Eve Ensler

V World

V-World is a longing.
V-World is a remembering.
V-World is in the center of us and it is round…as much as we are bent on flattening it.
V-World is what it smells like when they let you go, when you’re not waiting to be hit…when you perspire from the sun instead of worry.
V-World is the 20 year old suicide bomber who turned back. It is the dresses the young girls from Srebrenica wore and the way they fixed their hair to go and hear about their men…even though they knew they had all been murdered. V-World is the utter gentleness of the surviving comfort women who were raped by Japanese soldiers for twelve hours a day for two years during World War II.
It is the single egg the starving Bosnian woman gave as a present.
V-World is the lives our mothers never got to live.
V-World is unfolding between your legs.
It is urgent and slow.
It’s the joke the Palestinian woman told at a check point that made the Israeli soldier laugh and accidentally lower the gun he had pointed at her face.
It’s the video camera the Afghan woman held under her burqa, documenting the execution of a woman in a stadium, accused of flirting.
V-World is the place you could never touch…not with all the times you banged my head…or whipped my legs.
V-World is the third way…not right or wrong. Sitting still.
Trusting tears.
V world is the lipstick she wore during the shelling of Sarajevo and the high heels she refused to take off even though the snipers were firing from above the city.
It’s a state of mind.
V-World is the garden where the missing girls appear. Their mothers and fathers are waiting there.
V-World is the clitoral cut that did not happen.
V-World is after the pain has left and we sit in the utter emptiness
And we stop creeping around the hole but fall into it.
And it is not what we thought.
It is the opposite.
V-World is borderless and groundless.
There is nothing to defend.

Eve Ensler is the Obie-Award-winning author of The Vagina Monologues, a play based on Ensler’s interviews with more than 200 women. With humor and grace, the piece celebrates women’s sexuality and strength. The Vagina Monologues has been translated into over 35 languages and runs in theaters all over the world. Ensler’s experience performing The Vagina Monologues inspired her to create V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. Ensler has devoted her life to ending violence, envisioning a planet in which women and girls will be free to thrive, rather than merely survive. V-Day supports anti-violence organizations throughout the world, helping them to continue and expand their core work on the ground, while drawing public attention to the larger fight to stop worldwide violence against women and girls. Ensler’s other plays include Necessary Targets and The Good Body.

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