This image of Miriam Toews is from the 2012 guide to the International Writers' Festival
Miriam Toews addresses this and other questions in her Nov. 16, 2012 address to the Edinburgh International Book Festival in Toronto: "Is there Such a Thing as a National Literature?"
Within this essay, Toews uses the Mennonite question to obliquely address the national one. When she was in Italy at a writers' conference, she says, the Italians were much more interested in her Mennonite identity than her Canadian one, especially since she was there to promote her new novel, Irma Voth, set in a conservative Mennonite community in Mexico.
In a recent interview with a Manitoba publication she was asked why she portrays negative stereotypes of Mennonites in her novels. (Three of Toews' six novels focus on Mennonite characters and settings.)
She replies: "I have never set out to expose flaws in the Mennonite community.
"However, it would be bad faith to say I can't understand why certain Mennonites would object to my books. We don't want people to think we're unsophisticated inbreds who condemn gays and lesbians to hell. It's a natural, defensive gesture to say, 'Wait, we're not all like that!' But such protests conveniently remove the onus of confronting difficult truths and lobbying for change."
Toews doesn't reject the idea of a Mennonite literature, or a Canadian literature, for that matter, and is "honored," she says, to be designated as both. What she does reject, however, is the idea that because she is a Mennonite or a Canadian, she should fit into some generalized categories determined by someone else, particularly conservative male politicians or Mennonite patriarchs.
Her conclusion:
"The imagination is inherently subversive and cannot be mandated. A writer can only serve her nation by serving her story."
One can infer, then, that this is also her attitude, as a Mennonite writer, toward the Mennonite community: that, in fact, the artist can only serve her ethnic community, by serving her story.
Mennonite identity is strong, enough, she suggests, to withstand--or even respond to--critiques by its writers who, by the way, are not experts or spokespersons for Mennonite culture, but rather, have lived in it.
What do you think?
Here is an earlier blog post on A Complicated Kindness from the course I taught in Spring 2011.
