Eve
Ensler is an award-winning playwright, poet,
activist, and screenwriter. She has a long history of
activism on behalf of social justice and women's
issues, and is currently working on two new plays:
Necessary Targets and Conviction of the New Body. She
is the author of The Vagina Monologues which will be
opening in both Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo
April, 2002.
Eve
Ensler discusses the relationship between art and
activism.
From
a talk given at the New York Open Center, 2001.
I'll talk
a little bit about how V-Day happened because, to be
honest, it's as much a mystery to me as it is to
everybody else. I'd like to tell you I had something
to do with it. On the physical level, yes, I wrote
and performed The Vagina Monologues. But on a bigger
level, I think it has much more to do with the
moment, the time. There is a spirit and energy that
needs to get incarnated right now. The far-reaching
abuse of women is basically genocide toward women.
The UN recently announced that one out of every three
women on this planet will be battered or raped in her
lifetime.
I
went to 14 countries recently on a tour for the new
book I'm working on called The Good Body. In Africa,
there is a struggle to stop the ritual removal of
women's clitorises. In LA, women are paying to have
their labias trimmed and their vulvas tightened
because they hate their bodies so much. In
Afghanistan, under the Taliban, women are so
desecrated, so unbelievably destroyed that they are
walking corpses.
And
in 12 of those countries you could not swim in the
water. It's happening simultaneously. We're raping
the forest; we're raping the children. Our lack of
honor and respect for life is profound. That's the
downside. The upside is that there is a huge movement
around the globe of people who honor women and life,
who are ready to rise up, organize, stand up and say,
"Enough!" We have to reverse the trend of
the destruction of the planet.
During
my research for The Vagina Monologues, I witnessed
and was amazed by the enormous relief women
experienced when they began to talk about their
vaginas. In the same way we get relief when we begin
to talk about how we all know that the human species
is going to die out if we don't do something. We walk
around every day with that inherent knowledge. But we
can't talk about it - the way we don't talk about
death, the way we don't talk about sex, the way we
don't talk about intimacy, and certainly the way we
didn't talk about vaginas.
When
I interviewed women, I would suddenly feel this
incredible energy and light start coming out of them
just to be talking about their vaginas, just to be
saying, "Here is story of my vagina," which
of course is the story of their life.
I
started to perform little monologues and create
little pieces, and I would try them out in little
clubs downtown (in New York), and every time I did it
there would be fantastic reactions. Different
reactions than people ever had to my work, so I knew
there was a cap lifting off something. A wonderful
theater critic named Alexis Green wrote a review of
the monologues, and I must say it might be one of the
only times I've been encouraged by a critic. Somehow
she got what I was doing and that made me decide to
turn this into a theater piece - The Vagina
Monologues. That was the beginning.
The
pieces have incredible life. It's like a great spiral
that's moving out. It started in a little theater,
then moved into grassroots theaters around the world
and off-Broadway, and then it moved into big theaters
around the world. And it just keeps expanding.
When
I started doing this piece, I had felt very
dissociated from myself for most of my life. I am a
person who was beaten and raped as a child for a long
period of time. I lived my life as a head
disconnected from my body. I was disconnected from
myself, and I had no idea - on some fundamental level
- of what I wanted or what my real spiritual or
political ambitions were.
One
night, a year or two after I started performing the
piece, I was on stage and suddenly it occurred to me
that I was in myself, in this body, inhabiting this
being. Everything started to shift in my life. I
realized at that point that I had never really lived
on the earth. I had been disconnected from the earth,
and so it was easy to dishonor her because I didn't
have a relationship of oneness with her. And it is
the same thing about being in my vagina. The longer
I've been in my vagina, the more aware I've been of
the connectedness of everything. Violence fragments
us, dissociates us, so that we aren't able to see our
interconnectedness.
I
think that when you come to feeling, when you come to
truth, you come to a political place. One of the real
downsides of America is that we have always kept
politics and art separated. I've never seen art and
politics as a separate entity. How can we keep
creating art and theater and films that don't bring
us into our bodies, that don't help us arrive at
meaning, at what truly matters?
I
have the great privilege of running a writing group
at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women
right now. There are 15 women in the group, and
they're widely varied. Most have murdered someone.
There are political prisoners and women who have been
raped and have subsequently killed their rapists. The
other day we were struggling with a big issue. The
exercise was to write to the person you loved most
profoundly about why you are in prison. The women
struggled over this for weeks and weeks, and the work
got deeper and deeper, and the truth got deeper and
deeper. And all the things they talked about were
political things. They weren't just personal. The
fact was that they had grown up in environments where
they had little food and people beat them and raped
them. No one had ever told them they were worth
anything. They had not been educated. They were there
because at one point in their lives they believed
that revolution was viable and possible, and had
pursued that path to the full extent possible. This
was, of course, political.
If
we artists don't start making these links between art
and politics, then basically, we wind up creating
work that only asks an audience to be entertained. An
audience member would then go to the theater to
escape for two hours; to forget who she is; to go
somewhere else and enjoy the dissociation. They're
let off the hook. I think people need to be on the
hook. I think people need to be responsible. We don't
wake up and we're not made to be responsible if we're
not made to feel uncomfortable, squeamish, and
guilty.
And
I feel fortunate. I've had an incredibly difficult
career in the sense that the American theater has
certainly not embraced my work over the last 20
years. There is probably not a theater in this city
that did not reject The Vagina Monologues. All of
those systems are under the large umbrella of making
money. There are very few venues anymore for artists
in this country where it's not about making money.
But who cares? We've got to figure out ways to do it
anyway. If you want to keep going as an artist in
this culture, you must finally learn that you can't
wait for them to embrace you, because they're not
going to.
In
1996, I had been doing a grassroots tour of The
Vagina Monologues. I went to Jerusalem. I went to
Oklahoma City. I went to all these wildly different
places. Places that had a lot of censorship. And
women in these cities found all kinds of subversive
ways to advertise the piece. In Oklahoma City, for
example, they wouldn't put it in any of the papers
because all the papers are Christian run, and we know
Christians don't have vaginas. But women got together
and went around to beauty salons and supermarkets and
handed out flyers, and women came. I performed in a
warehouse way downtown. By the third night, women
were literally pulling up in pickup trucks with their
own chairs. And that happened everywhere I went.
At
the end of performances women would line up to tell
me how they had been raped, beaten, mutilated, or
incested. Literally lined up. Or they would faint
after the Bosnia piece, and we would stop the show
and a woman would announce that she had been raped by
her stepfather and had never told anyone. It got to
be that I had this feeling that photographers have
when they are in war-torn countries and they are
photographing people being murdered but they don't
intervene on their behalf.
So
a group of incredible women got together and we
decided to do something with The Vagina Monologues to
stop violence. In 1997, we created V-Day which is an
anti-violence day, a vagina day, a victory day - on
Valentine's Day. We decided to take the romance out
of Valentine's Day and put the vagina back in,
because we all know how much violence has been done
in the name of so-called romance.
We
got all these fantastic women - Gloria Steinem, Glenn
Close, Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg, and Lily
Tomlin - and we produced a huge event at the
Hammerstein Ballroom where they performed The Vagina
Monologues. It was amazing. And I have to tell you we
had no idea what we were doing. I took $5,000 out of
the bank, which we put down on a reservation. It held
2,500 people. Two weeks before the event we had only
sold two hundred tickets, so we took an ad out on a
credit card in the New York Times for $20,000, and in
two weeks the whole place sold out - a vagina
miracle.
After
that night this whole movement got launched. We
raised thousands of dollars, and people realized
there was a window opening. It was as if all these
women raced to the window and stuck their feet
through to keep it open.
The
next year we did it in London with all these amazing
English stars. Over the last two years, The Vagina
Monologues spread worldwide in places like Mexico
City, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Norway, Holland, Spain,
and Portugal. It is opening in Bulgaria and Serbia.
It ran in Manila. It's in Hong Kong. And all those
productions have linked up with local groups who are
working to stop violence against women.
It
is spawning all these wonderful connections. This
year I am proud to say that The Vagina Monologues is
going to be performed in 50 cities around the world
in places like Cameroon, Bulgaria (with women from
Kosovo), and we are doing it with Palestinian and
Israeli women in Tel Aviv. We're supporting the
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan
(RAWA) who are literally fighting for their lives. We
just opened the first rape crisis center in the
Balkans. All kinds of amazing things are being done
with the money and the more money we raise, the more
we can do.
There
is a worldwide movement. We've had an alliance with
an organization called Equality Now since the
beginning in which we tried to bring groups together
and join resources. We started this thing called the
Worldwide Gathering. We hired 12 women from every
region of the world, brought them together to create
a worldwide vision of ending violence, and came up
with this idea to do an international "stop
rape" contest.
For
the last year, women from all over the world have
been soliciting ideas from girls and women on how to
end violence, and then they chose 60 women who
presented their ideas and action plans. Three were
awarded grants to implement their ideas in their own
countries. I cannot tell you how utterly exciting
this process has been. To sit at a table with women
from Zimbabwe, and the Philippines, and the woman who
started the movement in Jordan to end honor killings.
To just go around a table with women from India and
South America and Eastern Europe and to look at how
violence has impacted women in all those countries.
Although the cultural manifestations are different in
each country, the impact is exactly the same, and to
see all these women sitting at a table shows a
world-wide movement is absolutely essential and
possible.
Reprinted
with permission from the author and Lapis magazine,
from which her speech at the New York Open Center was
published.
