Final Post

For my final post on this blog (for now, who knows what the future holds), I have been asked to reflect on the potluck dinner that our class prepared.  While I could mention the difficulty of trying to make your Grandma's recipe as well as she does it (especially since she doesn't follow a recipe), I think the goose encounter is the most appropriate.

Some members of the class were attacked by a goose on the way to Ann's house.  Although I never saw the fowl beast, it does illustrate key themes from this course.  Ann mentioned that she was enforcing insider/outsider exclusivity by not letting the goose in.  In our class we have often read the work of outsiders or work that is about outsiders.  At least in Mennonite writing, it seems to be the most fruitful.

I think it's funny that even when the outsider is just a goose, that is what people choose to write about.  Also, I never actually saw this goose.  We have explored how Mennonite writing keeps stories alive.  The most memorable part of that dinner was something that I don't remember, but just heard stories about!

Anywho, goodbye to my devoted blog readers.  I will see you all in the big blog in the sky.

Katya

Katya is one of the Canadian Mennonite novels we read this semester in Mennonite Lit.  It tells the story of how Mennonites living in a culturally isolated village came upon hard times during the time period close to WWI and the Russian Revolution.  It illustrates how larger themes in history can shape personal stories.

Mennonites first went to Russia under the protection of Catherine the Great.  She invited them to come and farm in what is now the Ukraine.  While this was originally a great opportunity, it caused many problems later on for the Russlanders (Canadian Mennonites who migrated from Russia in the second wave) (also the title of the book when it was originally published in Canada).  One such issue is that of land.  The Mennonites were unable to distribute land and thus those who owned property became the upper class.

Abram Sudermann is an example of this.  His estate is gigantic and because of this, he is targeted for by bandits. The book begins with a newspaper article that reports on his death and the several others.  While we see throughout the novel that he is greedy, and if came about as close to deserving that fate as one could, it still illustrates how disparity leads to violence.  The novel also hints that one of the local non-mennonites that Abram treated badly struck the first blow when the gang came to kill him.

A Complicated Kindness

One of the three Canadian Mennonite novels (keep looking for the next two) that our class has read this semester is "A Complicated Kindness," by Miriam Toews.  It is the story of Nomi Nickels; a snarky and rebellious girl growing up in the town of East Village.  There, nearly the whole town is Mennonite, and work in the historical village re-creation until they are old enough to begin work at the poultry factory.

She is not the first in her family to have problems fitting in to the restrictive (and boring) local-cultural authority.  This is her uncle, who she calls the mouth.  He was a wannabe flower-child who when rejected by that culture turned to enforcing conservative values in his hometown.  Nomi's sister was excommunicated and left town with her boyfriend.  Soon after, her mother was excommunicated and disappeared.  One of the original questions that we were asked when reading this novel is, "What is meant by "a complicated kindness."

Nomi's mother leaves when she was excommunicated because she didn't want to make her husband and daughter choose between her and his town.  This is her way of protecting him from choices, but there are definitely complications to this act of "kindness."  It is tough on those left behind.  Nomi wants to imagine her mother living out her dreams in foreign countries, but that is tough to do since she didn't take her passport when she left.  There are many other questions (not the least of which being, did she really leave because she loves us).

This model of kindness that is tough to take happens more than once throughout the book.  *SPOILER ALERT*  Nomi's father chooses a similar way to leave town.  When Nomi is excommunicated, he leaves to take away things that would keep her in town, living the half life of someone who is dead to the community.  However this way of showing love has its flaws.  Ray, her father, meant to give Nomi a reason to leave and begin her life, but the novel ends with her reminiscing about her childhood and delaying her escape from East Villiage.

Final Exam Essay

 We as a class have frequently realized throughout this semester that Mennonite writing often deals with how a community treats outsiders. This is obviously a broad topic, even when limited to a Canadian Mennonite perspective. The problem is also very accessible, since it happens constantly in communities of all levels. The lunch table that only the cool kids can sit at is an example. The poem, “Vesta's Father,” by Julia Kasdorf, where the father of her grandmother, Vesta Peachy, is not allowed to be buried in the Mennonite Church's cemetery is also one. One cannot forget that the wall in Jerusalem between Palestine and Israel is another.

In the three Canadian Mennonite novels that our class read, the community is always a Mennonite one. Likewise the questions that the novels ask are related to key historical (and modern) Mennonite themes; exclusion , persecution, and excommunication.

In “Peace Shall Destroy Many,” by Rudy Wiebe, the small Mennonite farming community in Saskatchewan live alongside people that they call “half-breeds,” Native Canadians. There is an uneasy relationship between these groups that deteriorates, as well as other conflicts within the Mennonites. Set against the historical backdrop of WWII, it asks, “Whether an individual that tries to include outsiders, can think of themselves as better than those that exclude?”

While Thom becomes self righteous about the issue of conducting church in English to evangelize to the native population, he finds that the pacifist ideals he claims are hard to implement in the heat of the moment. Despite his teacher, Joseph Dueck's model of selfless devotion to larger issues while maintaining a pacifist principle, and his fiery desire to reform his tradition, Thom finds that even he has failings and needs humbleness to accompany his convictions.

In “Katya,” by Sandra Birdsell, there are two levels of separation in the society. The Mennonites are separated from the local Ukrainians by law, language, and religion. However within the Mennonite sphere, there also exists a divide between the rich landowners like the Sudermann family. While one person might see the story as one of the transgressions of the wealthy elite bringing ruin to all, the frame narrative gives the story a different meaning. The question is not, “Why did the bandits destroy the household?” but “How did Katya and those who came to America survive?”

Like the way Katya hid from the murder and destruction in the cellar, her story stayed hidden within her. Finally in this telling of it, to Ernest Unger, the story manages to live on. The idea that this story is being heard and recorded for history draws a parallel between the Russian Mennonite tale and the stories in the Martyr's Mirror. In both cases the fact that people survived persecution is in the end less important to future generations than the survival of their stories. These stories, as we have seen throughout the semester, give foundation and shape to many generations that follow.

In “A Complicated Kindness,” by Miriam Toews, the protagonist, Nomi, tries to find her way in an unusual situation where she is torn between nostalgia for her childhood community and the people that have been rejected by that community. Her question then is, “How do people live when separated by excommunication?”

Excommunication is particularly hard, because insiders who suddenly are no longer insiders have no roots left. In this story, most Nomi's mother and sister choose a selfless route and spare their family the pain of ignoring them by leaving town of their own free will. Nomi has to deal with this side of the separation until she is excommunicated for setting fire to a truck. Then her father leaves, in order to allow her to be free of the family ties that keep her in the town. While saving people from choosing by leaving, is a solution, it's not a particularly good one. It leaves questions and ambiguity, not the least of which being, is that actually why they left. Nomi doesn't have an answer, but the final page of the book, where she hasn't yet committed to leaving a town that utterly rejects her, and all her close family ties have left, is a testament to the pain and difficulty of living with separation from community by excommunication.

Although the introduction noted that all of these stories dealt with those inside and outside of community (similar ideas were explored by Tiessen, Hostetler, and Gundy in their presentations at the second Mennonite Writing Conference), there is a more important connection running through “Peace Shall Destroy Many,” “Katya,” and “A Complicated Kindness.” The similarity is that the Mennonite Church is still dealing with all of these issues.

Growing up in one of the wealthiest areas that Mennonites traditionally live in, I have seen first hand how churches manage to quietly exclude those who don't fit in with our upper-upper middle class lifestyle and maintain a safe distance from our less materially blessed neighbors. However, we still deal with some persecution (albeit, not nearly as perilous as our predecessors). The most clear example to me is the national anthem issue. Though we are not being chased with anabaptist-catchers, our spiritual heritage includes counter-cultural ideas that need to be defended against oppositional philosophies if we are going to retain them. Finally I see the way homosexuals are treated by churches, conferences, and even parts of Goshen college as excommunication. We don't use that language anymore, but we take people who have grown up in this community, and we make them unwelcome through hiring practices and by limiting their ministry potential (among other ways).

The other way that I hope these questions about community are related is that the next generation of Mennonite writers will continue to deal with them and produce books that owe some debt of gratitude to these Mennonite novels that came before them.

Take Life Into Your Own Hands

On Friday, the 1st of April, Erin Gautsche visited and spoke to our class.  She is the program manager of The Kelly Writers House and a recent graduate of Goshen College.  This organization is affiliated with the University of Philadelphia.  They offer a variety of services to writers in their community such as computer work stations, publishing materials, and staff with lots of experience in writing and editing.  She gave us a little bit of personal history, as well as a brief history of the writing house.  Her job is to organize events at the writing house such as having poets and writers do readings.
Her advice to us was very practical, but it took me by surprise.  I had never articulated this to myself before, but the job of an editor is to hound people.  You need to find people who write and bug them into giving you their work.  It's not glamorous, but it is the reality.

She also told us that one has to look for forgiveness rather than permission when being entrepreneurial.  The Kelly Writers House was started by people squatting in an abandoned building, and eventually gained funding and support from the university. This "do-it-yourself" approach to publishing and life has definite benefits.  The Kelly Writers House starts new projects at no cost and then improves them as outside funders notice potential.  This means that there is no one making demands on creative processes until they are off the ground.
Erin's message was powerful to me.  I need to stop waiting for things to happen and make them happen immediately.  Take life by the horns and whatnot.

Peace Shall Destroy Many

This semester in Mennonite Literature, we read the first novel by Rudy Wiebe.  Wiebe is a prominent Canadian Mennonite writer.  His book, "Peace Shall Destroy Many," takes place in a small Mennonite community in Saskatchewan.  Thom Wiens is a young man on the cusp of adulthood, who begins to recognize ignored issues and hypocritical stances within his congregation towards people outside of it.

One of the questions we were asked in class was, "What does this novel suggest about the Christian’s role in the world?"  While the message that this novel promotes is hidden behind layers of imagery and description, as well as sparse conversation, I think it has to do with how the role of a community conflicts with it's ideas about purity.  Thom's school teacher opens his mind to ideas that question the ideas defended by the church.  While Thom's church focuses on separating the "good" from the "bad" through judgement and shunning, the teacher introduces a purpose for community to strive towards.  In a letter that he writes to Thom, which Thom reflects on at the end of the novel, he says, "We are spared war duty and possible death on the battlefield only because we are to be so much the better witnesses for Christ here at home."

Thom becomes passionate about this aspiration to witness, and sees church authority figures, such as Deacon Block, as having ignored this call by enforcing rules about the purity of the community.  Block chases out members and non-members who don't conform to his ideas while claiming to follow Christian teachings.  However, Thom's disagreement with Block is tempered when he found himself punching Herb in a brawl.  I believe that he sees the hypocrite in himself and realizes that being a witness in not just about making the right choices, but also about following through with them.

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.