- Eve Ensler will speak at the North Shore Credit Union Centre for the Performing Arts, Tuesday, May 14 at 7: 30 p.m. For tickets, $20, which includes a copy of her new book, In the Body of the World, visit capilanou. ca/nscu/Eve-Ensler.
EVE Ensler is in full "flashback hallucination mode."
Reached Tuesday in Rochester, Minn., during a stop as part of her current North American book tour, the Tony award-winning American playwright, performer and activist was experiencing a flood of memories and emotions.
"It's so crazy to be back in the Mayo (Clinic) at this moment," she says.
Following her diagnosis with uterine cancer in 2010, the woman behind the famed Vagina Monologues and V-Day, the ever-growing global movement dedicated to ending violence against women and girls and spawned One Billion Rising, underwent extensive treatment in the Midwest locale.
This week, she's returned to what she refers to as "cancer town" in her new book, In the Body of the World. In more positive terms, Ensler has been considered cancer-free for three years. The call-to-action memoir chronicles Ensler's cancer journey, her gratitude for her health, and her reconnection to both her body and the world, something she advocates for readers to likewise experience in order to better their own lives as well as the lives of others and humanity as a whole.
"I hope people wake up you know, and I hope that wake up is really about hearing the cries of the earth, and hearing the cries of women, and hearing the cries of the economically impoverished, and hearing the cries of, we can go down the list," she says. "I think when you come into your
body you are hopefully more compassionate, more connected and more activated and know that you are part of creating the story."
New York born, when asked where Ensler considers to be her home base, she replies, with a laugh, "I don't know where my home base is. Everywhere. I live in the world."
A common place she's found these days is the Democratic Republic of Congo in response to the countless reports of abuses against women and her interest in making positive change. It was there in Bukavu while working with people on the ground to establish City of Joy, a humanitarian project supported by V-Day that supports women survivors of sexual violence and provides leadership training opportunities, that she received her diagnosis.
"Cancer, a disease of pathologically dividing cells, burned away the walls of my separateness and landed me in my body, just as the Congo landed me in the body of the world," she writes.
Many people, at some point in their lives, are exiled from, flee or leave their bodies because it's just too painful to be there, Ensler explains. Examples of causes include some form of trauma, abuse or humiliation.
"For women, when we're violated, when we're beaten, when we're raped, when we're hurt, when we're attacked, when we're invaded, the body just becomes such a terrifying place and such a place of contamination," she says.
"I look back now and I feel like I've been away from myself, I've been away for so long and so much of my life I've been trying to find a way back into my body," she adds.
Ensler feels her disconnection followed her father's sexual abuse and her mother's remoteness.
She's made various attempts at reconnection over the years, including "promiscuity, anorexia, performance art" as listed in her book. Some were momentarily successful.
"Writing the Vagina Monologues was definitely a very amazing journey, certainly I had moments where I felt like I was in my body, but I didn't live there, I just visited," she says.
"I think with cancer . . . when you have your body cut open and you have so many body parts removed and you lose your nodes and you wake up with tubes and catheters and all kinds of things coming out of you, you're just body. I was body, I was nothing but body," she says.
Ensler's new outlook and sensitivity proved terrifying at first, however she quickly began to reap the benefits.
"Even in the worst moments of my sickness, I was connected to myself for the first time. Then I think what that started to do was begin this conversion process, which is the only way I can describe it, where I began to be connected to everything around me in a way I just had never been.
Those walls, or those barriers, were melting away and I just felt porous. It was a very amazing journey," she says.
Writing In the Body of the World proved "grueling."
"I think writing this book, it was kind of like a fever of language, or a language fever, that kind of just passed through me. It was a very intense process," she says.
Now that it's out there, Ensler admits she's feeling "wildly vulnerable," though not in a negative sense.
"I just feel emotional, very emotional. But I feel it's the book I'm meant to write. . . .
So much of it feels like it came from my body and that I'm in my body with my body and very exposed in my body at the same time. And it's not a bad or good thing, it just is, you know?" she says.
Ensler hopes readers from all backgrounds - females, males, cancer patients, survivors or otherwise, as well as anyone who has been forced out of their respective bodies - takes her message to heart.
"I think reading this book, hopefully it's this mantra of how do we keep our hearts open in the face of cruelty, in the face of attacks, in the face of seeing people be unkind to other people, in the face of seeing all the violence, in the face of people misunderstanding you. I think the work is not to put up armour," she says.
When asked why Ensler has dedicated so much of her life to helping others, particularly women, she says it's got something to do with where pleasure and happiness are derived.
"I think I learned at an early age when I was feeling quite mad from all the violence and destruction around me that if I could try to help somebody else out or focus on somebody else it usually kept me sane," she says.
She references a recent trip to the Congo to attend the latest City of Joy graduation ceremony. She was struck by just how far the young women had come.
"Is there anything that makes a person happier than that, to see another human being thrive, and transform and become who they were meant to be? That's just incredible pleasure," she says.
Ensler will offer insight into her story and new work at an upcoming talk at Capilano University's North Shore Credit Union Centre for the Performing Arts, Tuesday, May 14 at 7: 30 p.m.
For more information on her writing and activism, visit eveensler.org and vday.org.
