Not everyone sees the funny side of living with uterine cancer. Not everyone instantly gets jokes about the uterus, the cervix or lymph nodes. But then, not everyone is Eve Ensler. Nor can everyone read a book by Ensler without being shaken to the core.
To be honest, one suspects that is exactly the way the American author, performer and feminist would want it.
Best-known for her play, The Vagina Monologues, and for her association with One Billion Rising, a global day of action — and dancing — in protest against violence against women, Ensler firmly believes that the greatest illusion we have is that denial protects us. “It’s actually the biggest distortion and lie. In fact, staying asleep is what’s killing us. I think what I’ve learnt is that every time I say something I’m not supposed to say and every time I’m willing to look at something or feel something, there’s an incredible freedom that comes — even if there’s sorrow attached to it,” she once told an interviewer.
Indeed, denial is the one thing you don’t sense in In The Body of The World, Ensler’s extraordinary memoir released earlier this year. In this unapologetically raw, unsettlingly intimate book, divided into sections called “scans”, Ensler talks about her life, her many journeys and her tryst with uterine cancer.
Ensler starts with being upfront about her disassociation with her own body — a disconnection that grew because of sexual abuse by her father, and her mother’s remoteness. The most interesting part of her memoir are the connections that help her to rediscover and reclaim her body and her inner self as she embarks on her personal journey of healing, navigating her way through memories of a traumatic past, and celebrations and camaraderie with other women who have experienced violence and suffering like those in the Democratic Republic of Congo where Ensler helped establish City of Joy, a centre for rape survivors.
“Cancer,” she writes, “threw me through the window of my dissociation into the centre 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.”
But this is not just the story of a brave stage IV B cancer survivor and rape survivor. It is about everyone who feels undermined, reduced and minimised, and who is determined to find a way to turn self-hatred into action and self-obsession into service.
The language is not pretty, nor meant to be. Just before going into surgery, Ensler tries to imagine what it looks like inside a uterus, cervix, ovaries and whether she will need an “ileostomy bag” used to collect intestinal waste.
As one turns the pages of Ensler’s memoir, however, cancer comes across as not so much a disease as an alchemist, an agent of change. Her story, spliced with trenchant humour, is about the conversations she has with the two cancers she faces — the cancer within her body and the cancer that is everywhere, the cancer of cruelty, 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.
Some of the most memorable passages in the book are also among the funniest that I have read about hospitals and cancer wards. One telling sample: “This could easily be my last morning, and there is not even any bloody sun. My final memory will be the last thing resembling beauty, the faux Pakistani carpets in the Marriott Hotel lobby. It’s dark in Tumor town, but it’s prime time busy. There are so many of us online at 4:30 am, that it feels like the airport. The crowd is Midwestern and overweight, starving and empty from last night’s enemas and cleansers. The Mayo workers are way too cheerful for this time. But here in the Cancer Airways terminal there is no time…”
Ensler has myriad sources of inspiration, including Goddess Kali. The book is littered with passages with which cancer survivors will identify. But its true merit lies in its ability to also reach out to others, including those whose lives may not have intersected with a serious illness. There are poignant questions, often laced with Ensler’s trademark dry wit: “Was it failing at marriage twice? was it having an abortion and a miscarriage? was it the exhaustion of trying to change? was it suburban lawn pesticides? was it canned chopsuey?” They reflect the turmoil that swirls within every person suddenly face to face with a deep crisis and wondering why it happened to him or her.
At times, Ensler’s brutally honest style in describing scenes from her hospital bed can throw one off-balance, especially if one is not used to her style, but as one wends one’s way through the book, one senses that the incantation of the body parts under treatment or the surgeon’s knife are clever tricks to help surmount fear. The onslaught of data and details of every aspect of chemotherapy, for example, initially had a numbing effect on this reader. But then the characters that sashay through Ensler’s memoir as she undergoes chemo take over. There is a whole section devoted to Dr Handsome, whom she calls “the most handsome doctor in the world”, who comes in to “ examine her rear end”; Mama C, head of City of Joy; Sue, her “post-therapy friend”; Sister Lu, who stays with Ensler for a month while she undergoes chemotherapy, and James whom she describes as someone who is the closest she has ever had to a real brother. James makes flower arrangements, paints beautiful pictures, organises her closets and even helps find the perfect glass door for her shower.
The book ends on a positive note. At the time of writing the book, Ensler had been free of cancer for 18 months. The second wind arrives, she says, “when we think we are finished, when we can’t take another step, breathe another breath. And then we do…”
Warning: this book is not for the squeamish or those who prefer a gentrified response to pain. But if you have been at the edge of a precipice, and felt as if you have lost your mind, read it. Ensler’s riveting juxtaposition of the terrifying and the trivial, the humorous and the horrific, keeps it from being just another book about cancer.
Patralekha Chatterjee focuses on development issues in India and emerging economies. She can be reached at patralekha.chatterjee@gmail.com