Katya and Wastefulness

Katya was an emotional roller coaster near its end. I was taken by shock when Katya's whole family was killed, even though I'd seen the obituary at the beginning. I cried for deaths of the nobles charachters, and like Katya, I was most taken by the loss of Greta. But one of the most interesting aspects of the Kootzy's invasion scene is the one thing that really got Peter Vogt upset: wastefulness. Simeon Pravda and is followers kick Abram and his family out of their house, steal everything of value, trash the house, threaten to take the Vogt's house, and Peter is still calm, but when he notices the men destroying all of the canned food by throwing it out windows, he can't take it. "I have to say this, here, is wrong. Take the food,but don't spoil it. You could eat well this winter," Peter reasons with Pravda to steal the food, anything but wasting it. Peter Vogt is also portrayed as being the most honorable and dedicated Mennonite in Privol'noye, most representative of the ideal Mennonite values.
Those ideas together, we can discern that the the misdeed of wastefulness is actually seen as a higher sin than theft or brutality. Mennonites do not engage in brutality, but they understand the idea of taking something you want. They do not understand the idea of destroying something completely when it could be used for at least someone's benefit, even if not their own. This fact is actually what sets Peter off to the fact that Pravda and his men were severely dangerous, because they were unstable for wanting to waste. It was the instinct that wastefulness indicated mental instability, then, that allowed Katya and her sisters to live.
Later on, the idea of wastefulness comes up again: Katya is reported to some kind of community enforcement squad for wastefulness. The fact that she was reported is irrelevant because Liese would have reported her for something, but the fact that wastefulness was a crime that you could be executed for (as Willy Khran almost was) shows how important a value it was for the Mennonite community. And it still is an important value. Still today, frugality is celebrated and wastefulness of any kind will give you a poor reputation among the Mennonite community for ages, even among college-age Mennonite friend-groups. The value that kept Mennonites alive while they were impoverished and constantly migrating has become a permanent Mennonite value instilled in new and old, religious and cultural Mennonites alike.

Paraguay Primeval

When Carol Ann Weaver and Rebecca Campbell came into our clas on Thursday, they talked about the process of putting music to poems, bringing life to a work already written so well. Carol said she even has to change some word order around to fit the music or make different word choices.

It's one thing to be an editor of an anthology or a "Best U.S. Poems" book or something where deciding which poems to include and for what reasons is the hard part, which would really be difficult, but then there's the step further that Carol takes with the poems she chooses for her works. She is choosing the words that will tell a unique Mennonite story, and then choosing how to change them so that the music will flow through them and further tell that same story and communicate the emotions she's aiming for. I can only imagine the creative skill it would take to revise someone else's finished work for a different medium without changing the meaning too much, yet changing it completely for her use in music.

I haven't heard the music put to the words yet, but when I do, I will update this post.

Hope in Peace Shall Destroy Many

In class on Thursday, our guest speaker Ervin Beck asked the class if we thought there was hope given at the end of the book. Hope for reconciliation, of the sustained church, of a new mindset, or hope in a maintained mindset even. I said yes. There is a hope in the end, as Thom finds a middle ground in his internal war.

            Since the beginning of the book, Thom had struggled between ideas of total peacefulness and the fact they others were dying for their right to believe in peace. Between complete separation from the world, and living among the others and reaching out to non-Christians. These concepts waged war in his mind just as WWII waged on outside the community and the Mennonite community itself waged its own war against those very ideas, especially acceptance of the “half-breeds.” In the end, Thom punches Herb to protect his friend, Peter from his assault. He thinks about this, and he seems to come to terms with it as an action. This is what Thom decides is the right thing to do: act. In seeing Jackie Labret, Thom realizes that he must try to tell him the Good News in as pure a manner as possible, without interpretation one way or another, so that he might hear it as the disciples did from Jesus. He finds, as he did earlier, that “Truth must be followed as a Star, though the road is sometimes superhumanly difficult.” With this insight, he discovers the most hopeful message of the entire book: “Only a conquest by love unites the combatants.”

            His revelations at the end are somewhat vague in places and up to interpretation, but I feel that Thom rejects both the idea of fighting in the war and also staying in Wapiti and enjoying the luxury of peace that other buy for him. He decides on a middle way, a “conquest by love.” He will go out and act and teach and witness and wage his own war against the forces of darkness, not fought through violence, but through love and understanding and teaching. This is the hope in this very broken ending, and it is the hope for all the Christian world.

Gadfly

            Gadfly was very much a community event. The play brought together current students, former students who had gone to school with Sam Steiner, and even Sam Steiner and Sue themselves. The people in the audience baffled me by remembering the days when they were directly involved with Sam Steiner’s story. It blew me away.

            As in any story to be told, directors and writers must choose what parts of the story to be told, and I thought they chose well. They could have focused more on the aspect of homosexuality; they could have focused on Sam’s other male writing accomplices, James Wenger, Lowell Miller, and Tom Harley; they could have took the angle of an over-strict Goshen College president’s board and former president Paul Mininger’s regret later on. I feel all of these issues and aspects of the story are important, but not all are important to the story the Theatre of the Beat wanted to tell. They weren’t out to call attention to injustice and discrimination toward homosexuality or reprimand a former president for a harsh decision. They told the story of a young man encountering life in a unique way; they shared a personal testimony meant to give meaning to and take insight from a life of turmoil and counter-conformity. With this goal in mind, they did well in choosing which characters to include and which parts of the story to emphasize. Even in showing to non-Mennonite audiences, the play captures ideals and insights beyond that of community which both represent Mennonite culture through common threads and relate to the non-Mennonite audience on its level. 

Heavenly Voices

Heavenly Voices, a play birthed from the Mennonite Women of Color Oral History Project which tells the stories of 10 Mennonite women of color in their own words through the Ethnodrama theater filter, was a learning experience for me. While these women shared their stories from childhood through faith stories until late adulthood, I tried to understand their realities and add their stories into the collective story of all Mennonites in my mind. One of the main themes that struck me in each of their stories was the way their lives were filled with so much joy.
Coming into the play, I imagined I would hear of the hardship they each faced being women of color and even just being women in the Mennonite church, likely coming from other churches. There were times of hardship for all of them, but they didn't focus on this aspect over the course of the play. The focus was on the good times. Many of them said the faced very little racism in their lives but went on to talk about instances of racism later in their stories. The told of the Mennonite Church as well as other denominations of Christian churches helping them find peace and get their feet under them, not trying to bog them down or change them.
Maybe part of it is because they were already in Heaven, looking back on lives well lived, but each of the women told her story starting with beautiful parts of life, things she was thankful for, later told of the hardships, and ultimately came back to positive endings. They were joyful stories. They didn't tell of being outsiders in the Mennonite church (though many may well have felt like it at some point), but remembered quilting at the church with others and embracing their traditional songs and dances.
Those stories showed me that Mennonites overcome many different obstacles, not always including an immigration from Germany to Russia to The U.S. and struggling to overcome patriarchy in a small Kansas community, but maybe including drugs and poverty and racism and opposition to education or to their ethnic background. However, those stories also demonstrated how joyful and strong the lives of women  could certainly be in spite of those obstacles from engaging in loving community and giving one's life to the Lord.

Todd Davis and Nature's Simplicity

Todd Davis brought a new theme to my idea of Mennonite Literature. Nearly all of the Mennonite writers I have studied so far have written about nature in some way: Di Brandt’s “This land that I love, this wide, wide prairie” and her “The Zone: <le Détroit>” series,  Sylvia Bubalo’s “WHEN YOU MENTION APOCALYPSE,” Brandt’s comment that she cannot “write the land,”  etc. However, they all use the context of nature’s beauty and reverence. Sylvia uses nature to give God credit for creating such beauty. Di Brandt uses nature’s beauty juxtaposed with pollution and environmental issue to encourage environmental awareness.

Davis’s relationship with nature is much different than each of those. He sees nature in its raw forms and loves its simplicity. He depicts images of car crashes caused by a foggy cliff in “Veil,” an osprey killing its prey quickly and without hesitation in “Doctrine,” his father turning into compost and joining earth in “Turning the Compost at 50,” and burning the earth for its own good and competing against coyotes for the life of their sheep in “Taxonomy.” Davis seems to see nature in its simplest form, and he loves that simplicity. He embraces natures ability to take brutal action without overthinking the situation. Perhaps this is something he didn’t have in his own life growing up. Or perhaps this idea happily contrasts to the new Mennonite theme of approaching nature and God from extremely academic standpoints. 

Love, Mennonite Style

In reading "nonresistance, or love Mennonite style" by Di Brandt, I was made aware of the massive problem nonresistance can pose for young Mennonite Women. I know many more conservative Mennonite communities are highly patriarchal, and all Mennonite communities out a stress on peace and nonresistance. I had thought of the latter as a noble virtue for anyone to embrace, at least physical nonresistance, but this poem showed me that patriarchy combined with nonresistance can create a terrible ideal that women, especially young women must not talk back or fight against a man, even against something as terrible as sexual assault.

Brandt writes about when "your uncle / kisses you too long on the lips...& you want to run away but / you can't because he's a man like your father." Sexual assault kills me. It is the most vile thing i can think of at any given moment. It has become all too common on college campuses like Goshen, and a part of the problem lies here, with Brandt's childhood experience. She doesn't stand up for herself. She won't fight back. Even if she is worried for her body. Because she is more worried about being reprimanded for speaking up.
Brandt later continues in the same poem, "the / only way you'll be saved is by submitting quietly to your grandfather's house." She felt at that moment that the only way to save herself was to be quiet, to submit, to do whatever the men told her to. That is a dangerous way to be raised, no matter what tradition someone is from.

This issue has been expressed by other Mennonite female poets as well such as Julia Kasdorf and Sylvia Bubalo. In Kasdorf's poem, "Ghost," she talks about watching terrible things happen to herself in third person, unable to do anything about it. Her boyfriend touches her inappriately, and all she can do is watch. She watches and doesn't scream or fight back in a scene that implies her own rape (lines 15-18) ensues. She "rage[s] against the vulnerable socket" implying self-mutilation from the trauma of the rape. In lines 20-28, she pushes herself to be strong. She finds her solace in refusing to be the weak, obedient female she is expected to be.

Both Kasdorf and Brandt grew up in a seemingly typical environment in the Mennonite comminity, but these experiences force us to reevaluate what the Mennonite convictions are and what they tel children and adult alike about how they are to behave and interact with others.