HA&L magazine issue Thirteen.2

Mennonite Literature • by Tanis MacDonald • 1

 

Hamilton Arts & Letters




Lectures about Mennonite Literature that I Will Never Give by Tanis MacDonald


(With apologies to Mary Ruefle)


One of the first lines in Di Brandt’s Questions i asked my mother is “some of this is autobiographical and some of it is not.” This is followed by a quotation from Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire”: “If I have been untrue/ I hope you know it was never to you.” Trueness and untrueness: birds on a wire like notes on a scale.

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I missed the Mennonite Miracle entirely. I was someplace else, frying other fish, and the explosion in Canadian Mennonite literature happened in my home city without my notice. My ignorance was broad and deep. I didn’t know until Di asked me to comb through the University of Winnipeg archives about the Compulsory Education Act of 1916, which abolished – for a significant period of time – the right for public schools in Manitoba to teach in languages other than English. Until I read Magdalene Redekop’s Making Believe, I didn’t know about the revivalist movement that swept through Mennonite communities in southern Manitoba during the 1950s.

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[Distillate © HA&L + Tanis MacDonald {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]

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