Masculinity and violence in Searching for Intruders

Themes of violence and masculinity keep cropping up in the book Searching for Intruders by Stephen Raleigh Byler, and I think in some ways, these are the intruders on Wilson and Melody's relationship. In the story “Roaches” we learn that the the couple are sexually distant partly because Melody has the heavy task of counselling victims of sexual assault all day and is depressed by the connections between violence and sex that she sees all the time in her work. I think that Melody's pent-up physical/sexual violence from work takes an emotional form. While it's true that Wilson's character is often annoyingly helpless and bumbling, I find myself feeling sorry for him when Melody treats him so coldly and punishes him through different emotional blackmailing techniques.

In “Helper” we see emotional and physical violence intruding on a different relationship between a couple who Wilson spots fighting at the side of the road. Wilson points out somewhat naively, “If you two love each other, then you shouldn't be . . . beating on each other like that,” and this is the moment that the man backs down somewhat. Perhaps he realizes that it is the violence that is interfering in the relationship. In both of these stories, Byler doesn't really inform the reader what exactly the core problem in each relationship is. We know that there is probably some problem behind the fight that we are seeing, but because we don't know what initially triggered the conflict, the violence—both physical and emotional—of the fight becomes most problematic.In both of these relationships, both partners fail to see the conflict from the other's perspective. When Wilson attempts to understand the man at the side of the road rather than just having a fist fight with him, on the other hand, the man (while maybe not transformed) begins to at least listen to Wilson.

I think it's interesting that one of the few books/pieces of literature that we've read by a man so far in the semester is so much more centered on issues of violence than anything else we've read. It makes sense, though. Violence is stereotypically a more masculine attribute, which must make it difficult for pacifist Mennonite men to prove themselves and their masculinity in mainstream culture while still retaining their pacifism. These conflicting loyalties could be the struggle that Wilson faces and what makes him seem so inept. Traditional Mennonites were more separatist so men could be freer to express their more “feminine” pacifist beliefs and traits within the community without fearing judgment. But now that Mennonites are more engaged in mainstream culture, they struggle with double standards. Men especially face constant questions of identity when their pacifist and worldly values come into conflict.

Language and truth

I was really intrigued by Julia Kasdorf's claims about Mennonites' use of language in her essay “Bringing Home the Work.” She writes, “Mennonites have not been in the habit of changing details to suit the story: from our very first confessions of faith we've expected language to be a useful, solid bucket to hold truths as clear as water” (41). I suppose Kasdorf means that Mennonites don't traditionally pay much attention to the aesthetic appeal of language; they see language only as a transportation of the truth. This brings up the interesting question of whether language is ever completely truthful. By its nature, language is not the actual, solid, physical truth of what it refers to; it is only a symbol that attempts to communicate a single thing. But for different people, that symbol can signify lots of different things—each of which is truthful for each person. Anyhow, this idea that Mennonites try to use language that communicates truth as effectively as possible makes me wonder what sort of language/words are more truthful than others?

It seems that the advantage of using language solely to communicate truth would be that in this case, language can only clarify reality. I guess traditionally Mennonites valued the honesty of language and would see any deviation from the task of baring out the truth through writing as dishonest. This would violate both religious and cultural values of honesty.

But there are also lots of advantages to using language in more creative ways and being less concerned about always portraying the exact truth in writing. When I'm writing, I can't really get into a creative flow if I am constantly thinking about telling a story exactly as it happened. The part of the brain that is concerned with truth seems entirely different from the part that deals in imagination and creativity. Prioritizing truth also might sacrifice some of the poetic beauty of language. Some words just sound lovely together, and if the beauty of the sound can convey truth through emotions rather than facts, I think that language hasn't compromised honesty. When worked poetically, language can inspire me on an almost spiritual level, and it seems like Mennonites, of all people, should be able to recognize the truthfulness and the value in that sort of spirituality.

We talk a lot in our Memoir class about the distinctions between truth and fiction and how much we value truthfulness. I've been surprised that so many people feel so strongly that we need to stick to the absolute truth in our memoir-writing. I feel that making up details actually enhances the honesty of personal experience. I am more concerned about how I remember an event than how it actually happened—it seems that memory reveals more of the emotional truth of experience. While this makes “truth” more subjective, I feel that it also makes it more valuable. Also, because by its symbolic nature, language can never completely be “a solid bucket to hold truths,” as Kasdorf describes it, it seems less important that writers strive to express truth in exact, physical, realistic terms and more important that we let imagination reveal our more internal emotional truths.

Mennonite Ethnicity

Lately I've been thinking more about my own experience with religious ethnicities. Though my parents are both Mennonite (my dad by birth, my mom by conversion), there weren't any Mennonite churches anywhere around where I grew up. There were tons of church of the Brethren churches, though, and Brethren being the closest Anabaptist equivalent to Mennonite that we could find, I went to a Brethren church my whole life. I always thought that “Mennonite” and “Brethren” were pretty synonymous terms. From what I could tell, they both believed in pacifism and they both really liked the Sermon on the Mount—it was really only a little quibble about dunking or sprinkling baptism that divided them. Then I came to Goshen College and realized that culturally, Mennonites and Brethrens were in completely different worlds.

The Mennonites I met were so much more tied to their cultural heritage than any Brethrens I knew. They were so much more obviously a cohesive group with a fixed center, which was a direct descendant of their Mennonite past. Brethren people never played any kind of “Brethren game,” they never ate any kind of exotic foods from their Anabaptist past, they didn't use the word “community” nearly as much as Mennonites did, and they didn't uniformly brag about buying their clothes at thrift shops. Overall, Brethren people seemed much more mainstream than the Mennonites I met at Goshen. I am realizing only now that while Mennonite and church of the Brethren theology is fairly comparable, it seems that Mennonites have hung on to their heritage in a way that sets them apart as a distinct ethnicity, while Brethrens have more or less assimilated into the mainstream, culturally speaking.

Ann Hostetler writes in “The Unofficial Voice” that assigning the term “ethnicity” to a religious group is often mistrusted because it can exclude people on the basis of race. But exclusion and all, I think the term is aptly applied to Mennonites. I definitely feel a greater sense of inclusion/exclusion among Mennonites than I ever felt in the church of the Brethren. Fortunately for me, I do have ethnic Mennonite roots, so I can often pretend to be at the center of the community—until, that is, we sing 606 in chapel and I have to expose my inexperience by using the hymn book while everyone else sings from memory. When you have such a cohesive ethnic group, it seems inevitable that there must be some amount of exclusion to create the strong sense of internal community that Mennonites so value.

It's difficult to think about completely getting rid of the inside/outside paradigm in Mennonite culture, like Hildi Froese Tiessen talks about in “Beyond the Binary.” It's lovely to theorize about how nice it would be to get rid of the hierarchy of in-ness and out-ness, but if Mennonites erased those divisions, I can only see Mennonite ethnicity going the way that Brethren ethnicity has gone. As much as I would love to include everyone, I would not want Mennonites to lose their distinctive ethnic traits and become more mainstream.

Humor in MLBD

I've really enjoyed Rhoda Janzen's sense of humor in Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. Like Janzen, I also have quite frugal parents, and when she makes fun of that frugality, I can see my own experience of eating from dollar menus in a humorous light. I think that humor is partly why this book was so successful with such a broad audience. Humor is a form of honesty, and when I read this book, I am flattered that Janzen will so candidly reveal the weird and embarrassing quirks of her family life to me, a complete stranger.

It's something like being at a junior high slumber party with Janzen and hearing her tell embarrassing-but-funny stories about her mother drinking tuna juice or thinking that the word “boner” means “mistake.” Even if that exact experience hasn't actually happened to you, the reader, this humor provides a handle for you to grab onto to think about other funny things that your own parents have done, and to connect with the memoir. I was realizing the other day that the majority of college-student conversations are all about saying funny things, and I think this is because humor creates connections between people really well. It seems appropriate that a book about Mennonites and the community that they are so renowned for would be written in a humorous tone that fosters connection between author and reader, as well as between people in general.

Janzen manages to pull off a light-hearted tone even when she's talking about pretty serious subjects, but at times this humor seems like a defense. The little checklist box on page 13 comes to mind as an instance when Janzen is pretty humorously flippant about a really serious, sad event. She presents two options: “Yes, I want my husband to leave me pre-pee bag” or “No, I'd rather he left me post-pee bag.” I mean, it's really cool that she can talk about her nasty divorce with Nick in such an upbeat and funny way, but in some ways the candidness of her narration breaks down with this humor. As a reader, I begin to question whether Janzen is being completely honest with me; it seems that there must be painful emotions that she is covering up with this humor. She doesn't really talk much about her woundedness at all. Maybe this is intentional—maybe she worries that talking about her emotions would turn the narrative into a weepy, overly-sentimental story—but I feel less like her trusty slumber-party confidant when I begin to wonder if she is hiding something from me.

When the humor serves as a way of making connections between author and reader, then, it is effective for me, but when it breaks these connections by obscuring information, the humor seems somewhat superficial to me. This kind of relates to our discussion about what stories Mennonites choose to tell and what stories they choose to obscure. Is humor Janzen's more modern Mennonite way of hiding certain things that she doesn't want to reveal? And why would she be hesitant to express her feelings and emotions (assuming, of course, that she is hesitant to express them)?

Writing and Violence

Julia Kasdorf talks about the relationship between writing and violence in her essay “Writing Like a Mennonite" from the book A Capella. The concept that writing can be a violent act fascinates me, because I usually think of writing as a fairly passive occupation. But when you write about something that exposes painful incidents or reflects negatively on a person, I suppose this is, in some ways, violent. If, for instance, the character Hannah from Pearl Diver would have written the true story about her sister Marian's secret failure to play out the Dirk Willems role, this could have “violently” altered people's perceptions of Marian. I'm not totally convinced that “violent” is the right word to use here, but as Kasdorf writes, “The one who disturbs a perceived truth is felt to be an agressor” (180). So the writer who exposes these dark secrets is actively doing something to conquor them, and maybe to some Mennonites, this activeness signifies an unnecessary violence. It seems odd that Mennonites would equate activity with violence or aggression, especially since the early martyrs were, in their own way, acting out instead of passively accepting other people's beliefs.

Kasdorf also theorizes that writing is a way of splintering experience from words, which links it to violence. She writes, “As the ultimate disconnection from the life world, the ultimate dissociation, writing may be the most brilliant splintering trick of all” (179). This tactic of splitting the self in two, she says, is a Mennonite's way of avoiding actually having to deal directly with some trauma or issue. I don't quite understand how this works in terms of writing. But like Kasdorf points out, when you write, you express yourself all at once rather than having to hold an actual conversation with feedback from other people or the world (though this is not the case with these blogs). When you write you're usually separate from your body; the life in writing exists only in words on the page. So writing separates the body from the issues that are expressed through words, and in doing so, acts as a defense for the author. I think this is somewhat true. For me, writing definitely feels a lot safer than speaking; I can express things in writing that I would be really embarassed to say aloud. It's kind of unsettling to think of writing as a cop-out for speaking, though. Iis this splintering of ideas from body that occurs when we write really inflicting violence on the self? And how does this all relate to Mennonites and their anti-violence stances? These are some unresolved questions I still have after reading Kasdorf's piece.

Mennonites, you martyrs

I read the articles in the “Martyrs” issue of the Center for Mennonite Writing Journal. One article by Kirsten Beachy tells a number of stories rooted in Mennonite history about martyrs who did dramatic things to as a demonstration of their faith. Another entry is a series of poems by Rhoda Janzen that explores both historic and theoretical aspects of martyrdom. Julia Kasdorf writes a review of the film Pearl Diver, which she says upholds sacrifice as “a supreme virtue.” Jessica Baldanzi's review of the memoir Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is maybe the least obviously relevant to the theme of martyrs, but Baldanzi seems to imply that the book is a modification (if not a rejection) of the traditional Mennonite memoir of hardship and sacrifice for some greater good. I like the mix of poetry, prose essay, and critical review in this issue; the essay approaches the theme of martyrs directly, the poetry symbolically, and the reviews provide evidence of martyrdom in current Mennonite culture. All of the entries are more modern, less dramatic takes on Mennonite martyr values, but they all seem to suggest that the concept of self-sacrifice as a virture is still alive and well in Mennonite culture.

One thing that struck me as I was reading these pieces was that our contemporary conceptions of martyrdom are very rooted in history, but we don't talk as much about martyrdom in theological terms anymore. In the Anabaptist stories from the past that Beachy relates, the characters are sacrificing their lives to stand up for their religious beliefs, so sacrifice has a distinct spiritual purpose. But in more modern Mennonite stories self-sacrifice has become a more community-oriented value that is not as directly inspired by faith. As Kasdorf puts it in her review of Pearl Diver, “The origins of a practice are so integrated into everyday life that they are not overtly conscious, and particular choices are made simply because they are what we do, who we are, or how it is.” Self-sacrifice has become so much of a cultural expectation in Mennonite communities that the act of martyrdom, which was originally done for the sole purpose of expressing one's faith, has now become somewhat detached from that faith. Beachy begins her essay by describing one modern form of secular Mennonite martyrdom: making do with used twist ties and sour milk. If you are Mennonite, you are expected to tolerate these less-than-perfect commoditites, but no one really thinks about that toleration as a religious act.

There is some degree of irony present as these authors discuss the theme of martyrdom. It seems that, in the modern version of martyrdom, the contemporary Mennonite seeks only to deprive him- or herself for the sake of humility. But by the act of writing, these Mennonite authors are drawing attention to themselves and their ideas, which destroys the anonymous humility that the modern conception of martyrdom strives for. In her poem “The Martyr Box” Rhoda Janzen writes, “Let them kill / you every day for / fifteen years. Slip / through the world / unseen, the ant that / wanders off the line. / To others, the grand / booboiseries of / Shakespeare—ambition, / lust, the marriage plot.” Clearly, though, Janzen herself is not slipping through the world unseen—she has in fact published a bestselling memoir and is trying as hard as she can to be seen. Since martyrs aren't physically dying anymore, the modern version of it requires Mennonites to be self-deprecating and avoid being too showy. But if this also means obscuring one's art—which can bring good and beautiful things into the world that are uniquely Mennonite—it seems more like senseless killing than martyrdom.