Eve Ensler: Bald, Brave and Beautiful

Bald, brave and beautiful: Those words
can't begin to capture the remarkable Eve Ensler. She sat down with me
last week, in the midst of her battle with uterine cancer, to talk about
New Orleans and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Eve, the author of
the hit play "The Vagina Monologues" and the creator of V-Day, a global
activist movement to stop violence against women and girls, told me how
"cancer has been a huge gift."

Eve's moving essay "Congo Cancer" begins,
"Some people may think that being diagnosed with uterine cancer,
followed by extensive surgery that led to a month of debilitating
infections, rounded off by months of chemotherapy, might get a girl
down. But, in truth, this has not been my poison." The poison, she went
on, was the epidemic of rape, torture and violence against women and
girls in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Eve wrote "The Vagina Monologues" in 1996
as a celebration of women's bodies and women's empowerment. "When I did
the play initially," she told me, "everywhere I went on the planet,
women would literally line up after the show ... 90 to 95 percent of the
women were lining up to tell me how they had been raped or battered or
incested or abused. ... I had no idea that one out of three women on the
planet will be raped or beaten in their lifetime. Suddenly this door
opened for me."

Eve began producing the play to raise funds
for rape crisis hot lines and women's organizations across the U.S. "We
came up with this idea of V-Day," she told me, "which was Ending
Violence Day, Vagina Day-reclaiming Valentine's Day as a day of kindness
and good will to women. ... We are now in 130 countries. Last year,
there were 5,000 events in 1,500 or 1,600 places. It's raised close to
$80 million, that has all gone into local communities."

The V-Day movement brought Eve to some of
the most desperate places on earth-Haiti, the Democratic Republic of
Congo and post-Katrina New Orleans. She spent a year with women in New
Orleans, compiling their descriptions of their lives and the impact of
Hurricane Katrina into a series of monologues. It's called "Swimming
Upstream." Unbelievably, in the middle of her chemotherapy, Eve is
directing two special performances in mid-September, in New Orleans and
at the Apollo Theater in Harlem,

Eastern Congo, a war-ravaged region of the world's most impoverished
country, is where Eve and V-Day have been devoting most of their recent
efforts. Since 1996, hundreds of thousands of women and girls have been
raped in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, victims of what V-Day
calls femicide. Last month, Rwandan and Congolese rebels took over
villages in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and gang-raped
almost 200 women and five young boys. The rapes occurred between July 30
and Aug. 3 within miles of a U.N. peacekeeping base, and went
unreported for three weeks.

These rapes are brutal, leaving the victims
with deep wounds and fistulae that require surgery. V-Day has been
working with Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, the only facility in the region
where the women can receive adequate treatment. V-Day is also building a
woman-controlled safe zone attached to the hospital called "The City of
Joy."

Eve said the women themselves developed the
plans for the City of Joy, "a place where they could heal, where they
could be trained, where they could become leaders, where they had time
and a respite to rebuild themselves and redirect their energies towards
their communities." If all goes well with her own treatment, she will be
joining them to open the City of Joy in February.

The work, Eve told me, defines what she calls a "kind of three-way V between Haiti, the Congo and New Orleans."

With a scarf on her head, having lost her
hair during cancer treatments, she was days away from starting her
fourth round of chemotherapy. I asked her how she does it.

"The women of Congo saved my life," she
said. "Every day I get up, and I think to myself, I can keep going. If a
woman in Congo gets up this morning after she's had her insides
eviscerated, what problem do I really have? And I think of how they
dance. Every time I go to the Congo, they dance and they sing and they
keep going, in spite of being forgotten and forsaken by the world. And I
think to myself, I have to get better. I have to live to see the day
when the women of Congo are free, because if those women are free, women
throughout the world will be free and will get to continue."

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.