CGR Vol. 22, No. 2 (Spring 2004)

When I was growing up I wanted to be a writer. . . . But of course I knew no writers, nor had ever met one; the Mennonite bush farm community in Saskatchewan where I was born and later the small Alberta town where I spent my teens certainly contained none. I read endless books, but had no idea how to go about becoming a writer in Canada. Nevertheless, there is in the human imagination that which wants more. Not merely more of the same thing, the stimulated imagination always wants more, yes, and also different.[1]

– Rudy Wiebe

They’ve claimed you, your stories, written you down, a hand pressing them into the page you’ve worn as a cloak for more than forty years. Time is a long time, a stairway to climbing, one glistening raspberry alone and uneaten in the garden.[2]

– Aritha van Herk

In a statement to some one hundred people gathered for the closing panel of the first conference on “Mennonite/s Writing” in May 1990,[3]Rudy Wiebe declared: “I’ve never thought of myself particularly as a Mennonite writer, you might be interested to know. The publication of my first book destroyed that illusion for me forever.”[4] Three years earlier, in 1987, Wiebe had published in the Journal of Mennonite Studies an essay in which he had recalled the Mennonite reception of that first book, Peace Shall Destroy Many.[5] In that retrospective statement, he had confessed: “As some of you may know, publishing that first novel became for me both an exaltation and a trauma.”[6]

It is common knowledge that the publication and reception of Peace Shall Destroy Many, the first Canadian English-language work of narrative fiction to feature Mennonites living in a Mennonite community, resonated throughout the Canadian Mennonite world. Recently, reflecting on the impact of that novel, one of its original young Mennonite readers recalled how with that first book Wiebe “pushed us into ‘the sixties’ even before they had a chance to arrive with some appropriate ceremony.” From the day of publication, this early reader remarked, “Wiebe has led the way, helping us to figure out how we might live, even before we knew what to brace ourselves for.” Another early reader recalled that Wiebe’s “portrayal of the Mennonites – perhaps better said, of creatures of flesh and blood who happened to be Mennonite – was the first one I had come across that reflected the reality which I was beginning to see but which I was too timid and confused to name.”[7] Al Reimer, a young academic in 1962, and someone Wiebe had cited as one of his constant friends during the turbulent post-Peace period,[8] forty years later stated without equivocation: “To say that Rudy invented Canadian-Mennonite literature in English in the early sixties is no exaggeration. Peace Shall Destroy Many was the right novel at the right time in that it raised crucial questions and long-suppressed issues of Mennonite life and faith and dared to address them with probing honesty and creative independence. He created a Mennonite literary world that other Mennonite writers could enter and explore and make meaningful to readers in general. And that has led directly to the efflorescence of ‘Mennonite’ writing we enjoy today.”[9]

Few people familiar with the vigorous flowering of Mennonite writing in Canada – nay, in North America – would deny Rudy Wiebe’s central and persistent role as trailblazer and inspiration. Even when his influence has been indirect and diffuse, it has remained palpable. Different creative writers have given expression to it in diverse ways, each interweaving his or her own literary voice with Wiebe’s. “What I remember now of Peace Shall Destroy Many are first impressions,” Patrick Friesen recalls. “Mennonite life was given fuller expression than I had heard before. This wasn’t a narrow sermon, a censored history; it was a deeply-felt, imaginative exploration of a particular community by someone who belonged but asked questions. Someone who knew the shadows had to be lit.” Poet Jeff Gundy remarks on Wiebe’s brilliance and delicacy, ambition, and indiscretion. Wiebe, he observes, quoting Ezra Pound on Walt Whitman, was the “pig-headed father [who] broke the new wood.” For Di Brandt, “it was Rudy Wiebe who stood before me as the Man Who Had Survived Mennonite Wrath, who had risked everything to write what he understood as the true fiction of our people, playfully, lovingly, eloquently, but with an unerring eye for the seam of contradictions running through us, our violence and our pacifism, our evangelism and our separatism, our sense of justice, of egalitarianism and our racism and sexism, our insistence on religious freedom and our communal repression of self expression, our relentless honesty and our deep deceptions for the sake of community appearances. Our humanness, in other words. Rudy Wiebe did it, I said to myself, trembling, so I can do it too.”[10]

At the closing banquet of the 2002 conference on Mennonite/s writing – a gathering of writers, readers and critics where Rudy Wiebe’s forty-year career (1962-2002) was celebrated – I drew attention to Wiebe’s success as an author of national and international stature, particularly well known in Canada and abroad for his historical metafictions set in the Native communities of Canada. I said that Wiebe has been “a formidable force” in ensuring “the well-being of [Canada’s] national literary culture,” in shaping Canadians’ perceptions of themselves as well as of “the prairie, the north and the indigenous peoples who occupied our land long before the Europeans arrived.” Big Bear, I observed then, was “already there . . . in 1962 in the pages of Peace Shall Destroy Many, a novel in which the natives and Mennonites lived side by side.”[11] Nevertheless, I insisted, in spite of his efforts at denial, Wiebe has always had a committed audience among the Mennonites, especially for his “Mennonite” texts. There have always been Mennonites who have laid claim to him as a writer who speaks their language, a writer who, to paraphrase critic Clara Thomas,[12] has the power to identify them to themselves.

What Al Reimer refers to as the “‘Mennonite’ writing we enjoy today” has been the focus of three conferences in recent years: “Mennonite/s Writing in Canada” (1990)[13] ; “Mennonite/s Writing in the U.S.,” held at Goshen College in 1997; and “Mennonite/s Writing: An International Conference,” also at Goshen College, in 2002.[14] Like the first event of this kind in 1990, the third conference called together most of the prominent Mennonite writers of Canada and the United States (as well as the Japanese Mennonite poet Yorifumi Yaguchi, in 2002). Among the writers present at Goshen in 2002 were Canadians Rudy Wiebe, Di Brandt, Victor Jerrett Enns, Maurice Mierau, David Waltner-Toews, Rosemary Nixon, Barbara Nickel, Patrick Friesen, Sarah Klassen, Armin Wiebe, and Sandra Birdsell, and Americans Jeff Gundy, Dallas Wiebe, Julia Kasdorf, Raylene Hinz-Penner, Todd Davis, Ann Hostetler, Omar Eby, Keith Ratzlaff, and Jean Janzen. The conference comprised a wonderful festival of readings and academic papers. It served as an occasion to observe the burgeoning of Mennonite literary production in North America (we celebrated the publication of seven new titles by Mennonite writers there).[15] At the same time it provided an occasion to recognize the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Rudy Wiebe’s first novel and his subsequent four decades of literary activity. The conference proceedings were divided to reflect the dual focus of the event (Mennonite writing today and the watershed appearance of Peace Shall Destroy Many), between the October 2003 volume of The Mennonite Quarterly Review (appropriately dedicated to Ervin Beck of Goshen College, whose patient, steady hand, creative energy, and quiet persistence guided both the 1997 and 2002 conferences) and the present volume of The Conrad Grebel Review.

Most of the material concerning Rudy Wiebe has been reserved for this special issue of The Conrad Grebel Review[16] which contains, also, some new material by and about Wiebe. Edna Froese’s thoughtful and illuminating survey of Wiebe’s Mennonite protagonists, J.D. Mininger’s probing analysis of Peace Shall Destroy Many, Jane Robinett and Maryann Jantzen’s enlightening explorations of dominant themes in Sweeter Than All the World, and Maurice Mierau’s playful yet instructive musings on why Rudy Wiebe may or may not be “the last Mennonite writer” – these essays, prepared for the 2002 conference, form the core of this volume. They are accompanied by excerpts from an interview with Rudy Wiebe – excerpts that focus in particular on Wiebe as writer of “Mennonite” material – by Janne Korkka, and by a review essay that foregrounds one example of the substantial amount of collaborative work Wiebe has undertaken throughout his career, by Paul Tiessen. These critical works are augmented by the transcript of a compelling talk – a personal statement about the work of the fiction writer – Rudy Wiebe delivered at the University of Calgary this past spring.[17]

Rudy Wiebe’s persistence in claiming not to think of himself as a Mennonite writer is matched by his insistence that the writer must sustain some detachment from his work. Quoting from an essay Wiebe published in 1965, J.M. Kertzer, in his engaging and illuminating “Biocritical Essay” which serves as an introduction to the Rudy Wiebe collection at the University of Calgary archives, observes: “Rudy Wiebe has mocked the ‘personal fallacy’ in literary criticism, which ‘sees every work of art as arising directly out of the artist’s experience’ and sanctions ‘a great deal of snooping’” into his life. “In contrast,” Kertzer continues, “Wiebe insists that novels ‘acquire a life and character of their own, independent of and quite beyond the artist himself.”[18] At the Mennonite/s writing conference in Waterloo in 1990, Wiebe maintained his insistence on the artist’s detached perspective; “navel-gazing is no good to anyone,” he said. “The world of story and of fiction for me is all around me, and the world where I find my imagination stimulated is not necessarily found by sitting and looking in a mirror. It may start there. I know . . . [that] literature often begins with autobiography: this is my story, I have this story to tell. But if you’re a writer, it goes beyond that and, after a while, you’re not writing your own story at all. Of course you are, but you’re not really. It goes beyond that. . . . We’d better get on with writing the world of our imagination in such a way that nobody will forget it, whether they know that we existed personally or not.”[19]

Well, Rudy Wiebe does exist, and, his claims to objectivity notwithstanding, I would venture to say that some of his most sharply conceived work arises directly out of his own experience (the short fictions “Chinook Christmas” and “Sailing to Danzig,” for example). And he continues to function actively within the Mennonite community to which these stories relate (most recently team-teaching a Sunday School course on the Bible as literature for his home congregation of Lendrum Mennonite Brethren Church in Edmonton). Rudy Wiebe and his fictions are shaped, among other things, by the communities (Canadian, Albertan, Mennonite) in which the author has chosen to live. Like Wiebe, younger Mennonite writers continue to find their own voices – as he has, throughout his career – both within the context of the diverse Mennonite communities of Canada and the US, and beyond.

It is noteworthy that as the remarkably productive Mennonite writing community of Winnipeg has begun to disperse over the past decade or so, with Patrick Friesen’s move to Vancouver, Sandra Birdsell’s to Regina, and Di Brandt’s to Windsor, for example, another group of writers – self-identified as Mennonites – has begun to gather on the lower mainland of British Columbia, where in February 2004 nineteen Mennonite writers (including Andreas Schroeder, Barbara Nickel, Melody Goetz, Leonard Neufeldt, and others) met “to interact and connect with other writers, and to hear what other writers are writing.” The spirit of censure that drove Rudy Wiebe out of his job as editor of the Mennonite Brethren Herald after the publication of Peace Shall Destroy Many no longer persists for them, these writers have taken pleasure in observing. Andreas Schroeder, in fact, remarked subsequent to their meeting that the west coast Mennonite writers seem “very comfortable with their Mennonite upbringing, far more inclined to include it in their work in a productive and even fond manner. It seemed we weren’t any longer threatened or imprisoned by it,” he remarked; “we could afford to acknowledge its many advantages and strengths as well as its failings without feeling we had to buy into the faith or the lifestyle uncritically.”[20]

Much of the work published in this volume deals in some way with the intersections between the individual Mennonite and his community, the writer and “home” – subjects that have never been far from the heart of Mennonite writing as it has taken shape over the past forty years. Is it most fitting, then, that Rudy Wiebe’s informal piece “Climbing Mountains That Do Not Exist: The Fiction Writer at Work” should be given the last word here. In this most engaging piece, Wiebe speaks as warmly and personally as ever he has about his childhood and the advent of story in his life. Here he remembers his mother, “deeply troubled” that her last child, Rudy, “should grow up to have the overweening pride to write stories he expected other people to print and read.” And yet, he writes, inimitably, “from my point of view, it was exactly the powerful stories she told me in that isolated bush world, not only stories from the Bible but far more of her childhood in incomprehensible Russia, the village life in Orenburg Mennonite Colony, the brutal physical punishments of her father, her mother’s death when she was six and enduring two step-mothers – the last her own age and once her best friend – and particularly the stories of the family escape from the Communists, the escape over Moscow with a chronically ill baby Helen who was always, as by a miracle, strong and healthy whenever the Canadian immigration doctors examined her – it was all a miracle, and the greatest was not being forced to settle in Paraguay: these stories heard in bits and pieces over and over were far too powerful for me ever to forget, as was the pioneer farm life we lived. And all the more powerful,” Wiebe continues, alluding, as is his wont, to the blatant and persistent chauvinism of the imperialist political and cultural centers of power in Canada, “because, in the books we read in school, there was never a hint that refugee bush homesteaders in Canadian boreal forests existed, fumigating lice and swatting mosquitoes and trudging through snowdrifts while their hands and faces froze. And most certainly in our school readers and tiny library there was nothing readable about bohunk Mennonites, speaking Low German. . . .”[21]

When I visited Edmonton earlier this year, the face of Rudy Wiebe stared out at me every time I passed a newsstand. It was on the cover of the spring 2004 issue of Legacy, a glossy “Heritage, Arts and Culture” magazine published in Alberta. Here was Rudy Wiebe being acknowledged as a cultural treasure of a province rich in writers. Wiebe’s large readership in Canada and around the world, the hundreds of articles and reviews written about his work, his countless invitations to read and to deliver public lectures on diverse subjects of national, regional, or personal concern – all confirm the significance of his artist’s voice.[22] Along with his prominent role on the literary landscapes of Canada and abroad, Wiebe is unmatched in representing and probing the experience of Mennonites – whether in contemporary or historical settings. He has written about Mennonites with immense scope and tenacity, vision and complexity, with a cooly skeptical eye and a warmly affectionate heart. This volume of The Conrad Grebel Review has been prepared in celebration of narrative and story-telling in the Mennonite world where, thanks to Rudy Wiebe (and to the “powerful” tales his mother told him), it is increasingly true that – as Wiebe himself once remarked – “[t]he impulse to make story needs no defence.”[23]

Notes

[1] Rudy Wiebe, “The Invention of Truth,” typescript manuscript. This essay, presented in a plenary session at a conference in Grainau, Germany, in February 2002, was subsequently published in Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien, NR 1-2, 2002: 20-25.

[2] Aritha van Herk, [a letter to Rudy Wiebe], in Rudy Wiebe: a tribute, compiled by Hildi Froese Tiessen (Kitchener, ON and Goshen, IN: Sand Hills Books and Pinchpenny Press, 2002).

[3] The conference, “Mennonite/s Writing in Canada,” was organized by The New Quarterly. It took place at Conrad Grebel College, University of Waterloo.

[4] Rudy Wiebe, “Closing Panel,” in Acts of Concealment: Mennonite/s Writing in Canada. Ed. Hildi Froese Tiessen and Peter Hinchcliffe. (Waterloo, ON: University of Waterloo Press, 1992), 229-30.

[5] Rudy Wiebe, “The Skull in the Swamp,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 5 (1987): [8]-20. The essay was first prepared as the 1987 Marjorie Ward Lecture at St. John’s College, University of Manitoba.

[6] Ibid., [8].

[7] Tributes by Paul Tiessen and John Rempel, respectively, in Rudy Wiebe: a tribute, n.p.

[8] See Wiebe, in “Closing Panel,” 230.

[9] Al Reimer, in Rudy Wiebe: a tribute, n.p.

[10] Patrick Friesen, Jeff Gundy, and Di Brandt, respectively, in Rudy Wiebe: a tribute, n.p.

[11] In an oral tribute later published as “Rudy Wiebe: A Tribute,” in The Mennonite Quarterly Review 77.4 (October 2003): 690.

[12] Clara Thomas, “Western Women’s Writing of ‘The Childhood’ and Anne Konrad’s The Blue Jar,” in Acts of Concealment: Mennonite/s Writing in Canada. Ed. Hildi Froese Tiessen and Peter Hinchcliffe (Waterloo, ON: University of Waterloo Press, 1992), 130. Here Thomas remarks: “I agree with Bill Keith that The Blue Mountains [of China] is a magnificent epic and religious novel, but it does not and cannot identify me to myself as does, for instance, The Stone Angel or The Diviners, both of them written from a background so close to my own that Hagar is my mother, myself, as Morag is my sister, myself.”

[13] See Note 3.

[14] This last conference, like the other Goshen conference, was organized by Ervin Beck; cosponsor of the third conference was Conrad Grebel University College, represented by Hildi Froese Tiessen.

[15] See a list of these in John D. Roth and Ervin Beck, “In This Issue,” in The Mennonite Quarterly Review 77:503-504. Absent from this list of six new books is David Bergen’s The Case of Lena S., which was being actively promoted in Canada while the conference took place. Roth and Beck remark that four more titles appeared in the year following the Goshen conference (and others have appeared since, including collections of poetry by Patrick Friesen, Di Brandt, John Weier, and Melanie Cameron; a collection of short fiction by a new writer, Carrie Snyder; and a new novel by Miriam Toews). 

[16] The Mennonite Quarterly Review issue includes one essay on Wiebe’s work, focusing on his use of photographs in his most recent novel: Hildi Froese Tiessen’s “Between Memory and Longing: Rudy Wiebe’s Sweeter Than All the World,” 619-36.

[17] The lecture, one in a series of two given by Wiebe early in February 2004, was sponsored by the Chair of Christian Thought at the University of Calgary.

[18] J.M. Kertzer, “Rudy Wiebe: Biocritical Essay,” <www.ucalgary.ca/library/SpecColl/wiebebioc.htm> , citing Wiebe in A Voice in the Land, 40.

[19] Wiebe, in “Closing Panel,” 230-31.

[20] Andreas Schroeder, quoted by Angelika Dawson, “BC Mennonite Writers Gather,” typescript press release forwarded to me by Elsie K. Neufeld, who hosted the writers’ meeting. See also Angelika Dawson, “Writers inspired at B.C. gathering,” Canadian Mennonite 8.6 (March 22, 2004): 10.

[21] Wiebe, “Climbing Mountains That Do Not Exist: the fiction writer at work,” published in this volume.

[22] The most recent translation of Wiebe’s fiction is a German edition of The Blue Mountains of China, translated by Joachim Utz as Wie Pappeln im Wind (Eichborn AG, 2004.)

[23] Rudy Wiebe, “Introduction,” The Story-Makers: A Selection of Modern Short Stories, ed. Rudy Wiebe (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1970), ix.

Adam Peter Wiebe, the protagonist of Rudy Wiebe’s latest novel, Sweeter Than All the World, has not fared well in many reviews of the book. Among the complaints about the novel’s excessive number of themes,[1] lack of momentum, and a ragged, war-torn quilt of a plot,[2] comes the refrain: this Adam is a poor excuse for a central character, “a scarified creature of the 20th century, haunted by – just about everything.”[3] Unimpressed reviewers account for Adam’s vague, unconvincing personal struggles and “stilted dialogue”[4] by dismissing him as an awkward plot device designed to hold together “as much Mennonite history as the author can discover.”[5] Because the non-Adam chapters of the novel come to us through unusually strong first-person voices – “I was born almost five hundred years ago”[6] begins the first of these narrators, and she maintains her certainty of self and of belief even in the face of the fire of martyrdom – Adam’s pitiful, and pitiable, navel-gazing tends to provoke initial impatience and dismissal. In the words of Joe Wiebe of The Brantford Expositor, “when the modern man is lost and wandering in the wilderness, why does it have to go on for so long?”[7]

Adam does seem a Mennonite Prufrock, indecisive, cowardly, yet smart-alecky and too literate by half. He’s too small, somehow, for this epic novel with its sweep of Mennonite history and its large philosophical questions. Although he wanders, Odysseus-like (Sirens and all), over the face of the earth, his existential angst is dwarfed by the sufferings of his ancestors. Besides, his initial impetus is flight, not quest. He is no Beowulf or Galahad, sent by his tribe or court to kill a threatening dragon or find a Holy Grail for the benefit of all. Even after Adam announces his intention of re-rooting himself on his father’s homestead, it is hard not to visualize him as one who could still, with a shrug of his shoulders, mutter evasively, “That’s not what I meant. That is not what I meant at all” (STAW, 106).

Although Adam Wiebe does share some traits with Eliot’s Prufrock, I read him more as a Mennonite Everyman, who must negotiate the Anabaptist tightrope between the choosing self and the enabling constraints of the believers’ community.[8] Adam is the logical and theological descendant of Thom Wiens in Peace Shall Destroy Many, John Reimer in The Blue Mountains of China, and James Dyck in My Lovely Enemy.[9] All of these men have provoked confused readings and derogatory labels from one camp or other. Non-Mennonite readers see them as existential wanderers, marginalized from their rigid communities. In that role, these protagonists become partially understandable, at least until near the end when Wiebe imposes a sentimental, or unfashionably monologic, ending.[10] Believing Mennonites, on the other hand, attempt to read the novels as stories of redemption, but often have difficulty forgiving Wiebe for the confusing multiplicity of voices and, above all, for making his objects of grace, especially the last two, such worthless, unrepentant human beings.

A more productive way to read all these protagonists, for both Mennonite and non-Mennonite readers, is to recognize that they do not function primarily as developing individuals, let alone heroes, despite their increasingly epic contexts. As was pointed out in an interview with Wiebe in India, Wiebe’s novels resemble “Third World novels,” the “kind of novel where community is more important than the individual. That is, there is a shift in the form itself from the individual consciousness to the consciousness of the community.”[11] Yet his protagonists are not just the sites in which the “clash of communities, of world views” is played out.[12] They are also choosers – Anabaptist choosers evaluating several ways of being Mennonite in the world. The choices Wiebe affirms are made possible only by and within the community, choices that then also redefine the nature of that community. This dialectic tension between the need for individual responsibility and the importance of the supporting community is present in all four of Wiebe’s “Mennonite” novels, but it is increasingly developed through metaphor rather than direct exposition.

Thom Wiens in Peace Shall Destroy Many chooses within a narrow range of possibilities and in relation to a distinctly separated Mennonite church community. The immediate time-line Wiebe allows Thom is only a year, and the historical frame of reference in which he functions is only the living memories of the aging leaders of the church. Even so, Thom has several models of being Mennonite to choose from, all of which appeal to him at some level, however briefly: Deacon Block offers him security through rigid strength, unshakeable conviction, and unwavering reliance on tradition; Thom’s mother and Pastor Lepp encourage gentle piety and love even in disagreement – a form of non-resistance that occasionally resembles the path of least resistance; Thom’s brother David models the commitment and zeal of a missionary; and Joseph Dueck, who probes all tradition in the light of Scripture, dares to apply the biblical command to love others to the Métis living nearby, who have usually been ignored by the Mennonites. The didactic tone of the novel leaves no doubt that the first model (authoritarian tradition) is unacceptable, the second two (passive peace-keeping and evangelical zeal) deserve respect, and the last model (sacrificial love) receives authorial blessing. When Thom rebels against Deacon Block’s ruthless exclusionary tactics with a frustrated “Why must we in Wapiti love only Mennonites?” (PSDM, 215), he merely makes explicit what has already been made very clear through the plot and through Joseph Dueck’s persuasive letters.

What images Wiebe uses in the novel support the central argument for an inclusive community of love, without expanding or complicating the argument. Most prominent among these images is the bush that surrounds Wapiti – both a literal barrier between Mennonites and the world and symbolically, in Thom’s dream of the burning bush, a patriarchal boundary that has to give way before change is possible. Another significant boundary foregrounded in the novel is the disintegrating fence that provokes difficulties between Thom and his nemesis, the fallen-away Mennonite, Herb Unger. The community, speaking in the voice of Block, wants the wooden rails replaced with the nastier and sturdier barbed wire. (That painful string will reappear in other novels.) Song, in contrast, transcends boundaries: Thom feels one with the congregation and with God when he sings the beloved Mennonite hymns, and is able to connect most fully with the Métis families when he brings in his friends to sing for them. Song comes closest to the language of love that Thom hopes can be learned (PSDM, 198). 

The Blue Mountains of China likewise offers a choice among ways of being Mennonite, but the historical and geographical contexts have widened considerably. The single, authoritative voice of Peace Shall Destroy Many has been replaced by multiple centers of consciousness in multiple contexts. While John Reimer does function as a protagonist, or at least as link among the stories (and thus a precursor of Adam Wiebe), he is not so much chooser himself as a representative of one of the ways of being Mennonite in the world among which the reader must choose. Except for John Reimer’s sermon in the ditch, authorial control is most evident in the leitmotif of “nothing.” “Nothing” is the most powerful image in The Blue Mountains of China. Over and over again, characters utter variations on the practical Mennonite impulse to dismiss whatever “doesn’t bring anything in.”[13] “What is that to get ahead?” millionaire Dennis Williams/Willms asks the cross-carrying John Reimer, while his mother-in-law, Frieda Friesen, achieves a remarkable peace with “her nothing” (BMC, 241). The repeated “nothing” phrase highlights the self-sacrifice of individuals like David Epp, Sr., David Epp, Jr., and John Reimer, yet the only “nothing” actions that can be carried out in the novel are enabled by community support. David Epp, Sr. can leave his wife and child because his friend and the rest of the village will take care of them. Samuel Reimer cannot answer God’s call to go to Vietnam because his community not only refuses to support him but actively prevents him from obeying God. In the end, Jakob Friesen IV, the one who “believes that he believes nothing” (BMC, 235), who complains bitterly that “the big trouble with Jesus is that he gives you nothing to hold in the hand” (BMC, 272), nevertheless utters a simple, sacramental statement more powerful than Reimer’s sermon, “it is nothing for one to drink alone when there are two by the fire” (BMC, 263).

Both Thom Wiens and John Reimer function wholly within a Mennonite context. They both seek a way of incarnating belief that does not also separate them from community, although they are willing to bear the cost of separation, if necessary. Both are also confronted with the wholly Other (Métis, Russians, Indians) and with variations of the aufjefollna Mennist (fallen-away Mennonite). The Unger boys in Peace Shall Destroy Many are seen so completely through Thom Wiens’s perspective that they arouse little sympathy from the reader, although some in the community attempt to reclaim them. In The Blue Mountains of China, the fallen away Mennonites, although more sympathetically portrayed, are even more prominent in their disruption of community. Serebro, of Mennonite descent, has become a Communist commissar; Escha, the Russian servant, likely the son of some straying Mennonite patriarch, provokes Jacob Friesen V into murder; Liesel Driediger grieves her father with her scorn of all things Mennonite and, in the final chapter (now as the linguistics professor Elizabeth Cereno), tempts the young Irene with her selfish freedom. Yet one senses each one of these characters would believe if they could. These fallen away Mennonites are less “runners, hiders, and liars,” in Muttachi Friesen’s bitter phrase (BMC, 34), than those Mennonites in the novel who put their material wealth and religious security above the claims of genuine community. Muttachi’s phrase actually applies even more aptly to the entire community in Peace Shall Destroy Many, which has attempted to run away from the world for its own spiritual security and, incidentally, material profit. Such action undermines the possibility of community even in its insistence on conformity.

In My Lovely Enemy, the aufjefollna Mennist, this time a definite “runner, hider, and liar,” becomes the protagonist, signaling a marked shift in Wiebe’s focus and technique. James Dyck, history professor, adulterer, and urbanite, has some kinship with Thom Wiens, having lived under the watchful eye of Old Hildebrandt, an updated Deacon Block, James’s “father’s final ultimate and immovable authority,” who “always knew right and wrong” (MLE, 123). Unlike Thom, however, James flees from his Mennonite home town at the first opportunity. He is no prophet, prepared to advocate change. In fact, although his education and his photographic memory give him access to textual models of faith from the Bible to John Donne to Broken Arm, James does not choose so much as submit to being chosen. He is a recipient of a grace that he scarcely begins to understand and a participant in a community that can only be described in the language of magic realism. Thus Wiebe takes the reader even further on the journey of discovering that traditional ways of thinking alone do not work – not for reading texts and not for incarnating Christ’s love. Even more than in The Blue Mountains of China, the main work of understanding is granted to the reader, partly through the very erudite web of allusions and partly through the central conceit of divine love as passionate romance.

The dominant image of sexual love in My Lovely Enemy concerns the loss of self, as the image of “nothing” did in The Blue Mountains of China, but Wiebe’s choice of the “small death” of sexual intercourse to explore that loss of self has led to much misinterpretation and outrage (including mine, at first) and not only in Mennonite readers. T.W. Smyth, in his excellent article on My Lovely Enemy, quotes Wiebe’s assertion that “in one sense [the novel] is nothing more than a long, drawn-out metaphor consistently and artistically worked out to its logical summation.”[14]Smyth then concludes, “My Lovely Enemy in that sense is a working out of the parable of Hosea. [. . .]. [Its] essential focus and the measure of its significance is not the eroticism that leads to adultery but agapic love, particularly love as exhibited in the vicissitudes of marriage.”[15] The vision of community has thus moved away from the church, a social construction that ethnic Mennonites can simply acquiesce to rather than choose, to marriage, in which love must be chosen and continually chosen, even as the self is subsumed by that choice into an entity that is larger than itself.

James has fled from the rigid rules of his community of origin, disdaining its rejection of the body with its sexual desires, yet he still thinks in dichotomies of flesh and spirit, seeking possession rather than giving. Although the completely undeserved and unsought ecstasy Gillian offers him becomes also a “possible temptation of the personal Jesus” (MLE, 169), James never fully recognizes the positive models of love in his wife, Liv, and his mother, Liese, although he receives their forgiveness. Liese, in particular, is another model of “nothing” actions (although Wiebe doesn’t use that term here), first in her choice to serve a demanding husband until death, and then as she sits, blind and deaf, praying, singing, and knitting “for far-away children.”[16]

In Sweeter Than All the World, Wiebe returns to the narrative method of The Blue Mountains of China: the widened historical context, a protagonist who pulls the narrative strands together, the multiplicity of voices – this time all strong first-person voices who, I think, speak directly to the listening protagonist as much as to the reader. In Sweeter Than All the World, however, the ultimate argument for community voluntarily surrendered to is developed entirely through metaphor. No sermonizing here. Adam Wiebe is another aufjefollna Mennist, who, having perfected running and hiding to a fine art, stands in stark contrast to the other strong Mennonite characters who refuse to hide or run, whether it be from persecuting authorities or small-minded fellow Mennonites. Adam’s flight from we’re not sure what – perhaps his rigid background, more fundamentalist than Mennonite – turns into deliberate pursuit as he seeks out the stories of his ancestors, thereby uncovering even more ways of being Mennonite than the reader could discover in The Blue Mountains of China. He then searches for his daughter, who has likewise become a runner and a hider. Adam thus functions both as runner from his family obligations and past and as runnee – the one from whom his daughter has fled. Adam is thus forced into acknowledging the pain resulting from both positions, a pain that pierces him into reclaiming what he has run from.

In Sweeter Than All the World a whole cluster of images – songs, threads, and knives – each of which functions as the single motif of “nothing” did in The Blue Mountains of China to oppose selfish running and hiding, raises echoes of previous novels, particularly of My Lovely Enemy. Just as James’s mother had often sung Heimatlieder, and Gillian had spoken of her joy in love-making as “singing, but not just one voice, a whole orchestra, being yourself and a whole orchestra, together” (MLE, 176), so Adam’s parents sing together, “their voices floating like lovers hand in hand” (STAW, 19), and the “overwhelming choir of twenty-six Peter Wiebe descendants” in Germany finds “hours of harmonies in a tiny apartment, their heads filling endlessly with identical words and running notes, their bodies leaning together like one body” (STAW, 19). Adam himself significantly cannot sing. Unlike Thom of Peace Shall Destroy Many, he cannot experience the oneness of corporate song.

But he can listen, especially toward the end of the novel, and singing and breath (both speaking and listening closely) are now also connected. The wind has blown occasionally in the first two novels, most notably over the company in the ditch near Calgary in The Blue Mountains of China. In My Lovely Enemy, the wind has become more explicitly spirit-like: as the voice of Maskepetoon explains, “[our ancestors] taught us that we must rise before dawn and listen very carefully for the voice of the wind; it sounds like two people singing the same song together” (158). In Sweeter Than All the World, the very breath of God is present as people speak to each other, often directly into the listening ear. What is heard is not sermons – Adam cannot remember a single one of the thousands he has heard – but songs and stories, both of which are threads that knit community.

Repeatedly, song is connected with the image of thread and knitting. Adam’s mother’s singing is a “sweet sound” that “threads brightness,” “never [breaking] because of anger, unforgiveness, or even hatred” (STAW, 22). Most often, Adam’s mother sings as she knits. In The Blue Mountains of China, old Muttachi Friesen had kept spinning wool that she “had already spun a dozen or perhaps three thousand times” (35), a useless and hopeless action, but in My Lovely Enemy, James’s mother knits “vests and stockings for third world children” (244) as she sings and prays for her own children (245). In Sweeter Than All the World, many women knit, making sweaters for their families “thick enough,” Wybe Adams observes, “for any of God’s storms on his endless ocean” (80). Both the knitting and the singing, in the context of the rich harmonies of those who sing together, evoke – in all of Wiebe’s novels – the protection afforded by family and community.

Those strings that weave together a genuine, loving community are also threads of stories, sometimes followed, sometimes avoided, sometimes left unspoken in sympathetic silence. Adam initially doesn’t understand much about his parents’ past, though he remembers them “sitting there, suspending the thin thread of their songs across the marshes and bitter rivers of their past” (STAW, 26). As Adam begins, at age 19, to question them, “what they do is tell him small, personal, contradictory, denied, avoided details of their lives that explain very little; that are, as it seems, less facts than momentary needles tugging at a string of wool, knitting mittens to protect some hand they will never know; less facts than thin images of poles sticking up out of sinking ground, and holding up cables made possible” (STAW, 27). And thus the strings of songs, the threads of stories, and the wool for the knitting are combined with the ropes of Wybe Adam’s first cable cars. All are strung for communal protection.

None of these strings, however, is held in place without needles, poles, and then knives. Already in My Lovely Enemy, James had winced as “a needle of [his] Vulcan past [slid] deep into [him]” (16). And those needles soon become daggers as James is “pinioned by [Jesus’] black eyes, nose long and Semitic like a dagger” (MLE, 138). Thus the tentative link among threads and songs and knives already has redemptive possibilities in My Lovely Enemy. When James protests to Jesus that it’s “pretty hard to live, hanging by threads,” Jesus replies, “it’s really humanity’s most natural position” (MLE, 135). That that isn’t a Damocletian threat Gillian makes clear later when she describes her love-making, “I was strung by every nerve I have from all the stars and planets” (MLE, 153).

In Sweeter Than All the World, the stringing is more painful. The references to knives and needles and daggers multiply, particularly in connection with the violence and hurt that Mennonites, brothers, inflict on each other. Adam’s mother finally speaks aloud the story of her two brothers, one a prisoner on a “long island shaped like a knife” (STAW, 213), the other a Communist, a General in the Soviet army, who “brought a knife” when he visited, “And stabbed his brother. Spetje: pricked. Like a possible needle wandering through wool” (STAW, 206). Knives are also made of words. As Jans Adriaenz says, “We ourselves have learned to make the immense teachings of Jesus into small, sharp knives to slice ourselves apart” (STAW, 85). Whenever the individual’s conception of God is not balanced by a careful listening to others, the decisions result in the pain of separation.

At the same time, the needles continue to tug at the thread, and poles support the cables. What Adam needs to realize before he can begin to move toward wholeness is that the suffering itself – the needles, the knives, the betrayals and separations – is an inevitable part of the threads that hold together community (most often defined as family in this novel). As the scenes at the funeral of Adam’s oldest sister make clear, the ones who escape suffering or otherwise remain impervious to it, covering it up with bland assurance in a private God (such as the braying Pastor Bill and Adam’s insensitive, and deaf, older brother John) are the ones who become insufferable. Adam himself, as long as he refuses to suffer the pain of connection, is disdained, even by his son Joel. He becomes a much more sympathetic character after his daughter disappears and he begins to mourn her absence and cease to brush aside the pain of the break-up of his marriage. Only then does he cease fleeing. Early in the novel, when his typical response was ironic evasion or flippant wit, he reacts to Susannah’s seeming distance with a decision to “push her, out of or into what or where he is not thinking” and reacts “quick and deep as a kitchen knife turning” (STAW, 100). By the end of the novel, when he has been given the grace of suffering – his own and, vicariously, that of his extended family – Adam can accept the knowledge “like a knife in his heart” that he and Susannah “will never stop loving each other” (STAW, 373). He can even override his anger at his brother John’s callous bragging about God’s goodness to him by choosing to tell stories of relatives he has discovered, stories that have more suffering in them than he can stand but less enmity than he had initially surmised. Though he cannot sing, he can begin to knit oneness with stories, appropriately enough, over the grave of his beloved oldest sister.

The end of the novel foregrounds one other motif that deserves a fuller examination than can be given here – earth as a bastion of protection, as a source of growth (such as the turnips and potatoes of Wybe Adams in the last chapter), as the medium in which sins can be forgiven and forgotten. As David Loewen’s mother in Paraguay recognizes, “On earth, if God is good, you can sometimes forgive a few things long enough so you don’t have to drag them after you all the way into heaven before the Throne of Grace” (STAW, 330). She can let the name of the man who killed her son “rest in the sand, there’s enough sand for all of us here” (330). It is also the enclosing earth that finally reconciles Trish to her own identity and intimates the possibility of her forgiving her family for the pain inflicted on her. The poles that suspend the cables are rooted in the ground.

Perhaps Adam is an epic hero; in his quest for meaning in his initially too-easy life, he has stumbled into something much larger than himself. He does not discover his identity so much as he is surrounded by a crowd of witnesses that claims him as one of their own. Adam is certainly no Prufrock who would drown rather than accept reality with its responsibilities. Adam chooses rather to root himself in the earth, which, as a symbol of forgiveness that protects, enables him to welcome that “irrefutable needle of longing” (STAW, 244) and belonging.

Notes

[1] Joe Wiebe, “Too many themes burden book.” Review of Sweeter Than All the World, by Rudy Wiebe, Brantford Expositor 12 August 2001, Books & Heritage: D8.

[2] Mark Sinnett, review of Sweeter Than All the World, by Rudy Wiebe, Globe and Mail 27 October 2001.

[3] Margaret Sweatman, “Exploration of Mennonite Suffering.” Review of Sweeter Than All the World, by Rudy Wiebe, Ottawa Citizen 14 October 2001, The Citizen’s Weekly: C9.

[4] Nancy Schiefer, “Drowning in Too Much Detail.” Review of Sweeter Than All the World, by Rudy Wiebe, London Free Press 24 November 2001. D7.

[5] Sinnet.

[6] Rudy Wiebe, Sweeter Than All the World (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2001), 29 (hereafter cited in the text as STAW).

[7] Joe Wiebe.

[8] For a fuller explanation of the Anabaptist theology of the choosing self within the believing community, see Robert Friedmann, “On Mennonite Historiography and On Individualism and Brotherhood,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 18 (April 1944): 117-22; Edna Froese, “To Write or To Belong: The Dilemma of Canadian Mennonite StoryTellers” (PhD diss., University of Saskatchewan, 1996), 12-44.

[9] Rudy Wiebe, Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962; repr., Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1972), hereafter cited in the text as PSDM; Rudy Wiebe, The Blue Mountains of China (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1970), hereafter cited in the text as BMC; Rudy Wiebe, My Lovely Enemy (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1983), hereafter cited in the text as MLE.

[10] Bronwyn Drainie, “History repeats.” Review of Sweeter Than All the World, by Rudy Wiebe, Quill and Quire October 2001; Penny Van Toorn, “Dialogizing the Scriptures: A Bakhtinian Reading of the Novels of Rudy Wiebe,” Literature and Theology: An International Journal of Theory, Criticism, and Culture 9. 4 (December 1995): 439-48.

[11] Om P. Juneja, M.F. Salat, and Chandra Mohan, “’Looking at our Particular World’: An Interview with Rudy Wiebe,” World Literature Written in English 31.2 (Autumn 1991): 10.

[12] Ibid.

[13] A direct translation of the Low German phrase “doat bringt nuscht en.”

[14] Rudy Wiebe, “The Artist as a Critic and Witness,” in A Voice in the Land: Essays By and About Rudy Wiebe, ed. W.J. Keith (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1981), 44.

[15] T.W. Smyth, “My Lovely Enemy Revisited,” Essays on Canadian Writing 63 (Spring 1998): 130.

[16] Smyth, 131.

I live in America, help me out, but I live in America, wait a minute

You might not be looking for the promised land,

but you might find it anyway

Under one of those old familiar names. . . .

– James Brown, “Living in America”

On the night of September 17, 2002, I was at a baseball park in Winnipeg, one of the centers of North American Mennonite culture, with my teenage son. We were there to see a concert by the perpetually sixty-nine-year-old James Brown. My background is Russian Mennonite, and I grew up with an elaborate family mythology of traumatic flight from communism during World War II and redemption in the new world. I have no formal ties with any Mennonite institutions. My son is a thoroughly assimilated member of the game console generation, whose whole idea of being a Mennonite is based on his great-aunt’s cooking and my poetry readings and dinner conversation.

In Winnipeg on September 17, James Brown performed a frenetic version of his 1980s hit from “Living in America.” Brown was on stage with his band that includes two drummers, two bass players, four horn players, three guitarists, four background singers, and two highly toned dancers who wore bikinis imprinted with the Stars and Stripes. When James began to intone the “old familiar [place] names” of the song lyric, he went through the litany of New Orleans, Dallas, New York City, etc. as usual, but when he came to Chicago he substituted Winnipeg, also a three-syllable word. I assumed this was part of his usual assimilationist rhetoric, and noticed that the Canadian crowd did not respond well to this expression of cultural free trade.

At the time of the concert I had already begun writing this paper, and in the coolish fall air of the Winnipeg Goldeyes baseball park, I asked myself if James Brown was right. Was I really “Living in America”? Was Winnipeg a smaller, colder Chicago? What did it mean for me to consider myself a Mennonite, or even a Mennonite writer, when my son and I attended a James Brown show rather than singing tenor together in the church choir? Rudy Wiebe’s first novel appeared in 1962, the year of my birth. What was the case for Wiebe as the last Mennonite writer, and all of us who come after as more or less assimilated camp followers, living in America, desperate to move a little product, sell a few books? My first draft of this paper made that case. This version is partly the story of my conversion to the opposite point of view.

Before trying to parse the “Mennonite writer” tag, I want to separate that moniker into its components, beginning with “writer.”[1] In the twentieth century world beyond the little Mennonite one, writers were busy electing themselves unacknowledged legislators and indeed high priests of a new religion called art, a religion with the trappings of both science and mysticism, and one which ignored the mass killings and horrors that characterized the century. T.S. Eliot, in many ways the daddy of literary modernism, is a convenient exemplar of the role that literary writers were trying to establish for themselves: “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. . . . It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science,”[2] wrote Eliot famously in 1919, filled with bloodless detachment one year after the Great War ended and two years after the Russian revolution. Eliot’s own contradictory personality is endlessly fascinating: this was a Christian who had his sane but unstable first wife confined in an asylum where she died,[3] and whose unintended legacy to pop culture is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, a sleazy Broadway adaptation of his verse for children.

The only writers in Mennonite communities at the time Eliot helped define literary modernism were the preachers, who published their obsessive compulsive repetitions of theological propaganda in church magazines and books.[4] These writers had a religion already; they did not need to invent anything. Their writings were intended only for the faithful – the endogamous, visually predictable folks in the churches – much as modernist writing was only for the initiates (only naive teenagers like I was read the footnotes to The Waste Land). The preacher-writers often ventured outside their communities for graduate school, learning Greek words to embellish the dogmas they already accepted as absolute truth. The preachers’ sermons and writings served the same function as the pronouncements of mullahs in fundamentalist Islam: to reinforce doctrine, suppress dissent, and rationalize ugly schisms such as the one between General Conference and Mennonite Brethren churches in nineteenth-century Russia. Like secular writers, the preachers used the force of their often charismatic personalities to insist on the suprapersonal nature of the dogma they dispensed. The great, impersonal tradition was one that had their personal stamp on it. And yet they were part of an idiosyncratic minority religion, much as the tradition-worshipping Eliot was also an avant-garde writer.

Even if you pick other icons of modernism – such as the Jesuit-educated James Joyce, paring his fingernails as he builds the temple of art, or Ezra Pound, with his peculiar combination of anti-Semitic ranting and high art whining – there is no getting around the extreme individualism of the modernist ideal and also the way in which it idolizes art-making itself. The Mennonite preacher-writers did not see themselves as separate from their communities, nor did they see themselves as visionaries or artists of any kind. There was simply no need for that until the secular, European world’s traditions and culture had penetrated the Mennonite psyche, carried along by war, geographic and linguistic displacement, inter-marriage with other ethnic groups, urbanization, and all sorts of other social change. (Literary theory only changes people’s lives in rich, secular societies, much as anorexia only occurs in countries where there is plenty to eat.) It was the shock of the new and the modern world, as well as the education that the preachers had done their best to ignore and protect us from, that made us dissatisfied with them as bearers of the Word.

But still, a “Mennonite writer” is a contradiction. It is hard to imagine how anyone could continue to be in a rigid little Protestant sect that believes both in pacifism and Christian capitalism, in patriarchy and the priesthood of all believers, in separation of church and state but often only when that’s convenient, and simultaneously pursues an artistic agenda that bears any trace of modernist influence, or indeed valorizes making art out of one’s own experience and history, even when that experience is different from the official version of propaganda and pulpit.[5] And yet, in 1962, Rudy Wiebe seems to have done exactly that in Peace Shall Destroy Many, the novel whose fortieth anniversary formed the occasion for the 2002 Mennonite/s Writing conference in Goshen, Indiana.

The genesis of that novel and its origins in Wiebe’s experience of his own past were best documented by Wiebe himself in 1987 in a lecture titled “The Skull in the Swamp.”[6] In this piece he talks about the enormous influence of his teacher and mentor, F.M. Salter, the first professional reader to complain about Wiebe’s addiction to certain stylistic tics associated with William Faulkner. Wiebe’s lecture tells the story of Salter’s role as teacher, editor, taste police, and goad. It also tells the story of how Wiebe’s writing career began with the controversy around his first novel, a controversy that would now simply be lost in the 500-channel universe. Wiebe quotes from letters he received from devout Mennonites who lived in the communities he wrote about, expressing their shock that their secrets were now public in the form of a realistic literary novel, a format that discarded the familiar ideological filter of the preachers. In addition, Wiebe talks about how he had to resign from his editorship of the Mennonite Brethren conference newspaper and then accepted a job teaching English at Goshen College in 1963.

So perhaps the story of Wiebe’s career is really a confirmation that being a “Mennonite writer” is a simple thing. Maybe we can start with the assumption that a Mennonite writer is simply someone who works with materials that are part of the Mennonite community’s shared experience or history. Writers may need to move from one Mennonite sub-brand to another occasionally if controversy threatens their livelihood, or become financially independent of the mullahs entirely, but really one can be in the literary world and the Mennonite one at the same time. Further, it is possible that Mennonite writers might lose all formal identification with a Mennonite faith community and still deal with some aspects of Mennonite experience. However, this is still problematic: what this assumption means is that Sandra Birdsell’s novel The Russländer is “Mennonite” writing, and much of her other work is not; so is she a Mennonite writer?[7] If the right answer is “sometimes,” then perhaps we are dealing with a question of marketing more than with literary, ethnic, or church affiliation. So what is “Mennonite writing,” and can there be any of it after Rudy Wiebe?

Ann Hostetler has recently asked a similar set of questions: “What is a Mennonite poet? Does ethnic/religious context influence a writer’s form or discourse? How and by whom is Mennonite ethnicity constructed? Is it possible for someone to be culturally Mennonite, although not a member of the church, when the church defines itself as a community of believers baptized as consenting adults?”[8] Hostetler’s argument that “ethnic” literature depends for its success on its “intercultural translatability” is one that I largely accept, but translatability itself is a difficult concept. At what point have we translated ourselves so far out of our humble ethnic skins and into the literary values of the postmodern academic world that we are ready for a bar code as fully assimilated, cooperative, well-educated post-colonial writers? Could a Mennonite writer be mass-produced on this model, and if so, why would anyone bother?

If mass-production of sterile work is undesirable, maybe we need to go back to the question of what a Mennonite is in the first place. A “Mennonite name” is a signpost of ethnicity and belonging sometimes,[9] but what if it is not accompanied by the intellectual and spiritual conformity that normally go with membership in a sectarian church? For contemporary leaders of the Mennonite Brethren church community in Winnipeg, like Art DeFehr, there is an easy answer to this question: “You don’t have to be a Mennonite to be a Christian, but you must be a Christian to be a Mennonite!”[10] The Soviet army in 1945 did not make fine distinctions like DeFehr’s in East Prussia. Rudy Wiebe eloquently reminds us of this fact in his latest novel, Sweeter Than All the World, in the horrifying sixteenth chapter where Elizabeth Katerina Wiebe is gang-raped by invading Soviet soldiers along with a nun who is raped and murdered. To the Soviet invaders, these women are simply German scum. They speak German, and therefore they are less than human. If they were discovered speaking Russian in a formerly German zone, then they would be traitors to the Soviet Union and sent back to the mother country for death in a forced labor camp. Linguistic and cultural difference matter as much as any confession of faith, and sometimes more. The cultural and political ambiguity of the Russian Mennonites, caught between German and Russian armies in both world wars, was often startlingly resolved at the point of a bayonet or with a bullet to the head. Literary criticism must account for these radical simplifications, and not behave like fundamentalist Christianity, assuming that the world is not real but just a temporary home, a text to be cleverly deconstructed or dodged.

There are examples and counter-examples too. The Armenians who were massacred by the Turks in 1915 were seen by their murderers as members of a religion, and not as an ethnic group. Women and children were often spared upon conversion to Islam.[11] Sometimes reading the right book can save you. In the Balkans in the 1990s, people were murdered and abused based on their membership in an ethnic and cultural community; snipers did not check to see what God you worshipped before shooting. The Tutsis in Rwanda who were mass murdered and brutalized in 1994 by Hutus spoke the same language as the men and women who perpetrated the atrocities. When thousands of men, women, and children were hacked to death, shot, incinerated, and raped by Hutu militias, no one asked to see the victims’ confession of faith. Sometimes history is bigger than a text or a language.

I think it is useful to look at the Jewish-American experience briefly to gain some perspective on the Mennonite literary world after Rudy Wiebe. Cynthia Ozick’s essay “Toward a New Yiddish” was written as a lecture in 1970. In this essay she argues that “if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish . . . we will not be heard at all; for us America will have been in vain,” and further that “Jewish” writing is “a type of literature and a type of perception.”[12]Ozick implicitly defines Jewishness as a broadly cultural phenomenon. For her the perception and perceptiveness of Jewish writers, regardless of their religious affiliations, is located partly in the religious and ethical Hebrew tradition and also in the linguistic and cultural experience reflected in the Yiddish language.

Obviously Jewish culture is older, larger, and more culturally influential than Mennonite culture. But many parallels to Mennonite experience come to mind, beginning with the life and death of Low German and what that means for Mennonite culture and writing. The loss of Yiddish in Jewish culture and the emergence of the ‘secular’ in Jewish writing seem to be repeating themselves in Mennonite writing. There has been a clearly traceable movement from naïve folk literature in Low German to the emergence of many sophisticated writers engaged with the Mennonite experience over the last two decades. These new writers are producing work in English for an audience that extends beyond their ethnic communities but also speaks to those communities.

Ozick sees Jewish writers as having a place in maintaining the cultural and historical memory of their communities. I suggest that this role is paralleled in contemporary Mennonite writing where the church community often engages in radical fundamentalist amnesia while it is the writers, frequently alienated from the faith community, who are interested in the group’s history. Here is what Ozick says: “My Russian-born father had a plain word to signify a certain brand of moral anesthesia: Amerikaner-geboren. I translate it without elaboration as having been autolobotomized out of history” (160). Surely “autolobotomization” is one of the hidden themes of Mennonite writing, from Rudy Wiebe to Di Brandt and onwards.

As for the idea that a preoccupation with our own history removes us from the universal truths that are not to be found in the merely ethnic and the parochial, Ozick writes that Literature does not spring from the urge to Esperanto but from the tribe. When Carl Sandburg writes in a poem “There is only one man, and his name is Mankind,” he is unwittingly calling for the end of culture. The annihilation of idiosyncrasy assures the annihilation of culture.[13] For an idiosyncratic Mennonite like me, this passage brings to mind the deeply tribal theory of the virgin birth held by Menno Simons. J.C. Wenger, in the 1956 edition of Menno’s Complete Writings, dismisses Menno’s 1556 “Reply to Martin Micron” (in which Menno lays out his bizarre theory of the virgin birth) as “tedious,” “wrong,” and “unprofitable.” What made Wenger uncomfortable, of course, was Menno’s weirdness, his difference, his insistence on a poetic “heavenly flesh” that does not conform to any of the rationalist or historicist Christologies that came out of the theological cookie-cutters of better-dressed Protestants. There is no denying that Menno’s treatise on the virgin birth is tedious, incidentally, but that is not really a distinguishing feature of this work compared to any of his others.

So here’s another question. If we are convinced by some combination of the experience of other ethnic groups and the forced simplicities of our history to revel in our own difference and to make a literature out of it imbued with those perceptions unique to our long-term cultural experience, does that make us post-colonial writers rather than Mennonite ones? Maybe Rudy

Wiebe was never a Mennonite writer either – he was just the first post-colonial to appear in our midst. The seminal text of post-colonial writing is The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. Here’s what the three authors of this book said in 1989:

We use the term ‘post-colonial’ . . . to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is because there is a continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression.[14]

After this totalizing, almost imperialist, territorial claim, they go on to lay out the classic postmodern wish-fulfillment fantasy:

European theories themselves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden by false notions of ‘the universal’. . . . Paradoxically, however, imperial expansion has had a radically destabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power. . . . Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creative energy. The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has always been present in the history of European thought and has reached its latest development in post-structuralism.[15]

This is really an essentialist, romantic fantasy wearing black and speaking a little French, with a clever title borrowed from Salman Rushdie. In this account, history, in the multitudinous forms of European imperial aggression, is a nightmare from which “post-colonial” writing is trying to awake, writing back at the traditional centers of culture and power; indeed, power is irrelevant, and marginality, with its magical ability to “radically destabilize” the traditional center, is the new source of quasi-mystical power. So-called post-colonial theory, then, strikes me as built on a special kind of false consciousness, one in which the text is privileged over the world, and one which equates the masterpieces of European culture with the monstrous acts perpetrated by European civilizers, often in colonized countries. Of course, I am oversimplifying here, and there has been at least a decade of sophisticated critique of first-generation post-colonial theory coming from within academe.[16] In addition, a whole world of rich imaginative literature has been uncovered and anthologized by the evangelists of post-colonial theory. But does it help us decide if there are Mennonite writers after Rudy Wiebe? I don’t really think so, although it may be a reminder that the next generation of so-called Mennonite writers may be African or Caribbean. Mennonites have been mentally colonized by Baptists, tsarists, communists, capitalists, and bloody-minded patriots of all kinds. Mennonites also have a brilliant tradition of colonizing themselves and others. But we have also placed ourselves on the margins of history precisely at those points of rupture or maybe rapture when new worlds are born at the center: the Russian Revolution, the World Wars, the Thirty Years War, the Spanish Inquisition’s foray into Europe, Münster. As a group we have a Graham Greene-like talent for ending up in trouble spots. This should make us anti-colonial and filled with the energy to dissent from the ethics and aesthetics of the center, while being unable to take our eyes off the chaos and heat of that same center. We should be passionate realists and dispassionate experimental writers.

I am of course moving towards saying that there is some kind of Mennonite vision of things which our literary artists since Rudy Wiebe have begun to articulate. I disagree with Jeff Gundy’s statement that “poets of Mennonite extraction have radically varied experiences – almost one per writer.”[17] While it is true that there is a huge range of individual experience within the diverse history of Mennonites even just in North America, I suggest that there are some commonalities of experience too. I think of the admittedly somewhat ironic passage in Patrick Friesen’s essay, “I Could Have Been Born in Spain”:

If I met a Mennonite on, say, 4^th St. in New York (I would be able to tell by the walk), I would say, “Hey, I know you; let’s go and talk.”

Then we would go to the corner bar or restaurant and find out who our relatives are and how, exactly, each of us is lost.[18]

Below I attempt to sketch what kind of artistic vision Mennonite writers might have, based on the work of a number of writers who are continuing in Rudy Wiebe’s wake.[19] Julia Kasdorf writes that “a few Mennonite intellectuals . . . wonder if I am entitled to tell the stories I have told and suspect that I have simply crafted a marketable fiction of identity for myself.”[20] I think it is possible to acknowledge both that “ethnic” or “post-colonial” labels make writing marketable in a literal sense, and also that a “Mennonite writer” needs a fiction that is marketable to herself, a story that makes every kind of sense. Victor Jerrett Enns, editor of Rhubarb magazine, recently solicited responses to the question of “What is a Mennonite writer?” for a forthcoming issue. Here is my response to the question, as much a marketable fiction as any other:

I define a Mennonite writer as anyone whose writing is shaped in a primary way by a Mennonite sensibility. A Mennonite sensibility, to me, is one that includes some intellectual or visceral knowledge of Mennonite experience (preferably both), whether that experience be cultural, historical, theological, or literary (preferably all of these). This means, of course, that you don’t need to be either an ethnic or a religious Mennonite to be a Mennonite writer.[21]

I don’t claim any particular originality in this definition, and in fact the whole question has been addressed with particular clarity by Hildi Froese Tiessen in her introduction to the Summer 1990 Prairie Fire special issue on “New Mennonite Writing,” where she notes the fact that the contributors write out of “. . . an experience rarely in the past encoded by artists . . . an experience which is at one time universal and particular, complexly communal and personal, ethnic and religious.”[22]

I think there is a further clue to what knowledge of Mennonite experience might look like in Kasdorf’s essay “Writing Like a Mennonite”: “That trauma can both confine one to silence and compel one to find articulation is clear in the brief history of Mennonite literature.”[23] And the trauma of history, the contradiction of Mennonites’ painful withdrawal from and simultaneous engagement with the relentless world, is as real for socalled Swiss Mennonites as it is for Russian Mennonites, as indeed it is for many groups, none of which has an exclusive claim on trauma or silence. 

Look at this, says Sandra Birdsell in her novel The Russländer: look at our passionate attachment to the world and all the beautiful things we accumulate. Look at this world from the eyes of a woman trained to be silent and subservient, to lower her gaze, to never use language to describe either the splendor or the horror of what she sees:

The reflection of lit candles on the Christmas tree quavered in the glass front of a cabinet across the room. Shelves inside the honey-coloured cabinet were laden with Aganetha and Abram’s wedding china, pieces which Katya had held to admire, how each rose pattern was slightly different, the gold inscription of their names. . . . (27)

As David Suderman puts it later in the novel, when the troubles of 1917 and the larger world begin to intrude on the idyllic existence of the heroine: “we’re here, but we keep saying we’re not” (137). This is the quintessential Mennonite position, detached and obsessively attached at the same time. Birdsell’s loving re-creation of the lost world of Mennonite villages in Russia also captures the ambiguity of Mennonite perception: neither German nor Russian, neither intellectuals nor peasants, neither violent nor gentle, here and not here at the same time, the novel’s viewpoint character observes sharply while almost never speaking a sharp word.

Look at this, says Julia Kasdorf, our attraction toward and repulsion away from everything “Loud”:

Children, reaching for the reddest crayon, 
when do we learn what is too much?
When do we start averting our eyes
at overdone Puerto Rican girls on the train,
. . . . When do we start
calling flowers and women “cheap,”
as if life were a sale? Are we so far gone
we don’t know how to praise them, loud
as the shopkeepers on Church Avenue
who save insults for their best customers?
Carmine, the butcher who loves me, shouts
Wadda ya want with chicken breasts?
Don’t you know white meat makes you ugly?[24]

We want desperately to be as flamboyant as we feel, but like Katya in The Russländer, we also want husbands to choose us because we are quiet and decorous.

Look at this, says Patrick Friesen, we never stop wanting to be right with the Lord, to be spiritual beings even when the church tried to choke the life out of us:

the town believes so hard they worship themselves thin and hardly anyone reaches for the wine you fall asleep at the edge of the clearing when you wake snow has fallen for a million years you have grown young and ancient you rise in the still air your breath in clouds before you the shadow of a man beneath the moon struggling through the snow and night[25]

Look at this, says Rudy Wiebe, look how we are rooted in our past, rooting in it like pigs in shit, how we never get away from it, how it holds us and traps us appearing on every channel, how it frees us too, how it lets us be Mennonite writers even if we don’t all go to church, how the past lets us build a type of perception and a type of literature that is our own and also everyone else’s, that maybe belongs finally only to God:

Adam wipes his eyes, and finally he can look up. Faces blur into focus . . . and what does he know about her now anyway, decades of life gone by, she and Joe and their seven children with names

like Tanguay, Wong, Lopez, Porteous and a solitary Loewen between them, those Russian stories ancient as piled stones, and several of her middle-aged children divorced and all their married-again spouses and twenty-two grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren. . . . All their eyes looking at him: why is this crazy uncle interrupting the funeral, so rich he never has to be a doctor . . . always running around somewhere. . . . It’s for Helen, you witless nits, a few words over her body, the human being she was, you who knew her best, say it![26]

Look at the divine comedy of our bodies and desires, says David Bergen, look at the comedy of religion in a world that no longer believes, look at Lena S. telling Mason, the minor teenage poet:

My father has tests. Three of them. Supper at our house, a quiz on some historical figure – the last time, it was Galileo – and you’ll have to memorize a Bible passage. My father asked if you were a Christian and I said yes, but I don’t think he believed me.

She glanced at him. 

You are, aren’t you?

I guess so. If I have to be.

. . .

You have to be, she said.[27]

The world described by these Mennonite writers is the same world where Bakhtin turned manuscripts into cigarette papers, the world of consequences and concentration camps, not the academic fantasy where there are binaries and not oppositions, no simple conflicts between the hungry and the obscenely, garrulously wealthy, and no humor of the kind found in Rabelais and Kasdorf and Friesen and Armin Wiebe and David Bergen and so many others. We live in a world that is radically at odds with the value system and language of our Mennonite predecessors. We have literally lost a language, maybe more than one, and we are in the process of losing culture and memory as well. It is up to artists from the Mennonite community to practice their art with the kind of integrity that will shed a little light on their contradictory experience and fading memories.[28] For whatever it turns out to be worth, we are Mennonite writers, we are in the world, and we are not.

Notes

[1] I don’t mean to imply that there’s something new about the question of what is a Mennonite writer. See, for example, the “personal statements” on their work and identity by a diverse group of Canadian “Mennonite” writers in Prairie Fire’s special issue on “New Mennonite Writing,” 11.2 (Summer 1990).

[2] T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1932), 17.

[3] See Robert Craft, “The Perils of Mrs. Eliot,” New York Review of Books, May 23, 2002.

[4] I am assuming that there was no significant Mennonite literary writing other than Rudy Wiebe’s work until the 1970s. Not everyone will agree.

[5] Julia Kasdorf, in her essay “Bodies and Boundaries,” describes the 1997 decision of the Franconia Conference of the Mennonite Church in Pennsylvania to expel North America’s oldest Mennonite church over their acceptance into membership of openly gay and lesbian people. I am reminded both of the Taliban, approaching the problem more directly by collapsing brick walls on top of homosexuals, and of the many other Mennonite conferences in Canada and the United States expelling those churches willing to accept homosexual people. See The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 78.

[6] Rudy Wiebe, “The Skull in the Swamp,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 5 (1987): 8-20. Julia Kasdorf’s account of the reception of Wiebe’s novel in her essay “Marilyn, H.S. Bender, and Me” in The Body and the Book is also notable for its insights and feminist perspective.

[7] This same point applies to Rudy Wiebe’s oeuvre. See note 20 below.

[8] Ann Hostetler, “The Unofficial Voice: The Poetics of Cultural Identity and Contemporary U.S. Mennonite Poetry,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 72.4 (October 1998): 514.

[9] Lois Barrett tells a familiar story about church people asking her if Barrett was a “Mennonite name” in her essay “Flowing Like a River,” in Why I am a Mennonite, ed. Harry Loewen (Kitchener, ON: Herald Press, 1988), 21. I note with approval that Barrett married a Mierau.

[10] Art DeFehr, “Mennonite by Chance and by Choice,” in Why I am a Mennonite, ed. Harry Loewen, 35.

[11] See István Deák, “The Crime of the Century,” The New York Review of Books, September 26, 2002, 50.

[12] Cynthia Ozick, “Toward a New Yiddish,” in Art & Ardor (New York: Knopf, 1983), 169 and 177.

[13] Ibid., 168.

[14] Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 2-12.

[15] Ibid., 2-12.

[16] “. . . as Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge have well demonstrated, the concern in The Empire Writes Back with ‘textuality’ as an abstraction ‘tends to function at the expense of specific histories and power-relations in different parts of the world.’” See Dennis Walder’s Postcolonial Literatures in English: History Language Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 69-70.

[17] See Ann Hostetler, “The Unofficial Voice: The Poetics of Cultural Identity and Contemporary U.S. Mennonite Poetry,” 514.

[18] Patrick Friesen, “I Could Have Been Born in Spain,” in Why I am a Mennonite, ed. Harry Loewen, 102.

[19] I am indebted to Ann Hostetler for her useful distinction, also in “The Unofficial Voice,” that the Russian Mennonite and “Swiss Mennonite” traditions are quite different historical experiences, especially in terms of the descendants of Russian Mennonites who emigrated to North America during the two world wars and are still close to this traumatic experience. However, I think there is sufficient commonality between these Mennonite groups that one can still talk about an emerging Mennonite aesthetic and even rhetoric in recent Mennonite imaginative literature.

[20] Julia Kasdorf, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 10.

[21] Maurice Mierau, personal e-mail to Victor Jerrett Enns, November 1, 2002. This definition takes into account the uneasiness many “Mennonite writers” feel about having their entire output labeled as ethnic writing. For example, at the Mennonite/s Writing conference in Goshen where I presented this paper on October 25, 2002, Rudy Wiebe stood up and spoke about his many books that don’t have any Mennonite characters or explicitly Mennonite content in them, thereby objecting to the characterization of his work as simply “Mennonite.”

[22] Hildi Froese Tiessen, “Introduction,” Prairie Fire, 11.2 (Summer 1990): 9. See also Froese Tiessen’s introduction to another special issue of a literary magazine, “Mennonite/s Writing in Canada,” The New Quarterly, Vol. X, Nos. 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 1990): 9-12.

[23] Kasdorf, The Body and the Book, 177.

[24] Julia Kasdorf, Eve’s Striptease (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 43-44.

[25] Patrick Friesen, the breath you take from the lord (Madeira Park, B.C.: Harbour Publishing, 2002), 39.

[26] Rudy Wiebe, Sweeter Than All the World (Toronto: Albert A. Knopf Canada, 2001), 362.

[27] David Bergen, The Case of Lena S. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2002), 67.

[28] I do not mean to suggest that Mennonite writers become elegists for a mythic Golden Age, as Kasdorf puts it so eloquently: “Do I want to spend my one and only life grieving the demise of a traditional, patriarchal, insular subculture? Why must even my writing, that most excessive and self-indulgent enterprise, be converted into an instrument for community service?” (The Body and the Book, 18-19).

In the same way that – say, the Frieda Friesen stories in The Blue Mountains of China are based on an actual living person, I think my way of telling stories is to start with literal things somehow, whether I know them actually or they’re somewhere sitting in my head. Somewhere. And out of this grows something that’s intriguing and interesting to me. And then hopefully it’s interesting to others. But it begins with these – it almost always begins with these kinds of living stories of past human beings. You know, in some form or another. Like Almighty Voice. Almost all my stories are like that, some way.[1]

JK: You really seem to be intrigued by scarcity of information and facts, or just their contradictory nature. I’m thinking of Big Bear, Almighty Voice in “Where is the Voice Coming from?”, Albert Johnson in The Mad Trapper, the now extinct Yellowknife nation in A Discovery of Strangers, and Yvonne Johnson again. How important is this when you become interested in a subject and decide to go deeper and deeper, eventually turning it into fiction?

RW: Well, there are two things. The interest in the story is obviously triggered by the facts that are there. The more contradictory they appear, or if they seem to clash with our understanding of human nature, the more interesting they are. But I’ve learned to trust my instinctive response. Whatever intrigues me is what I should follow. That clearly began with Big Bear, because that story opened up more and more.

The story of Almighty Voice illustrates that. It was actually written in the middle of the process of writing The Temptations of Big Bear, but I had been thinking about Almighty Voice’s story for a long time, 15 or 16 years before I wrote it. So I knew that basic story, the same way I knew Albert Johnson’s story. I had listened to it as a child, a cowboy ballad sung on the radio. If that kind of thing sticks in the mind of a certain kind of imaginative person, you have to keep digging as there is something numinous, something loaded there that’s good.

Then you start looking at what history has to tell you, since it is an historical event. When it gets even more complicated, as it probably does, or contradictory, as it often does, you really start getting intrigued. The fiction writer is always happy when facts don’t work out any more, because then you can make it up. But make it up in such a way that the mystery expands, right? You don’t want to solve these things, you want to plumb their mysteriousness.

JK: I have always liked “Where Is the Voice Coming from?” because it is at least as much about the process of telling the story – or making the story – as about the events themselves.

RW: As I look at that story again, it seems that at every turn where the reader feels that you’re starting to get somewhere, something else that doesn’t quite work appears. That’s the mystery of human behavior, and stories should never try to resolve that. That’s why stories often end in deaths, because death somehow seems to finish the whole issue. But death doesn’t end anything for the people who surround the corpse. It makes it all the more complicated, and sometimes it makes it all the more devastating. There is a convention in fiction: when you die, that’s it. There was a time when you got near that, then that was the end of the story. Nowadays it isn’t; many of our stories start at death.

JK: Especially in the native stories you have dealt with there is often little information, the information is contradictory, or you can’t use the common western approach and access the information by reading a book. Big Bear was forgotten by most people for a long time, and Almighty Voice’s motivations weren’t noticed nearly as much as the actions of the people who were pursuing him. Also, hardly anybody in Yvonne Johnson’s life was genuinely interested in her problems before she herself became a problem for the judicial system. Would not being listened to at all be a primary feature of potential stories for you? Or is it just common in the stories of a marginalized people?

RW: I think it partly reflects my own growing up as the child of refugee parents who do not make up a particular race or group of people, who do not constitute a very large part of Canadian society, and who certainly at that time were a quite powerless part of society. You’ve read the stories of the two solitudes, right? They are the French and English facts of Canada. In my case, these two solitudes make no difference to you. Your particular world is in no way reflected by that, if you grew up in a bush farm or a homestead in Northern Saskatchewan, in a small Mennonite community that’s just been created there because of the depression, and which speaks Low German all the time. So, a part of what I’m doing as a writer is telling the stories out of this particular world.

If you think in terms of my first novel Peace Shall Destroy Many, or Big Bear, who was born within 40 kilometers of where I was born, then this was what really electrified me. He existed before cars, before electricity, before telephones. I did, too. For the first 12 years of my life I lived in a log cabin in somewhat the same way that the native people lived on reserves. So the world of, say, the 1880s was closer to me than the world of telephones and television. It should not surprise anyone that a kid growing up under such circumstances is intrigued by the people that lived in his landscape before he was there, by the way your world was before you were born.

JK: In one of the earlier interviews that you’ve given (Juneja et al., 8)[2] , you commented on the parallel experiences of dispossessed minority peoples – Native Americans, Mennonites, and so on. You basically said that these parallel experiences make it easier to access and formulate at least some kind of an understanding of the other peoples’ experiences. How much would you say this sensitivity guides the actual process of writing?

RW: Well, writing is an exploration of the human spirit. You try to be sensitive to other people, even though their sensitivities are not yours. But there has to be something that draws you to them, or you wouldn’t even use them as a character, right? The kind of existential questions that Big Bear faces are intriguing to me. If you do believe, as he believed, that the world is created by the creator and it’s given to us as a great gift, how do you then explain, in the light of what you’ve always believed, the fact that all of a sudden these almost thoughtless beings come into this world believing it’s theirs, and they seem to destroy your world? To me, that is a profoundly Christian – a profoundly religious and spiritual – question. That’s what intrigues me, not so much the fact that he’s eventually sentenced and sent to prison and punished by a system that he has never lived by and has no concept of. No more than he has a concept of the Crown and the King or the Queen. Of course he understands authority; he’s not stupid. But he’s never lived his life according to the white practice. That is what drives me to explore that kind of person, and try to tell that story.

JK: My personal favorite of your works is maybe The Blue Mountains of China. What I enjoy most is how it brings together different Mennonite voices who come from very different backgrounds. Most of them still shared what has been thought of as a very homogeneous religious background. However, as the novel advances, and the vastly different experiences shape the characters, the end result is anything but homogeneous. So, characters are disillusioned with their faith. Some keep it up, but end up realizing that the world they live in is very different from certain parts of Russia, or wherever you think that your ancestors came from. And then there’s John Reimer, who combines all this into what he sees as a need for a new approach to religion and life. What this makes you wonder is whether such a homogeneous background has ever really existed at all, for Mennonites or any other group.

RW: Well, I think it does to some extent in terms of the idea that animates their life. Not that it’s possible to live it in the same way in any given place. The point is, if you really take seriously (and this is what Anabaptism was always about, taking seriously the kinds of things that Jesus says) the core of things that Jesus says in his teaching, it’s basically the Sermon on the Mount. Live peaceably with your neighbor, you know, love God. Live at peace with all creation, especially with your fellow man. And when you say something like “How blessed are the peacemakers, for the kingdom of God is theirs,” if you live at peace, and if you are a peacemaker, that kingdom, that world, is yours. That’s an incredible statement. So then that is one of the basic things that Anabaptism is based on. It takes those kinds of things seriously: trying to be a peacemaker in a violent world. The Reformation world was extremely violent, as was the experience of the Russian Mennonites between the First and Second World Wars. This is what The Blue Mountains of China explores: the world situation the Mennonites were in in Russia and in South America and in Canada. That novel explores the possibilities there are to be explored. There were very different responses to the forms of violence the Mennonites encountered. You cannot have, in Russia, somebody walking along the highway with a cross; you couldn’t do it. You’d be out of there fast – the police would pick you up so fast, and you would be gone. In Canada, you could do this. It’s a place where you can express what you believe in such a goofy way. In Russia you’d have to express it in other ways. But the basic ideas I think are there, and that’s partly what I’m trying to explore. Maybe there’s a problem in trying to pull it together too much in the end, I don’t know. But I still like those two guys, sitting by the side of the road at night, and they’re talking, the one presumably completely disillusioned, while the other one is living this crazy illusion. And there they are in the bush, beside a Canadian highway, listening to the sounds of cars going by. I still think that’s not a bad way to end a book.

JK: There’s been, of course, quite an extensive debate on whether that ending clashes with the mosaic in the main part of the novel. I don’t think it necessarily does. It starts heading in a different direction, of course, but maybe it just opens a new path.

RW: It goes north, it goes north.

JK: That may be the new path. It’s of course based on the main body of the novel, and it’s not followed very far, this new path, because the narrative just stops. It doesn’t develop this new idea.

RW: You could pick up that story – you could start that story where it ends. It’s 1967. You could bring it up to the present if you wanted to. I’ve never been interested in doing it, but . . . . A book is not a life, you know. A book is something made with words; a life is not made with words. But it can be helpful in living a life, I suppose, or intriguing or interesting for a few moments.

JK: This ties up partly with My Lovely Enemy. Not that many critics have discussed the book in length –

RW: No.

JK: – and the Mennonite response was very mixed when it was published. Maybe the most conservative readers read the book as a suggestion of Jesus’ sexuality, or as a story where adultery goes unpunished. Perhaps the less conservative readers saw beyond these details, but still may have had a great problem with the almost complete lack of definitive resolutions in the book. It’s really inconclusive in quite a number of ways. Even the resolutions that are suggested don’t take place on a realistic level. The affair doesn’t seem to end, there’s no guilt or remorse, no one is punished, and the difference between the real world and the experiences on a mythic or a mystical plane just become blurred, even irrelevant in a sense. I see signs of this lack of resolution and really accentuated open-endedness in most of your works since The Blue Mountains of China. But why does it surface as a great problem only in some of the works?

RW: Well, I don’t know, I don’t want to theorize really about My Lovely Enemy, because – in terms of response to it, it was probably the least successful of my books. It was published once, and it’s never been republished, never – no one’s ever been interested in it, presumably; I don’t know. Actually, I think in many ways it’s still one of my most interesting books; at least I’m still most interested in the ideas that it explores, the character possibilities that it explores. But somehow we think, even though in life this doesn’t often happen, that in books or in the movies there should be some kind of justice. If you’re a bastard, you get dealt with, you get your comeuppance, or whatever, right? But this, too, is a convention, of course. It doesn’t happen in real life. The people in the book are going to die just like everybody else, right? It’s just the book doesn’t go to that point. But these kinds of things are worth exploring in every conceivable way, every way you can imagine. One of the things I was trying to do with that book was stretch my imagination beyond the usual things that always happen in stories. Push it, push it, push it. And the core story in there, of course, is the Maskepetoon story. Push that whole idea of what you do with your enemy, and the usual thing is you take revenge, you take revenge in the same way. If he kills you, you kill him back, you know, always that way, always that way. Of course, I didn’t make up that story, because that’s literally recorded by John McDougall, the Methodist missionary, about Maskepetoon, how he dealt with his father’s killer. So, that was really the trigger. The question would be, how to deal with adultery, which is, of all things, presumably one of the most serious problems of our social world. (In another sense it isn’t, of course, at all. If we have people marrying four or five or six or seven times, how can adultery be a problem?) But in one sense, you know, we have this crazy notion still that somehow, constancy in love is the great thing, right? Even if nothing in our society reflects that. And I’m just trying to explore some of those things. . . .

I think fiction is, in one sense, an exploration. It’s an exploration of human behavior and ideas. Things that intrigue me perhaps take a more religious and spiritual turn than they take a social turn. To me, those kinds of values and drives are more basic than, for example, getting married or not. It’s just the way I was brought up and the way I think. To me, religious and spiritual values are often more important than social or economic ones. Some people are interested in exploring social and economic implications of what human beings do, but I’m not terribly interested in that. I suppose this lines me up with Native people – who are more structured by their values, the spiritual feelings and apprehensions that they get out of their world, especially out of the natural world – than many urban people today. Of course the social and the economic elements are important, but you don’t have to restrict your thinking to those things. Many novels are not at all interested in exploring religious – Christian religious or any kind of other religious – structures, which is the way the majority of people structure their lives, I think.

Notes

[1] This epigraph, and what follows, are from an interview Janne Korkka conducted with Rudy Wiebe at Wiebe’s Strawberry Creek lodge south of Edmonton. The conversation took place after Wiebe gave Korkka a tour of the handiwork of beavers who regularly fell trees on the Wiebe property. The interview was conducted with the assistance of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, with additional financial support from the Emil Aaltonen Foundation in Finland. Parts of this interview were published in the journal World Literature Written in English 38.1. We are grateful for WLWE’s permission to reprint excerpts.

[2] Om P. Juneja, M. F. Salat, and Chandra Moran. “‘Looking at our particular world’: an interview with Rudy Wiebe.” World Literature Written in English 31.2 (1991): 1-18.