Women Talking

Back in the mid 2000's there was a small Mennonite outpost in Boliva where the women were waking up in a daze, their bedsheets soiled with blood, dirt and semen. Naturally they were dismissed as crazy, or at the very least guilty of some sort of adulterous behaviour. But the women began talking and soon it was clear it was happening to dozens of others. Demons! A plague from God! What are you going to do?

It wasn't until two men were caught breaking into a neighbours house, armed with a veterinarian spray used to anesthetize cows were the women taken seriously. The men promptly named names and 9 men were arrested.

Miriam Toews takes that as a jumping off point for her latest novel where the women in her imagined Mennonite community are faced with the return of the guilty men in 48 hours. The women are ordered to forgive the rapists lest their souls be damned to hell, and the women responsible for damning them would be judged in the eyes of God and would have to be excommunicated. The women are faced with a decision: Do Nothing, Stay and Fight, or Leave.

A timely and incredibly powerful read that explores how these women fight for the right to be heard in a patriarchal society that has essentially stacked the deck against them. Toews does an incredible job playing these ideas of justice, retribution, forgiveness and grace in the recorded conversations of the women that is by turns funny, warm, exasperating and hopeful. Hidden in a barn loft the clock is ticking and a decision must be made.