Dancing with My Mennonite Father,” by Anna Ruth Ediger Baehr. Dancing was once a controversial topic among the Mennonites. It was forbidden up until recently. While many Mennonites surely danced over the years, the image of a father teaching his daughter to dance remains surprising in this context. The poem has a flashback that explains how the father had stopped the narrator from dancing at a younger age. While the father appears to only be trying to protect his daughter from men watching her “small body sway to gypsy rhythm,” the narrator interpreted her father's actions very differently as a child. The telling lines in the last stanza, “You whisper now,/as you never did, 'You're lovely,/and strong,” imply that she felt demoralized that she wasn't allowed to dance when she was younger.

While this poem offers no evidence that this church doctrine hurt her relationship with her father, the narrator clearly disagrees with it. In the next poem, the pain caused is much more traumatic (although the connection to doctrine is less direct) and the criticism is much more powerful. “Nonresistance, or love Mennonite style” is a poem by Di Brandt that criticizes pacifism along with the cultural guideline that women should submit to men. She establishes that these concepts contribute to women acting meekly and being abused in various ways. The poem shows a girl who is sexually abused by older male relatives and feels she cannot protect herself or speak out, because Jesus said to turn the other cheek. Her poem is clearly a scathing criticism of nonresistance encouraging people, especially women, to be victimized.

The third poem that supports the hypothesis, that much Mennonite writing critiques church doctrine and tradition, is “Flowers,” by Raylene Hinz-Penner. Mennonite churches are traditionally very plain and free of ornamentation. This aesthetic tradition comes from the reformation. Anabaptists rejected the catholic church's use of statues and artistic representations in cathedrals. These reformers cited the 2^nd commandment, which prohibits the carving of idols, to support their argument. In the house of the narrator of this poem, this doctrine had been carried out to an extreme degree. Her mother allowed no art. The narrator finds it ironic that despite this, the girls of the house primped and ended up looking comparable to the paintings of flowers done by Georgia O'Keeffe. Her critique seems to be that this ban on beautiful art, like Georgia O'Keeffe's, didn't actually cause the members of the family to be any less worldly or any more devout.

These three poems show that a broad number of theological concepts and traditional views held by Mennonites are challenged by Mennonite writers. I believe that this theme is widespread and can be found in genres besides poetry, and also in the work of male writers (of which there are none in this paper). However, it seems likely that because all the poems that this paper considered touched on gender issues, that the treatment of women is a substantial and important area of criticism existing within the larger body of Mennonite writing.

Hostetler, Ann. A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2003. Print.