Title: Women Talking
Author: Miriam Toews
Date read: October 14, 2018.
Two Snaps.
Only the intro to this book can explain it and my engagement with it:
“Between 2005 and 2009 in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia named the Manitoba colony, after the province in Canada, many girls and women would wake in the morning feeling drowsy and in pain, their bodies bruised and bleeding, having been attacked in the night. The attacks were attributed to ghosts and demons. Some members of the community felt the women er being made to suffer by God or Satan as punishment of their sins; many accused the women of lying for attention or to cover up adultery; still other believed everything was the result of wild female imagination.
Eventually, it was revealed that eight men from the colony had been using an anaesthetic to knock their victims unconscious and rape them. In 2011, these men were convicted in a Bolivian court and received lengthy prison sentences. In 2013, while the convicted men were still in jail, it was reported that similar assaults and other sexual abuses were still taking place in the colony. Read about the true story and aftermath here.
Women Talking is both a reaction through fiction to these true-life events, and an act of female imagination.”
Yes, yes, yes. Well done, Miriam Toews!
