Can God Forgive Us for Their Crimes?

Confronting the Plague of Rape in Sarah Polley's Women Talking (2022)

Claire Foy as Salome, a name meaning “peace” in Hebrew.

30 November, 1989: Aileen Wuornos, a sex-worker, was raped and left for dead by a man who she later killed in self-defense. The catalyst that fueled her eventual killing of six sex-buyers, leading to execution by the State, was a line of choices she stood by in the name of God. Her words were mocked by the public as a signifier of insanity, condemned as acts indefensible in the eyes of the “good” and “just” Lord; her legacy, to this day, mangled by loathing toward a raped woman who defended herself and was punished for it.

It is by circumstances with reactions such as these, no doubt, that women are forced to quietly carry the burden of the favorited manifestation of male-supremacy: rape. Rape, a rare word of this world that the mere thought of can send a disconcerting hush to the body. We freeze in attempt to think the unthinkable. Corporeal flesh and blood halt as the brain delivers a paralyzing blow to our systems. Standing outside your body as though a shadow, looking at the figure you once thought was your own. Rape, the act of convincing its victim that they are subhuman, an entrance to be invaded for the sadistic pleasure of others. Rape: a word only written once in the screenplay of Sarah Polley’s Women Talking (2022), yet we do not need to hear the word to be enveloped in its terror. Rape is not what prevails; rape and its perpetrators are denied a voice.

Sourced from Miriam Toews’ novel, based on similar events of Bolivian women, Polley elevates the material from a solely linguistic form to one that the spectator can breathe, shake, and mourn beside. The women, part of an isolated religious Mennonite colony, have 48 hours to choose from three options – concerned with how they will to react to the violence they’ve been long tyrannized by:

1. Stay and forgive.

2. Stay and fight.

3. Leave.

They are coerced into this decision by their husbands, sons, and leaders of the church, exacerbated by a tangled relation to God and if He could possibly forgive these faithful survivors for simply reacting. The women must ask themselves: how can we articulate this unique yet endorsed form of socialized female regulation – beatings, druggings, and rape? Even if we do not recognize the cause?

Women Talking chooses to not answer the questions asked to its characters, and all for the better. Instead, it becomes a collective and embodied experience of feminine rage, mourning, and offers how we as women may heal from the crimes battered onto our bodies. Sisterhood, motherhood, womanhood: sutured together by the unspeakable. This lived-in realm does not assault the spectator, however horrified and small we may feel when thinking through difficult experiences. I only felt the aftermath. Sheets and walls stained with blood, pillows wet with tears. We feel these women tremble, confront, and learn to live beyond their trauma so that we may find the words to interrogate the abrasions that will continue to thrive if we do not reclaim our voices, as loudly as possible.