Shunning Platforms

Stage Identities:  Creating a Platform or Space for Dialogue

ne Kaunsel

   Some people in the know have informed me that there is a whole other history for Diane Driedger’s collection of poems, The Mennonite Madonna, one of which I was not aware.

 Apparently, The Mennonite Madonna actually originated as a collection of performance poetry framing a 1997 Fringe Theatre performance by Driedger as the Mennonite Madonna and as her grandparents. 

    The greatest strength, in my opinion, of the art scene in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is that the scene is all about smashing boundaries – boundaries between the numerous historic and immigrant cultures that have together built the city, boundaries between tradition and new perspectives and boundaries between art forms.  Two of my favorite examples of the latter are the adaptation of Patrick Friesen’s poetry to both print and stage forms and Clive Holden’s multi-media Trains of Winnipeg.  (Though I am also tempted to include a phenomenal presentation of Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) accompanied by acoustic and jazz performers on the level of the Wyrd Sisters.)

    The Mennonite Madonna is a stage persona Driedger developed in response to the lack of a female divine in Mennonite culture and worship.  Searching for options and solutions, Driedger apparently looked to the Roman Catholic image of Mary, Mother of Christ, and to Mary's iconoclastic double – the pop performer Madonna who became a dominant force in pop culture by challenging traditional values and perceptions – possibly one of the first great Postmodern performers.

2011 Mennonite Theater

   Tee'auta

    2011 was a good year for Mennonite Theatre.  Patrick Friesen’s The Shunning was resurrected to much acclaim for its 25-year anniversary while Jessica Dickey probed the mysteries of communal forgiveness as demonstrated by the Amish of Nickel Mines after the Schoolhouse Shootings in 2006. 

    For Anabaptists, these two works make positive bookends for a debate on the place and role of community in the life of the individual and the communal response to violence.  For sociologists, the two works help clarify and advance questions of identity formation and maintenance in communal societies.  For North Americans, both works provide rare private glimpses into the lives of their oft-misunderstood Anabaptist neighbours – introducing them to our archetypes, our lives, our greatest strengths and our greatest weaknesses.

Note that while I have studied Friesen's texts and the background of events at Nickel Mines, due to the distance between Chicago and Winnipeg, I could not view these two productions personally.  This article is comprised of reviewing texts and critical reviews of the productions, researching the background of the plays and speaking with friends and acquaintances who were fortunate to see the productions.  The purpose of this post is to raise awareness of these two works.

    First produced in Winnipeg in 1985, Friesen’s dramatic adaptation of his well-known poem of the same name, continues to provoke curiosity, sorrow and questions regarding social violence. 

    Like others, CBC reviewer Joff Schmidt generally approved of Robb Patterson’s direction and of Mike Shara’s portrayal of Peter Neufeld.

Courtesy and (c) CBC Canada.

    The Shunning is set in rural southern Manitoba.  Neufeld, a Mennonite farmer, begins to question certain tenets of his faith such as God’s intention to send persons to hell.  Neufeld is shunned for his lack of belief.  Schmidt says it well, “… he is ‘shunned’—a horrible form of imprisonment where he remains in the community, but no one, not even his wife and children, is allowed contact with him until he gives in to the church,” (CBC Theatre Review, 11 Feb, 2011).

    Like other deeply personalized accounts of alienation and degredation (Dan Franck’s La separation comes immediately to mind, with tinges of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery), Friesen takes the audience from a time of peace and happiness in a small community, within a young family, inside an old traditional culture, to a tortured experience of loss of identity, familial standing and compassion.  Drawing similarities with Milan Kundera, Friesen’s Neufeld makes the mistake of doubting the essential truth of the community (gemeinde).  While his doubts are not serious, or even life-changing, they yet threaten the essential conformity necessary for the preservation and continuance of the tight Mennonite culture – a society founded on the blood of martyrs and continued in a perpetual line of refugee immigrants struggling to find acceptance and peace – an historic journey that has strongly influenced their character and their theology.

    To be fair, there are two sides to the argument Friesen portrays.  Agreeably, Friesen is depicting scenes of spiritual violence (now referred to as social violence).  At the same time, much of that violence is directed at preserving the community against assimilation and cultural aggression by North America’s dominant Anglo-American majority.  As a Mennonite, I find myself sympathetic to both sides of the story and yet know all too well the shiver of fear when one is suspected of running afoul of the communal expectation.

    Two items stand out in Friesen’s presentation – the setting of the prairies as a place of comfort and the familiarity of the soil, yet an empty horizon that can be isolating or clarifying depending on the circumstances.  Secondly, the fact that The Shunning is still as applicable today as it was in pre-War Manitoba indicates that we as Mennonites, might yet have some cultural resolution to pursue.

    Dickey’s Chicago presentation, The Amish Project, is much more hopeful – and yet, amusing in that unlike Friesen who grew up Mennonite, Dickey has purportedly had little actual contact with the Anabaptist culture. 

     The Amish Project follows the life of the Amish community near Nickel Mines, PA.  In 2006, Charles Roberts, IV, a local milk delivery person, rather inexplicably took the Amish occupants of a small one-room schoolhouse hostage and shot ten girls before committing suicide. 

    Dickey picks up immediately on the United States’ fascination with this story – unlike other tragedies, people found something unexpected and hopeful in the way the Amish came together and shocked popular culture by publically forgiving the man who had murdered five children and wounded five others.  People were genuinely shocked with the Amish actually reached out to Roberts’ own family and consoled them for the loss of their husband and father, assuring them of the community’s forgiveness.

    Instead of venting pain and rage, the Amish quietly tore down the site of the shootings and rebuilt the school elsewhere.  Popular response to the Amish reflects how truly Nickel Mines has witnessed of their relationships to Christ and Anabaptist heritage to the greater culture.

   Tony Frankel, a non-Mennonite critic for The Chicago Theater Review, wrote of Dickey’s premise – “What kind of community forgives instead of resorting to a knee-jerk reaction of blind revenge?  What do they people do to mourn and work through such as unspeakable crime?”  Yet Frankel hits on Dickey’s weakness – “Unfortunately, we will not find a deeper understanding of this event and its aftermath…” (Theater-Chicago, 28 Sept 2011).

Courtesy and (c) Theater-Chicago.

    Dickey’s play revolves around a single actress (Sadieh Rifai) playing several roles.  Despite Frankel’s criticism, many non-Mennonite acquaintances in fact found the presentation compelling and commendable. Yet, one can see where the structure leads one to confusion – the cultural spirit of the “Amish” comes through where Rifai had trouble communicating the spirit of the individuals portrayed.  The importance of The Amish Project comes in the exploration as to why the Amish reacted the way they did – the weakness is that while the story is told artistically and compellingly, Dickey demonstrates no understanding of the strength and faith that unites the Amish into a strong unified Fellowship.  People wanting to view a compelling story can leave happy.  Those wishing a deeper encounter with Amish cultural criticism will, of necessity, leave disappointed.  The Amish Project is pure Hallmark, not quite PBS.

    Friesen’s The Shunning and Dickey’s The Amish Project deal with opposing understandings of Mennonite and Amish cultures.  Friesen, an insider, bares the dark seamier side of social violence that can occur when faith and trust are misplaced and abused.  Dickey, an outsider, falls back on a real-life demonstration of a slightly romanticized perspective of life within a strict, tight-knit, traditional, religious community.

    These two plays are compelling because neither world can exist without the other.  The Amish were able to reach out to the Roberts in many ways because they were not members of the community.  Only by pursuing the strict traditional social controls criticized by Friesen are they able to maintain the community that gave them the strength to move beyond the tragedy and to reach out to others.  Yet in maintaining these strengths, there will be casualties and too often, abuse.  Both plays are opposing faces of the same coin.  Both plays make for compelling commentary on the strengths and weaknesses of both the Anabaptist culture and its critical relationship to or juxtaposition with the dominant North American culture. 

    Whether Anabaptist or Inglisher, your participation in this dialogue is recommended.

Further Reading...

The Shunning:

• http://www.mtc.mb.ca/PDFs/Outreach/Study-Guides-2010-11/MTC-Study-Guide-The-Shunning-%28body%29.aspx
• http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/fyi/friesen-poems-ask-questions-of-hidden-god-134524218.html
• http://www.cbc.ca/inforadio/columnists/winnipegtheatrebeat/2011/02/11/theatre-review-the-shunning/
• http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/arts/inside-out-115705949.html

The Amish Project:

• http://www.amishproject.com/
• http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/stage/7931930-421/the-amish-project-leaves-you-breathless.html
• http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-amish-project-mourning-becomes-electra-reviewed/Content?oid=4758550
• http://chicagotheaterbeat.com/2011/09/29/review-the-amish-project-american-theater-company/
• http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=3505   

Madonnas, Breasts and Mennonites

A Review of Diane Driedger’s The Mennonite Madonna (1999)

    Diane Driedger’s book is hardly news – in fact, many have come to regard it as a classic of the protest poetry of late 20^th Century Canadian Mennonite-dom – the so-called Bitter Poets, the self-styled Recovering Mennonites.

    Driedger’s compositions can be divided roughly into four groups – poetry dealing with the shunning and ban of her great grandfather Johann Driedger in a 1908 frontier town in northern Saskatchewan; the poetry of her own autobiography; the poetry of womanhood finding its own strength and empowerment; and poems of her personal liberation in Trinidad and Tobago. 

    The Mennonite world is full of descriptives – English, German  and even a few Russian modifiers flying about seeking to inform and influence every moment of worship, work and self-consciousness.  So many words might be found filling the air that Mennonites have often become masters of the acronym and the code word just to marshal these spurious gnats into a semblance of order, to constrict them enough to give us the space necessary for us – for our individual living and the freedom to form our own identities.  In many ways, Driedger’s book Mennonite Madonna is exactly that – the marshaling of words into small coherent packets of order that can be dealt with, celebrated, praised or even buried and forgotten.  Under her direction, words of hatred, control and even the unspoken Mennonite sins of communal abuse, are slowly forced back into place – into a format and cogency that diminishes their power to inflict pain.  In this Driedger succeeds admirably – establishing a collection infused with meaning culturally, sexually (as in relating to the genders) and yet intimate through personal reflections of herself and her great-grandparents.

    Driedger takes the title of the book from Pieta – a reflection on the vandalizing of the famous Roman statue in 1972.  Driedger reflects on the dismemberment of a finger:

                … I looked at the finger

                glued on?

                yes it was still

                resisting the comforting motion

                of the other fingers

                a finger

                                going its own

                        way

     Perhaps this image of a broken finger, restored, yet going its own way is a the picture of both the experience of the greater Driedger family still paying for the presumed offense of Johann in 1908 and still bearing the marks of a generation of emotional and social abuse against her family.  At the same time, Driedger reveals a picture of her own conflicted heritage as a Mennonite.  Obviously, Driedger feels shaped and formed by her Mennonite ethnicity, and yet like her great-grandfather, demands the freedom to identify with it but not to be shaped, controlled or abused by it. Unlike Johann, Driedger finds her own strength to accept the church, society, marriage, others… on her terms, not theirs.  Sometimes she chooses to cooperate and accept:

nasty hand his.  on my knee in his office where I need to

fundraise for this project you see. and he waits until my male

colleague is out of reach and then sets me down in his den.

pretends to flip over my page. he’s not interested in

the paper. finds a fancy for knees and thighs as his fingers

lightly touch my knee. I breathe in out in out in out. I think

our government should be hiring decent men.  pretend not

to notice, like a lady. …

    Sometimes she chooses to decline:

                 … now I leave him

                our established routines

                the old withering away

                I fashion new wineskins

                of my own

                loving leaving entirely

                arriving at myself

                and on this day death smells

                sweet

     But always, she sees participation as a choice – if not in fact, at least in her ability to withhold consent:

                 … your life giving

                had a plan

                a prerequisite

                if I had known

                I would not have

                emerged

                would not have accepted.

     The image of the Madonna itself is perhaps borrowed.  As Mennonites, we have no strongly preserved tradition of spiritually powerful and authoritative women – at least not outside of the kitchen, bedroom and garden.  So the image of the Madonna is appropriated from Rome, from Catholicism – and yet it finds a comforting home astride Driedger’s collection.  By page 68, Dreidger finds her own Mennonite and personal identity by allowing others to discover her self, her words and her female form through the consensual sharing of her private thought, her physicality and her independence:

                                Breasts

                My boyfriend read that poem

                about breasts

                at Bible college

                it was by a Mennonite writer

                so my boyfriend read it in class

                amid snickers

                embarrassed

                I knew he was filled

with breasts

in his heart and hands

my breasts

beautiful       he said

a Venus di Milo

but I had arms

and a head

now    oh   breasts

once perky and proud

womanhood has set in

the after thirty plunge

jugs

no longer goblets

afraid     I avert my eyes

try to focus on another

body part

that may have fared better

but alas

my breasts

were my last stronghold

of youth

I wonder

will these breasts

lure men to my den

ah    it doesn’t really matter.

    Driedger’s portrayal of Johann as the proverbial victim, creatively allows him to emerge – a man more interesting in life for his afflictions, a man more sure of the love and dedication of his wife for her support in his spiritual and social exile – a man empowered with a strong voice, a voice able to single-handedly push back against the many combined voices of a weak, passionless and fearful congregation.  Yet as an outsider, Johann is allowed to become a prophet – a position of authority he never held from inside the church.  Johann’s voice emerges from the one-amongst-many as the solitary voice of a poet-writer – a crooked finger, once cut off only to be restored in its uniqueness, strengthened to makes its own way apart from the general curves of the whole:

                 The Congregation

                to the church

                up the stairs

                he comes again and again

                quick

                shut the doors

                hold them tight

                against Johann Driedger

                why does he come here

                why keep pushing against

                our shunning

                our beliefs

                our God

                hold the doors shut

                Dreidger is pushing

                puffing

                saying let me in

                I will blow your house

                down!

 and from Johann’s Psalm:

                 …  I have become a god head

                the head beckoned by God

                to do his will to be in

                love with the world the

                modern world

                the sins of the Mennonite fathers

                keep piling up

                even the snow cannot hide them.

 or Johann 1911:

                 … yes to the church to confront the Bishop

                his lack of understanding

                of biblical teaching

                to love each other in difference …

                … I will not be silenced

                in my opposition

                will not accept

                no never accept

                their shunning

                I am of the Mennonite Church

                of God

    From this tradition, Driedger has dredged her own identity, her own strength, her own voice and her own commissioning by the Spirit.  In my sir name, she pays heed to her name – Driedger, of Flemish origin meaning “powerful spear”.  She explores this meaning and decides that it is a good name for a “Menno knight.”  Diana, her first name, hearkens back to the Roman goddess of the hunt, the moon, of women – a “power full spear.”  As an ethnic Mennonite, she also couches her quest in the spiritual language and metaphor of her forebears:

                me

                my pen

                is this what  is

                meant by the inspired writing

                of the Bible…

                … he wrote was he like me

                trying to find a way out of

                (into) the maze of the world

                of himself …

     Less compelling stylistically yet equal in emotional vigour is her anthem to Mennonite writers:

                 This is a psalm of praise

                to the homeless ones

                selah

                from Russia

                from Reinland

                from Steinbach

                amen …

                … oh for a thousand tongues

                yes in Winnipeg there are many

                Mennonite writers

                all tongues wag

                praise to the writers

                for they have tongues of fire

                and God has not delivered them

                unto their people

                instead

                He has cradled them

                with words fiery    deep

                and so full of love for this home

                selah …

     The Mennonite Madonna, despite its age – it was published in 1999 – continues to resonate with pride, determination and voice.  Drawing from the stories and strength of her great grandparents and their pioneer history, their quiet, individual spiritual determination and their survival as spiritual outcasts in an inhospitable world, as well as from her own quiet struggles with self-acceptance, womanhood and socially-empowered injustices, Driedger wraps the comforting arm of her great grandmother Katharine around individuals seeking their voice in this world.  The solid unwillingness to wrongly concede defeat when words of truth are meant to be spoken comes from Johann, Katherine’s husband.  Yet nowhere is there such a strong condemnation, a bitter gall of past wrongs, as much as an invitation to the present to be inspired by the errors of the past to create a better now – to feel sorry for those who unlike her great grandparents, cowered together in dull, conformist, unfulfilled and perhaps erroneous lives.  Her own stories demonstrate how those lessons remain pertinent to this day.  Any bitterness would be directed not against the past or even against organized religion, but rather against the expectant assertion that one could choose fear over life, conformity over self-realization, and silence over truth.  The secret of the Madonna seems to be that life is a choice – not one necessarily entered into freely, but one of how we will choose to live.  While the Pieta’s pose is traditional, formal and manipulated – hope rests in the divine inspiration of that tiny little finger – going its own way, drawing strength from the whole yet following the inner inspiration of its own voice, resolving its own maze, confronting its own physical insecurities – finding its own way.  Selah.