Beyond “What We by Habit or Custom Already Know,” or What Do We Mean When We Talk About Mennonite/s Writing? HILDI FROESE TIESSEN* “Identity . is at once impossible and unavoidable.” – Robert Kroetsch1 Abstract: This essay deals less with the primary creative texts that make up “Mennonite literature” than with the critical discourse that continues to develop around these texts—with critics’ participation in what Sau-ling Cynthia Wong refers to as a “textual coalition.” In particular, my reflections focus on the relatively small, though vibrant, field of criticism that, for the most part, addresses authors and texts the critics deem to be representative of a Mennonite writing community or a Mennonite literary tradition. I argue that the question that lies at the core of this essay—“What do we mean when we talk about Mennonite/s writing?”—has generally not been addressed by the Mennonite “textual coalition,” and that discussion of the question can be richly informed by some of the critical debates that have engaged critics of other minority-culture literatures that developed alongside Mennonite/s writing within the broad literary panoramas of North America. This exploration of what we mean when we speak of Mennonite/s writing has its roots in what were, for me, two substantial literary experiences. The first spanned several decades, beginning in the 1970s, when I began to pay attention to the early, published fictional writing of Rudy Wiebe. While I was a graduate student in the Department of English at the University of Alberta, a department Wiebe had joined as a young professor of creative writing in 1967,2 I made a study for a course on the fiction of the Canadian West of Wiebe’s first and third novels: *Hildi Froese Tiessen is professor emerita at Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo. 1. Robert Kroetsch, Excerpts from the Real World: A Prose Poem in Ten Parts (Lantzville, B.C.: Oolichan, 1986), 15. 2. In 1967 Wiebe moved from Goshen, Ind., to his home province of Alberta, where he taught in the Department of English at the University of Alberta. 11 MQR 90 (January 2016) 12 The Mennonite Quarterly Review Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962) and The Blue Mountains of China (1970).3 I was, at the time, interested in the fact that these were “Mennonite” texts, but did not think of them as belonging to any sort of Mennonite literary tradition. In Canada Wiebe had been preceded, to be sure, by other writers of Mennonite heritage, several of whom had published modest chapbooks in German. Most prominent among them was Arnold Dyck, whose major work, in German, included a nostalgic Bildungsroman published in installments during the 1940s about Mennonites on the plains of Ukraine,4 and, in Low German, a collection of humorous stories about two flat-footed Mennonites from southern Manitoba named Koop and Bua.5 Others, who wrote in English, included Mabel Dunham, an Ontario woman “of Mennonite descent through her mother,”6 who, as early as 1924, began to write historical novels about some of the Swiss American Mennonite pioneers like Benjamin Eby and Sam Bricker, who had contributed to the development of the first Mennonite settlements in Canada, in southern Ontario, in the early 1800s.7 Another such writer was Paul Hiebert, a Mennonite chemistry professor, who won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour in 1948 for Sarah Binks, a faux biography of “the Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan.”8 Sarah Binks had no apparent connection with Mennonites. Moreover, Koop and Bua, Eby and Bricker, and Sarah Binks would have shared few readers in the early 1970s, and were unlikely to be thought of by anyone except, possibly, Rudy Wiebe, in the same breath. In the 1970s, Wiebe was the only author among the Mennonites in Canada writing for a national audience and whose fiction explicitly addressed Mennonite experience. At that time there was nothing that could be identified as a Mennonite “literature.” It was when Patrick 3. This student project became the first published scholarly article devoted to Wiebe’s work: "A Mighty Inner River: 'Peace' in the Early Fiction of Rudy Wiebe," Journal of Canadian Fiction 11:4 (Fall 1973), 71-76. 4. Arnold Dyck, Lost in the Steppe. trans. Henry D. Dyck (Steinbach: Derksen Printers, 1974). This novel was originally published in five modest volumes (1944-1948) as Verloren in der Steppe. 5. Among these was the popular Koop enn Bua opp Reise (1943). See The Collected Works of Arnold Dyck, 4 vols., ed. Victor G. Doerksen, George K. Epp, Harry Loewen, Elisabeth Peters, and Al Reimer (Winnipeg: Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society, 1985-1986). 6. See Elizabeth H. Bender and Sam Steiner. (April 2011). “The Trail of the Conestoga,” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Retrieved June 15, 2015, from http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Trail_of_the_Conestoga,_The&oldid=111360. 7. B. Mabel Dunham’s The Trail of the Conestoga was first published by Macmillan in Toronto in 1924, with a foreword by W. L. Mackenzie King, who was then the prime minister of Canada. 8. Paul Hiebert, Sarah Binks (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010). The novel was originally published in 1947, by Oxford University Press Canada. What Do We Mean By Mennonite/s Writing? 13 Friesen, Sandra Birdsell, Di Brandt, Victor Enns, and Audrey Poetker, along with Al Reimer, David Waltner-Toews, Armin Wiebe, and others, began to write and publish, in the 1980s and 1990s—work that was embraced by readers first in Manitoba and then more broadly across Canada, and work that addressed the condition of being Mennonite in that era—that a Canadian public began to see something of a literary phenomenon among Mennonites. This literary movement gained a palpable momentum through the support of hospitable regional publishers (especially Winnipeg’s Turnstone Press) and an exuberant, stimulating, wide-ranging drive by the Canadian government to renew its national culture at various levels, from the grassroots to government policy.9 At that time, Canada was friendly both to the arts and to all shades of the non-Anglo-Saxon “other.” Among the Canadian literati, issues of race had not begun to preclude interest in issues related to white ethnicity. In fact, from the late 1980s through the 1990s Mennonite writers of Canada were considered both “other” enough to warrant serious attention in those early years of multiculturalism, and prolific and gifted enough to sustain it. By the mid-1980s I was teaching a course in Mennonite literature at Conrad Grebel College at the University of Waterloo and, following the publication of Liars and Rascals: Mennonite Short Stories (1989)10 and in the context of the Mennonite World Conference assembly taking place in Winnipeg in 1990, I was invited by two prominent Canadian literary magazines—first by Prairie Fire (Winnipeg) and then by The New Quarterly (Waterloo)—to edit special issues devoted to Mennonite/s writing.11 At the same time, I was also invited to help plan and convene the first conference on Mennonite/s Writing,12 an event born in the imagination of Miriam Maust,13 organized and sponsored by The New 9. The Canadian Multiculturalism Act was passed into law in 1988; it was preceded by the adoption of a national multiculturalism policy, in 1971. 10. Liars and Rascals: Mennonite Short Stories, ed. Hildi Froese Tiessen (Waterloo, Ont.: University of Waterloo Press, 1989). 11. Hildi Froese Tiessen, guest ed., The New Quarterly, 10:1-2 (Spring/Summer 1990): Special Double Issue on Mennonite/s Writing in Canada, and Prairie Fire, 11:2 (Summer 1990): Special Issue on New Mennonite Writing. 12. The first conference on Mennonite/s Writing took place at the University of Waterloo in 1990. The second and third, hosted at Goshen College in Indiana, took place in 1997 and 2002. The fourth happened at Bluffton University in Ohio in 2006. The fifth took place at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba in 2009. This was followed by the sixth, at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia in 2012, and the seventh, at Fresno Pacific University in California in 2015. By the late fall of 2015 there were plans underway for two more conferences, in 2017 and 2020. 13. The idea of a conference on Mennonite writing originated with Miriam Maust, an American “Swiss” Mennonite literary scholar and poet who had settled in Waterloo, where she served as one of the poetry editors of The New Quarterly. 14 The Mennonite Quarterly Review Quarterly, funded by a combination of institutional and private donors, and hosted in 1990 on the campus of the University of Waterloo.14 I mention these developments because they define, in large measure, the substructure of this essay, which is concerned with critical writing about Mennonite literature. Although scholars like Harry Loewen had begun to write about Mennonite “literary arts” (composed in both German and English),15 questions about how to speak of this emerging field of “Mennonite literature” began around the time of the special issues and the first conference. It was then that I began to employ the slash in the now commonly-accepted brand “Mennonite/s Writing” to assert, among other things, my ambivalence about using the term “Mennonite” as a bare adjective, a simple signifier. To speak of this new writing phenomenon simply as “Mennonite literature” would have the effect, I feared, of both declaring and delimiting the “essence” of this burgeoning body of literature. Perhaps, I ventured, writing by Mennonites could be referred to simply as “Mennonite writing”; but I knew the label was inevitably more complicated, more knotty than that. Then, as now, the term “Mennonite” signaled numerous divergent, inconsistent, and unstable commitments to identity, and was coded differently within a wide range of chronological, geographic, cultural, and religious settings.