Owning our bodies and stories: Eve Ensler speaks at Mount Holyoke

Eve Ensler was not scared of anything as much as chemotherapy. In 2009, when the award-winning playwright and activist discovered she had cancer, friends and family had to convince her to go through with the procedure. But the process heralded something new and life changing, something even Ensler had not expected. In her words, it was the beginning of a “wall coming down.”

At Mount Holyoke College’s Gamble Auditorium last Thursday, Ensler shared passages from her latest book, In the Body of the World, in a joint event with the Odyssey Bookshop. Ensler additionally spoke about One Billion Rising, a global campaign she founded in 2012 as part of the V-day movement, which demands an end to violence against women and girls.

In the Body of the World, a memoir, came out of her experience of recovering from cancer; it is divided into CT scans instead of chapters, and is an account of how she navigated the private and the political spheres to become a more meaningful activist and feminist.

After years of working closely with women around the world and hearing and sharing their stories of trauma and joy, Ensler realized she had overlooked the reality that her feminism was not separate from her personal struggles with her body, her family and her relationships. Her recovery from cancer provided time for this self-reflection and self-exploration, and became a journey of reconnection and closure of the kind she had already been encouraging among women worldwide.

“It was almost as if all the stories had accumulated in this tumor,” she told her audience. The stories Ensler was referring to are the stories that resulted in The Vagina Monologues, a play which has been staged in over 140 countries. The play uses a montage of women’s narratives about their vaginas as a way of exposing their shared traumas and struggles.

But the stories Ensler was referring to were also her own. As a child, she was sexually assaulted by her father. As a woman, she still had an estranged relationship with her sister. Finally, her fight with uterine cancer was a kind of physical battle she had never anticipated. She shared that the collective trauma of these experiences had manifested into a personal disconnect with her body, in which talking about other people’s bodies had almost become an excuse for ignoring her own.

But post-surgery, and after the pain of going through chemotherapy and the nights focused on the limitations of her body, Ensler slowly found her way back to her physical and mental ‘home.’ She had almost lost everything, and yet, the first time she woke up after the surgery was the first time in her life she felt completely connected to her physical self. “I didn’t know where my brain was, but I was body,” she said.

Subsequent experiences restored a sense of purpose to Ensler’s life. Ensler learned to appreciate beauty she had previously ignored in nature, and made connections between violence against the body and the environment. She reconciled with her sister and therefore fundamentally, with her activism, saying, “I became a feminist to reconnect with my sister.” The stories she heard as an activist now reflected and had become her own stories.

The passages Ensler read were heartbreaking, even in their humor. She spoke about the importance of storytelling, of paying attention to our bodies, of loving and nearly losing everything. One excerpt, recounting time spent with nurses post-surgery, celebrated the daily activisms of ordinary people: of nurses who trudge in and out of hospital rooms to maintain bowel movements, of the millions of volunteers worldwide whose work goes underappreciated but is no less impactful than more visible activisms and of the love we give and share everyday.

Tinged with humor, passion and often pain, her words came out of her own experience but were essentially a testament to the transformative, universal power of love and hope.