Review
Title: The Women’s Book of Mormon Volume 2
Author: Mette Harrison
Publisher: By Common Consent Press
Genre: Fiction
Year Published: 2022
Pages: 176
Binding: Paper
ISBN: 978-1-948218-59-7
Cost (paperback): $9.95
Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols for the Association of Mormon Letters
Mette Harrison’s books always have an agenda: to insist that the “normal” Mormon story is not correct. That it’s only partial. That what the men in charge think and expect the rest of us to act in accordance with is a construct and often a farce, a mockery of the true nature of God’s reality. It’s a hard agenda, but Harrison has taken it upon herself to make sure we feel its force. For that, we should thank her.
The Women’s Book of Mormon Volume 2 continues the work she began in Volume 1. She sets out her agenda transparently in the Introduction: a friend asked her to write the stories in the Book of Mormon through the voices of women without critiquing or mocking the original. Harrison took the request as a call from a higher source and dropped everything, she says, to write it. It presents itself as an oral history, passed from woman to woman until Christ, visiting the world of these women, which is different from the war-obsessed world of the men in the Book of Mormon, requests that the history be given to him and blesses it.
Harrison knows her Book of Mormon intimately and appreciates it—I think she loves it—for what she believes it is: “an inspired work of fiction.” Thus she feels authorized to write an inspired work of fiction based on it telling the stories of, among others, the androgyne Hela (a parallel to Alma 18); the Lamanite Kara, abducted by former priests of King Noah (a parallel to Mosiah 19); and the Mulekite Juless (a parallel to much of Mosiah), who has many questions about King Benjamin’s teachings as they relate (or don’t) to the stories her people have handed down for generations.
Eighteen other women besides these three are represented in The Women’s Book of Mormon Volume 2, stories told from the time of Alma to the time of Christ’s coming. It’s profoundly instructive to read these with your Book of Mormon in hand, not only to discover the “normal” story Harrison is working from but to discover how she enlarges (some might say subverts) that story through the voices of the women. They’re not the already-named Book of Mormon women, not Abish or Sariah or the purportedly faithful mothers of the two thousand stripling warriors. They are quite real human beings with sensibilities from our time. Among them are, as per Harrison’s agenda to make the Church’s stories more inclusive, the marginalized, the Other-raced or -gendered or -abled. They are women who listen and reason, who observe critically, care for animals and plants, and hesitate to accept blindly what they hear. They make hard decisions about where to go and who to align themselves with, never approving of the tribal conflicts their world imposes upon them.
Harrison says the volume is a midrash, an interpretation, and commentary upon a canonized text, an incentive for further discussion. I would wish that Relief Society book groups (and men’s as well) would use this as an addendum to their discussions of the Book of Mormon, never as a basis for defense—never to protest, “Wait! The BoM says this, not that!”—but as a key to unlock the untold other sides of stories of warfare, hierarchy, butchering, and scheming.
Bella, for example, is the mother of one of Helaman’s stripling warriors (a parallel to Alma 53). Here’s what she says, after describing her husband’s abhorrent experience of war and their son’s return from the fighting with Helaman:
Helaman thinks that war is righteous. He thinks it is justified. If my son and the others had died, he would still not have apologized. I think he would have come up with another story about how God had wanted these souls returned to Him, that there was work for them to do in heaven. There would never be talk [from Helaman and his ilk] about how war is cruel, no matter which side you are on, or that there are no heroes in war, only soldiers being asked to do terrible things. …[Our son Trabor] came home to us whole in body but broken in spirit and we do not know if he will live. He threatens to take his own life, or mine or his father’s, nearly every day. And the other parents say it is the same with their sons.
If we kill ourselves, or if we turn into a people who think only of war and of killing, do we deserve to live?….I do not believe in war. I believe in the Christ who will come and make an end to war. It is all I think of now, that we must pray to God to bring the Christ quickly. (p. 79)
Here is Kishla, daughter of Kishkumen (a parallel to Helaman 1-6):
Yes, my father killed Pahoran and ran from the scene. I don’t excuse him of this. It was an evil deed. But I do understand why he did it.
He was by then so tired of waiting for men in power to step down and do the right thing. He was tired of seeing wealth given to those least worthy. And I think he was tired of waiting for the Christ to come and set everything right….
What do I think he should have done? I wish he had talked to me, and to my sisters, and to the other women in the city….We know the presence of God in our lives and how it lifts us up and makes us able to continue on…
What if the first chief judge had been a woman? I wonder this often….Not every woman would be a good judge, I suppose. But the problems would have been different…
Does God love my father still? They say that the Christ will come and die for all of us….[When] I pray for [my father], God answers me with a warm feeling. God loves him, too, I think, despite all his mistakes. God loves that I love him, too. And God doesn’t ask me to give up that love, no or in any future. (pp. 91-92)
Other women whose voices Harrison channels include Dara, the mother of Samuel the Lamanite; Shila, Zara, and Amma, who work among angels blessing and protecting the people; Nea, who persists in believing that Christ will come though she is persecuted when the signs do not appear; and Lissima, who is called aside by Jesus to recite to him the women’s oral records she has memorized:
I had carried all these voices with me all these years, and they had buoyed me up, had helped me keep my faith, had taught me that as a woman, I was powerful and chosen by God, that my work was seen and valued always. (p. 176)
After she recites the herstories, Jesus commands her to tell everyone who is assembled nearby. “These are true words,” he tells them, dividing them into groups so that each could remember a part. “….[‘Remember] the women among you who have always worked quietly to teach and to bless. Keep their records safe, as well as the men’s plates. Do this, and you will be received into the kingdom of heaven at the end—and you will have your reward.’” (ibid.)
There is a charge, a persistent energy in this book, Harrison’s “inspiration” and agenda-pushing forth to all who will read it. Not all men want violence. Not all women are content to be ignored or cast aside or thrown down as commodities or raped or forced into slavery. Women’s voices could change the carnage men seem determined to perpetrate. God is love, commanding us only to care for each other and to become one in spirit. These are Harrison’s themes.
It may be said—as some have said of the Book of Mormon—that The Women’s Book of Mormon is the truest book ever written: perceptive women’s stories transform the testosterone-driven stories of men, elevate human consciousness, remind us there is more. If truth is “the sum of existence,” the equation demands the variables, functions, and powers of writers with agendas like Mette Harrison’s.