I think I would rather have a pear than an apple
if I were Eve—not that it mattered, because I would be
eternally blamed for the fall of man anyway.
But alimentary preferences aside, I wonder
what this scene would have looked like
if Rubens and Titian had been women.
Once again, I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t sleep. I know it well, and since there is no point in tossing and turning in bed, I got up. Anyway, I’m aware that there are things I need to write about, and this is probably what prevents me from falling asleep again.
First of all, who is this journal written for? This is important because it determines the style and content of all its entries. If the answer is the readers of my blog, where I publish fragments of it, then yesterday’s entry is fully justified. But I don’t think that is the case. I was supposed to be the main focus—my thoughts, ideas, feelings, and dilemmas—all written with myself as the main audience in mind. After all, that is what a journal is all about, isn’t it? With all due respect to the external readers, they are just complementary characters that blend into the background.
And that brings me back to Karen Cinorre’s film. I’ve already seen it, so there is no problem analysing it with all the details I know. Besides, my blog readers could always find the whole plot on the dedicated Wikipedia page.
So, as I see it, apart from the protagonist, the main characters of the film are personifications of the heroine’s feelings after the sexual assault on her: fear, withdrawal, and anger/hatred, with the last one becoming the main driver of the new reality she has fallen into. The island on which the film takes place symbolises her mind, which becomes both a refuge and a prison, and the camps of women all over the island are mental connections with the women victims of sexual abuse all over the world—she hears their voices in many languages brought by the wind and the sound of sea waves.
What brought her to this place were suicidal thoughts, and while on the island, she has to decide whether she will give in to these thoughts or rather find something that will allow her to continue living after what she went through, as well as what feelings will guide her through this rebuilt life. The fact that the director, being a woman, still gave the protagonist’s male friend the privilege of being the beacon that brought the main character back to life shows that men as a gender are not perceived as evil incarnates and that friendship, love, and the most important—life alongside them—are still possible even after such a horrible experience.
This film is cathartic, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to see it. I can’t wait for Karen Cinorre’s next work because she has a very distinctive voice that will not leave you indifferent.
Maybe it is a matter of one’s inner voice being inaccessible to others (perhaps being a man makes me deaf to it), or maybe it’s like those deeply personal rituals that, seen from outside, seem absurd, ridiculous even, but I’m two-thirds through “The Vagina Monologues,” and apart from a very few exceptions, I can’t muster anything more than a shrug.
I really started to wonder where all this hype came from when the book was first published. I guess the real novelty was the title itself—controversial and headline-making. I’ve also never seen Eve Ensler on stage, and I could imagine her performance being crucial to the reception of this text. But beyond that, I can’t help but exclaim that the king (queen, actually) is naked. There are no secrets unravelled, no divine revelations about women. The whole book doesn’t even look like coherent narration. Reading it feels more like going through someone’s random notes on roughly the same topic in a notebook you found left by accident on a bus seat.
I am sure that this book will go down in the annals of history, but more because of what happened around it than because of the text itself. But it won’t be a whole chapter; more like a two-sentence mention, a short paragraph at most. And I don’t say this out of malice. This text simply doesn’t have enough weight to deserve more. If I’m in the mood for real heavyweight feminist writing, all I have to do is reach for something by Germaine Greer or Susan Faludi from my bookshelf.
As a side note, I will mention that after I finished Gloria Steinem’s foreword to “The Vagina Monologues” and the introduction by the author herself, the idea of my own monologues came to me. You can find them in the following texts:
hidden pilcrow 