Homelands, Identity Politics, and the Trace: What Remains for the Mennonite Reader?

Abstract: This paper interrogates the current state of Mennonite/s writing in Canada, where the explosion of literary activity among Mennonites in the 1980s and 1990s coincided with the adoption of federal government policy concerning multiculturalism. The paper asks what the reader might covet in the Mennonite literary text, and--observing that contemporary literary texts by writers of heritage are proportionately less distinctively Mennonite than works by the first generation of writers--asks what remains for the reader when the Mennonite text, which has often offered investigations of history, religious life, and culture, is no longer palpably identifiable as Mennonite. The winter of 2012 was a rich season for avid readers of what many have come to refer to as Mennonite literature. A series of public readings and lectures by and about writers at Conrad Grebel University College in Waterloo, Ontario, drew audiences of over a hundred on Wednesday evenings week after week from January to March. At the end of March the sixth international conference on Mennonite/s Writing, this time held at Eastern University in Virginia, attracted similar numbers of readers and writers over four days--all presumably interested in the phenomenon of literature that had begun to take shape as a literary fact in Canada in the decade before the first conference on Mennonite/s Writing was convened in Waterloo, Ontario, in 1990. It was mostly self-identified Mennonites who gathered at these events in 2012. There are Mennonites, it would appear, who like to read texts and gather around authors who, in the midst of a range of subjects, tell stories and evoke language, settings, and circumstances that resonate, often at a profound level, with their own experience. It is clear that while writing in Canada has evolved over the years, its keenly engaged though sometimes skittish readers have grown into a palpable, though by no means monolithic, audience. This paper is in part driven by my respect for and curiosity about that audience, which by its very existence makes implicit demands on the writers whose works they read--demands occasionally resisted by the writers themselves, who sometimes feel constrained by their readers' real or assumed assumptions or expectations. Initially, the audience's postulations about the literary works they read would have been framed, in large measure, both by Mennonites' experience of the apparently coherent Canadian world of the mid-twentieth century--augmented by the collective trauma represented by Rudy Wiebe's first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962)--and by the dynamic identity politics that came into play in the world-at-large in later decades, when the apparent integrity of the Canadian world clearly began to fragment. The present audience of literary texts, while invoking with less urgency the assumptions, identifications, and imperatives of past decades, continues to read and ponder the plethora of literary productions by writers of heritage. Given this keen interest, the question inevitably emerges: What do these readers expect of the text? Indeed, what do they want of writers? And can the writers--do they, will they--deliver on these expectations? What follows is a foray into the landscape these questions inscribe. HOMELANDS When I was invited, a few years ago, to present a paper on Mennonite/s writing in the context of studies in diaspora, I inadvertently drew laughter from my audience by confessing that when I began to think about Mennonites and diaspora, the first thing that came to mind was the literary diaspora of recent decades: the dispersal of many of the first generation of English-language Canadian writers from Winnipeg--the city with one of the largest concentrations of Mennonites in the world, and the center, the point of origin (if we are to accept the trope of the myth of origins, and assume we can identify a beginning) of English-language Canadian writing. …

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