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Biography & Autobiography. Medical. Sociology. Nonfiction. HTML: From the bestselling 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 and inspiring, Ensler's In the Body of the World calls on us all to embody our connection to and responsibility f… (more)
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In exploring and courageously sharing her raw and life changing experience of surgeries, ports, chemo, and all their emotional and physical side effects, Ensler emboldens others to find their own way, but encourages us to be bold enough to feel, to love, to name, to cry, and to believe that others are there for us. Ensler carries us through with beautiful metaphors and honesty about the facing and fearing death. At one point, her mother, also ill, tells Eve that “I dreamed they are came to take our hearts. They didn’t want mine. They wanted yours the most”...The next morning they move my mother to the cardiac unit because her heart has now become the problem. It is where we do not live that the dying comes.”
sh 4/201
My own experience with similar illnesses and invasive surgeries made reading the book an overwhelming emotional experience for me too. I took a few weeks following finishing the last page to let my personal connection to Ensler’s narrative to settle. My goal was to parse her story and narrative away from the trauma of the women in Congo that she was trying to work out and write in the midst of her own health crisis. During my own past health crises, much of what Eve describes feels so intimately true – as though she were embodying my own traumas and able to shout out loud the veracity of the fear, the foolishness, the reality of what I had gone through in her storytelling. But the truth is that Eve cannot speak truth to my own experiences, as similar as they were, because I was prepared for much of the invasive-ness, the intrusions on my privacy and bodily integrity – I had already had children, and each by emergency cesarean. I can assure Ms. Ensler that the loss of privacy and personal autonomy is completely destroyed and driven out of the ob/gyn delivery room. So that the horror of sharing intimate functions with family and strangers alike is forever lost following speedy and harrowing baby deliveries and never to be recaptured again in subsequent hospital stays.
So I began to wonder at the women in the Congo. Would they know about this book? Would Eve’s conflation of her health crisis to their brutalization be translated for them into a language that they could understand, read, hear? And that is the point at which the book started to fall apart for me. No matter the connection I initially believed I had with the text, the realization that Ensler’s healthcare experiences were vastly different and kind of insulting to see splayed out as they were grossly enlarged to match the trauma and terror that Congolese women have experienced following brutal rapes and forcible childbirth with little or no goodlooking to care for their every needs just made me feel kind of gross about the whole project. And just when I thought I was a lone angry shewolf ready to prey on Ensler, the Twitterverse responded to this work as well. It seems that many young feminists found the work to be lacking in global theory and offensively uppermiddleclasswhiteprivilege in it’s nature. I cannot disagree. Yet I am left wondering, where does Eve go with this all this worldy knowlege and lacking perspective? How CAN she reconcile what she sees and hears and knows about the world without a strong foundation of -isms work behind her? I suppose it is her answer to the world, that women and girls should rise up and dance in joy (One Billion Rising), rather than do the hard work of studying, understanding, doing what is needed to make real change in the world. Ms. Ensler has a rare gift, she can get all kinds of projects published. I do hope that her future endeavors are less about herself and more about the resilience and fortitude of the women she has the privilege to meet around the world. We were first introduced to her gift in the Vagina Monologues, and though they now seem troubled and similarly naive, they were once radical and engaging to read and share. Would that Enlser’s future projects have that same force; unfortunately this one did not.
I find her humanity and ability to be honest about the horrors she's seen incredible. I love that she can be honest about her reaction to her early years that could have lasted a lifetime, and I love her ability to
The language is perfect, and the emotion is relatable and beautiful--even when the story isn't beautiful. I highly recommend this. It's a quick read, but it's worth every second.
I received this as an Advanced Reader Copy from a Goodreads giveaway. It in no way influences my review, as I'm rather excited to buy the book when it's released.
Although I can see why she included them, I liked the African chapters less, not
Besides describing cancer all too well, she also writes about the power differential between
One thing that bothered me is the way Ensler relates her cancer to the gynecological horrors endured by the women she worked with in the Congo. It's a strange coincidence that her cancer hit in the same places these raped women suffered fistulas, but there are times Ensler seems to be appropriating their suffering. I know she means well but this is, perhaps, related to another feeling I had as I read the book: Ensler is a very self-involved person. That might help her talent, so more power to her.
I cannot recommend this book enough. To survivors everywhere, not just cancer, but survivors of life.