Final Class Reflection: What is Mennonite Literature?

Introduction 
In order to define Mennonite literature, one has to ask the question: What Mennonite narratives exist, in reality and in our societal and cultural imaginations? This is, of course, a complicated question, in that we all come from different contexts, experiences and cultures. Before exploring what I have seen in the Mennonite literature we read this semester, I will offer what image I had of Mennonites before becoming immersed in Mennonite culture and religious tradition at Goshen College.

I did not know any Mennonites prior to coming to Goshen, and had associated them with the mainstream (and often inaccurate) images of the Amish. I did not have any background on the history of the Mennonite church, nor had I even heard of the name "Menno Simons" before my sister started attending Goshen four years ago. So, in that vain, I admit that I did not have a Mennonite narrative in mind. I have often found that when we have no knowledge about a specific group of people, we have hold a single narrative of the group. That wasn't the case for me. Although I associated Mennonites with the Amish, I still did not have a single image that came to mind when I thought about Mennonites and their narratives. Coming into this class, from prior experience in taking classes about post-colonial literature and feminist literary theory, and coming to intimately know many Mennonites, I knew I wouldn't be reading a series of books, short stories and poetry that all featured the same narrative.

To return to the question of Mennonite narratives, it is important to note that our individual bodies do not carry a single narrative, so neither do our communities, cultures and religious traditions. We cannot simply name what the Mennonite narrative is and expect that everyone who identifies as Mennonite, or those who grew up in Mennonite communities, will be able to identify with that narrative. There are many themes that emerge in Mennonite literature, such as pacifism, community versus individual, trauma (memory and lived) and language. However, it would be impossible to define and examine every theme, and know what themes are Mennonite and which are universal. As Ann Hostetler articulates in "The Unofficial Voice: The Poetics of Cultural Identity and Contemporary U.S. Mennonite Poetry," "I suggest that the 'unofficial voice' of the poet can portray complex internal differences within Mennonite culture that are not articulated in official constructions  of Mennonite identity" (Hostetler 511). So while I take on this question of "What is Mennonite literature?" I will simply examine the ways gender, language, and location inform the narratives in recent Mennonite literature. There are many differences I am omitting for the sake of brevity, such as race, sexuality, class, place of origin, and others. 

Gender

The male Mennonite narrative is often unnamed as being "male," in that it is thought of as simply the Mennonite narrative. But in looking at the differences between a female and male Mennonite narrative, we see that there is specificity in both narratives and that the female experience is not simply derived of the male experience with some added experiences (such as menstruation, childbirth and other markedly female sex experiences), but unique in its own way. In Peace Shall Destroy Many, Rudy Weibe details the experiences of Thom Weins in his struggle to reconcile his identity as an individual in a highly communal culture. While some form of this is also seen in the female experience, such as in Miriam Toews's A Complicated Kindness, Thom Weins's struggle is a markedly male experience. Weins essentially experiences a power struggle between himself and Deacon Block, where their theology and ideas of how to organize the community (specifically in terms of separation) conflict.

While women certainly experiences power struggles between each other, the conflict between Block and Weins is exemplary of their social position as men in a patriarchal society. Two women in this Canadian Mennonite context (in the 1930s) would be unable to voice their concerns about theology and community as loudly as Weins and Block are able to. Indeed, this directly contrasts with the silence experienced by the women in Sandra Birdsell's Katya at the hands of Abram Sudermann. Protagonist Katya experiences silence by trauma and silence by patriarchal power and force. Readers see a similar experience between the two different Mennonite communities, but understood from a feminine perspective, this narrative is about silence rather than conflict. So again, the reader sees that bodies and communities do not bear a single narrative.

In American Mennonite literature and art, Sylvia Bubalo echoes similar themes of silence in the female experience. In her paintings, we see themes of community versus individual, as well as the experience of resistance to rigidity and traditional values. In many images, there is a patriarchal male figure looming over a young girl. From a male perspective, this would likely look very different. We would see young men struggling to know their place in terms of leadership. In Bubalo's and Birdsell's work, we see young women grappling with finding their voice in a traditional, patriarchal, and religious community.

Language
Language plays a crucial role in Mennonite narratives. As a diasporic community, in addition to a society structured by class, language, both in the type of language spoken and how the language is spoken informs Mennonite literature. In Peace Shall Destroy Many, Katya, and A Complicated Kindness, the importance of Low German (or Plautdietsch) and High German is emphasized throughout the novels. In Peace Shall Destroy Many, readers see the community struggle with the implications of speaking German during World War II. One such instance is in chapter nine, "While leaving, the trustee seem oddly embarrassed, which she could hardly have suspected him capable of, when he mentioned they could not invite her to Sunday evening church service because it was held in German. He had added, careful, 'Of course, we do not side with Hitler, though we speak German. As I explained–killing is never right'" (Weibe 121). In this, we see that German is important to Mennonite narrative, but changes within context. This is yet again another reminder that there is not a single Mennonite narrative. 

In contrast, Katya and A Complicated Kindness explore the importance of German to the Mennonite community in markedly different ways. In Katya, High and Low German are used to mark class. Abram Sudermann and his family use High German, where Katya and her family often use Low German. The Russian peasants, then, use Russian, save for Sophie, who crosses class lines when she recites a poem in High German, "While some of the Russian workers could speak a word or two of Plautdietsch, Sophie had recited in High German, the Mennonites' formal church and school language" (Birdsell 32).  In A Complicated Kindness, we see Nomi struggle with the loss of a maternal body while at the same time losing her mother tongue, Plautdiestch. Her struggle is accompanied by a need for permanence in her words. Ironically, she chooses temporary routes of inscribing her name and word on the world through graffiti. 

Location
To frame my discussion of location in Peace Shall Destroy Many, Katya and The Body and the Book, I offer this quote:

This is clearly illustrated by the different ways in which Canadian and U.S. Mennonite poets have constructed their ethnicity in relation to a larger national identity. Canadian poets have received national recognition during the 1980s and 90s when Canadian government grants offered incentives for ethnic publishing...Since the Vietnam War era in the United States, however, Mennonites in general–let alone Mennonite poets–have received little recognition from the surrounding culture beyond their immediate spheres of influence. (Hostetler 516). 

Peace Shall Destroy Many and Katya are prime examples of the ways location informs the way Mennonite literature is received. In Canada, Katya was published under the name Russlander, a term for the Mennonite immigrants from Russia. This difference in naming is exemplary of the way Mennonites exist in the Canadian cultural imagination in a vastly different way than in the American cultural imagination. The term Russlander is known to many Canadians, where it isn't to Americans. Furthermore, both Katya and Peace Shall Destroy Many deal with a more recently lived trauma of persecution and forced migration than the work of American Mennonites, such as Julia Kasdorf's The Body and the Book. While these two novels deal directly with the trauma experienced by the Russian Mennonites (albeit in two different locations), while Kasdorf cites the memory of trauma, rather than the lived experienced of collective trauma in the body, "The meaning of the word memory for me is enriched when I see its tangled Indo-European roots run through the Latin memoir (mindful); the Greek martus (witness), which become martyr; as well as the Germanic and Old English murnam (to grieve). We write to bring things to mind, to witness, and eventually, to grieve" (Kasdorf 189).

In this, we see that Mennonite literature is informed by location and trauma, with differences in the writers' proximity to that collective trauma.