Miriam Toews: Violence of Pacifism • by Maxwell Kennel • 2

Secular Mennonites and the Violence of Pacifism by Maxwell Kennel Toews’ novel dramatizes and responds to a crisis of sexual violence in a Bolivian Mennonite colony between 2005 and 2009 when men used animal anesthetic to subdue and rape colony women.2 Toews’ introductory note to the novel suggests, however, that this violence may continue in this colony and others. Through the male narrator, August Epp, the novel dramatizes and recounts in literary form the minutes of meetings held by women who are trying to decide whether to leave the colony.             Below – in a way that I hope is in keeping with the peaceful and non-imposing disposition of Epp – I will narrate the McMaster event with reference to my notes and the transcripts provided to me by the three commentators (unattributed quotations are from the transcripts, and errors and misattributions remain my own). At the end I conclude with a brief reflection on the complex figure of the secular Mennonite in the drama of community violence. THE VIOLENCE IN PACIFISM Following introductions, Grace Kehler began the event by addressing Miriam Toews, saying “I’ve been fascinated for many years by how your writing bears witness to the covert and explicit forms of violence that take place in purportedly non-violent settings and institutions: medicine and Mennonite community.” Kehler referred to Toews’ work as a kind of “public mourning and critique that refuses to lose sight of stories that are difficult to hear.” Kehler expressed admiration for how Toews’ novels address what Leigh Gilmore calls “historical and intimate trauma,” and what Arjun Appadurai calls an “ethics of possibility,”3 and she compared Women Talking with the controversial and highly acclaimed work of Rudy Wiebe in Peace Shall Destroy Many.4 For Kehler, these two novels similarly attend to “the violence that haunts purportedly pacifist Mennonite communities—and, in fact, to the violence of pacifism.”5    [  >>>>>  FORWARD ] 2 See Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, “The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia” Vice. December 22, 2013. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4w7gqj/the-ghost-rapes-of-bolivia-000300-v20n8  3 See Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001), and Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (London: Verso, 2015).  4 Rudy Wiebe, Peace Shall Destroy Many (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1962).  5 See my article on this theme in Patrick Friesen’s work: “Violence and the Romance of Community: Darkness and Enlightenment in Patrick Friesen’s The Shunning,” Literature & Theology 33.4 (December 2019): 394-413.    + [Distillate © HA&L + Maxwell Kennel {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]