Hardcover, 240 pages
English language
Published Aug. 30, 2018 by Faber & Faber, Limited.
Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote religious Mennonite colony, over a hundred girls and women were knocked unconscious and raped, often repeatedly, by what many thought were ghosts or demons, as a punishment for their sins. As the women tentatively began to share the details of the attacks—waking up sore and bleeding and not understanding why—their stories were chalked up to ‘wild female imagination.’
Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. Eight women, all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their colony and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in, meet secretly in a hayloft with the intention of making a decision about how to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. They have two days to make a plan, while the men of the colony are away in the city attempting to raise enough money to bail …
Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote religious Mennonite colony, over a hundred girls and women were knocked unconscious and raped, often repeatedly, by what many thought were ghosts or demons, as a punishment for their sins. As the women tentatively began to share the details of the attacks—waking up sore and bleeding and not understanding why—their stories were chalked up to ‘wild female imagination.’
Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. Eight women, all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their colony and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in, meet secretly in a hayloft with the intention of making a decision about how to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. They have two days to make a plan, while the men of the colony are away in the city attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists (not ghosts as it turns out but local men) and bring them home.
How should we live? How should we love? How should we treat one another? How should we organise our societies? These are questions the women in Women Talking ask one another—and Miriam Toews makes them the questions we must all ask ourselves.
I’m still wrestling with this! She writes so sensitively and often affectingly obliquely about the tragedy that was forced on these women and their efforts to work through agency and safety and faith and love. I would not recommend this for anyone who has suffered sexual abuse without a great deal of preparation ahead of time
True to its title, this book contains a lot of talking. Women in a Mennonite community are deciding what to do after learning of abuse that has been perpetrated against them and their daughters while they were rendered unconscious.
There is a lot of philosophizing that arises from this discussion, but the problem is, the novel reads more like an essay than a story, in many ways.
This was not my favourite Toews work.
