I am...

Navigating the process of growing up—maturing from a young child through the teenage years to adulthood—is equivalent to running a gauntlet of questions about personal identity. Finding and embracing sexual and gender identity is among the most challenging aspects of development; amid societal pressures and perceived and actual expectations, each individual must identify and address their own insecurities.

To further complicate this process, in the United States, traditional norms are changing, and the roles of men and women in the home, the workplace, and the public sphere are not as concretely defined as they once were.  With the advent of technology and, in some ways (although certainly not in all), a more open and accepting culture, men and women are not constrained to the physicality of their biological sex.  Gender, as a framework for establishing identity in relationship to society, is recognized as more of a spectrum than a dichotomy.  For example, some individuals identify as transgender, meaning that their inner feelings of gender identity do not match their biological sex or the expectations for men and women established in the larger community.  Some individuals are born intersex, or with some degree of biological ambiguity physically, genetically, or hormonally.

Recognizing this range of selves is changing the nature of relationships, as well; partnerships are not just about men and women, but about person and person.  That is perhaps what we all can learn from our friends and peers that identify differently than we do—love, partnership, finding support can be about the characteristics of a person, just as they are, not as they are defined by social structures.

It goes without saying that in The Vagina Monologues and I Am an Emotional Creature, both by Eve Ensler, the author is addressing gender and identity.  There are two monologues in particular, however, that address gender norms specifically, albeit from very different angles.

In I Am an Emotional Creature, the monologue “Stephanied” tells the story of a young woman in love with another young woman.  And yet, for herself, as the narrator states, “I’m not gay/ I’m not straight/ I’m Stephanied” (35).  This monologue said to me, as a reader, that love or passion or infatuation—whatever the case may be at a particular point in life—can be about an individual.

“They Beat the Boy Out of My Girl… Or So They Tried,” a Spotlight piece from The Vagina Monologues, looks at gender through a much more overtly sexual lens; this narrative is written from the perspective of a transgender individual who was born male but internally identified as female.  Later in life, after enduring scrutiny and discrimination, this person is able to go through the transition, through surgery and hormones, to becoming physically female—finally, this person is able to find peace and harmony between her body and her spirit.  She is able to live fully in herself, in her identity.

You may not agree. But in writing these two monologues, Ensler is furthering her purpose in writing, to put each reader or audience member in the shoes of another.  She is asking for openness and acceptance, so that every voice—male, female, person, human—can speak, can express, can explore every avenue and endure every blow that lines the path to self-discovery and self-confidence.  

*I would like to say thank you to Ethan Fusaris, who gave a presentation on cultural sensitivity in the Public Health Education Theory class that I took last semester.  His presentation contained much of the information about defining biological and gender identity spectrums that I discuss in this post.

"I was there in the room. I remember."

             


Eve Ensler is active. The Vagina Monologues are active.  They tell stories about women doing, women seeking out, women redeeming, women finding.  Women finding their voices.

Eve Ensler asks questions. The Vagina Monologues ask questions.  They solicit reactions from women, responses from women, stories from women. Voices awakening from within women.

Action and reaction are among the most commonly occurring and most frequently discussed themes in Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues.  Throughout the stories of empowerment, tragedy, victory and desolation, Ensler is actively engaging her audience.  She pushes them out of their comfort zone by saying words and telling stories of events and places that are considered illicit, taboo, meant to be hidden.  She seeks reactions by calmly stating the outrageous.  She makes her audience talk and laugh and cry and feel angry.  She insists that her audience start asking why women don’t do something different, why we accept so easily what we are taught is acceptable. She commands. “You cannot love a vagina unless you love hair” (9).  She gets women to talk. “My vagina’s angry… My vagina’s furious and it needs to talk.  It needs to talk about this shit.  It needs to talk to you. I mean, what’s the deal? (69).”

Then comes “I Was There in the Room.”  Amidst the undulations of emotions and reactions, through the emotional fatigue from active reading, listening, and feeling, there is something quiet.  Ensler is in a place in which events are happening not because she was asking questions in an interview or performing to instigate audience response, but because a new life has been created—the life of her granddaughter, Colette.  During the child’s birth, Ensler was just… there.

And yet, this monologue is still as powerful as the others.  Although it represents, in many ways, a different aspect of femininity, it still achieves Ensler’s goal of personifying the vagina.  This time, however, the vagina is not a place to be explored or a place that has been violated.  It is a heart.  It is an organ capable of letting out just as much as it is of letting in.  It has the capacity for love, and for sacrifice. It is a place that is capable of providing insight.

Maybe, then, despite its more passive tone, “I Was There in the Room” is not really saying anything that different…

"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.

~ ~ ~ ~

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.

"You can't pick the parts you want."

The genre of this piece of literature is drama, meaning that Ensler wrote these monologues to be performed. Why do you think she wants vaginas to be publicly performed? Why does she want vaginas to be physically embodied? What effect does this have on the way we see and think of vaginas?

In The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler is opposing the reality that currently exists (or in some places, fortunately, existed) for women in this world—silence, oppression, ridicule, fear, hiding.  By designing her monologues to be performed, to be shared in public, to be heard by anyone who will listen and even some who initially will not, she is not allowing for the passivity that can come with reading.

She herself, even in the form of her narrators, is speaking directly to you. 

She is speaking to me.

She is soliciting accountability.

 

Once you have seen them, once I have seen them performed, we cannot go back.  When you or I read a book, it can be put aside.

You do not have to acknowledge having read it.

Neither do I.

Books can have incalculable impact.  But it is different when one person looks you in the eye and speaks directly to you.

It is different for me, too.

                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler is trying, by personifying the vagina, to give it back a presence.  She argues that this very real, anatomical part of the human body has lost that presence; more so, she argues that its physicality has been taken away.  Not given up by choice, but taken away. Women, she says, do not see their vaginas as they do their arms, their legs, their eyes, even their hearts and brains.  We do not seem them as one of those essential physical building blocks to our character, our self-confidence, our carriage.  In “The Vagina Workshop” the narrator tells us that “[she] did not think of [her] vagina in practical or biological terms. [She] did not, for example, see it as a part of [her] body, something between [her] legs, attached to [her]” (45).

This is in part because women do not acknowledge this part of their body.  They do not embrace it, nor do they, in many cases, recognize it as a part that needs as much care as any other.  As is conveyed in the opening monologue, many women feel that they just don’t have the time or desire to be in a conscious relationship with that part of their body and therefore that part of themselves.

The aforementioned personification takes place through several vehicles.  Ensler asked the women she spoke with what their vagina would wear—just like she might ask about a person.  She also inquired as to what their vaginas might say—again, speech is characteristic to people.  And people carry a presence.  They have a name. “If I could name them,” one narrator says, “I could know them” (85). 

But we do not know them.  We don’t talk about them. We aren’t allowed to talk about them.  When we don’t acknowledge their presence, their role in our femininity, we are allowing for a perpetuation of the cycles of abuse that have led to the silence, the oppression, the ridicule, the fear, the hiding.

And so Ensler asks us to say the word out loud.

Vagina.

She asks us to look, to touch, to get to know.

Vagina.

Once we have taken back control of the physical body part, the anatomical structure that should be a part of what, and who, we are, we can take back the other characteristics the vagina symbolizes, because they are overlooked.  As the narrator of “Hair” says, “You can’t pick the parts you want” (11).  The same goes for women.  They—we—are whole individuals, and the world cannot just chose the parts that it wants to see while repressing the others.

"There. I've said it."

Discuss:

For Ensler, language is important? Why? What does it matter what we call body parts? What is the importance of language in defining sexuality, bodies, etc.? Why do you think she asks those questions about what vaginas would wear, etc? What is she trying to do with that?

Language and word choice are not only important but essential to the tone, the message, and the purpose behind Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues.  However, as these collective essays reveal, the combination of letters that make up a word are of no matter until that word is given meaning and until we become unwilling to say it.

During my first semester at Southern Connecticut State University, I took an anthropology class entitled “Language and Culture;” it was, essentially, linguistic anthropology.  One of the foundational questions in this class, and of the entire discipline, was whether or not language shaped our world view, or vice-versa, whether or not our worldview determined the words we used.  In simpler language: do we see the world in a particular way because of the words we have to describe what we see, or are the words we develop born out of how we see the world?

This question is truly one of the “chicken-and-egg” variety; there is no clear cut answer, and strong cases can be made for each side.  In reality, the two are not mutually exclusive.  In considering this question, however, there was one insight that I kept returning to: the debate is not about the words themselves, but their connotations and their cultural, socially constructed meanings.

The word ‘vagina’ most certainly has social meaning. 

While Ensler does talk about the strange sound of the word itself—at one point, she writes “Let’s just start with the word ‘vagina.’ It sounds like an infection at best, maybe a medical instrument…” (5)—the reality is that, no matter what anatomical name had been assigned to this particular aspect of the female body, it would carry the same taboo associations that the word ‘vagina’ does today.  In her introduction to the tenth anniversary version of the book, Ensler talks about a group of Comfort Women, “chanting ‘PUKI’ (…which means ‘vagina’ in Tagalog) with their fists rasied. Most had never said the word in their entire lives” (xv).   This line, even though not part of a monologue, demonstrates that language, the specific word, is not the culprit; the problem is the societal implications of saying the word, which acknowledges aspects of being female that have been suppressed and skewed by years of patriarchal society.

Another example: the monologue The Flood tells the story of a Jewish woman from Queens who, after one experience as a young woman, shut herself off to any possibility of a sexual life.  This woman, who Ensler interviewed when she was at least 65 years old, could barely stand to tell this story, to talk about her vagina, her sexuality, her identity as a woman.

Through these anecdotes and many others, especially those that unearth the tragedy that so many women have lived, Ensler is presenting her readers and audiences with a solution: say the word. “Vagina.” Take it back. “Vagina.” Say it until you no longer cringe. “Vagina.”  Whether or not the word or the societal perspective came first, saying the word is not about saying the six letters strung together.  It is about women becoming comfortable with and empowered by their sexuality.  When Ensler says the word, it inspires more women to do so.  And the more women that do, the more conversations that take place, and higher the level of awareness, the greater the degree of change in the world.

And so, when she asks what a vagina would wear or what a vagina would say, she is simply allowing women other ways to express themselves.  Because, when it comes down to it, the conversation that Ensler has started is not just about the word “vagina” but about all of the words that come after it.

The Cycle of Freedom

Laced throughout the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye in 19 Varieties of Gazelle and the short stories of Edwidge Danticat in Krik? Krak! is the use of winged beings—particularly birds and butterflies—and the sky as symbols of freedom and escape from socioeconomic, political, and even cultural bondage.  The imagery is not difficult to envision; few sights have led to more uplifting daydreams than that of wings silhouetted against a deep blue sky.  In Caroline’s Wedding, the final story in Danticat’s collection, however, readers are shown another more painful facet of avian imagery.

This story tells the tale of three Haitian women—a mother and her two daughters—living in Brooklyn, NY.  Like Danticat herself, the mother and oldest daughter had immigrated to the United States to join their now deceased husband and father; the younger daughter, Caroline, was born in America.  When the story begins, Caroline has become engaged to a Bahamian man named Eric; her mother, Hermine, is extremely disappointed that her daughter is getting “…married outside…” (161) of their heritage.  As the story progresses, the upcoming wedding continues to be a source of tension between mother and child, although slowly, “Ma” becomes more and more resigned to the idea, accepting that she will be unable to separate two young people in love.

It is when Hermine begins to realize that she has no choice, really, but to accept her daughter’s future that Danticat reveals this other meaning for imagery involving birds; she quotes Hermine as saying, “We’re not like birds…we don’t just kick our children out of our nests” (164).  In this line, as is evidenced throughout the remained of the story, Danticat is indicating that, like so many things, freedom comes with some cost.  For example, Hermine struggles with how seemingly American her children are; while the country has provided them greater freedom and greater opportunity, she sees her daughters as rebellious against their true culture.  As a mother and an immigrant, she cannot simply abandon her children knowing and sometimes merely hoping that she has given them the tools to survive and live well.  To the children, however, this can have a shackling effect—the exact opposite of the freedom flying so often represents. Caroline, for example, feels frustration with her mother and the beliefs and superstitions that “Ma” is convinced will cure her daughter and make her see sense regarding her fiancé.
Ironically, however, after her wedding and honeymoon, Caroline speaks to her mother and asks that her bed be left intact, just in case she wants to come home to visit.  And so we see that there is a continuing cycle of freedom—once emancipation, in whatever form, has been obtained, there exists a greater appreciation for the comforts that exist at home, in the nest.

 

It was an unexpected line that gave me pause...

“Kompe Jako, dome vou? Brother Jacques, are you asleep" (87)?

I stopped, reread the words. Then I began to hum, remembering the song from my own childhood and seeking to remember the rest of the words. In that moment, I felt the true weight of Edwidge Danticat’s message and a deep feeling of understanding about her purpose for writing the short stories compiled in Krik? Krak! 

In each of these stories, beginning with Children of the Sea, Danticat tells a tale of agony, writing of events and states of being that most American born individuals cannot begin to imagine, and, on the surface cannot relate to.  However, in each story, Danticat somehow finds the common element of humanity.  By minimizing individualism through the creation of characters, that, even when they have names, could be anybody, she gives a voice to the masses. Danticat provides an intricate portrayal of humanity and the endless search for a place to anchor our identity—something that is a part of every human experience.

In Children of the Sea, the two main characters—a young man and a young girl—narrate through letters to one another, though neither will ever receive these writings.  Their separation has come in the wake of the creation of the Tonton Macoutes, a military force given nearly full power by President Duvalier (though this actuality is not mentioned explicitly in the story). The young man, who spoke out against the violence and Duvalier’s rule, has escaped Haiti on a boat headed for the United States.  Everyone on board is lacking food and quickly becoming ill; Danticat describe the characters’ condition when she says, “…since there are no mirrors, we look at each other’s faces to see just how frail and sick we are starting to look” (9).  In this line, she truly minimizes the individualism of each character, as each one must look into the eyes of another to understand his or her own state of being.  In their situation, any of the refugees could be any other individual fleeing the circumstances they left behind.

In the other three stories—Nineteen Thirty-Seven, A Wall of Fire Rising, and Night Women—Danticat tells stories of equal, unheard despair.  Women whose heads are shaven in prison, so that “…they looked like crows, like men” (39); a father, who leaves behind a wife and son of whom he is proud, after experiencing a moment of freedom; a mother, who shares the desire of every mother that her son will “…forget that we live in a place where nothing lasts” (86).  And yet, as in Children of the Sea, emerging from each story, through the pain and the sorrow, are the simple moments of beauty, escape, and imagination that sustain us.  And that line—“ Kompe Jako, dome vou? Brother Jacques, are you asleep” (87)?—that connects each and every person, every child who lost a beloved parent, who memorized lines for a school play, who learned that simple madrigal.  In this, every child and every adult has a voice through someone else, and in the first part of Krik? Krak!, Edwidge Danticat emancipates the silenced voice of humanity in Haiti.