When I was ten, a boy from Altona boarded with my family for the four days that his Little League baseball tournament was played in Winnipeg. His last name was Toews, which I learned to pronounce Taves.
“Are you not history knowing?” – Tante Tina, via David Waltner-Toews
Are you kidding? I am not even me knowing.
I’m nearly done writing about Mennonite literature. To be fair, I’m nearly done writing about a long list of worthy subjects, so this statement is not especially about Mennonite literature. Or is it?
My feminist interest in reading and writing about Mennonite women’s writing has garnered some disapproval, and to be honest, this disapproval alone is nearly enough to keep me writing about Mennonite literature.
Robert Kroetsch observed in the 1980s that the discussions he heard about Mennonite literature had the dynamics of a family fight. And some of us are neighbours with long histories of overhearing, in Dionne Brand’s use of the word: to overhear a text like a conversation that is not spoken to you and yet seeps into your ears and changes you. You don’t get to demand that the speaker include you, but neither can you pretend that you haven’t overheard and been changed. With big ears comes great responsibility.
As Maggie Redekop notes in Making Believe, great responsibility means – among other things – a commitment to serious play. I thought about calling this piece Fifteen Ways of Complicating Kindness. Or The Stunning. Or Questions I Asked Every Mennonite I Know. But I was reminded of the many times that such cleverness has taken me down at the knees, and I decided to allude instead to Mary Ruefle’s essay about dedication via doubt.