In the Body of the World
Author: Eve Ensler
Sometimes I cleave to a novel. This novel by the author of The Vagina Monologues pulled me into a fetal position at times as I read about things that I myself have experienced. As women, many of us do not live within the world of our bodies; we have disassociated long ago, many men ago, in my life my father.
Ensler through the world with a new memoir that explores her own dissociation from and with her body due to her childhood issues with the men who tear our bodies apart and corrupt our sense of physical and emotional selves, as child abuse, incest, rape – the male dominion of dominance. Not all men. Please do not misread.
As Ensler works in the Congo, she discovers the abyss of women who live, day by day, with mutations of their own bodies after they have been carved and put on a spit by men, politics and an uncaring world. This book describes the horrors that these women have experienced and how they bravely keep on with their lives, their selves.
When Ensler discovers that she has uterine cancer, she is forced to become first and foremost a body – pricked, punctured, cut, scanned. As she connects her own illness to the devastation of the earth, her life force to the resiliency of humanity, she is finally and gratefully joined to the body of the world.
Ensler’s talents are poetic, metaphorical and graphically true. Not one of us knows of that inside world that women go to hide themselves. And now we know that we are universal, as we find our fold within Ensler’s memoir.
Beautifully written, horrifically authentic and insanely political, Ensler gives voice to her anguish and triumph as did Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.
Superb. Superb. Superb.
Ratings are based on a 5-star scale
Overall: 5
Review by Broad “A” – Ava
We received a copy of this title for our book review. All opinions are our own
In the Body of the World: A Memoir
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