Vaginas

In The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler emphasizes women’s’ empowerment and feminism and takes advantage of society’s perspective on the female form. Even today the word “vagina” is more difficult to say or think about than the word “penis”. For example, starting on page 25, Ensler interviews a woman that was so hesitant to tell her story of embarrassing bodily functions, strange dreams, and eventually cancer that at the end she says, “You happy? You made me talk…You got an old lady to talk about her down-there.” She purposely makes us uncomfortable but in this case, it is the only way to capture an audience to address these pressing issues. There is a social modesty that she confronts to not only celebrate femininity but also to identify that there is a brick wall between modesty and reality.

Although Ensler wants to help, and does help, women be proud of the secret they keep between their legs, she works hard to help Bosnian women, the homeless, any woman in need as well, however, The Vagina Monologues focused more on the emotional aspects of talking about menstruation instead of victims of sexual and violent crimes. She didn’t balance the two and the way she organized the interviews and her experiences made the book lean towards meaningful sex and embarrassing stories about puberty.

I cannot relate to this book. I am not as liberal as she is in that I do not feel a need to take workshops or personifying a sexual organ. I agree with very few of her liberating ideas but her work with sexually and physically abused women was a vital topic to address and should not be left in humor’s shadow.

Night Women

“Night Women” is a story of a young woman who does whatever it takes to take care of her son even if it means prostitution. She works in close vicinity to her son’s bed but there is no other choice. The, “…innocent fabric that splits our one-room house into two spaces, two mats, two worlds” is not just a matter of a very short distance between her and her son but also the impassable line between her own personal hell and the good times she used to have with her husband and son without strange men she finds on the streets. Ironically, one of her clients gave him a radio to deafen the sounds coming from the other side of the fabric and he is given the scarf she uses during the day to sleep with as if it is a security blanket.

She notices that as he sleeps, a firefly approaches him as if it is a light to show him the way out of there but it avoids her as if there is no chance. Then she worries if that firefly is actually a blood sucking mosquito that leaves marks on his face, “as though he had spent the whole night kissing a woman with wide-open flesh wounds on her face” – just like her. She uses the butterfly metaphor to describe him as delicate and vulnerable in a very dangerous world he still has not figured out yet.

Her guilt is overwhelming her more and more everyday like a dam that is about to burst. She knows he will find our what she does soon. She lies already that the men he has walked in on were just a dream and that she wears make up at night because she is expecting divine symbols who expect her to be attractive. Her life is like her job: beautiful on the outside but empty and dark on the inside.

Missing Peace

In the couple of days that this story takes place, Lamort is confronted with issues she has been plague by her entire life. The theme of posterity is evident throughout the story. Lamort’s mother died while giving birth to her but her grandmother resents her for it and when Emilie is introduced, not as a typical journalist, but a writer for posterity, her grandmother seems to find it irrelevant and trivial. Lamort asked her grandmother what she said to Emilie and she responded, “That I already have posterity. I was once a baby and now I am an old woman. That is posterity.” Her grandmother may think it is a trifling issue or something that should be ignored, but to Lamort and Emilie who are both looking for something of their deceased mothers, posterity is all that matters. This makes a womanly bond between Lamort and Emilie. Emilie points out that, “they say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother…you, child, were born a woman.” Lamort could have found this by becoming a mother just in the beginning with Raymond but she would not have found (the missing…) peace. This is evident in the first few pages when Raymond says, “I know I can make you feel like a woman…so why don’t you let me?” but Lamort responds, “My grandmother says I can have babies”. He then has her remember the password so she could trust him as if they were a man and a woman but the password “peace” changes leaving Lamort to become a woman for herself.

After the confrontation with Toto and Raymond, Lamort and Emilie walk home disappointed. Emilie wants to write down their names but Lamort reluctantly quotes her grandmother, “’Wehave already had posterity,’ I said. ‘When?’ ‘We were babies and we grew old.’” The next morning, after Lamort gives her Toto and Raymond’s names, Emilie writes them down on the back of a photo of her mother and gives it to her – “…for posterity”. This photo, which is the physical form of posterity in the story, finally gives Lamort the strength to confront her grandmother and have her change her name from Lamort, to her mother’s, Marie Magdalene.

Jerusalem

Naomii Shihab Nye is obviously very anti-war. She knows that it doesn’t matter who was there first or who was oppressed more. She is talking not only about how nonsensical war is but also how infectious it can be. Her father has a scar from his childhood because a friend threw a rock at him instead of at a bird. The violence made a soft spot that could not filled but…“the boy who has fallen stands up”. When she wrote, “Soldiers stalk a pharmacy:/big guns, little pills/If you tilt your head just slightly it’s ridiculous” she means that you don’t have to change your perspective to see how unreasonable people are being. It doesn’t matter what is happening now as much as ending all the violence now. In my opinion, this poem is a little bit hypocritical because she says “A child’s poem says,/’I don’t like wars,/ they end up with monuments’….Why are we so monumentally slow?...It’s late but everything comes next.” She wants things to change but she herself is not actively doing anything. She is the child in that verse but children can’t end wars they just complain about them. However, every writers writes for a reason and she obviously has very strong opinions on this topic to spread it through a whole book of poems.