Moving forward via Women Talking

Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’ novel Women Talking was recognized for its powerful screenplay in the recent Academy awards. In her acceptance speech, Polley said: “A young woman delivers the last line of our film to a new baby, and she says: ‘Your story will be different from ours.”’

“It’s a promise, a commitment and an anchor,” Polley added, “and it’s what I would like to say with all of my might to my three incredible kids . . . as they make their way through this complicated beautiful world.”

Although Polley’s film is set in a close-knit community, among women who have known one another for decades, this film provides a rich starting point. How could the story also be different for women elsewhere who struggle to find ways to move forward out of violence against them?

On the surface of Women Talking, nothing “happens.” And yet it is full of action as eight women wrestle with how to respond to the violent crimes the women of their community have experienced. And this is the crime: they had been anaesthetized in their own beds and awakened to the pain and trauma that they’d been raped during the night. Rather than focus on the crimes, the film follows the dynamic exchange between these women as they gather in the loft of a barn to decide whether to stay and fight, or, to leave.

They wrestle with what it means to forgive, to love, how to fight. From where will the strength come to address what has happened to them? What will give them hope as they go forward? With deep respect, Sarah Polley portrays the role that the women’s faith plays in their talking.

FIRST, BREAK THE SILENCE

Moving forward begins as the women break the layers of silence that have muffled what happened. Moving forward includes giving voice to their agony and rage; the women were told they were imagining things. The outrage includes not only the crimes committed against them, but how those attacks have been swept under the rug, discounted, dismissed.

Even as they struggle to find the words, they begin to express all that they could not address. “We don’t talk about our bodies. There is no language for it . . . the gaping silence was the real horror,” one of the women points out. The community does not have a vocabulary for referring to and bringing human sexuality into everyday conversation in life-giving ways.

The silence that is being broken extends to the community’s culture. These eight women represent three generations. Besides having no language, the women uncover the deep flaws in the structure that has been shaped from one generation to the next. Ona points out how their own mothers have surrounded them with silence after they have been raped or beaten.

Urging their daughters to quickly forgive has encouraged them to bury what has been done to them. Early on in the conversation, one woman bluntly exclaims: “You can’t enter the Kingdom of heaven if you can’t forgive.” This has been a cardinal dictum of the community. Greta, one of the two eldest women among the eight, muses: “there can be a misuse of the rule of forgiveness – perhaps in some instances quickly saying ‘I forgive you’ can be taken as permission to continue the wrongdoing.” “Spiritual bypassing” such as this demand to quickly forgive, can take away the other person’s accountability. Greta comes to apologize to her daughter for all the times she has told her she must forgive her husband Klaus after he repeatedly beats her.

SECOND, NO MORE HARM

Moving forward also includes remaining steadfast to their faith. Even as they begin to think about what forgiveness is and is not, the women remind one another of their community’s deep commitment to pacifism: to not return evil for evil. To move out of the way of violence. Staying, then, may be inviting more harm. One observes that “staying and fighting will turn this place into a battlefield,” while another says, “If I stay, I may become a murderer of those men who do this.”

At one point, the women begin singing the hymn “Nearer my God to Thee,” and some of the lyrics illuminate where they find themselves. As they search for language, as they wrestle with the “what is” that they will no longer accept, they sing:

Though like the wanderer
The sun gone down
Darkness be over me
My rest a stone
Angels to beckon me
Nearer, my God, to Thee
Nearer, my God, to Thee
Nearer to Thee.

The women wrestle with what it might mean to be part of the Kingdom of heaven. What does God’s face look like? What is reflected in that “countenance” that is lifted towards them in a way that brings peace, that shines upon the face of the beloved? (Num 6:23b-26). In their listening and talking, an image of God’s face does seem to emerge: in the face of the mother who rages over what has happened to her children, in the face and voice of the grandmother who breaks the silence she herself was a part of, as she is finally able to gather her daughter and granddaughter in her arms and weep with them. The image of God that emerges seems to be echoed in the tenderness of another scene:

Children of the heav’nly
Father
Safely in His bosom gather
Nestling bird nor star in Heaven
Such a refuge e’er was given.

The women sing this as they surround Salome, who is gently rocking her four-year-old daughter. We see the child’s body relax into slumber. This is the fierce protection and safety within which their children will be able to grow and flourish. And this is where the women are headed, moving forward.