V-World
an article by Eve EnslerI currently reside in the land of violence. I have lived here all my life. I cannot even determine all the ways I have been shaped by this country and the ways of this country, as it is the only country or place I have ever known.
Part of the problem of attempting to imagine another place, another way of being, another culture is that the culture of violence is now rooted in my cells, in my DNA. It has actually impacted my ability to imagine because violence has a deadly and distorting effect on the imagination. It creates hard impenetrable walls where there should be doorways and it creates despair where there could be great possibility.
I say this of course as a person who has never lived in another country, as a person who has never actually seen another country anywhere in the world that is not a land of violence. I say this as a person, as a woman who was been shaped by violence from the moment of consciousness. As a daughter whose father was an emotional terrorist-who threatened my existence through his fist or hand or whip or voice or money for most of the developing years of my life.
I say this as a woman who did not stop tiptoeing around my own apartment until late into my thirties for fear of waking up the sleeping monster, who might then beat me arbitrarily or lock me up.
I say this as a woman who lost the ability to say no and so for the first half of my life was a witness as my own body was taken many times against my deepest wishes. I say this as a woman who has struggled for most of my life not to lose my mind, not to self-destruct as the violence has now become part of my own interior mental and spiritual landscape working overtime against my own being.
I say this as a woman who has witnessed the consequences of violence in every region of the world--in small villages and massive cities. I see how women, like poisoned trees, have grown with crooked trunks and missing limbs.
So what is it that would allow for the possibility of imagining a world without violence, of conjuring V-world, of being so grandiose, so naive, so ridiculous to think such a world could come to be?
Maybe it is the extremity, the terrain of extremity that violence creates that would allow or even demand such a leap. Maybe it is the sense of urgency and madness that pulses through everything, every muscle each time the veil of denial is lifted and one is confronted with the possibility of nerve gas, anthrax, mass rape, nuclear war, environmental collapse, or annihilation.
Maybe it is the ravings of a mind permanently shattered by too much violence and now it simply clings like a mute child to a blind idealistic place in order to survive. Maybe it is the desire to break out of the familiar prison that violence has created, to actually confront my own fear of intimacy, goodness, love.
Whatever it is, I believe that a world without violence is possible. I am not talking about a world where there is no anger or passion or intensity or conflict or pain. I am talking about a world where there is no murder, no rape, no brutality. I am talking about actually being willing to enter V-world, where we separate from the known and comfortable paradigm and trust we will survive the vastness and mystery of the new. I am talking about putting down the guns, fists, knives, threats, loud voices and weapons of mass destruction and living, all of us, in the wild vulnerability.
I believe V-world is possible because I have seen signs of it again and again in what has leaked through the violence, in what has miraculously and outrageously survived. How in spite of this poisoning of women's bodies they manage to keep producing edible fruit and holding up their branches.
V-world is a longing and it is remembering. It is in the center of us and it is round as much as we are bent on flattening it. V-world is what is 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 girl suicide bomber who turned back. It is the dresses the young girls from Srebrenica wore and the way they fixed their hair to go to hear about their men even though they knew they had all been murdered.
V-world is the utter gentleness I saw on the aged faces of those who had been comfort women during World War II, when they were raped for two years, twelve hours a day by Japanese soldiers. It's the one egg the starving Bosnian woman gave me as a present when I was leaving. It's 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 checkpoint that made the Israeli soldier laugh and accidentally lower the gun he had pointed in her face. It's the video camera the Afghan woman in the stadium hid under her burqa in order to document the execution of a woman 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 her city. It's a state of mind. V-world is the empty breasts she kept offering the baby who sucked and sucked knee deep in mud in the Afghan refugee camp.
V-world is the garden where the missing girls appear. Their mothers and fathers are waiting there. V-world is the clitoral cut that didn't 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 the elephants and lions and eagles who grew back because we made space for them. It's the breath we finally took. It is the armor we finally took off.
V-world is borderless and groundless. There is nothing to defend. No beginning, no end.
Eve Ensler
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