Eve Ensler Research Articles

Obstacles to Empathetic Listening After Sexual Violence

Abstract Building on Linda Martín Alcoff's analysis of subversive speech in Rape and resistance, Lori Gruen's account of entangled empathy, and what Susan Brison calls the remaking of self in Aftermath: Violence and the remaking of a self, we introduce subversive listening as a way to resist obstacles to empathetic listening after sexual violence. Specifically, we identify and aim to interrupt five overextended frameworks (legal, medical, academic, fixing, and identifying) that commonly obstruct empathetic listening. To demonstrate the practical value of our work, we conclude by showing how a reader might avoid these overextensions when engaging with V's (formerly Eve Ensler) The apology.

The Rhetoric of Silence in Contemporary Autopathography: Susan Gubar and Eve Ensler on Gynecological Cancer

Despite Mary Deshazer’s affirmation that “living with cancer has become the topic of our times” (2005, 1), some cancers are still covered by a blanket of secrecy. This paper discusses Susan Gubar’s and Eve Ensler’s autopathographies about gynecological cancer in relation to silence. It explores their discussion of the possibility of finding words for their illness and their reflection about the unspeakability of the sick female body, concluding that they construct silence as undesirable and ineffective.

The Vagina Monologues in a Chinese Context: Discussing the Value of the Localized Adaptations

The silence around female genitalia and sexuality is a prevalent phenomenon with grave implications. Eve Ensler, an American playwright, wrote the famous Vagina Monologues to combat such issues and aim to end violence against women. While Ensler’s play is popular on a global scale, the localized versions inspired by Ensler are also emerging in various regions. A Chinese feminist organization, The Vagina Project, has created their own script and organized several localized performances in the past few years. A close analysis of one of the scripts written by the Vagina Project demonstrates that the localized versions of The Vagina Monologues, though less paid attention to, are effective in creating connections with the audience. Being attuned to the regional feminist differences allows the play to be more powerful and thoughtful when presented to the audience.

Masking the truth: The writer of The Vagina Monologues (formerly known as Eve Ensler) speaks to Index about attacks on the truth. Plus a new version of her play about living in a nuclear wasteland

Masking the truth: The writer of The Vagina Monologues (formerly known as Eve Ensler) speaks to Index about attacks on the truth. Plus a new version of her play about living in a nuclear wasteland

Lost Histories: Recovering the Lives of Japan's Colonial Peoples by Kirsten L. Ziomek

Reviewed by: Lost Histories: Recovering the Lives of Japan's Colonial Peoples by Kirsten L. Ziomek E. Taylor Atkins (bio) Lost Histories: Recovering the Lives of Japan's Colonial Peoples. By Kirsten L. Ziomek. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge MA, 2019. xix, 426 pages. $70.00, cloth; $35.00, paper. Names matter. Playwright Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues) has said, "I believe in naming what's right in front of us because that is often what is most invisible."1 The Naïve Idealist, contributor to the web site The Good Men Project, adds, "A person's name is the doorway into their world; a [End Page 505] person's name has the power to open a connection into their world, a connection to show them who you are, a connection to pass your feelings of that person through and a connection to show them how you see them."2 Onlookers apparently feel less connected to victims of genocide, refugees crossing treacherous seas, or migrants packed into detention camps unless and until they learn the names of individual sufferers who come to emblematize larger plights. To the extent the world came to care at all about the humanitarian crisis in Syria, it was because we learned the name of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler who was washed ashore on a Turkish beach in 2015.3 People subjugated by colonialism have been generally treated, by both colonial regimes and later historians, as discursive objects and subaltern "ethnotypes" whose individuality is effaced. Noting and recording individual names is one of the most powerful ways in which we can acknowledge their existence, singularity, and historical importance. Unfortunately, colonial archives rarely disclose those names. Therefore, when we find names we must treasure them, not just for the information they can provide for our books and articles, but for the potentially transformative encounters we might have with the bearers of those names. If, as the Naïve Idealist says, "a person's name has the power to open a connection into their world," Kirsten L. Ziomek's Lost Histories demonstrates that power. Her dogged pursuit of the names and life stories of people who lived within Japan's formal empire is truly impressive. In several cases Ziomek circumvents the limitations of the "colonial archive" to provide us with portrayals of people whose lives were certainly affected by the "oppressive nature of Japan's colonial policies" (pp. 8–10) but were nevertheless full and fascinating. Her investigations do not always yield "uplifting stories of power and agency," yet they do reveal some of the ways that "colonial subjects acted within that oppression" (p. 11). Several times throughout the text, Ziomek recounts her sleuthing process, sharing with the reader the excitement of discovery. The author sometimes overstates the originality of her insights and themes. For a couple of decades now, historians of Japanese imperialism have been crafting more "complicated" (p. 6) and "nuanced" (p. 11) depictions of colonial relationships; they have recognized the "precariousness of Japanese rule" (p. 6) and that there was no simple "one-way process in which [End Page 506] the Japanese always controlled their subjects" (p. 5); they have worked in multiple languages to understand the thoughts and experiences of colonial subjects and to create accounts that de-center (while not understating) the fact of Japanese domination. Ziomek is hardly the first to tell us that colonial identities were protean, or that Koreans, aboriginal and Han Taiwanese, Ainu, Okinawans, and Micronesians navigated imperial relations cleverly and turned the material and nonmaterial conditions of colonial modernity to their own personal and collective advantages. We know that Japanese officials relied extensively on connections and alliances with compliant local elites, whose own interests and motivations were complex and malleable, and who did not hesitate to invoke their status as "children of the emperor" to assert their own dignity. Historians of Japan are aware that there were multiple conflicting imperial theories, justifications, and visions, and that in certain contexts "ethnoracial difference" was celebrated as an asset rather than an indication of the failure and futility of assimilation (dōka) and imperialization (kōminka) policies (pp. 5–7). Ziomek is thus contributing to what have become mainstream trends...

Postmillennial cancer narratives: feminism and postfeminism in Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World

In the context of a new wave of women’s activism for equality, the body is once again at the centre of the discussion today, in the USA and globally. Analysing American discourses about health and illness at the turn of the twenty-first century, Tasha Dubriwny has argued that the current narratives are dominated by neoliberal and postfeminist philosophies that have thrived in a framework of biomedicalisation and self-surveillance. What happens, then, when a successful feminist artist is diagnosed with uterine cancer? How does Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and founder of V-Day, face the fact that her life may have a painful ending? How does a woman so aware of her physical and psychological self come to terms with illness? Is she willing to put her political project aside to become a patient? Through a close reading of Ensler’s uterine cancer memoir In the Body of the World, and focusing particularly on its structure and narrative strategies, this article situates her work within the corpus of female literature about health and illness in the twenty-first century, exploring her meaning-making process in the light of the current tensions between feminism and postfeminism.

From victims to suspects: Muslim women since 9/11

Shakira Hussein's From victims to suspects explores how, since the ‘war on terror’, Muslim women find themselves trapped between their perceived roles of helpless and docile beings on the one hand, and dangerous terrorists on the other. Drawing on relevant events such as the ‘burkini’ ban in France, the ‘ban the burka’ campaign in Australia and the Cronulla Riots in Sydney, Hussein's book is a necessary academic intervention on an often misunderstood contemporary issue. The preface to the book opens with a description of Oprah Winfrey's recitation of ‘Under the burqa’, a monologue written by the author of The vagina monologues, Eve Ensler. This recitation was followed by a powerful performance in which Oprah slowly lifted the burka off a young member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). This event happened only a few months before the 11 September attacks and, in Hussein's view, rendered Muslim women into ‘icons of victimhood’—thus providing a pretext for the ‘American rescue mission’ in Afghanistan.

Is the Staged Vagina Always White?

In 2003 the Women’s Center, a student-led organization, at Western Washington University opened a new show called The Vagina Memoirs. This new program replaced the annual V Day production of Eve Ensler’s 1996 play The Vagina Monologues (TVM) with the argument that Ensler’s approach was “racist and transphobic” (Kato, H. 2013, personal communication, June). This piece, however, is not to debate the Vagina Monologues , but to use it as a starting point to discuss the problems with producing documentary plays that focus on the self and the “free” ability or “choice” that artists have in presenting “truths” about themselves especially when the group is constituted by racial and sexual minorities. People of color and sexual minorities have not and are not afforded the same freedoms to voice their experiences because of historical and structural factors that limit who gets to speak, what they are “permitted” to say, and whether their messages are actually understood and heard. As I argue below, while the presentation of diverse voices within documentary plays suggests a level of egalitarianism, equity and choice, this façade masks how relations of power affect the gathering, writing, and the public production of minority lived experiences. I discuss these problems within the context of the experiences that have occurred on my campus and the students’ creation of their own documentary play called the Vagina Memoirs . Keywords: The Vagina Monologues DOI : 10.7176/JEP/10-21-13 Publication date :July 31 st 2019

Performing Transnational Feminist Solidarity? The Vagina Monologues and One Billion Rising

Established by Eve Ensler in 1998 and centred around benefit performances of her play The Vagina Monologues (1996), V-Day has been highly successful in raising awareness and funds in support of organisations and initiatives concerned with violence against women and girls worldwide. Meanwhile, feminist scholars from diverse (inter) disciplines have long argued that the representation of women in Ensler’s play is inherently reductionist and exclusive, and as V-Day’s global reach increased, this argument has often been made from the perspective of transnational feminist theory. In 2013, V-Day launched a parallel campaign “One Billion Rising” (OBR) which might be understood as an attempt to address this criticism. Drawing on social media and based on dance-based, flash- mob performances, OBR13 attracted high numbers of participants in over 200 countries but some activists still characterized it as embodying the “white saviour complex”. Taking account of this body of criticism of V-Day, this article considers the two campaigns together so as to question whether, rather than Chandra Talpede Mohanty’s transnational feminist ideal of “a non-colonizing feminist solidarity across borders” both One Billion Rising and The Vagina Monologues project might be said to represent the globalization of Ensler’s particular brand of feminism as a mode of cultural imperialism. At the same time, acknowledging that Mohanty’s critique is actually aimed at “Western” feminist theorizing, this essay also examines the status and impact of V-Day campaigns as situated and embodied practices in ways that raise questions about the colonizing effects of applying feminist theories across borders; national and disciplinary.

“The Every 28 Hours Plays” and “After Orlando”: Networked, Rapid-Response, Collective Theatre Action—New Forms for a New Age

“The Every 28 Hours Plays” and “After Orlando”: Networked, Rapid-Response, Collective Theatre Action—New Forms for a New Age Ann Elizabeth Armstrong (bio) and Joan Lipkin (bio) “The nature of an emergency dictates a response.” —Arlene Goldbard1 Naming both “natural” disasters such as hurricanes and “civil” disasters such as gun violence and police brutality, the US Department of Culture’s guide Art Became the Oxygen specifically details the role of arts in responding to emergencies. Drawing from the insights of crisis-management fields, they describe how artists form a “third line” of support to those in crisis, using storytelling and culture to cultivate allies and resources for communities in need on the “first line.”2 As we find ourselves increasingly lurching from crisis to crisis, theatre-makers are innovating new artistic forms and producing practices that leverage networks and foster dialogue through performance. Some refer to such work as “rapid-response” theatre. In the tradition of the Federal Theatre Project’s (FTP) Living Newspapers, plays are created quickly with minimal production values in order to disseminate a story, often literally ripped from the headlines. However, more than simply capturing a contemporary moment, now artists are also enacting mobilizing strategies, community-building, and collaborative methods that constitute an innovative form of networked, collective theatre action. Projects like “The Every 28 Hours Plays” and “After Orlando” represent a significant new trend using short-form drama to respond to the breakneck speed of the news cycle and construct a space for both a deep and wide community conversation. This note 1) introduces both of these projects and their original impulses and history; 2) explores this emerging genre of theatrical protest: the networked, rapid-response, collective-theatre action; and 3) brings together commentary about six different productions at various university campuses that staged either The Every 28 Hours Plays or After Orlando. Building on the lively roundtable discussions of two sessions in Las Vegas at ATHE 2017, we note that such productions provide significant educational opportunities for student actors, directors, and producers; encourage interdisciplinary collaboration and community partnerships; and construct spaces for deep dialogue, consciousness-raising, and community-building. As evidenced by each contribution, the performance of these plays within different university contexts extends and develops conversations beyond the immediate crisis to bear witness to injustices and construct multiple points of entry for social action. As a necessary step in commemorating, healing, and promoting action, the plays magnify the voices of those who have been silenced and allow for empathy in cultivating a community of allies. As mentioned above, the FTP’s Living Newspapers provide an important precedent for the rapid-response, networked, collective theatre actions. Living Newspaper units in the 1930s organized themselves like a news bureau to create a structure for US artists to quickly represent pressing stories.3 As Jordana Cox notes, their work spoke not only to a concrete public, but called for an “imagined community” as well (301–2). The FTP also consciously used its networks to foster simultaneous discussions at the same time across different geographic spaces.4 Cox notes how Living Newspapers took hold during a moment of a “fraught relationship between mass media and democracy” (302), [End Page 159] calling on audiences as concerned citizens to deliberate the issues of the day. Augusto Boal’s Newspaper Theatre, formulated in the Arena Theatre of 1970s Brazil, is another precedent, a kind of “ideological warm up” (225) for the actor; it uses Brechtian techniques to dramatize current events in short sketches to uncover biases and explore multiple perspectives left out by journalists in an authoritarian society.5 Other precedents of rapid-response, networked, collective theatre action include productions like Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues and Tectonic Theatre’s The Laramie Project. Although not short-form drama, their dramaturgical structure portrays a controversial event or issue from multiple perspectives, based on interviews and research. These productions started in professional theatre.6 Interestingly, they soon discovered how the dramaturgy facilitated the opportunity to move performances beyond that setting to enact mobilization and community-building around the process of performance in educational and community settings. In both, a website provides a kind of unifying frame, bringing local efforts...

“Cancer was an alchemist”: Eve Ensler’s Experiences of Vulnerability in In the Body of the World

This article analyzes Eve Ensler’s experiences of vulnerability as they are related in her 2013 memoir, In the Body of the World. While the book illustrates “traditional” or etymological vulnerability, resulting from trauma and cancer, it also exemplifies what American philosopher Erinn Gilson calls “epistemic vulnerability,” i.e. vulnerability not as weakness but as potential. As both illness and trauma narrative, Ensler’s memoir also offers an opportunity to question the dichotomy between disability and trauma studies.

Inspiration from the "Really Real": David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face and Documentary Theatre

Inspiration from the "Really Real":David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face and Documentary Theatre William C. Boles (bio) According to David Henry Hwang, two literary influences for his Obie-winning play Yellow Face were Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, both of which rely on a stand-in character for the author as he revisits painful autobiographical memories.1 In writing Yellow Face, Hwang did not want the same thing to happen to his literary doppelgänger DHH that happened to Tom Wingfield and Edmund Tyrone, namely, paling in comparison to the rest of the play's richly defined characters. However, the more he wrote, the less concerned Hwang became: "I found that…creating a character that I actually gave my name to…liberated me to make him a character…. It's kind of counterintuitive, but by naming him after myself he became more of a character."2 Aiding Hwang in separating himself from the fictional DHH was his recent performative turn in Greg Pak's short film Asian Pride Porn, where he played himself hawking "politically correct Asian porn."3 By embracing, in part, his highly self-conscious and at times self-parodying creation, Hwang imbued his literary double with much less seriousness than Williams and O'Neill did. While the inspirational roots of the main character DHH can be traced back to two canonical American plays and playwrights, the play's format stems from the realm of documentary theatre (also known as verbatim theatre), and its influence over Yellow Face and Hwang is far more significant than that of Williams and O'Neill. Over the two decades prior to the play's premiere in 2007, the documentary play had reappeared to much fanfare. In England, London's Tricycle Theatre produced numerous [End Page 216] tribunal plays, with its most successful being Richard Norton-Taylor's The Colour of Justice, while the National Theatre produced David Hare's The Permanent Way and The Power of Yes. In the United States, docudrama was equally successful with productions such as Moisés Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater's The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project; Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992; Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues; and Anne Nelson's The Guys. This form of drama relies on myriad informational sources, including government documents, public hearings, trial testimony, media outlet transcripts, newspaper pieces, letters, and personal interviews, all of which are used as informative as well as authoritative statements about the topic being theatrically explored. The source-based format intrigued Hwang and, in turn, jump-started his creative process. He admitted: "I'd been wanting to fix my play Face Value [which closed on Broadway in previews] for the past 17 years, but I couldn't figure out how to do it."4 Face Value had been Hwang's farcical and biting response to the yellow casting of Jonathan Pryce as The Engineer in the Broadway premiere of Miss Saigon and he intended for his play to challenge multiple misguided conceptions about ethnic identity and stereotypes. In his later return to this subject matter, he "started thinking about the stage documentary form—making it a mock stage documentary that would poke fun at some of the absurdities of the multicultural movement."5 In regard to the "mock" part of his documentary play, he created a fictional narrative surrounding Marcus Gee, a white actor, who is mistaken as Asian by DHH and is cast as the lead in Face Value, whereby Gee then goes on to garner great success as an Asian-American actor. Surrounding this fictional story line, Hwang uses newspapers, magazines, and government sources to document specific incidents in the 1990s, including Hwang's protest against Pryce's casting, the critical and financial failure of Face Value, the rising sense of "yellow peril" associated with Chinese Americans in the 1990s, and his father's role in a campaign finance scandal surrounding Bill Clinton's run for President. Leigh Silverman, the play's director, noted that what "we ask people to believe in in the play is that everything...

The Dramatization of the Female Body: Discourses of Resistance and Power in of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues

Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (TVM) is an atypical play that centers on the most intimate part of the female anatomy: her vagina. This paper analyzes the double play of “jouissance” as the site of pleasure and resistance through the body and words. As a hearing and sharing of women’s experiences with one another, Ensler’s play delineates a new aesthetic grounded in the performance of individual and collective stories through the mediation of their voices/bodies. This paper analyzes the dramatization of the female body as site of resistance and power.

Agitating for Change: Theatre and a Feminist ‘Network of Resistance’

Focusing on the UK, where feminism is gaining momentum through multiple sites of activist dissent from a neoliberal hegemony, my primary concern in this article is to understand how, given this renewal of feminist energies, theatre might be able to play its part in agitating for change. Inspired by Chantal Mouffe's compelling description of a ‘network of resistance’, as a possible way forward I conceive of theatre politically as a series of heterogeneously formed sites of oppositional and affirmative activity, each linked into articulating dissent from neoliberalism and the desire for socially progressive change. This provides the critical framework for my engagement with three radically diverse performances ranging from new playwriting (Lucy Kirkwood'sNSFW), through the flash mob (Eve Ensler's One Billion Rising campaign), to the West End musicalMade in Dagenham.

The Trouble with White Feminism: Whiteness, Digital Feminism and the Intersectional Internet

In August, 2013 Mikki Kendall, writer and pop culture analyst, started the hashtag #SolidarityisforWhiteWomen as a form of cyberfeminist activism directed at the predominantly white feminist activists and bloggers at sites like Feministing, Jezebel and Pandagon who failed to acknowledge the racist, sexist behavior of one their frequent contributors. Kendall’s hashtag activism quickly began trending and reignited a discussion about the trouble with white feminism. A number of journalists have excoriated Kendall specifically, and women of color more generally, for contributing to a “toxic” form of feminism. Yet what remains unquestioned in these journalistic accounts and in the scholarship to date, is the dominance of white women as architects and defenders of a framework of white feminism – not just in the second wave but today, in the digital era.. In this chapter, I offer a critique of white feminism as it plays out on the intersectional Internet. To do this, I critically examine three examples of white women’s feminist activism: Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and “Ban Bossy” campaigns, Eve Ensler’s One Billion Rising, and The Future of Online Feminism report. I end with a discussion about the difficulty of challenging white feminism, how necessary it is to move forward, and how crucial the Internet is for sustaining such a critique.

The Resistance of Women towards Sexual Terrorism in Eve Ensler�s The Vagina Monologues

In this present time, women are still oppressed and considered as the inferior class to men. One of the literary works containing the evidence is The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler. The monologues inside it share the experiences of various women who have been physically, mentally, and sexually terrorized. From those experiences of the women in the monologues, this study tries to identify the sexual terrorism that is experienced by each woman in each monologue, and at the same time, tries to examine the resistance of the women towards the sexual terrorism.Men use sexual terrorism as a tool to control womens autonomy over their own body, sexuality, and reproduction. It occurs to any woman in any situation. Sexual terrorism is there to keep women in the subordinate position. The awareness of the women towards the sexual terrorism triggers their resistance towards it. Each woman experiences different situation of sexual terrorism, therefore their ways of resisting the terror are also varied. Feminism approach is used in this study in order to see the accurate analysis of the condition of the woman in each monologue.Keywords: sexual terrorism, women, resistance

Becoming Whole Again

Becoming Whole Again Frankie Y. Bailey (bio) What I Want My Words To Do To You Madeleine Gavin Public Broadcasting Service www.pbs.org/pov/whatiwant/ 90 Minutes; Film, $9.95 Filmed at New York’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, What I Want My Words To Do To You documentary focuses on the women prisoners who participated in a writing workshop taught by playwright Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues [1996]). Over the course of four years, the filmmakers recorded what occurred as the women shared their responses to writing prompts from Ensler. The workshop participants featured in the film are not typical of female offenders in that the majority of them have committed and/or been accomplices to offenses that resulted in the deaths of the victims. Only two of the featured women were serving sentences for drug-related crimes. Diverse in background and ethnicity, the participants included several high-profile prisoners: Judith Clark and Kathy Boudin were members of the Weather Underground, a radical organization from the 1970s. Clark and Boudin participated in a Brinks robbery that resulted in the deaths of three men. Pamela Smart, a former teacher sentenced to life without parole for her involvement in the murder of her husband by her teenage lover, was also a member of the group. The paths that brought these three middle-class white women to prison were radically different from those of Betty Harris, a large black woman with multiple health problems, who killed her mother, or Keila Pulinario, who, at the age of 21, shot her best friend after he raped her and threatened to do it again, or Cynthia Berry, who became a prostitute and drug user and killed one of her “johns,” a 71-year-old man, by stabbing him multiple times. The length and structure of the documentary—less than 90 minutes with cutting back and forth between workshop sessions and the preparation for a performance of the women’s work by well-known actors (Mary Alice, Glenn Close, Hazelle Goodman, Rosie Perez, and Marisa Tomei)—means that the audience may not be fully conscious of the passage of time within the workshop. The film moves back and forth from the pre-performance read-throughs by the actors with Ensler there to provide information and explanation to the classroom writing workshop sessions in which the group members take turns reading what they have written in response to the prompts from Ensler. We hear their words being echoed by the actors during the read-throughs and during the benefit performance. There is an interweaving of present and future. But in the workshop sessions, the women themselves tackle time—their pasts, their presents, their futures—in multiple ways. One of the most poignant is the discussions that ensue in response to various readings about the length of their sentences and the reality of their lives in prison. These discussions occur from the perspectives of participants who are at various stages in the process of acknowledging their crimes and accepting responsibility for the deaths of their victims and the harm done to survivors and their own families. For example, during one exercise, Cynthia Berry reads the letter she has written to her former mother-in-law who became a substitute for her own mother. In the letter, Berry lays bare her anguish and guilt about a victim—a 71-year-old man who had recently lost his wife and was a father and grandfather. She describes how she was never able to move past her own sexual abuse by her uncle, and that when she killed her victim, she was turning all of the rage she felt toward men on him. She describes guilt so intense that she feels she has no right to be happy and that she should pay for her victim’s death with her own death. Other members of the group tell her that she has to move beyond her guilt and find a way to give back. Roslyn Smith, who will be featured in another scene, reminds Berry that Berry has expressed interest in working in the puppy program at Bedford Hills that allows selected...

여성공동체의 모놀로그: 『버자이너 모놀로그』에 나타난 커뮤니타스

여성공동체의 모놀로그: 『버자이너 모놀로그』에 나타난 커뮤니타스

"({})": Raunch Culture, Third Wave Feminism and The Vagina Monologues

This article considers Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues in the latter part of the 2000s, in respect of tensions between Second and Third Wave feminism in an era of raunch culture, in the contexts of exploratory university teaching and in performance, and against the background of experiences of cultures of feminist activism in Greater Manchester, and the trashier end of feminist literature.

Two Poems

12 worldliteraturetoday.org A uthor note: These prose poems are flash semi-témoignage or reportage, inspired by stories people told me. It began as a personal account of my relationship to the island of Hispaniola—Haiti and the Dominican Republic —and moved to the voices I encountered because they were louder than mine. An earthquake hit Haiti on January 12, 2010. It had been over twenty years since I had been in Haiti for any length of time. I initially planned to go with Eve Ensler and a few members of the V-Day team after the earthquake, but unfortunately the trip was canceled. Not long afterward, Writers Bloc, led by Zadie Smith, Rachel Holmes, and others and sponsored by the Open Society Foundations, commissioned ten authors to write about education in a developing country from a personal lens. I chose Haiti and went there in February 2011, via the Dominican Republic, where my parents reside. Coincidentally, Edwidge Danticat was in Haiti visiting a women’s organization called We Advance, founded by Haitian activist Barbara Guillaume and American actress Maria Bello. Our time together took me to places I needed to return to but didn’t know how to reapproach. After that trip, I started working on these flash reportages. Ten Drumbeats to God I confess to stealing the tomb to bury my mother . I admit to emptying the gas tank my neighbor kept for blakawouts. I took the rope and the cakes of an old lady because she had more and I needed some. I stole a radio to eat. Stole medicine to sleep. I tried to forget I lay beside dead bodies but my eyes couldn’t shut. Tried to refill my heart but it stayed shut. I wished and wish some more to be dead and not an idea, a solitude, a shame. I summoned words tangled in debris, measured the distance of fire a mile into my voice. I took everything and a little more. Then I heard the drumbeats and remembered—like rain like song like light lit by old questions—there is no reason —there is god, drum, beat, there is what lingers and there is what comes later. Strong Motion He had to leave so he could see her. Count the chickens before he gave them away. Count the money under her bed. He had to leave to see his face vanish in hers. To recognize the country he is from. The good news is, he allowed himself to keep the accordion and recordings of some perico ripiao. He opened his mouth to accommodate the white moon, his body like a machine you turn off and on. On and off—when on it means he is sneaking into a place, disguised, the way church music is disguised when we pause to think how much meat costs. He had to walk miles to play dominos and allow the sea inside the tidy grave he dug in his heart. You can’t have a weak heart here. And milk isn’t cheap here, nor is melancholy or a funeral procession. He robs a banana leaf and lets the tropical thunder that evening steal it again. It’s only fair, he thinks. The warm wind whips night into an early beginning . And everything is now purple around him above Photos taken after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti by Zoriah, an awardwinning photojournalist who has a background in disaster management and humanitarian aid. She specializes in documenting human crises in developing countries (www.zoriah.com). Two Poems Nathalie Handal May–August 2014 • 13 —his hands, the dark, the distance, and even the unused roads. Damn it, a man can’t even get drunk properly here. He lies flat on his back and imagines himself naked. Why take his clothes off if she is not next to him? After all, sleep lasts one hour in the countryside. Misery does that to a man. He has to walk miles to see a baseball game, to cross a cemetery and buy an orchid for her. She has a long neck and wide hips and breast like wild apples—hard and directionless. He decomposes grace to find another grace...