Rage, Dread and Love

Miriam Toews‘ novel, Women Talking, engaged me instantly, from the very first page. It stayed with me, leading to research on the web and a second reading. Days later, it is still with me, ready to summon a powerful mixture of feelings and sentiments. It is an intense work.

Women Talking is based on a horrific history: the serial raping of women in a Mennonite community in Bolivia. For years, women in the community would awake bleeding, disheveled and bruised, the victims of sexual attacks. Their complaints were ignored in their isolated, insular and extremely patriarchal world. Men called them imaginary “ghost rapes” or the work of devils. When women finally captured one of the rapists, they learned that they were being drugged by a spray and assaulted. Eventually, through years of investigation and trial, nine men were convicted of rapes. The trail cites 135 victims, from ages 3 to 65, but unofficially there were probably many more.

The sect’s misogyny enabled the crimes and compounded the harm. Most of the women had lives of limited opportunity, illiterate and in secondary status. The religion limited access and understanding of basic sexual health. A closed culture of shame made things worse, and the community’s faith and power structure bound the women further. The women were denied basic civil and human rights, like so many others in the world. But that does not mean that the women lack agency or have nothing to say.

From this horror Toews, herself a lapsed Mennonite, gives us a novel of women in this community talking. It is a novel of conversations. The women talk of options, of revenge, of harm, of their children, their families, and of love. Toews lets us listen to the women as individuals with strengths, weaknesses, ideas and fears – not as objectified victims – and that “reality” makes the evil they endured all the more terrible. It’s an extremely well-crafted work of intimacy and care, told in a situation of almost unimaginable evil. But the evil isn’t unimaginable – it happened. And that makes it all the more awful.

Women Talking is a powerful indictment of patriarchy. It gives voice to those that we might not hear. It is an extremely good novel.

David Potash

November 24, 2020 Reviews

Wild, Wild, Westside Chicago

Mike McHugh, a long-time Chicago native, recently penned a book recounting his father’s stories. The elder McHugh, a building inspector and man about town, was “connected.” He knew police and crooks, mobsters and molls, union officials and politicos. He had all manner of yarns to spin to Mike, his brother Jerry, and I’m sure many others. The resulting volume, Chicago Westside Irish, reads like an adult story hour, best told at a bar and not your local library. McHugh’s approach is non-judgmental; it is simple reporting.

The book’s tone is conversational. Without sources or context, it is relatively easy to get lost amid the exploits, the names and the nicknames. On the other hand, with some selective web searching, it’s easy to put the pieces together. From what I’ve researched, McHugh’s stories are based in fact – no matter how fantastic they might read.

There were bootleggers in the family. Famed criminals, like Al Capone, move in and out of the tales, with a drink here, a funeral there. It’s a telling reminder of just how small a town the enormous city of Chicago can be.

Chicago Westside Irish is also a reminder of Chicago’s rich history – especially when it comes to crime, politics and criminal justice. Just as today, there were significant problems in the 1920s and 1930s, too. Chicago, for some, can very much be the wild, wild west.

David Potash

November 19, 2020 Chicago