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.

Mennonite in "Searching for Intruders"

This past week in our class we have been reading a book called Searching for Intruders, by Stephen Byler.  It is a bleak "novel in stories" about a man named Wilson Hues who repeatedly fails to make his life come together in a satisfying way.  The novel documents the destruction of his marriage, doomed romance with a cancer patient, and damaging relationship with his father.  It is without a doubt a tragedy in the classic sense.

Stephen Byler is the first major male Mennonite author that we have read this semester.  What is curious about this is that Searching for Intruders is not explicitly Mennonite.  The Amish are mentioned, but somewhat in passing.  Throughout my reading I searched and searched for some Mennonite theme or image to grasp onto and came up empty.  However after letting the book simmer in the back of my mind for a while, I believe I have found why I couldn't identify the story as Mennonite.

I'll begin by explaining that each of the chapters begins with a short flashback.  Most of these center around Wilson's father and how he was violent, abusive towards animals and yet also a man with ambition.  Wilson is heavily affected by this and rebels against his fathers violence.  He always tries to avoid violence, even to cockroaches and wounded deer.  He also struggles with the inability to make things work out right in interpersonal situations.

I believe that these two tendencies are related.  His desire to avoid his father's violent personality causes him to subconsciously reject his father's drive and ambition.  I also believe that this portrayal of a peaceful person who causes tons of harm to others by trying to avoid causing it is Byler's critique of Mennonite pacifism.  He is subtly showing that pacifism can be taken to the extreme, where it does more harm than good.

On the final page of the book, a wise Chilean advises Wilson to "manage his affection" and to "learn the mercy of ruthlessness."  He rejects this advice, continuing in his self-destructive path of following only his most basic convictions.

Mennonite Church Artifacts

In the basement of the Good Library at Goshen College, there is a small art gallery.  At the moment, the exhibit is entitled “Going to Church: Objects Representing Mennonite Congregations.”  I visited this showcase, expecting to see a host of sights familiar to me from my home-church in Pennsylvania.  There were many things that met these expectations; baptism pitchers, friendship quilts, antique pews, and even a commemorative plate from the church I grew up in.  These items were interesting for several reasons.  For one, they showed an astonishing link to the past.  Offering plates from 100 years ago look pretty much the same as they do nowadays.

However, what really fascinated me was the diversity of church buildings from around the world.  I had imagined all Mennonite churches to incorporate the wide and plain meetinghouse design that seems so normal to me, from what I've seen in Pennsylvania and Indiana (apart from worldly churches like mine, that dare erect a steeple).  Most of the variety was found in the Russian Mennonite tradition and the churches in Europe.

There were photographs of a forest in Langenau, Germany where Anabaptists met during persecution, and later built the oldest surviving Mennonite church.  The churches in Amsterdam also looked completely foreign to me.  They were built into city blocks, and appear to be apartment buildings (to my untrained eye) from the outside.  The Dutch/Prussian/Russian Mennonite tradition also surprised me with their elaborate pulpit designs, that are reminiscent of high-church protestant constructions.

In addition to these photos and artifacts, there are a number of paintings and scale models of Old Order Mennonite churches in Goshen.  It is a delightful exhibit.

Models of Mennonite Lit

In this class we have been studying Mennonite Literature and discussing common themes and images since the beginning of the semester.  However we have only recently began looking at l representations of how literature functions within the Mennonite community.

To do this we started with three lectures given at the Second Mennonite Writing Conference at Goshen College in 1997.  Hildi Froese Tiessen's piece, entitled "Beyond the Binary," took issue with the way Mennonite writers are considered outsiders.  She criticized the notion that there was such a thing as an accepted Mennonite "tradition" and that there was a clear division between the people who fell inside and outside of it.  Her piece was very theoretical and echoed post-colonial criticism themes, such as wanting to accept everyone as somewhere on a continuum.

Jeff Gundy in his essay, "In Praise of Lurkers," used a similar model to outsiders and insiders, but unlike Tiessen, did not call for change.  He saw the role of the Mennonite writer as a positive outsider.  Many artists and visionaries throughout history have been, in Gundy's words, "lurkers."  Likewise in the Mennonite community, these unconventional members of the community as bringing critique, introspection, and outside ideas.

In my opinion the most accurate article was Ann Hostetler's, "The Unoficial Voice: The Poetics of Cultural Identity and Contemporary U.S. Mennonite Poetry."  While like Tiessen's, it was very academically written.  It asserted that the relationship between outsiders and insiders in Mennonite culture was more complicated than it appeared when one considered only Mennonite culture.  Hostetler saw Mennonite culture as only one ethnic group among many.  In this model, "outsiders" are actually cultural translators that give accounts of Mennonites to exterior groups and in turn represent other cultures to their Mennonite communities.

I found this to be a healthy relationship because it gives writers and artists the freedom to represent groups as they see them, rather than needing sanction from the group being looked at.  It also does not limit the scope of our vision to only one community, but rather sees ethnic groups as unique but interrelated through art.

A Memoir of Going Home?

Was I the only person who noted a huge shift in tone towards the end of "Mennonite in a Little Black Dress" by Rhoda Janzen.  It seemed that the first section of the book was about her midlife crisis; divorcing her gay husband, getting her uterus removed, and beginning a new period of life.  She seemed to try new things with flair and wit and took many difficulties in stride.  Then almost halfway through the book she suddenly revealed that her husband was a complete jerk and abusive.  After this she reflects back on her childhood, and the book concludes with a series of unrelated scenes that display some of her regrets about the lifestyle she choose (while denying that she regretted a moment of it).

Overall the book left me very confused as to the character of Rhoda Janzen.  Was she the clever and independent woman who joked frankly about having a pee bag in her purse, or the lady who continuously second guessed her every move while looking high and low for guy to get involved with?  Did her divorce and illness change her that much?  The disjointedness confused me.  Why did her husband go from her reserved and secretly gay husband who she loved despite herself, to the brooding and viscous aggressor who she had to hide from after court?

I get the feeling that this novel was written in sections and later put together into one story.  While it was certainly hilarious at times, by the end I got the feeling that she indiscriminately pushed the story in unexpected directions to be able to include her observational humor about all sorts of topics.

Or maybe that's actually what life is like (and perhaps the reason that I don't really like memoirs).

What do you think?

New Mennonite Poetry

Jeff Gundy's poem, How to Write the New Mennonite Poem, is one of the funniest pieces of poetry that I've read since Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutzky were my favorite authors.  Granted, one has to be familiar with the obscure genre of Mennonite poetry to get the clever observations, but it those who have some experience with Julia Kasdorf and others will find that it has that unbelievable accuracy that truly funny writing contains.

As was noted in class today, it begins as a recipe, calling for either Bibles, quilts, Fraktur, or the Martyr's Mirror. The instructional theme continues to the end, slowly moving from classic Mennonite images, to images common of liberal Mennonites, and finally to images of modern life that show the pupil/poet abandoning their roots.  It seemed to be agreed in our discussion that Gundy intended to draw attention to how Mennonite poets were failing to represent their current lifestyles when they focus on objects common to earlier generations of Mennonites.

However, this is not what I saw at play in this piece.  Gundy mentions (whether in vignettes or outright) guilt throughout the poem.  I thought he was satirizing how modern Mennonite writers love to capitalize on their guilt from sacrificing traditions, but don't actually feel guilty.  He isn't condemning of this phenomenon, but he is definitely making fun of the way this theme has become formulaic and pervasive in new Mennonite poetry.

What does anyone else think?

Pearl Diver

The film "Pearl Diver" was an interesting combination of Mennonite stereotypes and inside jokes.  The Mennonites portrayed seemed to live more like they would have 60, 70, or even 80 years ago in a lot of respects.  I think this was partially done to satisfy the image of Mennonites that most people unfamiliar with the denomination would imagine, Amish.

As for the sense of place, while many Mennonites that I know live in farm houses, very few actually work the farm.  Perhaps this is just due to where I grew up, but the scenes of the bonneted children running out to their dad riding a tractor is no longer an accurate portrayal of Mennonite life.  Driving with mom in an SUV to visit dad at the insurance office while listening to Disney soundtracks would be much more representative.  The film also seems to show people who leave the farming community as less Mennonite than those who stay.  This is a very unfair portrayal.  I like to think that anabaptism is more than a aesthetic or an ethnic community.  I believe that many of the people I know who best fit the Mennonite stereotypes (even if they are a bit different than the film's) embody real anabaptist values the least.  I am not going to go into a lot of theology but I find the most liberal and progressive (read worldly) Mennonite churches following an ethic that best meshes with the jesus's teaching and the spirit that the church was founded in.

In terms of technology, the film seems to be saying that no one entirely accepts or rejects new technology and that there are dangers associated with both the old-fashioned and the new-fangled.  Part of how the film creates a cinematographic style is by keeping the representations of technology to be simple and far between. You didn't see a whole lot of technology in this movie, which is inaccurate, but forgivable since accurate representation of modern technology is not really all that important to a film (hint: storytelling is).

But back to stereotypes, while I found a lot of the stereotypes of faithful and conflicted Mennonites a little overdone, I was also annoyed by the stereotypes of non-Mennonites (the somewhat sleazy real estate agent for one).

As for stories, I was interested in the evolution of stroytelling happening in the film.  While King suggested a certain kind of story to be typical of the Mennonites in the film, I found the film to be typical of the sort of stories that Mennonites in real life are telling RIGHT NOW IN THE REAL WORLD.  I think the story of people who can't live up to their spiritual ancestors and are conflicted about representing themselves to the outside world is much more typical nowadays.

In fact it seems that the role of a Mennonite writer is more to represent the group to the outside than to work through issues within the denomination.  I think the typical Mennonite writer is to some degree flirting with the idea of leaving the church and pushing its boundaries.

Well, these are some thoughts I had.