A call for critical renewal in Mennonite literature

Review of Reading Mennonite Writing: A Study in Minor Transnationalism, Robert Zacharias (Penn State University Press, 2022)

Although the production of Mennonite literature is flourishing, Robert Zacharias finds a “crisis” in its reading and criticism, and advocates several bold changes for “critical renewal.” Following the ideas of Francois Lionnet and Shu-meh-shih, he proposes that Mennonite writing be redefined as a “minor” literature rather than a “minority” literature, the currently prevailing view. In turn, that change would require corrections in scope of materials studied (expanded), literary history (deepened), and relation to political boundaries (transnational rather than international).

Like other ethnic literatures, Mennonite writing as a minority literature is a kind of footnote in the literature of the majority, being recognized by the mainstream because it emulates their assumptions about genres, literary history, critical theory and practice – but also valued there, in a condescending way, for its often exoticized rendition of a minor culture. Yet if Mennonite literature is to have integrity, it needs to examine and embrace its community’s actual writing, tastes, publishing history, preference for genres, theory and critical practice. In other words, it needs to be seen as a “minor literature,” with an identity of its own, rather than as an appendage to mainstream literature.

One of the obvious consequences is the need to expand the genres of writing that do not fit into that minority literature agenda. In addition to the canonic genres of fiction, poetry and drama, Zacharias proposes opening the field of critical interest to literature about Mennonites by non-Mennonites and, especially, to Mennonite memoirs, diaries, letters, young adult and children’s literature, creative nonfiction, speculative fiction, Amish romances and “of course, religious” writings (23). All of these genres have been produced by Mennonites for many years, but seldom given critical attention.

To illustrate this neglect, Zacharias reports on his diachronic, or “cross-sectional,” analysis of Mennonite literary production. It reveals the writings that have been ignored by readers and critics because of their bias for the “serious” literature that the mainstream requires of minority groups. He chooses 1986 to identify and count all literary-inclined publications by Mennonites during that year. His method is to survey the “Mennonite/s Writing” and other bibliographies and also the publication lists of Mennonite publishing houses, including the conservative Rod and Staff and Christian Light publishers.

The statistics are fascinating. He identifies 627 publications, most of which are popular Mennonite writings showing “the centrality of faith” (60), being didactic and mission-oriented. Fifty-two percent of the publications were by Canadian writers and 48% by American; 54% were by women and 46% by men. Of books of fiction, 57% were by men and 56% were by Canadians. Poetry volumes were by roughly half men and half women, and a slight majority of the poetry was by Americans.

He does not expect “close” readings of all such work, but rather “distant” ones. Is “distant reading” this kind of counting? The statistics are a preliminary report from his much larger ongoing project in the quantification of Mennonite literature.

Highlighting this neglected mass of Mennonite writing also encourages a reconsideration of the origins and development of Mennonite literature. The current consensus, of course, is that Mennonite literature “began” in 1962 with the publication and great success of Rudy Wiebe’s novel Peace Shall Destroy Many, followed by the “miracle” of Mennonite poetry and fiction burgeoning in the 1980s and after – especially in Winnipeg – that continues today. This minority literature was encouraged by the multicultural policies of the Canadian government.

With a revised sense of the substance of Mennonite literature, Zacharias points to a possible historic beginning in Mabel Dunham’s Trail of the Conestoga (1924) or Paul Hiebert’s Sarah Binks (1947). In the U.S., it could have been Joseph Yoder’s Rosanna of the Amish (1949) or Christmas Carol Kauffman’s Light from Heaven (1946) or Gordon Friesen’s The Flame-throwers (1936). But if Zacharias includes religious texts as Mennonite literature, then publication begins much farther back, in the 19th century. The point is that Mennonite literature, redefined and expanded, needs a literary history that extends earlier than 1962 when Wiebe’s book won critical acclaim in mainstream literary circles.

The rethinking of “Mennonite minor” literature, according to Zacharias, frees the field from its current grounding in ethnicity or ethnicities, but rather in Mennonite as a “religious/theological” (30) construct. And since Mennonite is now a global reality, its literature should be regarded not as “international” but as “transnational” – that is, transcending national boundaries. Zacharias may have in mind the situation in Canada, where Mennonite literature is almost entirely associated with “Russian” Mennonite ethnicity or ethnicities, and writers seldom look across the Canadian border to the United States – Magdalene Redekop’s and Zacharias’s own work being examples. This part of his agenda is not well developed, although he recognizes the book Three Mennonite Poets (1986), which contains the work of Jean Janzen (U.S.), David Waltner-Toews (Ontario) and Yorifumi Yaguchi (Japan), as an early example of Mennonite transnationalism. Zacharias also finds it in the Mennonite identity poems of Julia Kasdorf, Jeff Gundy and David Wright, all Americans. He discusses the Mexican film Silent Light, the poetry of Somali-Canadian poet Mohamud Siad Togane, and the novella Fallow by Somali- American Sofia Samatar. He cites Mexicans who have written about Mennonite colonists there. The general scarcity of Mennonite literature from beyond North America indicates that transnationalism as a determining element in criticism is more of an aspiration than reality.

The above is a rough summary of Zacharias’s agenda in this impressive book. It is a work in progress, detailed and subtle. How will readers and critics receive and implement this radical reorientation of their work? I am inclined to welcome the agenda, since I asked for a similar perspective in my essay “The Signifying Menno” from the first Mennonite/s Writing conference at Goshen (Ind.) College in 1997, and in 2023 published “Plain Poetry for Plain People,” which goes beyond the canonical categories of current Mennonite literary criticism.

Chapters 2-5 of Reading Mennonite Writing offer close readings of many important texts – too many to be included here, except by quick summary. In Chapter 2, to illustrate his recommendation of life-writing as a literary genre, Zacharias presents a longitudinal study of A Russian Dance of Death, the diary written by Dietrich Neufeld beginning in 1919 but published and translated through the years to 1977, when it was produced by Al Reimer for the Mennonite Literary Society in Winnipeg, as a basic text for succeeding Canadian Mennonite literary history. It is a diary, but intended for publication, and with so many literary pretensions that Reimer cut Neufeld’s references to Sophoclean tragedy – hence, not your grandmother’s daily diary record.

In Chapter 3, Zacharias returns to one of his major concerns, identity, as found in the book he edited, After Identity (2015), to which he and others contributed essays. Following Slavoj Zizek, Zacharias calls the often nebulous Mennonite identity “The Thing.” Noting in his book, as others have, the decline of identity markers in Mennonite literature, especially the autoethnographic announcement, he finds a persistent interest in and expression of identity, even where he least expects to find it: in literature that explicitly rejects identity but in a subtle way nevertheless affirms it. Will re-defining the ground of Mennonite literature as religion/theology rather than ethnicity/ethnicities reduce, or increase, the interest and presence of The Thing?

Chapter 4 is a fascinating study of the relationship between the 2007 Carlos Reygadas film Silent Light and Miriam Toews’s novel Irma Voth, which is a response to the film. Zacharias says that in aestheticizing Mexican Mennonite experience and theology into fantasy, Reygadas dismisses it, just as he has no personal regard for his subjects and performers. Toews, who acted in the film, on the other hand, takes the theology seriously. She contextualizes the lives and beliefs – and failures – of the Mennonites, but in the end affirms the value of forgiveness and welcome that the end might imply.

Finally, Chapter 5 examines the emerging genres of queer literature in Little Fish by Casey Plett, and speculative fiction in Fallow by Sophia Samatar. Zacharias points to antecedents of those genres in Mennonite literary history. In both cases, the heroines are trying to find ways to belong to the Mennonite community. Wendy in Little Fish searches for evidence that her Opa (grandfather) was gay, in order to establish a tradition for her continuing participation in the community. And Agar in Fallow does the archival research necessary to prove and revive the original covenant that established her (Anabaptist?) community in space.

Reading Mennonite Writing joins Magdalene Redekop’s Making Believe (2020) and Hildi Froese Tiessen’s On Mennonite/s Writing: Selected Essays (2023) as seminal works that sum up the state of Mennonite literature. Tiessen’s essays follow historical developments in the field; Redekop’s book is an integrated summing up; and Zacharias’s book looks to the future. They are marks of maturity in the study of Mennonite literature.