AUGUST 3 2019 LISTENER 27
T
he book couldn’t be more excruciat-
ingly personal. But we’re in the age
of the Me Too movement. It’s also
highly political. “Part of it is feeling that
we’re stuck. We’re really at stalemate.
We’ve called men out, we’ve broken the
silence, we’ve told our stories, la-la-la. And
men are not changing. Men are not taking
responsibility.” The big taboo this book
breaks, she says, is that it has a man apolo-
gising. “Men do not apologise. Honestly,when have we heard one? When have we
heard a man apologise publicly in a thor-
ough, personal and detailed accounting? I
can’t think of any.”
Inevitably, Donald Trump comes up.
Her description of him is best not printed
here. “Is he as despised in New Zealand
as he is everywhere?” she wonders. You
would hope so. Perhaps she could write
his apology.
Ensler is a phenomenon, a one-woman
consciousness-raising industry. She’s
already working on making The Apology
into a play and translating it into activism.
Her website for the book outlines typically
monumental goals: “How do we offer a
doorway rather than a locked cell? How do
we move from humiliation to revelation,
from curtailing behaviour to changing
it?” The idea is to form apology groups.
“People come together and start talking
about going through a process: detailed
accounting, what was my intention, how
did I get here? Then, hopefully, next year,communities can write their apologies and
they can perform them on V-Day.”
But will men read it? “Men are reading
it and I’m getting such amazing letters
saying, ‘Thank you, this is changing my
consciousness.’ Is it 95% of the popula-
tion? No, it’s not. But it’s a beginning.”
Certainly, women have done all the
work in this area. In The Apology, she’s
throwing the responsibility back on the
man, her father. “Yeah, which I did forhim,” she says, laughing. Oh, well, baby
steps. “But, hey, someone said the other
day the book was heroic ventriloquism.
That sounds about right.”
Ventriloquism, heroic or otherwise,
isn’t easy. “Oh my god, right? Figuring out
what you need to hear. Really going inside
and saying what would set you free? What
would make it right?”
So, has she been set free? Has it been
made right? “At the end of the book, when
I said ... when he said ... I don’t know who
says, ‘Old man be gone,’ it was as if he
were a dot in the cosmos and he just went,
he was sucked back into it. It was just, like,
swoosh.” She makes the sound of an email
when you press send. “He’s gone. It’s been
months now. Honestly, he hasn’t been
back. And the ways that I was tortured by
him really seem to have subsided.”
So, where is he? “Now?” Long pause.
“I’d like to believe that he is on his way
to a higher consciousness.” For her, the
book was also something of a spiritualencounter. “I think it was a joint project.
It was like, okay, I guess we’re doing this
together.” Even her vocabulary changed.
“I’m not formal like that. There are words
such as ‘crepuscular’. It’s not my style. Is it
that he just so deeply lives inside me and
has for so long? Or is there some other
kind of presence in the mystical realm?
I can’t figure it out.” Well, the past is
never really safely back there somewhere.
“Exactly. Which is why we have to clean
it up.”
He’s gone. That absence
might take some adjusting
to. “Oh, I have to tell you,
it’s very discombobulating.
I think survivors of any-
thing, those things are the
frame of our life, our identi-
ties, to some degree. So, it’s
very odd to suddenly be
in this place where I don’t
know who I am.”
Being lost isn’t a bad
thing. “I’m beginning to
understand how vio-
lence and this whole
paradigmatic structure
limit women’s abilities to
be other things. If that’s the
story you’re in, that’s the
cage you have to wrestle
with. But there are so many other stories
that you could be out there being a part of
or creating. The depth of the occupation is
what’s becoming very clear to me, feeling
the release from it.”
After the book, she says, things
changed. “I was suddenly overcome with
people wanting to do new projects and
none of them were about violence against
women. Everything was completely new.
It’s not that I won’t always be concerned
about violence against women. My life
is for that. But it’s not the only story I’m
telling any more.”
No one’s been let off the hook. Ensler
leaves her father trapped in the cage of
the story he made, spinning out there
somewhere. “But
he’s not controlling
the narrative any
more. I’m not his
victim and he’s not
my predator.” She’s
pressed send. Swoosh,
he’s gone. lGE
TTY (^) I
MA
GE
S
THE APOLOGY, by Eve
Ensler (Bloomsbury, $39.99).
A one-woman consciousness-raising industry: from left, Ensler performing The Vagina Monologues;
with Jane Fonda during V-Day; with Meryl Streep and Afghan women’s rights activist Sahar Saba.