Between European Past and Canadian Present: Lesbian Mennonite Writing and Collective Memory

MENNONITE WRITING IN CANADA HAS BEEN LEAVING ITS MARK on English-Canadian literature ever since, in the 1960s, writers representing the Mennonite community such as Rudy Wiebe decided to write in English rather than in the traditional Plautdietsch, type of Low German, that was often still generally spoken among the members of this 'marginal' pacifist community. While the first Mennonite writers writing in English in Canada were mostly male, such as Rudy Wiebe, Armin Wiebe, and AI Reimer, by now there is also growing group of female Mennonite writers in Canada, among them the successful novelists Sandra Birdsell and Miriam Toews and the poet and essayist Di Brandt.Mennonite writing represents religious, ethnic (and linguistic) minority, the history of which has for centuries been characterized and unified by common reference to distinct collective memory. It thus stands for certain type of minority and exilic writing as well as for reliance on the concept of an 'imagined community', although - as an ethnic and religious community within the larger national community of Canadians - it is not necessarily the type of national collective that Benedict Anderson generally subsumes under this term.1Within the group of Canadian Mennonites, I am - in this context - particularly interested in the writing of individuals who are doubly marginalized in this already marginalized group, whether it be on grounds of gender, language, or ethnicity. In addition to presenting unique historical and religious background, Mennonite writing offers fascinating playing field of linguistic interrelationships in the trilingual and polyglot character of this community: its sixteenth-century Frisian origin reflected in the use of Plautdietsch or Low German in everyday life, its religious Anabaptist background reflected in the use of High German in church, and its twentieth-century Canadian context in the Mennonite characters' use of English with their fellow Canadians.2In the following pages, I will try to bring some of the ideas I have mentioned so far - linguistic as well as historical and literary - together and introduce new Mennonite writer and new aspect of Mennonite writing: Jan Guenther Braun' s lesbian Mennonite novel Somewhere Ebe, which came out in 2008 with Arbeiter Ring, small publishing house in Winnipeg which sees its mandate as bringing out a dynamic combination of cultural, fiction, and non-fiction titles with an emphasis on progressive political analysis of contemporary issues.3 In her novel, Braun describes the tensions that arise in her character Jess, sixteen-year-old who, after leaving her family because she fears she cannot survive in the stifling atmosphere of her Mennonite community, later learns that coming out as homosexual does not preclude coming home to and being accepted as member of one's family in the end.So far, there has not been very much criticism on this novel. The book was brought to my attention by German colleague, himself Mennonite, and there is an interview with Jan Guenther Braun on Christian student radio station which is available on the internet. In addition, there are some brief YouTube impressions of Braun reading from her book in Winnipeg bookstore.Mennonite writing represents one of many types of ethnic Canadian writing among minority literatures in Canada, but its situation is somewhat special because of the Mennonites' history of pacifism and because of their historic journey from Northern Europe to East Prussia to Ukraine and Russia and then across the Atlantic to Canada, Mexico, and South America.In this kind of minority writing, new minorities come into being, as tend to be exclusionary, barring actual or functional minorities such as women or ethnically mixed groups from full membership in the community, or, as Braun' s central character Jess Klassen puts it, Mennonites slip into exclusionary politics with frightening ease. …

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