In the Body of the World
Read In the Body of the World Online
Authors: Eve Ensler
Advance Praise for
IN THE BODY OF THE WORLD
“Ensler has written a profound and vulnerable book, full of tenderness and strength. I was amazed by the clarity of her vision and the power of her message about the body and self. This book isn’t meant only for patients; it is meant for anyone whose life has intersected with illness—in short, for all of us.”
Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of
The Emperor of All Maladies
“I dare anyone to read
In the Body of the World
without crying, without crying out, without getting up and rising to this beautiful broken world with awe and gratitude. There is no pity here, only the raw force of courage in the face of fear and violence, and the healing grace of honesty.”
Terry Tempest Williams
“Eve Ensler’s vibrant cosmopolitan voice refuses to be silenced by an abusive past or virulent disease, for she has seen larger suffering. Connected by activism to survivors of sexual violence in Bosnia, Congo, Serbia, and many other countries, her memoir is a valiant unflinching exploration of what it takes to survive a personal form of war.… This book left me feeling porous, larger, connected to people everywhere.”
Shauna Singh Baldwin, author of
The Selector of Souls
“By turns fierce and tender, Eve Ensler’s new memoir is both warrior whoop and maternal inspiration. Shining a deft light on the common disconnect we have with our own bodies and that of the planet we share, Ensler dares us to surrender comfort, and find healing and wholeness through compassionate action.”
Billie Livingston, author of
One Good Hustle
“Eve Ensler has been such a significant force for such a long time—who’d have thought she’d find a whole new way to use her voice? She is one of the world’s foremost explorers.”
Emma Forrest, author of
Your Voice in My Head
ALSO BY EVE ENSLER
The Vagina Monologues
Necessary Targets
The Good Body
Insecure at Last
A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer
(editor)
I Am an Emotional Creature:
The Secret Life of Girls Around the World
PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2013 Eve Ensler
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2013 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States of America by Metropolitan Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd., New York. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.
Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
“The Journey” from
Dream Work
, copyright © 1986 by Mary Oliver.
Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Ensler, Eve, 1953–
In the body of the world / Eve Ensler.
eISBN: 978-0-345-81324-4
1. Ensler, Eve, 1953–. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Cancer—Patients—United States—Biography. 4. Cancer patients’ writings, American. 5. Women human rights workers—Biography. 6. Women—Congo (Democratic Republic)—Social conditions. I. Title.
PS3555.N75Z46 2013 812’.54 C2012-907993-6
Jacket design by Rodrigo Corral Design
Designed by Kelly Too
v3.1
For Toast, Lu, and
the women of the Congo
If you are divided from your body you are also divided from the body of the world, which then appears to be other than you or separate from you, rather than the living continuum to which you belong.
—Philip Shepherd,
New Self, New World
SCANS
The Beginning of the End, or In Your Liver
What We Don’t Know Going into Surgery
This Is Where You Will Cross the Uji River
The Obstruction, or How Tree Saved Me
I Was That Girl Who Was Supposed to Be Dead, or How Pot Saved Me Later
I Love Your Hair, or The Last Time I Saw My Mother
Live by the Vagina, Die by the Vagina
DIVIDED
A mother’s body against a child’s body makes a place. It says you are here. Without this body against your body there is no place. I envy people who miss their mother. Or miss a place or know something called home. The absence of a body against my body created a gap, a hole, a hunger. This hunger determined my life.
I have been exiled from my body. I was ejected at a very young age and I got lost. I did not have a baby. I have been afraid of trees. I have felt the Earth as my enemy. I did not live in the forests. I lived in the concrete city where I could not see the sky or sunset or stars. I moved at the pace of engines and it was faster than my own breath. I became a stranger to myself and to the rhythms of the Earth. I aggrandized my alien identity and wore black and felt superior. My body was a burden. I saw it as something that unfortunately had to be maintained. I had little patience for its needs.
The absence of a body against my body made attachment abstract. Made my own body dislocated and unable to rest or settle. A body pressed against your body is the beginning of nest. I grew up not in a home but in a kind of free fall of anger and violence that led to a life of constant movement, of leaving and falling. It is why at one point I couldn’t stop drinking and fucking. Why I needed people to touch me all the time. It had less to do with sex than location. When you press against me, or put yourself inside me. When you hold me down or lift me up, when you lie on top of me and I can feel your weight, I exist. I am here.
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 knives 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.
In the Congo there has been a war raging for almost thirteen years. Nearly eight million people have died and hundreds of thousands of women have been raped and tortured. It is an economic war fought over minerals that belong to the Congolese but are pillaged by the world. There are local and foreign militias from Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda. They enter villages and they murder. They rape wives in front of their husbands. They force the husbands and sons to rape their daughters and sisters. They shame and destroy families and take over the villages and the mines. The minerals are abundant in the Congo—tin, copper, gold, and coltain, which are used in our iPhones and PlayStations and computers.
Of course by the time I got to the Congo, I had witnessed the epidemic of violence toward women that scoured the planet, but the Congo was where I witnessed the end of the body, the end of humanity, the end of the world. Femicide, the systematic rape, torture, and destruction of women and girls, was being employed as a military/corporate tactic to secure minerals. Thousands and thousands of women were not only exiled from their bodies, but their bodies and the functions and futures of their bodies were
rendered obsolete: wombs and vaginas permanently destroyed.