1
Three Dark-Brown Maidens and the Brommtopp
(De)Constructing Masculinities in Southern Manitoba Mennonite Mumming
MARCIE FEHR AND PAULINE GREENHILL
For most adult Euro North Americans, the season from Christmas to New Year’s has some (often vestigial) religious significance but remains characterized primarily by formal ritual obligations of feasting, gift giving and receiving, and visiting (see, e.g., Bella 1992; Caplow 1982, 1984; Cheal 1988). Periodic moments of play and socializing (sometimes involving alcohol!) may break up the structure, but for the most part drinking (sometimes to excess) offers the only relief from the often socially and financially expensive obligations. Yet in the past and to some extent the present, various Euro–North American and other cultural groups marked the period from Christmas Eve on December 24 to Twelfth Night on January 6 with rowdy, disguised playful/ludic (see Huizinga 1950) or carnivalesque (see Bakhtin 1968) behavior that mainstream Euro North Americans associate more with Halloween than with this holiday season (see Santino 1994).
Many such customs, termed the “informal house visit” (see Halpert and Story 1969; Lovelace 1980; and Pettitt 1995), involve a group (usually composed of young men) perambulating from one location to another within a community, to the households of socially and culturally proximate families and individuals. The visits include performative aspects—often dancing and singing—as well as the expectation of a reward—usually food and/or drink—and some sociability with the visited household. The cultural and social surround of one such form, Newfoundland Christmas mumming, has been well documented. Also called mummering or janneying, it has been variously explained as a ritualization of social relations and solidarity, an expression of otherwise repressed hostilities, an indication of fear of strangers, and a dramatization of socioeconomic relations or sex/gender roles.1 We find aspects of all these motivations in the Brommtopp.2
Figure 1.1. Brommtopp players, Sommerfeld, 1914 (Toews and Klippenstein 1974, 304) photograph by Peter G. Hamm (1883-1965) (Photo Courtesy Mennonite Heritage Centre, Winnipeg [Peter G. Hamm Coll. 526.27.5])
A seasonal informal house visit custom performed well into the twentieth century by young men, almost always on New Year’s Eve, in rural Manitoba Mennonite villages where the church tolerated it, Brommtopp is named after the musical instrument, a friction drum, used during the performance (see figure 1.1). The Brommtopp, constructed from calfskin, a barrel, and horsetail, sounds when its player pulls and rubs rhythmically on the horsetail, producing a difficult to describe thrumming sound: “The player, by situating the drum against a wall, could cause sympathetic vibrations which sometimes shook the china from the shelves. The singers had to shout their song in order to be heard over the racket of the brummtupp” (Petkau and Petkau 1981, 92). Writing in a local history, Jake Bergen remembered, “If everything was made real well this strange instrument would make the dishes in the kitchen cupboard rattle” (2005, 189). Traditionally, a group of some dozen teenage boys and young married men would drive (originally in a horse-drawn sleigh or buggy; later by car) and/or walk from house to house within their own village and sometimes beyond. At each residence, the group would sing the traditional song, which could vary from one location to another but generally asked for money in return for good wishes (Toews 1977, 303–304).
As social historian Ervin Beck comments, the “ ‘Brummtopp Song’ must have many variant stanzas, since the young people who sing it while performing the New Year’s mummers’ play typically compose or alter stanzas to make the song fit the household in which they are performing” (1989, 774–775).3 As the lyrics imply, players could receive money, liquor and/or food, often the traditional Portzeltje (New Year’s fritters) (see, e.g., Beck 1989; Epp-Tiessen 1982) in exchange for their performance.4 Their rowdy behavior contrasted with the usual expectations of decorum for house visits, as we’ll detail below.
Costume varied from place to place. As local historians describe, Blumenfeld performers had elaborately specified roles:
(a) Policeman: His role was to keep order in the group that tended to become unruly in their merrymaking. He would knock on the door to say that a group of people wanted to present a New Year’s Wish. If the group was welcomed, he ushered in his troupe. He was the steward of the evening’s collection. The policeman was uniformed and wore a red stripe on his trousers.
(b) Clown: The clown’s attempts to add humour to the performance were hilarious and ridiculous. But everyone loves a clown! His costume can be imagined.
(c) The Couple: The man and woman tried to pose as a hen-pecked husband and a nagging wife.5 They were dressed in styles typical of that year.
(d) The Singers: The group of approximately 15 young men sang the song of New Year’s wishes. They were dressed in white costumes sewn from flour sacks. They had black stripes on their trouser legs and wore white flathats. All were masked.
(e) The Brummtupp Player: He was dressed like the singers. Upon entering the house, he would find a place in the room that was close to an inside wall or near a china cupboard. (Petkau and Petkau 1981, 91; see also Bergen 2005)
Figure 1.2. Brommtopp players from near Plum Coulee, December 31, 1930. (Photo Courtesy Tammy Sutherland and David Dyck)
At other locations, costumes seem more improvised, using blackface and whiteface instead of masks (see also V. C. Friesen 1988; Schroeder 1999; Toews 1977) (see figure 1.2). Photographs of Brommtopp players indicate that many employed both gender drag—some men dressing as women—and ethnic drag (Sieg 2002)—representation as othered ethnoracial groups like Jewish, Chinese, and First Nations peoples (see figure 1.1). The performance, singing and sometimes dancing followed by socializing, rarely lasted longer than ten to fifteen minutes before the group moved on to the next household.
Most participants assume the tradition has roots in Prussia, predating Mennonite immigration to Russia in the 1780s and then to Manitoba in the 1870s (Petkau and Petkau 1981, 82–92).6 Interviewees told us that active local performances stopped in some locations as early as before the end of the Second World War, and in others as late as the 1950s or early 1960s (see also Epp-Tiessen 1982; Petkau and Petkau 1981). As writer Armin Wiebe told us:
Something happened in the era that I was growing up, in the ’50s . . . and probably happened well before that. But there seemed to be an attempt to distance the church from . . . the folk traditions . . . And even in my experience, I remember one church that I spent my teenage years in, it seemed like the church went from having guitars used to accompany singing to singing cantatas. And the guitars—more sort of country gospel kinds of singing—got pushed out. A real shift occurred in the late ’50s and ’60s when the Low German language became less used. In my own experience as a teenager, my generation still spoke Low German socially, but my oldest sibling, six years younger, never became quite fluent. They could speak it to some extent and understand it but weren’t fluent. And I think that’s also around the time when television became [laughs] accessible with the arrival of KCND, and the transmitter was there and the signal was strong enough. And the school system had been really working hard to improve English skills, and churches started switching from German to English. All those kinds of things happened around that time. And along with that, a lot of other traditions became not cool [laughs]. (KM2008-1, 2)7
Folkloric revival (see Rosenberg 1993) of the practice may have begun at the Sunflower Festival in 1977 in Altona, when a group of then middle-aged men did a Brommtopp performance.8 But from the first decade of the twenty-first century, a group has regularly performed on the afternoon of New Years’ Eve at seniors’ homes like Eastview Place in Altona. These performers have also appeared at events in Neubergthal village, a designated Manitoba Historic Site reflecting the early years of Mennonite settlement. Organizers incorporated Brommtopp performances into a series of concerts sponsored by the Mennonite Heritage Village in Steinbach in 2010 (see figure 1.3). All these events included performers dressed in gender drag but not ethnic drag. The presentation incorporates mimicking actions from the song. Thus, for example, when the lyrics refer to fried fish, one man places plastic fish on all four corners of a table on the stage. At the verse about silver coins, another rattles a Folger’s coffee can containing money at the audience. All perform the final stanza together, using their arms to describe a golden band and jumping as the “dark brown maidens” rush out of the house.
Figure 1.3. Poster from a series of concerts organised by the Steinbach Mennonite Historic Village in 2010
Several research consultants, including one who withdrew his name and information, vehemently deny that cross-dressing and ethnic drag were ever part of the Brommtopp. Many of those who acknowledge the presence of such practices disagree with our interpretation, arguing that Brommtopp is an entertainment only, and can have no other meaning. While we respect their right to hold such opinions, we do not share them. We deconstruct masculinities and their relation to the cross-ethnic, cross-racial, and cross-gender costuming in the traditional and revival manifestations of Brommtopp. In working through this material, we experienced the anxiety of trying to balance a fair account of the practice with our recognition that, historically and currently, it risks invoking profoundly sexist and racist stereotypes. Our exploration of the tradition seeks to address such anxieties and discomforts head-on. By employing feminist, queer, trans, and postcolonial lenses and theories, our analysis of the Brommtopp explores how the opportunities it once gave young men—and now gives older men—for transgender, transethnic, and/or transracial identity exploration offer insight into the fragmentation of hegemonic masculinity in Mennonite societies.9 This research is primarily based on seventeen interviews by Pauline Greenhill, six by Marcie Fehr, and one by Kendra Magnus-Johnston conducted between spring 2009 and winter 2010, with folks who participated in or otherwise experienced the practice in the south-central Manitoba communities of Altona, Blumenfeld, Hochfeld, Neubergthal, Plum Coulee, and others on the so-called West Reserve of Manitoba Mennonite settlement (see figure 1.4).
Figure 1.4. Map of portion of Manitoba showing East and West Reserves of Mennonite settlement
Mennonites and Low German in Manitoba
Until as recently as the last thirty to forty years, Mennonites in rural Manitoba communities were somewhat culturally detached from the Euro–North American mainstream. Villages offered socioreligious islands in a sea of greater diversity. As Armin Wiebe noted:
Long after I had left home it dawned on me one day that where I had lived was in reasonable biking distance from a French community but there was never really any interaction with them . . . I think I was in grade four when we had moved to town and the teacher asked, “What do you call people who live in Manitoba?” and I was going to shoot up my hand and say, “Mennonites!” and luckily something stopped me [laughs]. Because up until that time I was under the impression that that was what it meant, you know: that Mennonites were people who lived in Manitoba [laughs]. (KM2009-1, 2)
Southern Manitoba Mennonite communities and cultural expressions weave elements of displacement, dissent, pacifism, and conscientious objection with self-sufficiency informed by religion. Mennonites trace their history to the sixteenth century and the Reformation era in Switzerland and the Netherlands, and then to migrant communities in Prussia (Poland) and Russia. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Prussia dictated that Mennonite churches be plain, with no bell, towers, or pointed windows. Such concepts of “modesty”10 permeated forms of (in)visibility including gendered and uniform dress codes, nonmaterialism, and Luddite ideals (J. Friesen 2001, 4–6) (see figures 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7). In Russia, by 1870, the government introduced a universal military service policy but granted Mennonites the so-called Forsteidiensts, alternative service in forestry. The government also pressed them to teach Russian in their schools alongside High German, but left them free to speak Low German (a North German dialect with some Dutch influence) in everyday communication (Staliûnas 2007; Thiessen 2003, x-xiii). Some 17,000 conservative Mennonites migrated in the 1870s to North America (J. Friesen 2001, 6–8), seeking more extensive rights and privileges.
Figure 1.5 Marcie’s paternal Grandmother, Mary Fehr, in traditional Old Colony Mennonite dress in front of the Fehr family home in Winnipeg, June, 1970. Mary’s youngest son—Marcie’s Uncle Gary—is standing on the steps. (Photo Courtesy Mary Fehr)
Figure 1.6 (from left to right) Great-grandfather Fehr, Isaac Fehr (Marcie’s paternal Grandfather), Great Aunt Nettie, and Great-grandmother Fehr in Hochfeld, Manitoba, 1931. (Photo Courtesy Mary Fehr)
Figure 1.7 Girls who attended Hochfeld School, in Hochfeld, Manitoba, 1936. Back row center: the only teacher, who did not speak Low German. (Photo Courtesy Lena Rempel)
Most Mennonites who came then to Manitoba settled southeast and southwest of the city of Winnipeg, in rural areas known as the East and West Reserves.11 The first immigrants arrived in 1874 from the Bergthal and Borosenko colonies in South Russia and laid out their farm villages on the eight-township East Reserve (Reimer 1983). Those who came in 1875, finding the East Reserve unsuitable for farming, occupied land further west, between the Red River and the Pembina Hills (Francis 1955; Reimer 1983; Warkentin 2000). Relatively quickly, Mennonites lost the autonomy to establish their own social and economic systems, including for land tenure and education. The Manitoba School Attendance Act (1916) enforced “attendance in public schools where English was the primary language of instruction mandatory for all children between the ages of seven and fourteen” (Sawatzky 1971, 13). This policy established a hierarchical system of linguistic spaces, specifically: English for school; High German for church; and Low German for home and everyday life. Recalling his personal experience as a first generation Mennonite-Canadian, Jac Schroeder notes: “All the children spoke ‘Low German’ . . . at home. The Provincial Government gave to the School Board the privilege of also teaching German as a second language. But this had to be done outside of the regular school hours of 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. when only the English language could be spoken. The School Board decided to add half an hour from 8:30 A.M. to 9:00 A.M. for instruction” (1999, 153).
The government-sanctioned compartmentalization of High German in institutionalized education both supported the class superiority that came from its association with Church activities and limited its use to those two locations. Without an established writing system,12 Low German lacked the central tool to facilitate skills on the North American wage market (Francis 1955; Loewen 1983, 1999; Warkentin 2000). Some resisting Mennonites guarded their traditions in the private sphere. But many folk practices disappeared as the language central to them became obsolete, ousted by the capitalist system that flooded Mennonite subjectivity and culture. As sociolinguist Suzanne Romaine indicates, “Schooling and literacy create a division between those whose credentials give them access to town as opposed to those who have no negotiable skills on the wage market. English is a kind of cultural capital with a value in the linguistic market place” (1994, 93).
Mennonite Masculinities
Brommtopp does not mesh well with outsiders’ views of historical or current Mennonite culture and tradition. The hegemonic, historical, exoteric image for rural Mennonite men presents stoic and sober (both literally and figuratively) business owners and farmers. However, as historian Royden Loewen (2006) suggests, Mennonite masculinity changed drastically after the Second World War in response to economic crisis. Mennonites began to commercialize their farms, specializing in wheat, poultry, and beef. Men’s move to commercial poultry farming in particular represented gender transgression. Collecting eggs and slaughtering chickens, with their everyday physical and social relationship to cooking and kitchen work, were traditionally women’s work. Thus men who commercialized poultry doubly transgressed gender roles, first by linking their identities to a feminine domain, and second by masculinizing traditionally female work for the sake of capitalism. The pressure to adapt and re-form commercial farming led to a masculinity crisis. Indeed, traditional gender roles and expectations for both women and men shifted to sustain economic security in a time of cultural strife.
Further, as larger commercial enterprises replaced small farms, Mennonite men and women increasingly sought employment outside their villages. Smaller families increased the need for farmhands from the community and beyond. Shifting roles meant that men were no longer the sole laborers outside the home, nor the breadwinners at the homestead farm (see figures 1.8 and 1.9). Well before the Second World War, many women found paid labor in urbanized areas, especially Winnipeg, as seamstresses, housekeepers, and cleaners (Epp 2008, 176). The trend to find off-farm labor increased after 1945. The original communities became less localized, their populations decreased, and extended families fell out of touch. With fewer local connections, smaller families, and a decrease in communal farming practices, the resultant destabilization of hegemonic masculinity left little room for what were once performative boyhood practices like the Brommtopp. When the maintenance of a local cultural economy made the performance of the most mainstream, conservative Mennonite identities and their strict gender scripts themselves deviant and resistant with respect to the mainstream (urban Euro North Americans), Brommtopp performances and other Low German traditions became culturally anomalous.
Figure 1.8 Great Aunt Lena Rempel plowing grass on Rempel family farm, (circa 1940). (Photo Courtesy Lena Rempel)
Figure 1.9 From left: Great Aunt Tina, Great Aunt Lena, and Great Aunt Nettie Rempel picking corn on Rempel family farm (circa 1940). (Photo Courtesy Lena Rempel)
Brommtopp
Most traditional participants and audiences experienced no sense of Brommtopp as an inappropriate or disjunctive social practice. Many research consultants, recalling their childhood and youth in the 1920s to 1950s, described a much-anticipated fun and wholesome atmosphere when the Brommtopp players would arrive and perform. Jake Schroeder recalls: “We lived half a mile from Grandma and Grandpa’s and when we knew that they were going to come over there, and they might miss our house, we would all go over to Grandma and Grandpa’s. It was a whole bunch of people in the house waiting for the Brommtopp, ’cause this was exciting! This was something that we looked forward to! It was good entertainment!” (PG2009-24, 25).
Neighbors in Mennonite communities recognized one another; families attended church together, worked communally on each other’s farms and village projects, and followed faspa, a weekly family house-visiting tradition, usually after Sunday church services.13 Loewen claims that “it was only an odd farmer [who] would not be glad to stop his work for a while when a guest appeared on the yard. Village culture encouraged visiting” (1983, 167). Calls on Sunday after church brought large families un/expectedly to each other’s doors for food, refreshments, and conversation. Kin and friends gathered to discuss sermons, farming, relatives, and sometimes world events that someone had read about in a newspaper from Winnipeg or gathered from local village papers such as the Mennonitische Rundshau or the Nordwesten (168).
Doors were never locked, and folks rarely arranged meetings ahead of time. The idea of the feared stranger was only a distant possibility, as “not only was one fulfilling a scriptural injunction by having an open home; it was also a sign of prestige if one had many guests” (Loewen 1983, 168). However, many respectful social codes were transgressed in the Brommtopp tradition. When entering the host house, performers never removed their boots and overshoes and therefore trod the dirty, melting snow onto the kitchen or parlor floor. Also, the musician in charge of the Brommtopp drum poured water over the horsetail for lubrication and optimum sound, leaving behind a pool of dirty water that needed to be mopped up. The aftermath of a performance often mixed excitement with resentment, as the women of the house were, by gendered default, left to clean up after the messy gang of costumed singers. Indeed, some consultants suggest that the end of the Brommtopp tradition could be attributed to the replacement of easily cleaned linoleum tile and wood floors with carpeting and broadloom. However, interviewee Bruno Hamm linked the tradition’s demise to other gendered concerns: “Because some of them had their floors all waxed and polished for New Year’s and then on New Year’s Eve and someone comes and messes it all up? Takes a pretty good mother to accept it” (PG2009-12). Ideally, women shouldn’t care about having extra messes to clean up, or indeed wish to put their own interests above those of their family and community. Thus, this pollution explanation of why the Brommtopp tradition ended is strongly gendered. When outsiders’ values—like the idea that women should be attentive to their own individualistic concerns—enter the traditional Mennonite home, they also endanger the social climate in which Brommtopp originally flourished. But these same values also foster the revival of Brommtopp by older men as an expression of another time and place, remembered with nostalgia. For, as we argue, this rowdy tradition was not only about its young male performers’ sex/gender others but also about their ethno/racial/religious others. This concern for expressing self and difference remains salient for the revival performers as well.
Some consultants depicted the Brommtopp performance as far more obnoxious and vulgar than others remember—or are willing to disclose. David Schroeder recalls: “They would simply yell the minute they were on the yard and we all had dogs [that] warned us that somebody’s on the yard, so it was often pretty rowdy until they got into the house. They would be dressed differently sometimes and . . . would be very boisterous, purposefully boisterous. So they made a lot of racket outside” (PG2009-15, 16). But Alvina Giesbrecht, a young girl at the time the Brommtopp would visit her family home, remembers, “There’d be . . . a lot of jokes and maybe even some off-color ones. . . . Filthy ones” (PG2009-01). Di Brandt, Mennonite writer, scholar, and artist, describes her family’s historical experience of the Brommtopp: “It was definitely a disruption. You didn’t expect it. No one would have announced it or anything. It wasn’t like they would have said, ‘Let’s wait up for the Brommtopp people to come!’ No, certainly not. As for the noise, that was exactly the thing, making a lot of noise, being rude and . . . irreverent. Everyone would be, sort of, ‘Oh, good,’ you know, embarrassed. People would think, ‘Oh, ergh, here they are again!’” (PG2009-08).
Consultants agree that not every community member enjoyed or welcomed the Brommtopp. The tradition incorporated more than merely a song and dance in exchange for baked goods and well wishes—or even alcohol. Indeed, even when it flourished, its aesthetic and behavioral ideals diverged incongruently with everyday social norms for Mennonites such as the aforementioned modesty, uniform dress, strict heteronormative gender scripts, and sobriety. Further, traditional Mennonite Christian interpretations order that depicting oneself as anything other than one’s birth body and face blasphemes against humans’ creation in God’s image. Thus, while actual dress and occupational opportunities have evolved with urbanization and modernization, nevertheless the Brommtopp costuming, then as now, jars with stereotypes of Mennonites.
Transgender Mennonite Men
As would be expected of a liminal, seasonal, disruptive tradition, the costumed alternative identity of Brommtopp allowed young men to engage in behavior that would otherwise be codified as socially inappropriate. Typical Brommtopp performers in the practice’s heyday would be young, Mennonite men, embodying hegemonic masculine identities, from the same town or village. Now, those in Brommtopp revival performances are elderly patriarchs. For both groups, everyday behavioral license would be greater than for any other man or boy, or for any woman or girl. Indeed, the alibi of a pious, hardworking male serves as license for a performer to substitute cultural and gender subalterns for his hegemonic identity, providing the fluidity and privilege to perform a Brommtopp persona. Thus, social conventions of gender scripts could be explored under the guise of an accepted male ritual.
Still, possibly in an effort to suspend or displace anxieties about cross gender dress, the transperformers’ feminine beauty (or lack thereof) could be scrutinized. Writer Eleanor Chornoboy in Faspa with Jast calls the mummers “far too noisy men singing out of tune and looking like ugly women or goofy men” (2007, 61). Neither the historic nor the revival performances demonstrate any effort by the cross-dressed men to represent a conventionally attractive woman. In the revival performances, the transgendered costumed men mark their performative nonperformance of womanhood by wearing their jeans or dress pants under their skirts and aprons as well as by leaving on their everyday men’s shoes. This careful attention to detail in order not to pass as a woman shows concern that their gender/sex and—for the traditional performers, sometimes sexually transgressive—behavior could too uncomfortably resonate with everyday life.14 Thus, judgments on the beauty of male-to-female Brommtopp costumers, as well as their disinterest in passing,15 can serve to control and repress trans expressions and identities as well as to fortify internalized homophobia.
Armin Wiebe’s prize-winning novel The Salvation of Yasch Siemens (1984) tellingly suggests that cross-dressed performers may have stirred anxiety for traditional Brommtopp players and their audiences. His hero reflects: “Those other badels [scoundrels] wouldn’t have the nerves to put on a dress . . . his grandfather said a woman couldn’t play the brummtupp. It just wouldn’t be right . . . I don’t know what do to because nobody told me that if I had a dress on I would have to do stuff like a woman, too” (1984, 16, 22). The connection a man might feel to transgressing his gender script in Brommtopp would nevertheless remind him that he should not wish to pass as a woman in real life. Bruno Hamm, when asked if men had cross-dressed as women in the Brommtopp group he performed in, said. “You know, I don’t really remember that. I don’t think so, because in those days it was [either] women [or] . . . men, nothing like, mixed” (PG2009-12). So taboo was this subject that one consultant denied that Brommtopp players ever cross-dressed during an interview conducted in a hall decorated with a famous picture of a local Brommtopp group clearly depicting gender (and ethnic) drag. We note that this individual also participated in the revival performances we saw, though he was not one of those dressed as a woman.
In traditional Brommtopp visits, even when a player’s primary identity would be obscured with masks or makeup, the community usually knew who he was. Interviewee Alvina Giesbrecht commented, “You’d see something like that even though. . . . cross-dressing, as far as a man was concerned, you would still recognize him” (PG2009-01). Yet periodically, planned trickery could lead to private guessing games between audience members, or could be deliberately calculated to fool and embarrass women. One interviewee and past Brommtopp performer, who asked not to be identified, described how some men would switch costumes with fellow players to trick their wives when arriving to perform at their family homes. The trickster friend, now doubly disguised, would cuddle up to the woman—playfully, physically, and sometimes intimately interacting with her—and then remove his mask to reveal he was not her husband. The woman would sometimes leave the room or hide her own face. Though she was supposed to feel ashamed for not recognizing her husband—she would know his costume, having typically been the person who pieced it together—and thus for interacting inappropriately with another man, we imagine that in some circumstances the situation also offered play opportunities for women.
Heterosexuality, fidelity, and honoring one’s spouse are highly valued identities for Mennonite men and women. Thus, the social contract between the two men who are doubly disguising their identities creates a space of permissible male sexual openness and play while shaming the wife’s sexual agency. This act of double disguise and the permissive space of comedy allow men to explore intimate possibility, disturbing the hegemonic ideals of heterosexual coupling, especially when the man happens to be cast as a female character. In these instances of switching costumes, and indeed in other instances of disguise in Brommtopp, just as in Cajun country Mardi Gras, “real life social relationships were negotiated under the surface of a cultural game” (Ancelet 2001, 152; see also Sawin 2001). Unfortunately (and we certainly don’t mean to downplay this consequence), from the men’s perspective this happens at the expense of the confidence and sexuality of women.
The Space between Boy and Man
Another transgressive aspect of Brommtopp was its frequent association with drinking. Alcohol use, typically discouraged among Mennonites, varies in social acceptability from village to village. As described in the Brommtopp song itself:
Thus, not only drinking but indeed intoxication (“jollity”) becomes a central aim in the song’s world. Some interviewees denied offering or using alcohol, yet others indicated that audiences gave it to performers as a (sometimes more than) token exchange. In some cases, a drunken (or suspected drunken) Brommtopp performer could suffer drastically negative social consequences. Alternatively, as one interviewee who asked not to be identified claimed, the overindulging man or boy could simply be left behind to sleep it off. Some research participants also described judgment on a performance as too energetic, too jovial or obnoxious, resulting in suspicion that the player was drunk or even alcoholic! As Menno Kehler explains, in one case, “Everybody thought, ‘Well, that guy’s just a terrible drunk.’ He just got so wound up because it brought back memories, eh? Man, could he sing . . . Even his church elders talked to him about it and heard that he’d been very drunk . . . He was so hurt. He never sang . . . again. He disappeared. But he would never! But that’s what people saw, eh?” (PG2009-13, 14).
Clearly the rambunctious, energetic behavior a Brommtopp performer embodied was not codified as socially appropriate for a Mennonite adult man. Boyhood and youthful narrative embodiment of play, dress-up, and foolery transgressed the presumed manhood of a Brommtopp performer. Consultants confirmed that traditional players were usually young men, commonly unmarried and thus, like their cognate Nova Scotia belsnickles, “occupied a distinctly transitional position, being no longer children, but just on the verge of assuming their full roles and responsibilities, having to give up the carelessness of boyhood and the peer group and face up to the stronger social demands and constraints of adulthood” (Bauman 1972, 238). As the markers of perceived succession into manhood are not only culturally relative but also subjective, it is possible that the young men and boys of historical Brommtopp groups were negotiating their transitional stage from boy to man through disguise, ritual, altered consciousness from alcohol, and socially inappropriate behavior. Barry Jean Ancelet’s description of traditional Cajun Mardi Gras practice argues that “as young boys become young men and young girls become young women, they shed their adolescence by stepping outside themselves and imitating their elders in public, yet in secret” (1989, 2). Alvina Giesbrecht, asked why the young men in the photographs of Brommtopp groups shown to her would have chosen to disguise themselves, said, “These young people, these young men would not have wanted to let their parents know what they were doing, that would be one thing. Now, the parents might . . . they might have known, but they just let them go ahead and do it. But they were not supposed to be doing it, really, it was actually a no-no” (PG2009, 1). Such passive sanctioning meant that while they were in public settings such as neighbors’ homes, for the Brommtopp players as for Mardi Gras participants, “the ritual consumption of alcohol serve[d] to loosen inhibitions, while the mask serve[d] as a sort of cocoon, providing a cover for the changes occurring in the real self underneath” (Ancelet 1989, 2).
The potentially deviant queering of hegemonic manhood, paired with the manifest anxiety of the transitional masculinity embodied by the Brommtopp players, often scared young children. Consultants who remembered the tradition from their childhood often said they feared the Brommtopp’s strange sound and the weirdly costumed people, even when they recognized their parents’ friends and neighbors. As they became older, however, fear could be replaced by excitement. One minister’s daughter, who asked to remain anonymous, a teenager at the time, followed the players through her community. She commented: “I remember that my dad wasn’t home. My dad wouldn’t have allowed us to go with [them]. My sister and I went with them from house to house . . . I’m sure that if he had been home, we wouldn’t have been able to.” Interviewee Eleanor Chornoboy talked about “us kids sitting on the staircase and looking at these guys in awe because they didn’t act as adults at all” (PG2009-21, 22). In Faspa with Jast, she notes: “The noise and odd looking adult men scared . . . youngest daughter Anna. But not wanting to miss a thing, she hid behind the door and peered through a small crack to see big men acting as silly as her toddling brothers” (2007, 61). Clearly, men’s roles were sufficiently restricted that children recognized that the Brommtopp players were not fulfilling the scripts their communities normally dictated to them.
Indicating a poignant overlap of traditional meaning and purpose, folklorist Richard Bauman’s discussion of masculinity in the Nova Scotia belsnickling argues that “in frightening and intimidating the youngsters of the household, [performers] were gaining release from the time, just recently left behind, when they themselves were fearful children, terrified of the strange and the supernatural and subject to external mechanisms of moral control” (1972, 240). We also note that at the revival performance in summer 2010 in Steinbach, when the Brommtopp began to sound, a four-year-old girl climbed onto her father’s lap, hid her face in his chest, and only peeked at the stage for the rest of the presentation.16
Ethnic Drag and Privilege
The many intersections of identity play integral to the Brommtopp performance associate each song verse with a different archetype from a historical heteronormative extended family and household group. While the Brommtopp song has many melodic permutations, and like other traditional songs its texts vary, it follows a common overall structure. The general archetypes represented in all versions brought to our attention have been, in order of their usual appearance: a patriarch known as master of the house; an elderly matriarch; a young daughter; an elderly female housekeeper; a young son with a sword and pistol set; a boy who keeps the horses; a pig herder/shepherd, usually wielding a whip or stick; and, in the last verse, three young girls of color who come running out of a house. Historical photographs show that performers sometimes dressed in costumes not explicit in the song, such as clowns, animals, and First Nations, South or East Asian, and Jewish stereotypes, as well as wearing masks and/or using blackface or whiteface (see figure 1.10). The song itself does not clearly call for gender cross-dressing. Indeed, we first recognized the link between costumes and song verses when we saw a revival performance in the seniors’ home, Eastview Place in Altona, on December 31, 2009. And only the last verse implies any kind of cross-ethnic or cross-racial dress:
We draw a golden band over the house
and three dark brown maidens rushed out. (Toews 1977, 304)
Figure 1.10 Brommtopp group, photograph courtesy Marge Friesen, Altona, Manitoba.
We have few details about how the historic performances actually incorporated—if at all—the costumes and disguise evident in the astonishing number of posed pictures of Brommtopp groups, dating from the second to the middle decades of the twentieth century. No photographs of actual performances have come to our attention. Further, we have encountered considerable difficulty in persuading most interviewees to give many details about gender or ethnic drag. Clearly, recent revival performances have raised anxieties regarding the inclusion of the last verse with the “three dark brown maidens.” Some seek to explain it away as only tradition and entertainment.17 Yet the program published for the Singing in Time: Mennonites and Music concert, which we attended, avoided the issue, rather than accurately translating into English the final verse, as the group sang it in German. Clearly, the greatest concern was that the “English” (non-Mennonite) attendees would (mis)interpret the verse and its representation as racist. So in the English translation, instead of “three dark brown maidens,” “three pretty maidens” jump from the house. Avoiding the possibility that the song and practice could actually be racist, the decision to include while excluding the “three dark brown maidens” reinforces racism as a trivial and historically bound variable for which blame can be displaced for the sake of traditional continuity. The artifice implies that whatever such words and representations might have meant then, now they reference the past only, and specifically the Brommtopp performance, not any contemporaneous or current attitudes and practices. But we find it somewhat bizarre that, despite the obvious ethnic stereotypes, arguably much more offensive than any linguistic reference to skin color, organizers deemed the photograph in figure 1.10 perfectly acceptable for the cover of the same concert program. Representations cannot be divorced from what they (potentially) depict; in this case, the images in the photograph invoke the actual marginalization of ethnoracial minorities in historic and present-day Manitoba.
However, racial and ethnic anxieties indeed manifested through imitation in historical Brommtopp performances. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the tradition flourished in Manitoba, most Mennonites were—as discussed above—new immigrants, members of an ethnoreligious minority invoking a narrative of persecution in early modern Europe. The implications of identity crisis in the cross-ethnic dress and imitation found in Brommtopp renders visible the construction of immigrant identity, which “emerges out of the fragmentation of colonization, transportation, and migration of peoples, and cultural diaspora” (Clary Lemon 2010, 8). It complicates the construction of identity in the simplistic discourse of posturing the self as known in relation to the mysterious, even incomprehensible, other. In a tremendous irony, the Brommtopp song itself is preserved in otherwise English-language community histories and in books and articles on Mennonite folklore in High German. Indeed, some controversy remains as to whether or not the song was originally performed in Low German—the informal community language—or in High German—the formal institutional language.18
The identity crises of Mennonite communities cannot be detached from the Brommtopp’s presentation of what cultural theorist Katrin Sieg calls “ethnic drag,” which “includes not only cross-racial casting on the stage, but, more generally, the performance of ‘race’ as a masquerade” (2002, 2). A lumpen functionalism argument would make Brommtopp ethnic drag “a way of expressing and releasing tensions within a rapidly emerging culture” (Ackroyd 1979, 112). Though one group, First Nations peoples, apparently sparked fear and the other reflected the more comfortable, ubiquitous rural Manitoba towns’ Chinese restaurants (see Marshall 2011), both quintessentially represented what Mennonites were not. On one level, this racial masquerade offers a flattering view of a strong impression of exotic difference; on another it reflects appropriation and privilege. By “perform[ing] an ethnic identity in order to negotiate the rigid stereotypes of self and other” (Benbow 2007, 517), the White males in Brommtopp groups, then and now, may work through their cultural anxieties of the gendered and/or ethnoracial other. Yet clearly, in Brommtopp, “the impersonation of ethnic others by a subject that stages and conceals its dominance . . . in the form of a series of displacements” (Sieg 1998, 297) takes place at the expense of marginalized races and ethnicities.
Nevertheless, we argue that the essentialization of race and ethnicity is not simply rehearsed but instead problematized in the practice of Brommtopp. As Sieg says, in ethnic drag, “ethnicity [is] underscored as a drag performance in the sense that actors displayed its signs at a distance, rather than in the mimetic mode of merging actor and role. Its signs were shown to be attributed to bodies, rather than originating in them” (2004, 126). The performers’ White, male privilege to perform race as masquerade to construct, as well as preserve, their religious, ethnic, and gender identities in crisis is indeed problematic. Yet Brommtopp also fractures the understanding of “the palpable, physical effects of ethnicity on bodies that are forced to identify” through race (315). Brommtopp performances challenge the deterministic convergence and construction of race and ethnicity as well as of gender. Through the understanding of ethnicity and gender as socially constructed, and embodied through performance, events like Brommtopp foreground the construction of—and consumption of—race, ethnicity, and gender. Events that include performances crossing socially vested lines need to be placed in the hierarchically structured systems of class, gender, and ethnicity, and to account for radically unequal positions of access to representation and cultural exchange. But at the same time, a deeper understanding of the Brommtopp’s gender and ethnic drag implicates taken-for-granted notions of assimilation into Canadian ethnicity, adulthood, and hegemonic gender scripts, illuminating while disturbing more conventional identities.
Notes
Funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Standard Research Grant “Transgender Imagination and Enactment in Traditional and Popular Culture in Canada” (Pauline Greenhill, principal investigator, 2008–2012), made this research possible. Emilie Anderson-Grégoire, Kendra Magnus-Johnston, and Merrick Pilling gathered and prepared materials. Roland Sawatzky offered invaluable background from the Mennonite Heritage Village in Steinbach. Thanks to interviewees Di Brandt, Eleanor Chornoboy, Mary Fehr, Alvina Giesbrecht, Bruno Hamm, Menno Kehler, David Schroeder, Jake Schroeder, Erika Thiessen, and Armin Wiebe for their invaluable insights. The positions we take in this chapter are not necessarily ones all of these individuals would share, agree with, or even approve of. Carol Toews and Jonathan Sawatsky at Eastview Place, Altona, gave help and cooperation. Margruite Krahn helped us make connections with the community. For permission to use photographs, we thank David Dyck and Tammy Sutherland, Marge Friesen, The Mennonite Heritage Centre (Peter G. Hamm Coll.) 526.27.5, and Marcie’s great-aunt Lena Rempel and grandmother Mary Fehr. Weldon Hiebert drew the map. We also appreciate Diane Tye’s careful reading and many suggestions and Royden Loewen’s keen eye for nuances and historical references.
1. Halpert and Story (1969), including Chiaramonte (1969); Faris (1969); Firestone (1969); Szwed (1969); and Clyde E. Williams (1969); as well as Firestone (1978); Handelman (1984); Robertson (1982, 1984); Sider (1976), and others have extensively detailed the practice’s forms; we do not reprise them here. Return to text.
2. Orthographic variations abound. Using Brommtopp, we follow Jack Thiessen’s Mennonite Low German Dictionary (2003). Other possibilities in newspaper articles, local histories, autobiographies, and so on, include brummtupp, brumtup, brummtopp, brumtop, and bromtop. Return to text.
3. Beck talks about the tradition across Anabaptist culture; we are unaware of any Brommtopp mummers’ play being performed in Manitoba. Return to text.
4. Thiessen’s dictionary offers two alternatives: Portzeltje and Porzeltje. He also calls these fritters Niejoahschküake (2003, 188). Epp-Tiessen (1982) uses porzeltje; Toews (1977) uses portzelky. Return to text.
5. The “woman” would be a cross-dressed man. Return to text.
6. Erika Thiessen, who emigrated from Russia to Paraguay in 1947 and came to Manitoba in 1956, remembers the Brommtopp from her girlhood in Russia (PG2009-07). See also Voth (1994). Return to text.
7. This citation system gives the initials of the interviewer—Pauline Greenhill or Kendra Magnus-Johnston—the year of the interview, and the interview reference number(s). Return to text.
8. Revival, as folklorists use the term, refers to a return to a cultural tradition, often after a period in which it was inactive. Revivals of tradition sometimes include members of groups other than those who originally participated in it. Thus, for example, the 1950s and 1960s folk music revival in Europe and North American included many participants and performers who were not directly linked to source traditions in that they did not come from families and/or communities in which folksongs were commonly performed, and/or many who performed songs from ethnolinguistic groups other than their own. Return to text.
9. Though multiple forms of masculinity exist within any society, some are recognized as privileged, normative, and prescriptive, and are thus termed hegemonic (see Kimmel and Messner 2012). Return to text.
10. Modesty refers to religious and social dictates that people dress plainly—for important occasions, preferably in black—be well covered, and subsist with minimal material goods. Return to text.
11. This terminology describes the plots of land the Manitoba government set aside for Mennonites (see, e.g., Reimer 1983). Return to text.
12. High German was the written language in Mennonite communities, and newspapers like Steinbach’s Die Mennonitische Post continue. Some churches still sing in German. Recent work toward establishing Low German as a written language includes Thiessen (2003). Return to text.
13. For faspa, the woman of the house needed to be prepared with baked goods and fresh coffee or face humiliation: “No woman wanted to run out of food on Sunday Faspa, regardless of how many guests arrived. She wanted to be seen as prepared, hospitable, and well-organized. To run out of food would suggest otherwise” (Chornoboy 2007, 57). Return to text.
14. In a different Canadian prairie context, mock-wedding cross-dressing raised similar concerns around critique of gender roles rather than attempts to pass as female (see Taft 1997). Return to text.
15. Elaine Ginsberg argues that “‘passing’ has been applied discursively to disguises of other elements of an individual’s presumed ‘natural’ or ‘essential’ identity, including class, ethnicity, and sexuality, as well as gender, the latter usually effected by deliberate alterations of physical appearance and behaviour, including cross-dressing . . . and forces reconsideration of the cultural logic that the physical body is the site of identic intelligibility” (1996, 4; see also Schlossberg 2001). Return to text.
16. See also Patricia Sawin’s (2001) discussion of children’s fear in contemporary Louisiana Mardi Gras. Return to text.
17. Greenhill (2002) discusses various alibis for racism in Morris, an “English men’s dance tradition.” Return to text.
18. When we asked ethnomusicologist Doreen Klassen why the Brommtopp song was not included in her Singing Mennonite (1989), she answered that it was in High German, and the book included only Low German songs. Return to text.