Personal to Political

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Our special guest now is V, the Tony Award-winning playwright, author, and activist, formerly known as Eve Ensler. Best known probably for her landmark play that debuted in the 90s, The Vagina Monologues, which her website notes has been published in over 48 languages and performed in over 140 countries by now. Who was also the author of other important works, including In The Body of the World, for which she was on the show in 2013, and The Apology, her imagining of the apology her father could have and should have given her, but never did for the sexual violence he inflicted on her as a child.

She was last on the show for that book in 2019. V is the creator of V-Day, which she describes as a global activist movement to end violence against all women, cisgender and transgender, those who hold fluid identities, non-binary people, girls, and the planet. Now V is out with a memoir, largely a book of collected works called Reckoning, and she'll be doing a talk and panel and book signing at The 92nd Street Y this Wednesday, February 1st at 7:00 PM. V, thank you for coming on again. Welcome back to WNYC.

V: Thank you, Brian. I'm so happy to be back with you. I just want to begin by saying, I was really happy to hear the last segment of your show, and I really want to just hold Tyre Nichols in our hearts and sympathy to his family and to all those who live in the shadow and trauma and daily fear of these state-sanctioned racist crimes. I think he so permeates everything we are today in this moment.

Brian Lehrer: When I was previewing the show back around ten o'clock at the top of the program, I was mentioning that you were going to be on and that not only gender-based violence but also police violence comes up in your book. I thought you would have something to say about this. Did you decide to watch the video or not watch any of the video?

V: I ultimately did watch the video because I just need to see and need to know, and I liked what your last guest said, I also watched the other videos of him skateboarding with his child. I was thinking about all these things that are happening in the world now that can be so traced to patriarchy and patriarchal violence and the dominance of patriarchy. In this case, race is patriarchy. It is so unbelievable to me, after everything that we keep going through and all the amazing protests that happened around George Floyd that it's Groundhogs Day. We just keep coming back here over and over and something has to give. Something has to change now. This can't keep happening.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. We didn't even get to with Janai Nelson the fact that even after George Floyd, even after a number of these other incidents have been caught on video, and police have been prosecuted or humiliated. Even with their body cams rolling in this case though, possibly with some purposeful misdirection in what these officers were saying as the body cams were rolling. That's another topic we didn't even get to, were they saying, "Show your hands, show your hands, and on the ground, on the ground," even though he was showing his hands, they had access to his hands and he was on the ground for the sake of witnesses who might be passersby nearby and who would testify later, well, I heard him saying, show your hands, that might have been, some people are saying that was allegedly a purposeful act of misdirection.

We didn't even get to that. We didn't even get to the fact that after all these videos, cops would still do the same thing with videos rolling. It goes to something really deep in the culture, I guess.

V: Deep deep in the culture, something that's been licensed forever from slavery onward, and it's in the DNA the permission for that, and that's what has to be excavated and reckoned with and transformed in a major way.

Brian Lehrer: Just one more thing on watching the video or not watching the video because, for people who don't know your work, you deal so explicitly and repeatedly with trauma stemming from violence. Is it a trauma-informed decision, let's say, for people in the audience right now who've experienced some trauma in their domestic life? Doesn't have to be from police. Is it a trauma-informed decision to watch or not watch or how to watch?

V: I think everybody has to make their own decisions about how they deal with it. I did not watch it for a day because I was feeling too, to be honest, overwhelmed and devastated by the news. I knew I wasn't in a place where I could handle it. Then I girded myself and I decided to watch it a day later. I don't know, sometimes if it's a good thing to see it or not, but what I do know is metaphorically, we have to look at what's happening. We can't protect ourselves from the truth.

I always think of Mama Till in that gorgeous film where she made the decision for people to see what her son looked at so that they couldn't walk past it. There's a moment in that film where someone says, "I can't see it."

She just says you need to see it. You need to look we cannot turn away. We cannot look away. I think there's something really true about that. This is a country that has forever looked away. Our country is based on looking away.

I think a lot of the reason I wrote Reckoning is that we are a country that doesn't reckon with. This country was founded on the stolen lands of the indigenous people who lived here, and the genocide brought upon them and the destruction of their traditions and ways. By removing them from lands, which they were the gorgeous stewards of which moved right into 400 years of slavery and lynchings and Jim Crow and mass incarceration, which we have never reckoned with.

When we begin to reckon, which I think was really starting to happen during COVID and certainly during those diabolical public minutes of the knee on George Floyd's neck, I think there was beginning to be this really mass collective reckoning. I still think it's going on despite the fringe minority pushback against it, which we are seeing in all quarters right now.

Whether it's a pushback against critical race theory or anti-racism education, or now with George DeSantis stopping African American studies in Florida. This fringe is pushing back, but they will not stop it. It has a momentum now, we are in the reckoning. There may be obstacles in there, may be moments to that, but it is happening.

Brian Lehrer: I was going to ask you about that anyway because the title of the book is Reckoning. By the way, if you're just tuning in, my guest is V formerly Eve Ensler. An early reference to the word is in the introduction to your book the context that you were just touching on of your experience during early COVID isolation, which you said gave you time to reckon. Then the next line is America has never been big on reckoning.

It made me wonder, what would a national reckoning look like. You wrote the book and you were on for the book The Apology, which was the apology in the words of your father for the abuse he leveled against you if he had ever given you a proper apology. I'm imagining you could write a book like The Apology, but in the voice of the United States.

V: Thank you for that question, Brian, because I think about it so much. We need a mass devoted reckoning that is across the boards in our schools, in our high schools, in our colleges, in all our institutions. It is so clear to me that any country that is based on, is landed on denial and the oppression of what gave birth to it and allowed it is doomed to repeat everything that happened at the beginning.

If we look at the violence of this country right now, the fact that there are 400 million guns, more guns than people, that we are seeing already in this year, 2023, how many mass shootings, how many police killings of unarmed black people, how many rapes and beatings of women. We are of violent nation. That violence is predicated, in my opinion on a massive denial of who we are and how we came to be. I can only say my own experience. Personally and politically is when we are willing to look at the truth, look at the truth of what we have done to other people, as white people for example, how our lives are made possible and made more privilege because of the past enslavement of other people. How for example my family never dealt with, never dealt with the violence of my father and that disintegrated my family.

It divided us, it splintered us, it put us in all directions. If we look at this country where trauma, every direction is filling people with loneliness, and depression, and fentanyl abuse and we can go on and on. We need to all agree that we need a national psychological political reckoning, and devote the resources to that.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, any fans of V formerly Eve Ensler, want to ask her a question or tell her something you always wanted to tell her after seeing The Vagina Monologues or reading The Apology or anything else, 212-433 WNYC 212-433-9692. The new book called Reckoning. It was after your 2019 appearance here for The Apology that you started going by V, so would you explain the name change to listeners unfamiliar?

V: Yes, happily. It was in writing The Apology, and for those who don't know it I think I waited 31 years for my father to apologize to me in his living, and actually even after he died, I had this imaginary idea that one day I'd go to the mailbox and he'll he'd have sent me an apology from the ethers and that never arrived. Then Me Too happened and all these men were being called out and I kept waiting, waiting, waiting for one man to publicly apologize, and that didn't happen and so I finally decided I would write the apology I needed to hear and say the words to myself that I needed to hear from my father.

That book was an excruciating experience but it was also really really profound and liberating. I finally through writing it came to understand my father, not justify him, not write off his responsibility but understand the mechanics and history that went into him doing the kind of things he did to me. At the end of that book there's a line at the end it's Old Man Be Gone, and I don't know if my father said it or I said it at that point because I feel like we were writing this book together.

He kind of like at the end of Peter Pan, Tinker Bale just goes [unintelligible 00:12:51] into the ethers and so did my father. I realized several months later that for so long I think when we're in this relationship with a perpetrator, particularly if it's your father or somebody who has power over you, they've created a narrative that is your life, and when I wrote that book I ended that narrative. I'm no longer in my father's story, and I don't have rancor or bitterness or rage, any of that, that's all gone. I also knew that names are very powerful, they're signifiers, they're determinants, they really create a light a lot in your life passage.

I knew I could no longer have his name or the name he had given me, so I made a decision to let that name go. I picked V because I love that letter, it's an opening, it's an invitation, it's been a letter that has just run through my life and The Vagina Monologues to ending violence, to voluptuous, to victory. I feel so happy having that name, I make a joke that I'm down to a letter and soon I'll be nothing, but it feels light, it feels light.

Brian Lehrer: I guess you just went there, but to announce the name of the person who abused you makes perfect sense intellectually. How does it feel emotionally, you just used one emotion word happy.

V: You mean in terms of changing my name?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

V: What we all have to remember and sometimes we forget is that we are the architects. We are the writers of the story of our own lives. Very often when violence is done to us or oppression is done to us, somebody else has written our lives, they've determined us by their exploitation or by their oppression or by their violence or by their undoing, or by their terror. I think what I feel for the first time in my life and even though it's late I'm going to be 70 this May, I feel like writing my life.

I'm not in a bell jar, I'm not in anybody's shadow, this is my story and this is my life. I really believe in the significance of names in determining that, Eve was a heavy name to carry. You want to talk about patriarchy, so this feels like an opening. This feels like I'm in the becoming now, and anything is possible.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you one other thing about V, then we're going to take a break and we'll let you and some callers talk to each other. I read the epilogue of the book which is new material called V a Dream Vision of My New Name. I don't know if I'm reading it right, you tell me, but it reads to me like a dream sequence about a community of origin. Maybe we would call it. The V were a vast and humble people, you write, my people prayed with their arms outstretched like a V. In the V community there was no such thing as hierarchy, and later how can we be sure the v ever existed? Would you describe what you hope people will take from the dream vision epilogue?

V: Yes. It's so funny. I was interviewed by this lovely woman the other day. She said is it a metaphor? Is it a prophecy? Is it a dream? I said it's really up to you to decide that. I think we need new stories. Years ago in V-Day the movement that you spoke of earlier we did this exercise at all our V Days. All the productions, The Vagina Monologues where we asked people to imagine a world without violence, and to write pieces about what that world would look like if they woke up in the morning and there was no more violence.

Some people couldn't even imagine it, Brian. They just didn't even have the capacity to imagine it, and some people did. What I know to be true is if we can't imagine a future, we can't go there, because everything we can see in the future, everything we have the prophetic vision of means there's a possibility of moving towards it, and so I think that last piece is my offering of a possible world we could create if we were to direct our intentions, and our hearts, and our resources, and our intellects in that direction.

Often all we're doing and certainly, all I've been doing as an activist working to end violence against women in trans and non-binary people, is I've been fighting against and fighting to stop, rather than going oh wait, wait, wait, we're going to create this other world over here. That's the world we dream of, where we honor people, where we don't have hierarchy. Where a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of the population controls all the wealth, where we actually think that care, and connection, and feeding people.

Making sure all people have healthcare, and that we respect nurses, then we respect farmers, and we can keep going on is the world we want to live in. What does it look like over here that's so attractive, that's so joyful, that's so beautiful, that people want to be over here and not in this world that we're in right now? I think we need many people envisioning that world so that we can begin to give ourselves the possibility of the transformation of where we are now.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with V, formerly Eve Ensler, her new book Reckoning, and you right after this.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with V former Eve Ensler and her new book Reckoning, also I'll mention again she'll be doing a talk and panel and book signing at The 92nd Street Y, Wednesday night at 7:00. Let's take a phone call. Here is Dr. Courtney in Weehawken, you're on WNYC, thank you for calling in.

Dr. Courtney: Hi Brian, thanks for having me talk to you. I just wanted to share I'm the president of the Society for Black Neuropsychology. I've heard you speak with your guests about whether or not they watched the killing of Tyre Nichols and just being able to process that trauma. I wanted to say that it really is traumatic, particularly for people who are within the Black community to see these things happen again and again. Vicarious trauma is real, and so people need to really take care of their mental health and take care of their own well-being. They don't owe anyone to have to watch what's going on, and I appreciate those who have seen it and who have empathized, especially those outside of the Black community who are supporters. I do want to just make sure that people understand that it doesn't make them any less empathetic. It doesn't make them any less supportive if they choose to guard their mental health by not watching this video because it has a profound effect on our minds and our bodies. I want people to be aware of that, take care of that. Even if you did watch it to really process it with someone because even on a subconscious level, it might have an effect on you. I know your guest knows quite a bit about how trauma affects and reverberates throughout your years. I just wanted to make sure that people recognize that.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for that. Would you, with your expertise, professionally on this, have any guidelines for people trying to decide for themselves whether to watch something like this video or not?

Dr. Courtney: Well, one thing that I would recommend is that if you feel like you already have a lot of trauma that you're dealing with, maybe that is something that you would want to avoid. If you feel like you feel very compelled to watch it, I do encourage you to watch it mindfully. By that I mean, as you're watching it, make sure that you're paying attention to yourself and make sure you're paying attention to how you're feeling as you're watching it, so that if you begin to feel nervousness or anxiety or depression in your own psyche, in your own body, you might feel tension in that, it's okay to stop.

It's okay to say, "I'm going to walk away for right now," or maybe walk away and just not continue watching it. That is an absolutely valid option. Again, whether you watch it or not, I do encourage people to really process it with somebody. Talk to someone afterward.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Dr. Courtney. Thank you very much. Please call us again. Bobby in Union City. You're on WNYC with V. Hi, Bobby.

Bobby: Hey, good morning, Brian. Good morning, Eve. Yes, I just wanted to say something really quickly. I think it was in 2005, a friend of mine, my friend Stephanie, was appearing in a production of The Vagina Monologues at a venue called Maxwell's and Hoboken. At the time, my mom was dying of complications from Alzheimer's disease, and I was very moved by the whole production. When my friend Stephanie's scene came on, I think the listeners will know which one it was. It was the one in which it's mentioned all the different names for that part of a woman's body. Everyone in the audience was cracking up laughing, but I was so overcome that I burst into tears.

My mom was a very big influence on me and on a lot of people that knew her. I think the mark of a great work of art, which The Vagina Monologue certainly is, is its ability to bring out emotions in us that we really didn't know we possessed.

Brian Lehrer: V, you want to talk to Bobby?

V: Well, thank you, Bobby. I'm really moved by that story. It's funny the things that speak to people in that play and also speak to people at different times. I really appreciate you sharing that with me. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Bobby, thank you very much. He was talking about people cracking up at that scene. That's one of the things I think that makes you brilliant. If this isn't an inappropriate way to describe it, that you do like sometimes trauma-infused comedy, would you put it that way?

V: Yes. [laughs] I think so. I think one of the ways we survive trauma is through humor. I often lived in that very dark humor place because it's how I got myself out of a lot of the severe sorrow and sadness and depression I was particularly when I was younger. I also want to speak to something Dr. Courtney said, because I think it's so true how we look at that video and how important it is to surround ourselves with people we love and people who can support us, and people who can help us process it. There is no mandate on anybody to need to see it. It isn't proof of strength or anything. I just want to echo that.

Brian Lehrer: Justine in Astoria, you're on WNYC with V. Hi, Justine.

Justine: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I want to tell V that what The Vagina Monologues have meant in my life. I've seen the play three times at very different times in my life. The first was around 1997 and 1998. I was still living as a man back then. The second time was in 2004. I had just started my gender affirmation process. Then the third time was in 2015 when-- was after my surgery. I had been living a few years as a woman. Each time the play meant a lot to me, but for very different reasons.

The funny thing is, the first time I saw it, I think that was just a general reaction I had to the play. I was like, wow someone can do this, but I felt liberated in a weird way. The second time I saw it I think the funny thing was that the part that resonated the most with me then was the part that was added just recently about the woman in the burqa. I was like, wow, she's releasing herself. I'm going to release myself. Then the third time when I saw it, I was feeling happy that I was getting to live the life that I wanted, but the angry vagina resonated the most with me because I thought, wow, I've lived with that.

I had to feel ashamed that I had to hide the vagina that was within me, so to speak. I'm always going to be grateful to V. I want to say one more thing. There are three plays that I carry with me that always means something to me. That's one of them. Another one's at Doll's House by Ibsen. The third one is Shakespeare's Tempest. They all have spoken to different aspects of me. Another thing, the way they're all alike is that I've seen each of them multiple times at different times in my life, and they meant something different to me, but they were all equally important. Like I said, I want to thank V for that, for bringing that into the world for us.

Brian Lehrer: Beautiful, V.

V: That moves me so deeply. Really. Thank you so, so much for sharing that.

Brian Lehrer: Justine. Thank you. Thank you very much. In the book, the very first thing is the quote page that you have from [unintelligible 00:28:00]. The Aruba Poet and Public Intellectual. A quote that ends with a line, "Forgiveness is settling debts, reconciliation is troubling boundaries, forgiveness is settling debts, reconciliation is troubling boundaries." I want to ask you why you started with that, because we were just talking on the show recently about the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission, and how reconciliation has at least two meanings to make up with each other, to reconcile, but also in finance, to reconcile your debts, to balance your books.

The idea of a racial truth and reconciliation commission in the US would have to include that squaring of your debts form of reconciliation. This almost seems like a third meaning, reconciling is troubling boundaries. Why did you open the book with that quote?

V: Because I think that reckoning is a deeper process and a deeper knowing. I think it means going back to where you have closed off parts of yourself in your refusal to take responsibility or to see your historical lineage connection to things where you understand that we are all connected in these processes. Nobody gets off the hook. There's nobody border where you are off the hook, particularly those who have done the oppressing.

I think so much of the times, like now when people say things like, "Why don't you just let it go? Why don't you just move on? Why don't you--?" That is said to many oppressed people, and many oppressed could just forgive and forget it. That is not a possible thing to do when something is dug down deep into your soul and into your DNA and into your heart. The only way we can get through things is by the acknowledgment of things, the recognition that things actually did occur. When I wrote The Apology, I really understood there were four steps in an apology. One of which is looking at who you are and what went into creating you to be the kind of person who was capable of doing what you did. The other is looking at a detailed accounting of what you have done. I look at 1619 for example and the detailed accounting of the story of the history of African Americans in America and slavery.

That detailed accounting is critical for a true reckoning. That is troubling boundaries. That is troubling the spaces that we have put walls up. I think the third piece is then really looking at the short-term and long-term impacts of what that behavior caused or created in another person. Then it's making apology or reparations and transformation, changing your behavior, changing your action. I think there is no possibility of change without a recognition of harms done.

It cannot happen without that reckoning. It cannot happen without the deepening accounting of what you have done or what you've been part of having been done. I think that's what it means if that makes sense.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Obuna in Mount Vernon, you're on WNYC with V, formerly Eve Ensler. Hi, Obuna.

Obuna: Thank you, thank you, thank you, Brian. I just want to comment on her work and with prisoners. What I want my word to do to you. A few years back that she did that all of us really celebrated the power of words, and also her visit to Central Africa with women who had been raped during the Congo conflict. I just want to commend that. It's really wonderful to hear that a person as prominent as V would go to those women in the Congo who had been raped, vulnerable women, and also prisoners. With what I want my word to do to you, I just want to mention that really it's wonderful work that she's done for all of us. Thank you.

V: Thank you so much. I just want to say that in both those cases, when I worked at Bedford Hills for nine years with that extraordinary group of women who were there for violent crimes, who spent eight years in that group wrestling down, doing their reckoning, doing their accounting of looking at who they were and what their lives had been leading up to those acts. Then why they did it and how they did it, and really wrestling with their souls. I'm happy to say, except for one woman, all of those women are out of prison and those that are still living are doing extraordinary things in the world.

In terms of the Congo, it has been my honor. It has been my privilege to have now worked with women in the Congo for over 10 years building the City of Joy that is one of the most extraordinary holy places I've ever been on the earth. It is a sanctuary and a revolutionary center where women come, young women from 14 to 34, who have suffered some of the greatest violence on the planet, and yet they are loved and nurtured and lifted and educated by only Congolese. It's run by Congolese. It's owned by the Congolese. Those women go from being victims to survivors to leaders in their communities and transform everyone in their community when they get home.

Really, both of those experiences were privileges were honors to be led into the stories of women in prison and to be part of their journey to reckoning and freedom. To be in relationship with Christine Schuler Deschryver, who is one of my sisters of my heart in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and work with Dr. [unintelligible 00:34:35] and work with so many extraordinary women at City of Joy. To see women who come in broken and lost and feeling worthless leave in six months blossomed flowers that are leaders in their community. What greater joy? What greater gift is there to be part of that process?

Brian Lehrer: In our last minute, what's going to happen at this 92nd Street Y event on Wednesday night? It looks like you have an all-star panel accompanying you to this book talk and signing.

V: It's going to be an amazing night. My son, Dylan McDermott, Noma Dumezweni, who is one of my favorite actors. Marisa Tomei, who was the first woman who ever agreed to do The Vagina Monologues. Rosario Dawson, who's been in this movement since the beginning and is a board member. Paula Allen, who took pictures for this book and has been my partner in crime for years on the road. We have a surprise guest that I'm not going to tell you about. I think they're going to do readings from the book. We're going to share stories from the book.

I think it's going to be a night of celebration. So many people in that audience have been part of this movement for 25 years. We're still here. We're still in solidarity with each other. We're still building a global sisterhood of women, trans women, and nonbinary people to end this violence. Come and join us. There's still some tickets left. It's going to be a gorgeous night.

Brian Lehrer: I see it's in person and virtual at 7:00 at the 92nd Street Y Wednesday. V, her new book is Reckoning. Thank you so much for joining us today. This was wonderful.

V: Brian, you're the best. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you so much.

 

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