I read this book twice, first as an audiobook read by V (the author, formerly Eve Ensler) and then I immediately bought a paperback copy which I’ve just finished. It’s a frank, unflinching account of Ensler’s work with brutalised women across the globe, latterly in the Congo, interwoven with her portrayal of the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father as a child, and her own uterine cancer diagnosis and treatment.
“If you are divided from your body you are also divided from the body of the world, which then appears to be other than you or separate from you, rather than the living continuum to which you belong.”
Philip Shepherd, New Self, New World (epigraph in the book)
I’m often drawn towards cancer memoirs, and love to hear other people’s insights from their experiences, seeking the ways in which they converge and diverge from my own. V’s book is visceral and often confronting, as she weaves her three threads together, and I preferred the immediacy and intimacy of hearing her read aloud the words she had written.
I remember years ago - when I was going through a period when I seemed to be sick all the time - a shrink friend saying to me in that knowing and slighly patronizing sorry-for-me way, “You somatize, Eve. Somatize. It was one of those words like individuate. I had to look it up. Somatize: how the body defends itself against too much stress, manifesting psychological distress as physical symptoms in the stomach or nerves or uterus or vagina. I read that women who had suffered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse tended to somatize more.
It turns out that somatization is related to hysteria, which stems from the Greek cognate of uterus, Dorépa (hysteria). Uterus = hysteria. They always called me hysterical in my family. Extreme feeling. Sarah Bernhardt. Intense. But what is extreme? Again, it depends on 10? I mean, what would be the appropriate level of emotional response to someone beating you daily or calling you jackass or stupid or molesting you. What would be the nonhysterical response to living in a word where so many are eating dirt and swimming in the sewage system in Port-au-Prince to unclog the drains and find plastic bottles to sell? What would be the appropriate non hysterical response to people blind folding other people and walking them around naked on leashes or watching waving people being abandoned on rooftops in a flood? What would be the proper way to experience these things? Hysteria: a word to make women feel insane for knowing what they know. A word that has so many implications- hysterical, out of control, insane, can't take her seriously, raving. Hysteria is caused by suffering from a huge trauma where there is an underlying conflict.
I found the way she drew parallels between the different areas of her life quite fascinating, and the rage she feels towards her father for abusing her, society in general for ignoring trauma, and cancer for trying to kill her, is raw and immediate. I didn’t find parallels with my experience in this regard, but I did relate to her observations about the impact of a cancer diagnosis on the patient’s experience of temporality:
Once you are diagnosed with cancer, time changes. It both speeds up insanely and stops altogether. It all happened fast. Seven months. Impressions. Scenes. Light beams. Scans.
It takes a herculean effort for her to practice self-care, and she hates the feeling that she’s letting down the women she’s been working so hard with to establish the ‘City of Joy’ in the Congo. As she leans in to allowing herself to feel vulnerable, she finds strength in community, and rekindles her relationship with her sister.
There is obviously something scaring me even more than the cancer. It is the idea of stopping. The idea of being still. Of not being able to do or make or travel, or speak or organize or write. I don't want to be a fucking patient. Then the Italian doctor says, "It will be a threshold for you. You will learn to have pity for yourself. You will learn to be a patient.” In that moment I want to wrap my IV tube around his neck and jerk it hard.
As part of me rages and refuses, another part of me is already there. I watch it there and it knows, truly knows, something else. This part of me likes the gnome, wants to crawl up on his lap and be his patient. This part is so tired. This part knows he is telling the truth, he is a guide, giving me a challenge, a vision, saying, "This is it. Your life has to change. It cannot be driven anymore by a need to prove anything. It cannot be a reaction, a "fuck you,” an “I'll show you.” That's how you got sick. That is what your sickness is: over-taxing the body, the nervous system, fight-or-flight, always driving off the imagined enemy, always pushing and driving yourself, pushing and fighting and driving.
I am too tired now. I have cancer. My organs are gone. I have tubes coming out of me, and a bag. My body is sewn up the center. There is no drive. I can't find the gears. I am a patient. Patient. Patient. And something relaxes in the center of me for the first time since I heard my father raise his voice, and I sleep, I really sleep.
Of particular note for the purposes of my research, is the way in which her cancer changed her relationship with her body:
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, my body, just as the Congo landed me in the body of the world.
The invasive nature of cancer treatment thrust her firmly in the world of her body, echoing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s words in Tendencies, in which she laments how her breast cancer diagnosis was a defining trauma that constituted her womanhood:
“Shit, now I guess I really must be a woman.”
As she experienced, breast cancer demands a surrender to femininity, no matter how non-normative one’s body, gender or beliefs may be.
But cancer can also often precipitate that Cartesian duality of body and soul, where the patient distances their perceived ‘self’ from the cancer that is happening ‘to their body’, and it seems as though V didn’t escape this either:
There was something not only passive but downright suicidal about my response to the early signs of my cancer. A kind of resignation possessed me, as if I were an estranged voyeur noting my body from a great distance. Somnolent is the word that keeps coming to me. Half awake, half asleep, knowing but refusing to know. Somnolence: A self-produced narcotic state triggered by extreme danger, a kind of splintering of self, a partial leaving of one world with one foot or semiconsciousness in another. Somnolence: paralysis that comes when strung between two extreme moral choices--loyalty or shame, change or die.
There is all kinds of pain in this book, and I admired the honest way in which V shares her experiences. Ultimately, her story is one of redemption and growth.
Having cancer was the moment when I went as far as I could go without being gone, and it was there, dangling on that edge, that I was forced to let go of everything that didn't matter, to release the past and be burned down to essential matter. It was there I found my second wind. The second wind arrives when we think we are finished, when we can't take another step, breathe another breath. And then we do.