The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001
Julia Kasdorf
This spiritual autotobiography reflects the struggle of a Mennonite woman to be a writer: poet and essayist. The "body" in the title refers both to her own female body and to the religious community to which Kasdorf belongs. The "book" in question is both the Bible and the Martyr's Mirror--a seventeenth-century compilation of martyr narratives that has been central to Mennonite identity.
It is a fascinating read, giving access to a community experience that is seldom shared with outsiders and to a personal account of breaking away that is borne of deep reflection. The author observes,
To return to the community of my memory by way of writing is to return as a stranger. The work of poetry requires that a person gain deep access to her emotional life and write to make sense of it. To do this she must assume a certain authority, a belief that her perceptions are true and worth telling. Yet to brood over one's existence and to speak in this way is antithetical to the long tradition of Demut (humility) and Gelassenheit (submission) so embedded in many Mennonite souls. ... To grow up as the kind of Mennonite I was and to write poetry that probes the reality of that experience is a serious contradiction.
This is rich fare, of interest to anyone who has wrestled with the tension between emerging individual meanings and the approved meanings inherited from a community.
Mary Aquin O'Neill, RSM