Settle in for a long Series of essays, titled Women Talking
Women Talking was possibly the only Oscar-nominated film I saw this season—and that’s only because it was available on Amazon Prime. Sorry movie theaters, I’m still not going out, mainly because I need the luxury of bailing because I’m tired and want to go to bed. I often watch stuff in stages. Women Talking I gulped down in one sitting.
It’s complicated. The subject matter and how it left me feeling.
The premise of the film/book is based upon true events. An Anabaptist history lesson:
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
According to the 2012 estimates, there were 100,000
Mennonites living in Mexico[1] (including 32,167 baptized adult church
members),[5] the vast majority of them, or about 90,000 are established in the
state of Chihuahua,[2] 6,500 were living in Durango,[3] with the rest living in
small colonies in the states of Campeche, Tamaulipas, Zacatecas, San Luis
Potosí and Quintana Roo.
Their settlements were first established in the 1920s.[6] In 1922, 3,000 Mennonites from the Canadian province of Manitoba established in Chihuahua.[7] By 1927, Mennonites reached 10,000 and they were established in Chihuahua, Durango and Guanajuato.[7]
Mennonites left Canada presumably because of a lack of land. The oldest son inherits and by the time a second, third or fourth son comes around there is nothing left to divide, thus to have one’s own farm and make a living or have their own family there was a need to immigrate for cheap land and expansion. Colonies were relocated or started in northern Mexico.
Miriam Toews (pronounced Taves) has taken as her subject many times the religious and lived-experience of Mennonites, often exploring the hierarchal systems in place and women’s roles in that society. She is a feminist and a bit of an outsider now to that faith.
Her book Women Talking upon which the film is based is about a true event. A Manitoba Colony in Bolivia. Between 2005 and 2009 women and girls were sexually assaulted, dosed with animal tranquilizer while asleep and then raped. Upon waking and realizing, they were told it was demons, wild imaginings. Gaslit for years, the women doubted themselves, some losing faith and going insane. Eventually the men were discovered and jailed. Because of the hierarchy within the colony and the autonomy (it’s why they chose to live in those remote rural areas), it is up to the elders to decide the men’s fate. Unity and agreement is of upmost importance to their faith—thus the women are encouraged to forgive their rapists and just go on living with them.
This is where the novel and movie start—the options presented to them are three: to stay and do nothing, stay and fight the system (tenets of faith, rules of the colony?), or leave. The movie and book are comprised around dialogue, presuppositions, and philosophical wanderings/wonderings. For example: Is forced forgiveness true forgiveness? It is assumed that the women have little agency, that even these choices are limited because—
*In addition, they do not have maps, they do not know where they live or even which direction to go to leave
*Having little contact with the “outside” world, they have no practical skills or know-how to navigate outside the colony
*Lastly, they have been told if they leave then they will not enter Heaven, that they will be cut off from their families and loved ones, that they will be excommunicated—thus losing EVERYTHING they have ever known.
This is a lot.
Sarah Polley deserved the Oscar for screenplay adaptation. It is a complicated history to weave into a “story” for the screen. It’s a story difficult to summarize and cannot be reduced emotionally.
I my next post I’ll examine some of the questions raised in the book/film and how I struggled with them myself when deciding to leave my religious community subsequent to the pandemic. A bit of how I got where I am now.
NEXT POST—Who am I?
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