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ISBN : B00C2DMQPK
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From the best-selling author of The Vagina Monologues and one of Newsweek's 150 Women Who Changed the World, a visionary memoir of separation and connection - to the body, the self, and the world
Playwright, author, and activist Eve Ensler has devoted her life to the female body - how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body - a disconnection brought on by her father's sexual abuse and her mother's remoteness. "Because I did not, could not inhabit my body or the Earth," she writes, "I could not feel or know their pain."
But Ensler is shocked out of her distance. While working in the Congo, she is shattered to encounter the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women there. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer, and through months of harrowing treatment, she is forced to become first and foremost a body - pricked, punctured, cut, scanned. It is then that all distance is erased. As she connects her own illness to the devastation of the earth, her life force to the resilience of humanity, she is finally, fully - and gratefully - joined to the body of the world. Unflinching, generous, and inspiring, Ensler calls on us all to embody our connection to and responsibility for the world.
Direct download links available for PRETITLE In the Body of the World POSTTITLE
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 4 hours and 15 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: April 30, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00C2DMQPK
{PRETITLE} In the Body of the World {POSTTITLE}
Not for the squeamish or the fainthearted. Not for the indifferent or the complacent. Eve Ensler, famous for her play, The Vagina Monologues, has written an impassioned memoir which uses her personal story of enduring treatment for a huge, Stage IV uterine tumor, as a metaphor for our destruction of our planet and for our toleration of the atrocity of gang rape as a weapon of war. Again and again, Ensler shows us the links between her own ordeal and the ordeal of a suffering planet, especially its women.
Ensler became absorbed in the stories of these women, especially in Congo, who had been so savagely raped that they developed fistulae (a fistula is a tear in the vaginal wall), which made them permanently incontinent. Ensler was so horrified by their ordeals that she vowed to create, for these women, a refuge where they could heal, physically and emotionally. She pays tribute to a brilliant and selfless, heroic doctor, Dr. Mukwege, who has performed surgery on these damaged women, and to the women who, even if they cannot walk, still sing and dance, and who, in turn, help others like themselves. Ensler began fund-raising for a place, called City of Joy, where women could receive surgery to heal their bodies AND, at the same time, rescue their souls.
Given her own history, Ensler was shocked to discover the irony of a tumor the size of a grapefruit in her uterus. Although aware that something was wrong, she ignored the tumor until it had spread throughout her reproductive system, threatening her, at 57, with disfigurement and death. She shows us the links between her own personal denial and our collective denial of phenomena like global warming, the destruction of species, and the use of rape as a weapon of war.
Although I have never read or seen on stage "The Vagina Monologues", I was of course aware of the extreme importance of Ensler's endeavor to raise the consciousness of humanity to the tremendous abuses suffered by women around the globe. "In the Body of the World" seems to carry this awareness to an entirely new level, however.
It is not a book that can be called "enjoyable" in any trivial way. It is harsh, harrowing, and definitely not for either the weak minded or squeamish. Both the blow-by-blow description of Ensler's terrible cancer therapy, as well as her recounting of the atrocities perpetrated on women around the world but especially in the Congo, require the use of the adjective "horrific", and even that seems completely inadequate. In addition, Ensler turns the harsh light of honesty on her own emotions and reactions, including her internal struggles at the time of her mother's death. The only analogy I can come up with is the effect of turning on a 1000 watt bulb in a room infested with vermin and seeing them scuttle for cover. Some of this narrative is without question the stuff of nightmares, as for instance when Ensler, dealing with an incredibly noxious abdominal abscess following her surgery, links it in gruesome detail with the Gulf oil spill.
And yet, somehow this book avoids being disgusting and discouraging. Two chapters especially stand out, and in fact lifted my spirits in an indescribable way. One, with the unlikely title of "Farting for Cindy", is an absolutely magnificent paean of tribute to the reality of self-giving love, often where one least expects to find it.
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