of rape and recovery. the healing voice of "the vagina monolgues'

 Reading this interview made me realise that  Indian society needs something more important than calls for  capital punishment .  Healing !   

The healing of the victims of rapes. Rapes that continued around the country even as the young woman lay dying. And died. Died,one hopes.not in vain. 

Eve Ensler: I've been in the Congo for the last five years. I went there at the invitation of a doctor named Dr Denis Mukwege who is the director of a hospital called the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, DRC. I went there because I had heard him talk about the horrific atrocities that were being committed against women's bodies and against people in the Congo. Six million people have died there in the last 13 years, and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of women have been raped and tortured. I went there for the first time five years ago and spent weeks interviewing women and listening to the stories, and to be honest I was utterly shattered.

i've been in many war zones and I've travelled the rape mines of the world, from Afghanistan to Haiti to Bosnia to many terrible situations, but I have to tell you, nothing compared to what I met in the Congo. The rape of babies, the rape of little girls, gang rapes, the destruction of babies inside women's wombs, the use of all kinds of terrible implements inside women, and all or mostly in the name of getting minerals from mines, because once you destroy a family by raping a wife in front of a husband or forcing a husband to rape a daughter or a son to rape a mother, you destroy the infrastructure of the family, the family is split apart, the people flee the village and the militias come and take over the mines.

Eve Ensler: Me too. I should have said that my favourite kind of theatre is the theatre where people tell stories. I was saying this to a class I did today at the Sydney Theatre Company, we did a class on monologues and I was saying that my experience of the world is that the 99% live invisibly, live with unspoken, untold stories because the dominant narrative is the narrative of the rich and the narrative of those that control the media and control the culture.

So most people on the planet have not only never told their story but they've never seen or heard their story in the dominant culture. I think when people begin to tell their stories, everything changes, because not only are you legitimised in the telling of your story and are you found, literally, like you matter, you exist in the telling of your story, but when you hear your story be told, you suddenly exist in community and with others.

Michael Cathcart: Eve, you've chosen to live in the presence of terrible suffering, terrible abuse. How do you maintain this joy?

Eve Ensler: That's a good question. Well, let me see if I can describe it…you know, I think for so many people we're taught that if we don't feel our pain and we don't talk about our secrets and we don't tell our story and we don't feel our sorrow, we'll be fine. The exact opposite is actually true, that the more you repress, the more depressed you are, the more you deny, the less energy you have.

Yes, I do live in the face of enormous suffering, but I also live in the face of enormous joy, where people are changing and transforming their suffering. I have the privilege of travelling the world and spending time with the fiercest most revolutionary women on the planet, women we call vagina warriors, who have literally taken this horrible thing that's been done to them and transformed it into devotion and service and action and theatre.

And I get to be in the presence of those women, whether it's Agnes Pareyio in Kenya who is stopping female genital mutilation, or Rada Boric in Zagreb who is one of the great feminist leaders, or Christine Schuler Deschryver who is leading the City of Joy, or Zoya in Afghanistan who's a young revolutionary whose mother was the greatest revolutionary, I get to know all these women, I get to be in their presence, I get to be fuelled by their energy.

And I think for me, happiness is crucial, but I think we think that happiness comes from amassing goods and getting things and being loved and being successful, when in fact my experience of happiness comes when you give everything away, when you serve people, when you're watching something you do make somebody happy, that's when happiness happens.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandartsdaily/eve-ensler-on-art-and-activism/4392232