In The Body of the World , livre ebook

Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd. - Ensler Eve

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85 pages

English

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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.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Memoir

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	30 avril 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184004182
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0420€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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IN
THE BODY
OF THE
WORLD
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
IN
THE BODY
OF THE
WORLD
Published by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 175 5th Avenue, New York NY 10010, USA
All rights reserved
The Journey from Dream Work, copyright 1986 by Mary Oliver. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published by Random House India in 2013
Copyright Eve Ensler 2013
Eve Ensler has asserted her right to be identified as author of this Work.
Random House Publishers India Private Limited Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, UP
Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184004182
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
Divided
The Beginning of the End, or In Your Liver
Dr. Deb, or Congocancer
Somnolence
Cancer Town
Dr. Handsome
What We Don t Know Going into Surgery
This Is Where You Will Cross the Uji River
Two Questions
Uterus = Hysteria
Falling, or Congo Stigmata
Lu
Here s What s Gone
The Stoma
How d I Get It?
Circumambulating
Ice Chips
Patient
The Rupture/The Gulf Spill
Becoming Someone Else
Beware of Getting the Best
Stages/5.2B
Infusion Suite
Arts and Crafts
The Room with a Tree
A Buzz Cut
Getting Port
The Chemo Isn t for You
Tara, Kali, and Sue
Crowd Chemo
The Obstruction, or How Tree Saved Me
I Was That Girl Who Was Supposed to Be Dead, or How Pot Saved Me Later
Riding the Lion
Chemo Day Five
On the Couch Next to Me
I Love Your Hair, or The Last Time I Saw My Mother
It Was a Beach, I Think
Shit
Rada
Death and Tami Taylor
A Burning Meditation on Love
My Mother Dies
De-Ported
Live by the Vagina, Die by the Vagina
Farting for Cindy
It Wasn t a Foreboding
Congo Incontinent
Leaking
She Will Live
Sue
Joy
Mother
Second Wind
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.
The Congo and the individual horror stories of her women consumed me. Here I began to see the future-a monstrous vision of global disassociation and greed that not only allowed but encouraged the eradication of the female species in pursuit of minerals and wealth. But I found something else here as well. Inside these stories of unspeakable violence, inside the women of the Congo, was a determination and a life force I had never witnessed. There was grace and gratitude, fierceness and readiness. Inside this world of atrocities and horror was a red-hot energy on the verge of being born. The women had hunger and dreams, demands and a vision. They conceived of a place, a concept, called City of Joy. It would be their sanctuary. It would be a place of s