Part 2

Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security-Obsessed World
by Eve Ensler

(Page 2 of 3)

In those first ten days, I spent between five and eight hours a day interviewing women refugees in support groups in city centers, desolate refugee camps, and local cafés. I interviewed mothers, widows, grandmothers, lawyers, doctors, professors, farmers, teenagers. I heard stories of atrocities and cruelty. I met a country of women dressed in black: black silk blouses, black cotton skirts, black lycra T-shirts. The courage, community, kindness, and miraculous sense of forgiveness I witnessed on the part of these war victims threw me into moral chaos and deep questioning.

In all these interviews either I was filled with an overwhelming desire to rescue the women or I tried to maintain this "professional playwright" position. I was observing these women as characters, hearing their stories as potential plays, measuring the drama in terms of beats and momentum. This approach made me seem cold, impervious, superior. Both postures were attempts at maintaining a distance and, more important, maintaining my security.

Thousands of journalists had already passed through these women's lives. They had visited for a day, a week at most. The women felt invaded, robbed, ripped off. The reporters were interested only in the most sensationalistic aspects of these women's lives - the gang rapes, the rape camps. One journalist had actually sent a fax (these were still the days of faxes) saying, "Get me one raped woman, preferably gang raped, preferably English speaking." The women had taped the fax to the bulletin board as evidence and a warning.

It was a great honor and privilege that the refugee workers had brought me into the camps, allowed me to be in their most intimate groups. They had even, at times, focused their groups around my being there.

I felt I had not honored my end of the contract. I realized that if I wasn't "saving" these women - offering solutions - or transforming them into literary substance, I had no idea what to do. My ways of relating were hierarchical, one-sided, based on me perceiving myself as a healer, a problem solver. All of this was based on a desperate and hidden need to control - to protect myself from too much loss, chaos, pain, cruelty, and insanity. My need to analyze, interpret, even create art out of these war atrocities stemmed from my real inability to be with people, to be with their suffering, to listen, to feel, to be lost in the mess.

On the tenth day in Zagreb, a woman who worked at the center generously offered me her apartment for the weekend. I was actually terrified. It would be the first time I'd be alone since my arrival in Croatia, the first time I'd be able to digest the stories and atrocities.

In all my years as an activist - working in desolate shelters for homeless women, tying myself to fences to prevent nuclear war, sleeping in city parks in women's peace camps with rain and rats, camping on a windy Nevada nuclear-test site in radioactive dust - I had never felt so lonely. I called the States. I reached answering machines in place of loved ones. I paced the little apartment. I tried to read but was unable to concentrate. I lay down on the bed.

My heart was breaking from the inside like an organism giving birth to itself, to the stories of itself: the lit cigarettes almost put through the soldier's wife's eyeballs so "she could always see clearly," the decapitated heads of her old parents, the fifteen-year-old girl raped by her soldier husband and his soldier friends in the car, the hand grenades he stored in their house, the pistol they put in her three-month-old baby's little hand as a game, the food they didn't serve the Muslim girl's mother, who had decided to give birth to the baby of the Serb who raped her, the Canadian uncle who attempted to molest his fourteen-year-old niece who had fled to him from Sarajevo for safety, the dirty stained clothes that arrived in the bandaged boxes of humanitarian aid that the refugee women were supposed to be grateful for, the broken toys, the generic ammonia-smelling body soap, the husband and son she last saw two years ago digging the graves of friends and relatives in their village under orders from Serbs, the waiting, her twisted waiting face, the big fang-exposed German shepherd that the Chetniks held right near the little babies' faces in her living room as he forced the Muslim doctress to suck his dirty dick while her mother was forced to prepare his dinner, the window the twelve-year-old girl jumped out of eight stories high because she couldn't comprehend how her best friends from high school, her friends from the disco, had turned so quickly against them with knives, guns, fire, and insults, the cows they burned with bombs and left starving, the family cows.

Tears broke out of my eyes like glass cutting flesh, breaking me, breaking through my craving for definition, authority, fame, somebodyhood, breaking all that into little tiny pieces that became nothing I could identify, nothing that resembled me or the matter of me. Me was lost. There was just melting. Bandages unwrapping. Me becoming invisible.

It wasn't the cruelty that broke my heart. Cruelty is boring, generic. What hurt in my chest was witnessing the unsuspecting nature of the women, how unprepared they were, how shocked and disbelieving. What hurt was feeling love for these lost women who sat around a wobbly refugee table. The woman who clung to her one plastic bag or made sweet pastry in what was now her kitchen, bedroom, living room, bathroom, all in one. Made pastry for me, a stranger. The woman who kept smiling with missing teeth, who gave strength to the woman next to her, who smoked cigarettes and smoothed her skirt or apologized for her messy hair. What hurt was that their life was over. What hurt was that they kept going.

After this experience, my journey was transformed. I began to re-perceive the nature of my interviews, the nature of interviews in general. I began to see these encounters as sacred social contracts. I, the interviewer, could not simply take stories, events, feelings from my subjects. I could not sit there icy and objective, absorbing. I had to be present. I had to be in dialogue. I had to be insecure. I could no longer protect myself, stand outside the stories I was hearing. I had to allow myself to feel the sadness, torture, fear, loss, and particularly the courage and strength of the women I was meeting. War was not natural. I would never be comfortable with atrocity and cruelty. I found myself crying often during the interviews. I felt little, helpless. I experienced aspects of myself - defenses, identities, approaches - dying away.

Copyright © 2006 by Eve Ensler.

About the Author

Eve Ensler is an internationally acclaimed playwright whose many works for the stage include Floating Rhonda and the Glue Man, Lemonade, Necessary Targets, and The Vagina Monologues, for which she received an Obie Award. Performances of The Vagina Monologues have raised $25 million to stop violence against abused women and girls around the world. She lives in New York City.