Mourning, Melancholy and the Mennonites

Julia Kasdorf

This essay was originally titled "Thriving Beyond Bounds" and was offered in a slightly different form at the BMC annual conference in Buffalo, New York, October 2004.

When my parents, who recently moved to a traditional Mennonite community after living years on the fringes, began to hear from their friends that I would be speaking at this conference, they mentioned it to me in oblique ways.  You know how those conversations go.  “I hear you’re talking at the BMC conference…?”  This was spoken as a question and followed by a long pause in which I knew something more than a simple affirmation was expected.  I could not tell whether they were proud that I was doing something public for the Mennonites or embarrassed because I was challenging official church doctrines, and of course I didn’t ask.

The second or third time it came up in this vague sort of way, I firmly told my dad that this is the only conference I’ve ever attended in a professional capacity that has provided childcare.  His face suddenly brightened, “Wow!” he said.  “You should tell people that!”

I assume that the presence of childcare at BMC means not that you are buying into “family values,” but that you are embodying the ideal of the rainbow—that everyone’s needs must be met, every animal gets into the ark and is fed and cared for and saved from the flood.  Maybe being queer does not mean that you are carefree, released from the duty of caring for children and other vulnerable individuals (as one popular stereotype assumes), but that you understand all too well that different needs demand different kinds of attention and structures.  And I thank you for that.

But before childcare issues emerged, when the invitation came to talk at this conference, my mind first went to a conversation I had some years back with my best friend from high school.  The dynamic of our friendship in a redneck Western PA public high school in the late 1970s was this:   I suffered a massive crush on him for years while he, I later learned, was longing to try out for the Theatre Club’s musical productions, but all the while he was terrified that someone might recognize him for the “band fag” he knew he was, to borrow the terminology of our high school.  When that very dear man reached his early 30s, he came out to me and his mother—the last people on his list.  Then he told me that he’d felt a strong personal resonance with the nostalgia and ambivalence that I express toward the traditional Mennonite community in my first book, Sleeping Preacher.   The way I write about Mennonites parallels the feelings queer people experience toward straight culture and its institutions and traditions, he said.  That ambivalence—a powerful mix of love and aversion, longing and loss, grief for knowing one will never fit into that idealized world of the past—is the space I want to explore a bit in this piece.

I was supposed to talk here about “thriving beyond bounds,” an optimistic phrase drawn from one of my essays. I know BMC is supposed to be moving from a position of “pain” to “power,” but the more I got to thinking about it, the more I realized that it would be impossible for me to write about “thriving beyond” without facing the fact that our roots are still grounded in the traditional communities we come from.  I say this assuming that you belong to BMC because you or someone you love has maintained some kind of relationship with this particular background—even if it’s a relationship of rage or constant complaint.  I assume that you or someone you love grew up in a church community that might just as well excommunicate you as welcome you (and sometimes it may be hard to tell the difference)—and that, nevertheless, you are bound to those communities, as I am, by very deep and very ambivalent bonds. 

Let me offer one of the poems that expresses my own ambivalence about our background—this is the first poem in my first collection Sleeping Preacher, and it serves as something of a thesis for that book.

Green Market, NY

The first day of false spring, I hit the street,
buoyant, my coat open.  I could keep walking
and leave that job without cleaning my desk.
At Union Square the country people slouch
by crates of last fall’s potatoes.
An Amish lady tends her table of pies.
I ask where her farm is.  “Upstate,” she says,
“but we moved from P.A. where the land is better,
and the growing season’s longer by a month.”
I ask where in P.A.  “Towns you wouldn’t know,
around Mifflinburg, around Belleville.”
And I tell her I was born there.
“Now who would your grandparents be?”
“Thomas and Vesta Peachey.”
“Well, I was a Peachey,” she says,
and she grins like she sees the whole farm
on my face.  “What a place your folks had,
down Locust Grove.  Do you know my father,
the Harness shop on the Front Mountain Road?”
I do.  And then we can’t think what to say
that Valley so far from the traffic on Broadway.
I choose a pie while she eyes my short hair
then looks square on my face.  She knows
I know better than to pay six dollars for this.
“Do you live in the city?” she asks, “do you like it?”
I say no.  And that was no lie, Emma Peachey.
I don’t like New York, but sometimes these streets
hold me as hard as we’re held by rich earth.
I have not forgotten that Bible verse:
Whoever puts his hand to the plow and looks back
is not fit for the kingdom of God.

When I first wrote this, I had no idea why it ended as it did with that Bible verse.  The poem enacts a conversation which actually happened, pretty much as it is reported, between a contemporary, urban Anabaptist and a figure who embodies and represents the traditional, rural community.   But what about the last lines that got written later, far beyond the actual exchange at the market? Certainly I recognize the passive aggressive rhetorical strategy of hurling a Bible verse at someone in order to close a conversation or curtail conflict.   (In my home growing up, when I grumbled about doing chores, I would hear  “Do all things without murmuring and disputing.”  That verse still haunts me:  Do all things?!  Compliantly? Silently? Is this why so many of us are obnoxious over-achievers or compliant accommodaters?)

In any event, although it intuitively seemed right, I didn’t understand the poem’s ending until well after the book was published and I gave a reading at Eastern Mennonite University.  Afterward, Ken Nofziger said that he believed that quotation was a denunciation of guilt, my refusal to feel ashamed for leaving the traditional community and assimilating into the dominant culture.   By quoting a familiar line from Scripture, but turning it against traditional expectations, I said that I honor the authority of the tradition but that I must refute that tradition if I am is to be true to its highest values.  (In response to this poem, Mennonite poet Jeff Gundy has pointed out that, at least on a tractor, you have to look back from time to time to see whether the cornstalks are plugging up the plow, but I think his quarrel is more about our life choices—and his own sense of rural authenticity—than the words of Jesus.)

Here’s another poem that makes a similar subversive move by quoting scripture, and turning those quotations against traditional expectations for dutiful daughters and wives.

The Mean Words of Jesus

In the home movies that run endlessly
through my head, Grandpa offers Dad
a new car if he’ll quit school at sixteen
to help run the farm.  And Dad turns him down.
Then the other Grandpa offers Mom
a store-bought dress if she’ll stay home
from college to take care of her mother.
She doesn’t want a dress that much,
but stays, and one of his cows fetches enough
to pay tuition at a nursing school nearby.
When her mother finally dies, Mom’s home again
for six months, cooking and cleaning, giving
birth to me while my father works miles away.
This is the part I cannot stand to see
another time.  Here I edit the scenes
and reverse all their consequences.  Here
my mother must turn to her father
at the last minute when the music swells
unbearably as in the last scene of Casablanca,
and in that soft, trembling light,
the mean words of Jesus must fly
from her lips:  Who is my mother?
or better yet:  Let the dead bury the dead.
Here she must announce, “I can’t reproduce
her cream sauce or spotless windows;
let the strawberries rot on the vine
if no one will pick them.”  Here she’ll remember
her mother’s high school diploma, framed
and stern as a clock above the cookstove,
earned while younger sisters dropped out
to work in a bakery, take in laundry,
scrub rich people’s floors, and their mother
grew sicker in body and soul.

In that poem, my mother acts in a movie of my mind.  As such, she recalls that her own mother finished high school instead of taking care of the family.  And together with “the mean words of Jesus”—a literal quotation from the Biblical text—that example from the family’s past becomes her grounds for refusing to sacrifice herself.  In the fantasy scenario, she resists the domestic plot, which was a plot against her own life in some real respects.

Looking back on these two poems, I see two important strategies for making meaning that strike me as very Anabaptist.

• They offer new, oppositional interpretations of scripture—which is more in line with the Anabaptist radical reformers—and
• they draw on historical precedent from within the tribe—which is more in keeping with traditional Mennonite and Church of the Brethren practices in the twentieth century. 

Both of these ways of making meaning are huge and very powerful strategies for resistance that come from within our traditions.

It seems to me that identifying those sources of authority and resistance may be the only way to have any sort of positive relationship with our exclusive traditions.  The faith communities we come from do not profess formal creeds and don’t have much of an overt theological tradition either.  There is a sense that authority comes from scripture not interpreted literally as fundamentalists claim, but interpreted by the community through conversation and revelation.  (Truth-telling:  I realize there are Mennonite congregations who cling to a fundamentalist view of Biblical authority, but they are out of order with their tradition and should be reminded of that.  The hard part of the communal heurmaneutic, of course, is the excruciatingly endless “dialogue.”  It took the Quakers a hundred years to denounce slavery, and queer people I love dearly will die before they can come out in the Mennonite church, and that makes me want to scream—never mind that I’ve already taken my own church membership elsewhere.) 

Fresh interpretations of scripture can be deployed to rectify injustice within our faith communities, as can strategic uses of memory, because history is the story of a people together over time, and therefore it constitutes another form of community.  I believe that when it comes to authority, history is second only to scripture, and perhaps equal to it in many Anabaptist communities.  You know how valuable it is to remember the famous queer people who came before you and who ranked among the faithful in your family or tribe.  These saints are not only a personal comfort to individuals struggling with queer identity, but a direct challenge to the exclusions of the present institutions.  This is why GLBT historical recovery work is so important—and I was constantly mindful of this when I was doing the biography work for J.W. Yoder.

The good news is that neither scriptural interpretation nor historical narrative are fixed things; both sources of Anabaptist authority can be challenged and change over time and in response to current circumstances and new knowledge.  And that is why Anabaptists can find more space for flexibility and grace than some other Protestant traditions that have more explicit creeds and theologies.

For me, engaging with personal memory and Mennonite community history—by writing  poetry and prose and even serious ethnographic and archival research—has been enormously therapeutic, not that I always realized it at the time.  One of the first functions of that work has been a kind of mourning—not just mourning my own distance from a normal-seeming Mennonite family or from my parents’ rural, conservative community of origin (which I didn’t grow up in), but for the loss of all of it, including the traditional ways of farm life that many Americans lost with the enormous cultural and economic shifts that came with World War II.   What gets lost with the passing of traditional Anabaptist communities?  (By the way, I need to stress that they are only passing from my life; in fact traditional or “plain” Anabaptist communities are growing at a much faster rate in the U.S. than are the liberal ones who might tolerate a gathering like BMC.)  What’s to mourn about leaving a sexist, racist, homophobic religious tribe that keeps everyone in line by making them feel ashamed to be different?  What’s to mourn about realizing there’s no way you’re ever going to fit into the mom/dad/two kids/two cars/ one dog American heterosexist ideal?  Good riddance, right?

Right.  Except it’s lots more complicated than that, as we all know.   There are many strong sites of comfort, security and love in the traditional families and religious communities we come from, and to feel exiled from them is a staggering loss that leaves one deep in a grief that can feel like losing yourself.   (Here, let me quickly insert one idea:  I’m not talking about nostalgia—which is a kind of bogus sentiment which obsesses about and longs for the past without admitting fully the truths of the memory; people can get nostalgic about their childhoods as a mask for angers or hurts that cannot be recognized.)  I’m talking about clear-headed loss that admits the complexity of the issue.  Several writers of queer theory and culture have seen coming out not just as a liberation, but as a kind of death—the loss of a life and imagined future—that must be mourned.   That, compounded by the AIDS epidemic and incalculable losses in the gay community, has led to some powerful writing about mourning and melancholy—following Freud. 

Here is a very swift paraphrase of Freud’s famous 1917 essay, “Mourning and Melancholia”:  Mourning is characterized as a destabalizing process that comes as the result of the absence of a known thing (a lover, for instance) which will eventually come to an end and somehow enable an individual to work through and recover from the loss.  Melancholy can look like mourning, but rather than working through the loss, the individual obsessively acts it out—consciously or not.  The individual cannot seem to get over it, and the cause of the grief is often unrealized, and marked by complicated feelings of love and hate toward the lost object.  In mourning, an individual eventually gives up the lost object because it is dead, and he must live; in melancholia, the individual struggles with bouts of deep ambivalence, disparaging and denegrating the beloved lost object.

A strain of melancholy drives the work of many writers, and at some level writing has always be seen as a melancholic act because it is an attempt to stop time and loss.  Writing arrests speech, which is always dying on our tongues.   For me, melancholy is manifest in the obsessive rendering of lost worlds that appears in my work.    Here is a poem from a series based on childhood memories of my time among older Conservative Conference Mennonites in Central Pennsylvania.  In that community “left over blessings” is a term used for unmarried women, a euphemism for “old maid.”

Leftover Blessings

His dinner on the stove, Grandpa smirked at our jar
of pickled eggs and beets, “Old maids picnic,
party for hens.”  They still let Bertha come
since she married so late and someone so mean.
(Who could begrudge all those children a mother,
besides it was she who taught that proud Amishman
to drive in her own new, black Plymouth.)
They had a spot under the hemlocks
by a stream on Back Mountain, the Valley’s
leftover blessings:  Elsie and Miriam,
the three Stayrook sisters who crocheted and sang,
and Mary and Loamie who lived on the home farm
like girls—calling all the chickens by name,
milking goats and Rosie the cow by hand,
feeding geese and guinea hens just for fun.
Winters they hooked rugs from wool rags,
heating only one room in that great, dark house.
The only child among women, I couldn’t imagine
them young or waiting for dates, though I’d seen
the photograph from Rehoboth or one of the ocean cities—
five of them lined up, laughing in the surf,
thin, dark-haired, hiking their skirts.
I never guessed they might have chosen
to stay with women.
I only felt the weight of the way
they heaped my plate and touched my hair,
or the picnic games they made only for me.
How they cheered while I raced against
invisible children, sparing me the indignity
of three-legged relays, bestowing balloons
and butterscotch.  So much for just one child,
I thought.  This is what it means to be a blessing,
enough love left over to give prizes for nothing,
for just showing up, being young, being born
the granddaughter of a man someone married.

Writing these kinds of poems out of memory has been a way for me to see things differently.  Until I wrote the poem, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to consider whether those “leftover blessings” had chosen to remain single—or whether they were single at all.  Nor could I have seen the grace in their attention to me, particularly set against the recalcitrance of my grandfather.   By telling the old stories anew—revising them (re-vision, of course, means to see them again, to see something we might have missed before)—I’ve been able to talk back to those parts of the religious culture that have offended my soul.   At the same time, I’ve also been able to talk with the tradition in public ways that have connected me to other people on similar journeys—from both within and outside the Anabaptist subculture.  It’s been a great relief to me to find that our family stories are not so special or unique.

I suspect that a secret and debilitating pride of the Anabaptist experience is to assume that our history of suffering makes us special (unlike the suffering and troubled histories of other groups like Jews, Muslims, members of the African diasporia and so forth).  I believe that a willful clinging to Anabaptist identity may be part of a melancholic obsession with the persecutions and losses of the past.   That kind of fixation on one’s own suffering isolates and prevents real connections with others.  I know this happens in the women’s movement, too, and wonder whether there is an analogue in gay culture as well. 

Of course the personal or communal past can’t be blotted out or ignored; those stories trail behind us like cans tied to a length of twine, banging on the road.   It seems to me that the thing must be to stop and turn around and engage with those stories yourself.  And they must be brought into conversation with the stories of others so that they become a source of solidarity and means of connection.  Only through those conversations can there come hope and the forms of courage and support we all need to thrive.

Thinking of Certain Mennonite Women

When I think I can’t bear to trace
one more sorrow back to its source,
I think of Lois those summer evenings,
when, supper dishes done, she’d climb
a windmill and cling beneath its great blades,
drawing water from under her father’s fields.
She’d stay there until the sun went down
on barn roof, garden, and the one paved road
pointing toward town.  When  I am afraid
to set out once more alone, I see Julie
pumping her legs so hard she believes
she will fly off the swing set and land
gently on the lawn.  I see her let go,
braids streaking behind, then see her knees
shredding on gravel, stuck to stockings
each time she kneels to pray at a pew.
When I can’t tell my own desire
from the wishes of others, I remember
my mom, too young to know or care better,
flinging her jumper, blouse, socks, and slip
into the wind, dancing for flower beds
until her mother discovers.  When I wonder
how I should live this only one life,
I think of how they tell these stories:
honestly, without explanation,
to whoever will listen.

Sources

Douglas Crimp,  Melanchoila and Moralism:  Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, MIT Press, 2002.

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV, Hogarth Press, 1957.

Walt Odets, In the Shadow of the Epidemic:  Being HIV Negative in the Age of AIDS, Duke UP, 1995.