Women Talking
Readers talking too: more reader faves for 2022
Pamela sent me her 2022 standouts:
The Recent East, Thomas Grattan. I'm a nut for period literature on Cold War-era Eastern Europe. Grattan's book features a scraggly young girl, Beate, who escapes East Germany for the West, raises a family in the USA, then as a grown woman and mother returns to her coastal East German village with her nearly grown children. Grattan captures well the disenchantment of an Ossie caught between two worlds. I love the book’s elegiac, end-of-history feel. Back home the ghosts of the Stasi live on, but there was also a kind of sterility in the West, especially since Beate never had any money to thrive in the consumerist Germany and upstate New York.
The Transit of Venus, by Shirley Hazzard. I finally read this, and it was a fever dream, like you've watched those mystical Taviani brothers' films, and you're left scratching your head at what happened. A page-turner of the very best kind. Yet another tale of displacement, like the Grattan book, but this one has more tragic consequences.
When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodron. Why are most of us such emotional idiots? For those out of the Buddhist loop, Chodron's a buddhist nun who dares her readers to “run toward the danger” (to borrow Sarah Polley’s phrase). If you want to live an emotionally satisfying life, you can't skirt what's horrible, but are well-advised to "use what seems like poison as medicine." Her advice only seems counter-intuitive on the surface. When I am able to abide by her wise counsel, I get more out of life, period.
Yoga, Emmanuel Carrère. I always read Carrère, in spite (and because?) of his rather self-absorbed Parisian persona and lifestyle. In this memoir of a breakdwon (the French call it a novel, and I don't get why), he writes about his Bipolar 2 diagnosis, and his harrowing attempt to regain his sanity. It's touching and maddening, like everything he writes.
There’s still time to include your 2022 choices, reader, with one final newsletter of the year to go.
Women Talking (2022)
At Tiff Bell Lightbox until Jan 12, 2023
One of the best pieces of theatre that I’ve seen in the last few years is Joel Pommerat’s dramatization of the early events of what we now know as the French Revolution. The nobles and the clergy, opposing the changes to the fiscal system proposed by Louis XIV and his prime minister, and in order to buy time, demand that the Estates General be called, including the commoners of the Third Estate. How the Third Estate came to proclaim itself the National Assembly, and turned from a disorganized mob with a mass of disparate grievances into a political subject and the sovereign body of a nation – that’s the play. The actors are dressed in modern clothes, but they’re spread out around the theatre and the piece is in essence the people arguing; trying to convince, assemble, differentiate, unite, mobilize. People, Talking. Forming themselves as We, the People.
Sarah Polley-written and directed Women Talking, based on Miriam Toews' novel, is very much a work of this kind. Based on an event that took place in a Mennonite settlement in Bolivia, the novel and the film try to imagine what would have happened if the women who had been drugged and raped by their men gathered to discuss What is to be done. The police have been called, the culprits are in jail, and the other men of the colony have gone to the city to post bail for them. The women have two days before the men return. They gather in a hayloft and vote on whether to do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The do-nothing and forgive women are in the minority and they go home. The battle is now between the stay and fight to reform the colony and rewrite the sexual contract, and leave altogether and restart with the children somewhere else. Both options are daunting. Women are largely illiterate and uneducated, with no assets in their name. What complicates things is that they are also Christian and look favourably on meekness, forgiveness and pacifism and believe that suffering will, in the ultimate tally of things, be rewarded. They also know no other life but the one they’ve led with the men of their colony.
As the conversation unfolds, we gather what each has endured. There’s been one suicide. Girls too have been raped, including a four-year-old. One of the women is pregnant with the rapist’s child. One has lost all her upper teeth. Those most cruelly affected try to convince those least affected why radical action is needed. When should we respond to violence with violence, if ever. Some wonder how they should look upon men from now on and if they are, by their constitition, dangerous for women (this is examined with some philosophical distance and ultimately shelved). Freedom too enters the conversation. Is it a value, can the women ever have it, is it a muscle to work out which will otherwise atrophy. The oldest question of feminist philosophy – phrased by de Beauvoir as Should a woman’s life be measured by freedom or by happiness – comes into the conversation, as does the question of freedom vs security and comfort. Centuries’ old conversations which are still ongoing in many parts of the world and religious and ethnic communities appear here distilled. What if we love our enemy. How are we to raise the next generation. How can we get past the deepest despair and continue seeing our lives as worth living.
Women are not flawless in Polley’s rendition, nor immediately capable of uncomplicated solidarity. They fight, they mock each other. The most directly hurt woman, who is also the angriest, in a moment of crisis resorts to parental dominance over her teenage son, and a hint of a smothering, power-wielding mother comes into the view. (The novel also has a scene where one of the women uses the same anesthetic used to rape the women to temporarily knock out two young men who can wreck their plans.) When most women decide to leave, some, though fewer, decide to stay.
The film has the odd problem, of course. The one man who is allowed into the hayloft for the proceedings in order to take the minutes (in Toews’ novel, he’s the narrator) is written as a big cry baby. There’s nothing else he’s doing in the last few scenes. Come on, the man has suffered enough, let his cheeks dry for a minute. Another tacked-on storyline is about a raped teen who decides to identify out of her sex, cut her hair, adopt a male name and become mute. The tomboy – what some excitable critics have rushed to call a trans character – refuses to speak when she needs to explain that a crying child has a cherry pit stuck inside her nostril, but un-mutes herself to thank someone who used her male name. Even amid these false notes, however, this character is quite truthful: we live in a time of huge increase in teen girls and young women wanting to identify out of their sex. For some it is indeed the result of a traumatic event, but for others it’s because they see how girls and women are being treated and crassly sexualized and want a ticket out. She with a male name, because she knows what her sex is and knows that the men know it too, leaves the colony with other women, and happily.
In many ways, though, while resonating with so many contemporary issues, Women Talking is best watched as not a realist endeavour, but a biblical story of sorts. It’s an Exodus: do we stay in Egypt as slaves, or do we set out into the unknown. Or an even earlier Old Testament story: do we bite from the tree of knowledge and exile ourselves from paradise for good? In real life, in history, no group of women have ever done this quite in this exact way, but it has happened in different ways, asynchronically, hesitatingly, partially, sometimes self-destructively, often on the level of individual consciousness. Polley (and Toews) distilled it and concentrated it, and in spite of some nuance and detail being sacrificed in the process, the movie is still a special experience. The other half of humanity, formerly known as chattel, needs its biblical parables too.
Fantastic review of the Polley film. On another note, it's also a sad state affairs, when humanizing a male character is so rare in a review.