Eve Ensler: My Journey to Find My Way Back to My Body

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/books/eve-enslers-body-world-memoir




The following is an excerpt from In The Body of the World: A Memoir. Copyright © 2013 by Eve Ensler. Reprinted with permission of Henry Holt and Co.Metropolitan Books.

For years I have been trying to find my way back to my body, and to the Earth. I guess you could say it has been a preoccupation. Although I have felt pleasure in both the Earth and my body, it has been more as a visitor than as an inhabitant. I have tried various routes to get back. Promiscuity, anorexia, performance art. I have spent time by the Adriatic and in the green Vermont mountains, but always I have felt estranged, just as I was estranged from my own mother. I was in awe of her beauty but could not find my way in. Her breasts were not the breasts that fed me. Everyone admired my mother in her tight tops and leggings, with her hair in a French twist, as she drove through our small rich town in her yellow convertible. One gawked at my mother. One desired my mother. And so I gawked and desired the Earth, and my mother and I despised my own body, which was not her body. My body that I had been forced to evacuate when my father invaded and then violated me. And so I lived as a breathless, rapacious machine programmed for striving and accomplishment. Because I did not, could not, inhabit my body or the Earth, I could not feel or know their pain. I could not intuit their unwillingness or refusals, and I most certainly never knew the boundaries of enough. I was driven. I called it working hard, being busy, on top of it, making things happen. But in fact, I could not stop. Stopping would mean experiencing separation, loss, tumbling into a suicidal dislocation.

As I had no reference point for my body, I began to ask other women about their bodies, in particular their vaginas (as I sensed vaginas were important). This led me to writing The Vagina Monologues, which then led me to talking incessantly and obsessively about vaginas. I did this in front of many strangers. As a result of me talking so much about vaginas, women started telling me stories about their bodies. I crisscrossed the Earth in planes, trains, and jeeps. I was hungry for the stories of other women who had experienced violence and suffering. These women and girls had also become exiled from their bodies and they, too, were desperate for a way home. I went to over sixty countries. I heard about women being molested in their beds, flogged in their burqas, acid-burned in their kitchens, left for dead in parking lots. I went to Jalalabad, Sarajevo, Alabama, Port-au-Prince, Peshawar, Pristina. I spent time in refugee camps, in burned-out buildings and backyards, in dark rooms where women whispered their stories by flashlight. Women showed me their ankle lashes and melted faces, the scars on their bodies from k nives and burning cigarettes. Some could no longer walk or have sex. Some became quiet and disappeared. Others became driven machines like me.

Then I went somewhere else. I went outside what I thought I knew. I went to the Congo and I heard stories that shattered all the other stories. In 2007 I landed in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo. I heard stories that got inside my body. I heard about a little girl who couldn’t stop peeing on herself because huge men had shoved themselves inside her. I heard about an eighty-year-old woman whose legs were broken and torn out of their sockets when the soldiers pulled them over her head and raped her. There were thousands of these stories. The stories saturated my cells and nerves. I stopped sleeping. All the stories began to bleed together. The raping of the Earth. The pillaging of minerals. The destruction of vaginas. They were not separate from each other or from me.

[babylonsister]

1. She sure can write; thanks for this. So sad, but I am

now also curious; would like to read this.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

2. I think very few people, let alone Public people,

Take the humanity of women as seriously as Eve Ensler does.

The atrocities that are particularly reserved for women are never addressed as any action of Men as a group who are operating within a destructive paradigm.

The same kind of hate based world view shared in white red-neck culture and in straight traditional culture is also alive in bro-culture. But this "bro-culture" has not yet been generally recognized as a group phenomenon with a sick perspective regarding The Feminine.

The cult of machismo harbors--or actually celebrates! the triumph of male-ness and masculine sexuality; contempt for women supports their belief in their own primacy.

But it is still very difficult to succeed in consciousness raising on the issue.

[ismnotwasm]

3. Well said.

"The humanity of women" awesome.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

4. thanks! Even better now that I edited...

[Arugula Latte]

8. Agree. This country, like many others, is way off kilter and tilted much too far

into a masculine/power/violence/pillage/plunder mindset. It has been for all of its history. In modern times we see it in these Republican politicians working day and night to keep women as second-class citizens, in our endless aggression towards other oil-rich countries (when was the last time the U.S. military actually "defended" us?), in the sicko cult of guns, in the worship of aggressive sports like American football, and on and on.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

9. yep...you hit all the symptoms

It's the oldest hatred...I guess it makes sense that it's the slowest to change

[niyad]

5. k and r and bookmarking to read later.

[Hotler]

6. Oh my God! Just when I thought my heart couldn't break anymore.........

[undeterred]

7. Ray of hope...

Some good people working on behalf of women in the Congo:

http://www.jewishworldwatch.org/blog/blog/on-the-ground-in-congo-2013/10138

[smirkymonkey]

10. +10.000

Great thread, even though reading it makes me want to puke.