In the Body of the World: A Memoir of Cancer and Connection

By Eve Ensler

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, generous, and inspiring, Ensler calls on us all to embody our connection to and responsibility for the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9780805095241

Eve Ensler

V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a Tony Award–winning playwright, author, performer, and activist. Her international phenomenon The Vagina Monologues has been published in 48 languages and performed in more than 140 countries. She is the author of The Apology, the NYT bestseller I Am an Emotional Creature, the highly praised In the Body of the World, and many more. She is the founder of V-Day, the global activist movement to end violence against women and girls, and One Billion Rising, the largest global mass action to end gender-based violence in over 200 countries. She is a co-founder of the City of Joy, a revolutionary center for women survivors of violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, along with Christine Schuler Deschryver and 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Denis Mukwege. She is one of Newsweek's “150 Women Who Changed the World” and the Guardian's “100 Most Influential Women.” She lives in New York.

Book preview

SCANS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

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

Acknowledgments

Also by Eve Ensler

About the Author

Copyright

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 safety, of healing, of gathering strength, of coming together, of releasing their pain and trauma. A place where they would declare their joy and power. A place where they would rise as leaders. I, along with my team and the board at V-Day, were committed to finding the resources and energy to help them build it. We would work with UNICEF to do the construction and then, after V-Day, would find the way to support it. The process of building was arduous and seemingly impossible—delayed by rain and lack of roads and electricity, corrupt building managers, poor oversight by UNICEF, and rising prices. We were scheduled to open in May, but on March 17, 2010, they discovered a huge tumor in my uterus.

*   *   *

Cancer threw me through the window of my disassociation into the center of my body’s crisis. The Congo threw me deep into the crisis of the world, and these two experiences merged as I faced the disease and what I felt was the beginning of the end.

*   *   *

Suddenly the cancer in me was the cancer that is everywhere. The cancer of cruelty, the cancer of greed, the cancer that gets inside people who live downstream from chemical plants, the cancer inside the lungs of coal miners. The cancer from the stress of not achieving enough, the cancer of buried trauma. The cancer that lives in caged chickens and oil-drenched fish. The cancer of carelessness. The cancer in fast-paced must-make-it-have-it-smoke-it-own-it formaldehydeasbestospesticideshairdyecigarettescellphonesnow. My body was no longer an abstraction. There were men cutting into it and tubes coming out of it and bags and catheters draining it and needles bruising it and making it bleed. I was blood and poop and pee and puss. I was burning and nauseous and feverish and weak. I was of the body, in the body. I was body. Body. Body. Body. 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.

*   *   *

Cancer was an alchemist, an agent of change. Don’t get me wrong. I am no apologist for cancer. I am fully aware of the agony of this disease. I appreciate every medical advance that has enabled me to be alive right now. I wake up every day and run my hand over my torso-length scar and am in awe that I had doctors and surgeons who were able to remove the disease from my body. I am humbled that I got to live where there are CAT scan machines and chemotherapy and that I had the money to pay for them through insurance. Absolutely none of these things are givens for most people in the world. I am particularly grateful for the women of the Congo whose strength, beauty, and joy in the midst of horror insisted I rise above my self-pity. I know their ongoing prayers also saved my life. I am in awe that it happens to be 2012, not twenty years ago even. I am gratefully aware that at just about any other point in history I would have been dead at

Reviews for In the Body of the World

[joyfiction_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the past I have read Ensler’s books The Vagina Monologues & The Good Body. This book was a rather touching and raw memoir chronicling her experience with uterine cancer. Having lost two grandparents and an aunt to cancer (and my mother having a scare with cancer a year before I was born) the content matter immediately appealed to me. And while a couple of times I had to stop and really focus to realize whether the writing was in the past or present it was a good book that was written in an interesting and beautiful way. Parts of it are painful to read merely because cancer is such a scary subject for most people but that didn’t make the book any less enjoyable.

[bobbieharv · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A beautifully written honest emotional jewel of a book. I had my daughter, an oncologist, read the chapter about the doctor who walks around the bed to recognize her as a human being - it brought both of us to tears. Although I can see why she included them, I liked the African chapters less, not only because they were very hard to read, but because the writing was different - more of a recounting from the outside.

[mamakats · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I’ve been sitting on this review for quite a bit of time, struggling to contextualize my feelings that should not be so disparate, but are in fact incredibly contradictory. The truth is that I have struggled with Eve Ensler’s, In The Body Of The World because it is a difficult read for someone who has experienced invasive medical procedures. Her descriptive and painfully emotional passages are detailed so intimately that it feels like reading her private diary. I too have experiences with the illness and invasive surgeries which made reading the book an overwhelming struggle. Even though reading the book was incredibly quick, I took more than a few weeks following my finishing the last page to allow my personal connection to Ensler’s experiences 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 health crisis. Her descriptive and painfully emotional passages are detailed so intimately that it feels like reading her private diary.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.

[susanbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a hard book to read and to review. I have my own cancer issues and there were times Ensler's writing was too real, too powerful for me to read. That's a tribute to the book and to Ensler's talent.Besides describing cancer all too well, she also writes about the power differential between doctors and patients. One doctor ignore her cries for pain medication during a procedure and in doing so, she writes, "He might as well remind me I am not even really there" (82). Ensler has good, compassionate doctors, too, and those interactions are just as beautifully described.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.

[myriadbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Deeply personal memoir of surviving a cancer diagnosis, twinned at times with Esner's work to assist victims of rape in Africa. Esner's writing is lyrical and painfully pointed. I found her writing style mesmerizing, but at times it seemed almost too much – the lyricism worked for me as long as it was grounded and purposeful, and felt overblown when it wasn't. Esner is, at the heart of this, writing for herself and not necessarily for her readers. Considering the subject matter, it's hard to fault her for this. Four stars.

[dallas.barnes · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

wow! wow! wow!

[spoerk_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I haven't read any Ensler's work before. I've watched The Vagina Monologues a couple times. I knew that this was not in the same vein as her other books. But I found it just as powerful. Living through death, coming back from getting to the depths of life itself is no small task. The power Ensler finds in herself and the way she explains it, is utterly amazing. I cannot recommend this book enough. To survivors everywhere, not just cancer, but survivors of life.

[janismack · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

hard to read at times, but a real insight to one's emotions when you have cancer

[ninarucker · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully written. Both hilarious and heart breaking. This memoir was an incredibly interesting look into an incredible woman's life.

[walkonmyearth · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Relationships, communicating with one’s body, facing life and death, defining love in its many forms, giving to the earth and its people more than one takes away. This is, in summary, what Eve Ensler expresses in her book, ‘In the Body of the World’. Ensler talks about her experience, her relationship, with cancer and chemo with wry wit, and candor.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

[seongeona · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When this book arrived, I was surprised it was so small. Then I looked at the list of chapters and was even more surprised by how short they were - 2 pages, 6 pages. Then I began to read and was moved to tears by page 5. This little book packs a big punch. It feels much like a diary, sometimes a dream, with short but powerful images that leave you haunted. Ensler's disbelief, fear, pain, and gratitude are palpable. You are right there with her. Her honest feelings and thoughts about the mother that wasn't there for her moved me as I could relate. The connection between the Earth and women's bodies and how we are similarly destroyed, suffering together, is strong. It is not a happy book, yet there are small bright spots that offer hope and joy - faithful friends, selfless volunteers, caring doctors and nurses, survivors who reach out to others.

[sarahlizfits · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love this book. I love the writing, the language, the emotion and the honesty. 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 overcome all she's seen in life and embrace the good. 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.

[linyarai · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads. Amazing. Heart-breaking and exciting. A tale of cancer survival by the author of The Vagina Monologues.

[feministmama · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I use Vagina Monologues in the classroom and it's good to see more books by Ensler I can recommend to my students. This is a lovely poetic little book giving voice to a struggle that needs more attention. i applaud Ensler for her bravery that once again inspires us all