He regrets that her view has come to be seen by many as representing what all Mennonites in Canada are like, “as if there is only one sort of Mennonite world. While praising Toews, whom he considers a personal friend, he says “The kinds of things she writes about Mennonites, I don't write that way about them.” Unlike Toews, however, he never left his faith nor lost his appreciation for the Mennonite church. Wiebe took on similar themes, and received similar backlash. In response, she told The New Yorker, “It’s not a critique of the Mennonite faith or of Mennonite people but of fundamentalism, of that culture of control.” Like with Wiebe, Toews’ work has provoked angry reactions from some Canadian Mennonites. That was all-but-confirmed last month when Toews was profiled by The New Yorker in an essay titled “A beloved Canadian novelist reckons with her Mennonite past.” The subtitle was: “How Miriam Toews left the church and freed her voice.”Īs author Alexandra Schwartz put it, “Her fiction has often dealt with the religious hypocrisy and patriarchal dominion that she feels to be part of her heritage, and with a painful emotional legacy, harder to name but as present as a watermark.” If Rudy Wiebe is the father of Mennonite writing in Canada, the best-known Canadian Mennonite writer today is Miriam Toews. I have always marvelled at how little anger he has.” Of course, his experience was “far more drastic,” than for the characters in his book, Wiebe observes.Īs for Khadr today, Wiebe says, “He strikes me as a wonderful man. being dominated by an overwhelming patriarch and getting into real difficulties over it.” It’s quite wonderful.”Īs for why Khadr liked the book, Wiebe says he saw in it how a person could “struggle with the teachings of a father.

“Through that, our friendship and our understanding of each other grew.

“We had a number of conversations through the prison glass,” Wiebe says.

When Khadr came to Canada, he was sent to a prison in Edmonton where Wiebe went to visit him. “Omar liked it and wrote me a long letter about it, and so we start corresponding,” says Wiebe. One of the books they gave him to read was Peace Shall Destroy Many. While he was in prison at Guantanamo Bay, professors at Edmonton’s King’s University helped him get a high-school education. Khadr, who was 15 at the time, was taken there by his father, an extremist who was part of al-Qaeda. One unexpected result of Wiebe’s first book, Peace Shall Destroy Many, is his friendship with Omar Khadr, the Canadian who was imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for committing war crimes in Afghanistan. During a recent interview focusing on his debut novel and recent CMU Pax Award, acclaimed Mennonite writer Rudy Wiebe spoke on a variety of topics, including Omar Khadr, Miriam Toews, the western Canadian Indigenous story and the MB Herald.įirst book leads to unexpected friendship

Peace shall destroy many