"There is no place like home."

This is a simple phrase, a common and even clichéd phrase.  Yet, it represents a sentiment that so many people can relate to—it captures the relief of entering one’s kitchen at the end of a long day, the sleeping deeply on the first night in weeks lying in one’s own bed, and the resting undisturbed through the creaks and thumps and bumps, because these ones are familiar.

It captures comfort.

Tiger River Sunset. Joanna Smith.

 The comfort of home, and the having of a place to be one’s true self, is a common theme in Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues. Using the tangible and intangible identities that she has bestowed upon it, the vagina symbolizes home.  It characterizes home as a place into which you or I can invite people, over which all women have control.  It represents a place that fosters self-efficacy, and space that allows us to embody our desires.  It is described as parts of home—some women imagine their vagina as furniture, as a house, as a house with a clitoral doorbell, as the basement under a house, as a place in which we come back to ourselves.  A place in which we find comfort.

No particular monologue personified the significance of this—and the need, as humans, as women, for this—than “My Vagina Was My Village.”  In this piece, Ensler opens her reader’s eyes to the brutality endured by women around the world—and in reality, right here in the United States.  The narrator is a woman from Bosnia. In a time of war, she was raped, violated so harshly and so violently that her sense of self was torn out of her.  She was ripped from herself, and she was displaced from her geographical home.

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Ensler is arguing that we are not separate from our vaginas, cannot be separate from our vaginas, our femininity, our sense of confidence and purpose, our ability to assert and experience pleasure. To lose this place, its significance and access to it, is to lose ourselves.  Just as the places and influences among which we grow up—that we call home—are part of the fabric of our worldview, our vagina’s ties to these things is a part of the fabric of ourselves. 

But the fabric of the women who endure such violent, hostile rapes is unraveled.  Not only are they refugees, forced to live in new places, they are foreign to themselves.  The places that once represented life, fertility, love and comfort—their villages and their vaginas—are lost.  The places that they knew are distant memories. They “do not touch now…do not visit… live someplace else now” (63).  They are refugees, from their country and from their relationships with themselves.

They cannot find comfort.

There is no home.

Perhaps, one day, the conversations started by Ensler’s monologues will allow every woman to know, for her entire life, a place like home.