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Narratives Crossing Borders: the Dynamics of Cultural Interaction

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Narratives Crossing Borders: the Dynamics of Cultural Interaction Freedom to Know Me: The Conflict between Identity and Mennonite Culture in Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness Rita Dirks Ambrose University, Calgary “Freedom’s just another word For nothin’ left to lose.”1 In Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness (2004), Nomi Nickel, a sixteen-year-old Mennonite girl from southern Manitoba, Canada, tells her story, in episodic chunks of memory, of her short life before being excommunicated from the closed community of East Village. Set in the early 1980s, the story details the events that lead up to Nomi’s excommunication, or shunning; Nomi’s exclu- sion is partly due to her embracing of the “English” (“That’s what people in my town called anybody who wasn’t Mennonite”— Toews, p. 134) culture through popular, mostly 1970s, music and books such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Insofar as Toews’s novel presents the conflict between the teenaged narrator and the patriarchal, conservative Mennonite community, the book represents Nomi’s position at the crossroads of negative and posi- tive freedom (Dworkin, 2015). The sarcastic, satirical Nomi must, in this Bildungsroman, resolve the dialectic of her very identity: the negative freedom of No Me (she declares herself to be “Nomi from Nowhere” (Toews, p. 56) incurred through shunning, where 1 Lightfoot, Gordon, “Me and Bobby McGee,” If You Could Read My Mind (1970, Warner Bros.). How to cite this book chapter: Dirks, R. 2021. Freedom to Know Me: The Conflict between Identity and Mennonite Culture in Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness. In: Jonsson, H., Berg, L., Edfeldt, C. and Jansson, B. G. (eds.) Narratives Crossing Borders: The Dynamics of Cultural Interaction. Pp. 33–50. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/bbj.b. License: CC-BY 4.0 34 Narratives Crossing Borders she literally has “nothin’ left to lose,” or the positive freedom of Know Me, insofar as having an identity outside of her commu- nity. Nomi’s excommunication leaves her invisible or erased in East Village; there is no interference from anyone—everyone re- mains passive in light of her excommunication—a circumstance which gives her a kind of negative freedom; yet, inadvertently it becomes here positive freedom as she gains self-understanding and becomes a writer. Nomi is a representative of the second generation of Mennonite Canadians that finds itself on the periphery of at least two cultures. At first reading, because of the engaging satirical tone of the teenage narrator, the novel presents itself as a condemna- tion of the religious fundamentalism of her own people. Certainly, the author’s powerful iconoclastic work is fuelled by her own in- timate knowledge of the Mennonite way of life, for Toews lays bare the punishing mores of that culture in a young protagonist’s formative experiences. Yet, that is not the whole story. My chap- ter, then, places on view the tension between Nomi’s identification with her own culture and the disowning of it, as it disowns her because she also participates in the culture outside of it. Such a position is at once a predicament and a blessing; writers and mar- ginalized intellectuals are often in this same situation and must negotiate their place within and without such communities. As such, Nomi represents the plight of the second wave of Mennonite writers in Canada. Di Brandt, a poet who rose to prominence in the 1980s, writes: I think it’s important for us to remember . how difficult it was for most of us to become writers in the 1980s, how much resistance we needed to put up to the many internal community forces that were trying to control the narrative identity of Mennonites. (Brandt) Shunning in some shape or form was a common experience for these writers because they offered a different voice than the offi- cial “schmock bliewe”2 one. They needed to overcome resistance, or cultural, symbolic, and identity borders, in order to give voice 2 Mennonite Low German for “remaining” or “abiding obedient,” or painting “pretty” pictures only when telling a story. “Schmock bliewe,” literally “remaining pretty” or “nice,” along with “ontlich,” meaning “obedient” Freedom to Know Me 35 to their distinct Mennonite experiences. Mennonites, historical- ly, have crossed many a geographical border to flee persecution; much of their oral and sometimes published narratives in the past involved stories of faith, martyrdom, and escape from op- pressors. Such narratives were always controlled, before the event of Canadian Mennonite writers getting published in the twenti- eth century. Toews, in A Complicated Kindness, places the act of shunning on view as an invisible enforced border between Nomi and her community; in East Village she becomes a non-entity, a ghost, but she begins to write, in her own voice. Notably, A Complicated Kindness begins with absences and shunnings: “The furniture keeps disappearing,” and “half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing,” symbolizing the loss of stability of the Nickel family within their community, caus- ing Nomi to question her own relationship between self and Mennonite community and the larger community of city, country, and world (Toews, p. 1). At the beginning of the novel, Nomi does not know that she is about to be shunned herself, and the only other remaining family member, her father Ray, is selling the furniture in order to leave East Village as well. In this novel of becoming, Nomi becomes a writer, for on the first page ofA Complicated Kindness, she is working on an assignment for her English teacher, which, in fact, becomes the novel. Mr. Quiring expects her to write an essay about “The Flight of Our People,” in the vein of the official narrative wherein her ancestors escaped Russia, “fleeing in the middle of the night, scrambling madly to find a place, any place, where they’d be free” (Toews, p. 148). Nomi, instead, and in a sinister parallel, writes of her sister and mother, leaving in the middle of the night, after they had been excommunicated, toward a dubious freedom. As a bourgeoning writer, Nomi navigates between the politics of belonging/not belonging, between memory, history, her com- munal and familial identity, and her own individual agency within and without. Yet, the novel presents no easy binary; by the end of the novel, completely alone, we do not know where Nomi will go; before the final pages she dreams of going to New York and or “observing decorum,” were words that many of us heard as Mennonite children. 36 Narratives Crossing Borders Winnipeg. The truth is more complicated than Nomi “find[ing] salvation in the city and damnation in a small town” (Loewen, 2015, p. 45). Worthy of note here is a recent volume edited by Robert Zacharias, After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America (2015), which suggests that we live in a post-identity age. Yet, as both Toews and the contributors to After Identity indicate, it is not that simple. In this after-identity age, Nomi’s search reso- nates with readers in Canada more than ever, even if one considers the awards A Complicated Kindness has received (The Governor General’s Award), translations into other languages, and copies sold. For the purposes of this chapter I utilize Zacharias’s mean- ing of the word “after” as denoting a pursuit of or still seeking or owning a complicated identity. Mennonites (Writing) in Canada As I address the topic of the conflict between Mennonite cul- ture and Canadian society, I must call attention to the fact that Canada does not have one readily identifiable mainstream cul- ture; to begin with, it is First Nations, then English and French, and, since the Multiculturalism Act of 1988, at least officially, it celebrates the plurality of ethnical cultural production. However, most Canadian writers still publish in one of the official languages or else remain obscure, incidental, and narrowly ethnic. For ex- ample, Reuben Epp (1920–2009), who has chosen to write his poetry and short stories in Low German, the oral language of the Mennonites, reaches only a “restrictive” audience (Levertov, 1998, p. 482). E.D. Blodgett also writes of this dilemma: The paradox for . immigrants whose native language is not English, is that if access to agency appears offered by English, it carries a high cultural price. If some immigrant writers contin- ue to write in their national languages, such as Ukrainian and Hungarian, their presence in Canada and their bearing on the literary system of Anglophone writing is limited, inasmuch as they have chosen separation or marginalization. If they choose English or French, as . most immigrants have done, they acquire, in many cases, the insights of integration, but run the risk of being read without full understanding by the people of other cultures of their difference and their challenge. (2004, p. 230) Freedom to Know Me 37 Canadian Mennonites are also distinct from other ethnic groups living in Canada in yet another way: They do not belong to one parent nation state in Europe or elsewhere in the world. While Italian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Swedish immigrants to Canada have a point of reference in their ancient homes in Europe, Mennonites have no such home. Toews obviously writes in English, yet she finds a way to in- clude her Mennonite heritage using Low German phrases, often untranslated, throughout the novel. In her own way, she evades the two pressures to conform: She does not write in one of the official Canadian languages exclusively, yet, at the same time, she resists appropriation by the Mennonite tradition, however, not without bearing out the tension in the inclusion of both. In combining the two languages, she expresses and safeguards her own heterogeneous identity, her own voice.
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