Miriam Toews

‘Why do you write?’ the organiser of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews – all of them unsatisfactory to the organiser – surfaces new layers of grief, guilt and futility connected to her sister’s suicide. She has been keeping up, she realises, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy.

A Truce That Is Not Peace is the first time Toews has written about her own life in nonfiction. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; wrenching and joyful – this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.


A Truce That Is Not Peace

biddy

My sister punctuated her life with long periods of silence. It was during these periods that she begged me to write her letters—about anything, my life, the days—and in that asking was an offering. She taught me how to stay alive. Silence and words: both are good, both are failures, both are efforts, and in that effort is where life lies—not lies, or maybe it does—but where it exists.

And the fragments in between are the spaces where she and I meet.

Are writing and suicide related? The same thing? Or estranged relatives, at least? Angry siblings whose origins are the same. An attempt—a fragment of an attempt—to save life, preserve life, to freeze it in a moment, to end what is real, to survive by ending. To preserve, in silence, what is authentic.

Writing is artifice and silence is truth. No? Well, yes. No?

But writing is life, listen to me, you clown, you don’t quit, you don’t grimace and wave away your audience, tell them the show is over. Writing is life and silence is the final step before the metal rail, the sharp scent of creosote, the wind.

Why must I draw a comparison between writing and suicide?

Yes, you can imagine my suffering. Yeah, you fucking can. Try! Stay with me.

That’s easy! (Remembering my mother’s response to my question about why they—my father, my sister—went silent.)

It was something they could control. (They could control the beginning of not-being?)

After my cellphone-in-the-river episode, the breakdown,  the torn coat lining, the madness, the divorce, the sickness, my sister’s silence, the dread, here we go again: the only thing I can control is the writing. Or, the only other thing I can control, the only alternative to doing away with myself, as they (who?) say.

I will go there with you. I will go right to the very edge of the rail where you can smell the creosote, feel the limestone shale give way under your feet—or is it ballast?—a small earth quaking.

And: good news! Or: good news for my museum. The Chinese have discovered how to capture the wind created by trains as they whoosh down the track. They do this with small devices installed on the undercarriages. The captured wind then drives a turbine to generate electricity.

The immense altering of silence, of writing. It is the same. We are sisters. We are thieves. We steal ourselves, and others, and we alter them, Frankenstein them, ourselves, into something that tracks, that scans, that makes sense, that remains. Something not corporeal, this strange non-thing.

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