43 pages • 1 hour read
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Though Swiv narrates the novel, Grandma is arguably its protagonist, as her experiences shape how the events unfold and how the past is understood. She speaks in her “secret language,” as Swiv denotes it, as she comes from a community of “escaped Russians” (30). Grandma was a refugee in post-World War II Europe whose family left for Canada to escape oppression. However, Grandma (and Mom) encountered a different form of oppression in Canada. In a religiously dominated town, leaders like Willit Braun dictated how the residents should think, believe, and behave.
The author, Miriam Toews, was raised in a Mennonite community in Canada, and these experiences inform Grandma’s background—indeed, the novel acknowledges the author’s own “revolutionary mother” (253), Elvira, which is also the given name of Grandma’s character. Braun represents all the repression that comes with the indoctrination that Grandma saw within the town. As Swiv records it, Braun “embodie[s] the fascist notion of a superior group” that only includes men (30). In addition, Grandma calls Braun “the uber-schultz of the village who [i]s a classic tyrant” (30). In Swiv’s letter to her father, phrases that she does not quite understand are italicized, but these italicizations also underline the phrases’ importance to the characters. Braun symbolizes not only the authoritarianism of this particular community but also the ambient misogyny that both Grandma and Mom have rebelled against, with Swiv as their heir.
This rebellion informs Grandma’s worldview and fuels her constant joy in the present. As Grandma tells it, the religious leaders within the community “took the beautiful things…right under [their] noses…crept in like thieves…replaced [their] tolerance with condemnation, [their] desire with shame, [their] feelings with sin” (160). This defines the contours of their lives and thus the shape of Swiv’s. While all three generations of women fight against authority—even if sometimes destructively—they do so in a way that empowers them against despair.
For the author, emancipation from oppressive gender roles derived from religious belief is one of her primary leitmotifs. Alongside Fight Night, this motif is clear in Women Talking, her 2018 novel that she describes as “an imagined response to real events”: the drugging and raping of 130 girls and women in an isolated Mennonite community in Bolivia between 2005 and 2009 (Ermelino, Louisa. “In This Religion-Heavy Novel, the Devil Isn’t the Only Evil.” Publishers Weekly, 9 Nov. 2018). Alongside this sexual violence, the community’s men manipulated their victims through religious and misogynistic propaganda, blaming their experiences on demons or otherwise dismissing their experiences entirely. Like the oppression and deaths by suicide in Grandma and Mom’s family history in Fight Night, these are circumstances that are unimaginable, but Toews uses her narrative to imagine a world outside of despair. Women Talking centers on all the community’s women sitting together to share their testimony, asserting that solidarity and exposing the truth are the solutions to misogynistic religious violence.
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By Miriam Toews