{"product_id":"insecure-at-last-isbn-9780812973662","title":"Insecure at Last","description":"“Why has all this focus on security made me feel so much more insecure? Nothing is secure. And this is the good news. But only if you are not seeking security as the point of your life.”–Eve Ensler\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen her stage play \u003ci\u003eThe Vagina Monologues\u003c\/i\u003e became a runaway hit and an international sensation, Eve Ensler emerged as a powerful voice and champion for women everywhere. Now the brilliant playwright gives us her first major work written exclusively for the printed page. Insecure at Last is a timely and urgent look at our security-obsessed world, the drastic measures taken to keep us safe, and how we can truly experience freedom by letting go of the deceptive notion of vigilant “protection.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEnsler draws on personal experiences and candid interviews with burka-clad women in Afghanistan; female prisoners in upstate New York; survivors at the Superdome after Katrina; and anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan–sharing unforgettable snapshots that chronicle a post-9\/11 existence in which hyped obsession for safety and security has undermined our humanity. The us-versus-them mentality, Ensler explains, has closed our minds and hardened our compassionate hearts. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eProvocative, illuminating, inspiring, and boldly envisioned, Insecure at Last challenges us to reconsider what it means to be free, to discover that our strength is not born out of that which protects us. Ensler offers us the opportunity to reevaluate our everyday lives, expose our vulnerability, and, in doing so, experience true freedom and fulfillment.Eve Ensler is an internationally acclaimed playwright whose previous works for the stage include \u003ci\u003eFloating Rhoda and the Glue Man\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLemonade\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eNecessary Targets, The Vagina Monologues\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Good Body\u003c\/i\u003e. Ensler is the founder and artistic director of V-Day (\u003cu\u003ewww.vday.org\u003c\/u\u003e), the global movement to end violence against women and girls that was inspired by \u003ci\u003eThe Vagina Monologues\u003c\/i\u003e. In eight years V-Day has raised more than $35 million for grassroots groups around the world. Eve Ensler lives in New York City.I\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    DRAWN TO   WHAT I FEARED   THE MOST\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e      THE FIRST MELTING\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e       It is difficult to determine where any journey really begins. From a very  young age, I was suspicious of the promise of security. Walt Disney  cartoons and Father Knows Best gave me enormous anxiety. I sensed an  underworld that was not being expressed, and the absence of it made me  nervous. As a teenager I read two books over and over: Hiroshima and Death  Be Not Proud. In the first, John Hersey documents individual accounts of  those who survived the first nuclear attack. I remember melting flesh,  bookcases crushing an older Japanese man, radiation sickness, hair falling  out. In the other book, John Gunther’s son gradually and nobly dies of a  brain tumor. I do not know which I feared more, nuclear annihilation or a  massive tumor in my brain.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I remember when I became afraid of the dark. It was after I watched the  movie The Invisible Man on television. There was something about Claude  Rains unwrapping his bandages and revealing that underneath there was  nothing, he was nothing. I vomited the whole night. I still feel nauseous  thinking about it. The idea of becoming nothing, that we were made of  nothing, the dissolution of self, of ego, was then my greatest fear. It  was my introduction to death.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The possibility of tumors, disappearance, annihilation, circled my  childhood, but it wasn’t until I traveled to a war zone in my early  thirties that the abstraction of insecurity became a reality. In spite of  even my very difficult childhood, I still lived in a comfortable  environment. I had a cozy house on a white middle-class street in the USA.  There were no air raids. No curfews. There were no bombs dropping around  me. There was no one dragging my mother or sister out to be murdered or  raped.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Sometime in 1993 I was walking down a street in Manhattan when I was  seized by a photograph on the cover of Newsday—six young Bosnian girls who  had just been returned from a rape. A rape camp. A place where soldiers  held kidnapped women to serve and pleasure them. A rape camp in 1993. It  seemed utterly surreal and impossible. Yet the faces of the girls who had  survived indicated the seriousness and reality of the situation. There was  something about the anger in their faces, and the shock. There was  something about the disassociation and the loss. These girls entered me.  Or perhaps they already lived inside me. I knew I had to go and be with  them. I didn’t really know how or why. I knew I had to go and hear their  stories. I had to know the details of what happened to them. I had to be  close, to touch them, hear them, smell them, know them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      “They took my sixty-year-old mother and my sixty-eight-year-old father  outside. These Chetniks, these boy soldiers who grew up with us, went to  primary school with us. They were our neighbors, our close friends. They  took my father first and made him stand in the center of our lawn. They  were holding guns to his head. Then they casually began to throw stones,  big stones, at him, pelting him in his head, his neck, his knees, his  groin, as he stood helpless and very confused before us—before me, my  mother, our other relatives. He was bruised and bleeding and exposed and  they wouldn’t stop.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I was sitting in a metal chair in a circle of women,   all smoking and drinking thick black coffee from tiny   cups, in a makeshift doctor’s office in a refugee camp out-  side Zagreb, Croatia. I was listening to a thirty-year-old woman  “doctress” (as my translator called her) describe her recent nightmare  experiences in Bosnia. It was the summer of 1994. I had gone to Croatia  for two months to interview Bosnian refugees.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Then they took my mother and poured gasoline around her feet. For three  hours they lit matches and held them as close to the gasoline as they  possibly could. My mother turned pure white. It was very cold outside.  There was nothing we could do. Three hours they tortured her like this.  Then she started screaming. She was so courageous, my mother. She ripped  her shirt open and screamed, ‘Go ahead, you Chetniks. Kill me. Kill me. I  am not afraid of you, not afraid to die. I am not afraid. Kill me. Kill  me.’ ”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The group of refugees around me seemed to have stopped breathing or moving  as they listened to this story. Except for their eyes, which filled up or  fluttered reflexively from pain.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I heard myself asking reporter-like questions in a strange reporter-like  voice, a voice that implied I had seen all this, it wasn’t new, just  another war story. I asked questions like “How do you explain your  neighbors turning against you like that?” “Did you ever worry about being  a Muslim before the war?” I asked these questions from behind this newly  developed persona as if it were a secret shield, a point of logic, a place  of safety. I was suddenly a “professional.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “After I had finally escaped and gotten here, I heard our village was safe  again. The U.N. raided the concentration camp and my father was released.  I began to get a glimmer of hope. Then the real horror happened. The  Chetniks invaded my village. They were wild, insane. They butchered every  member of my family with machetes. My mother and father were found, their  limbs spread out all over our lawn.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I listened to the doctress’s words and I felt the loss   of gravity. Something caved in. Logic. Safety. Order. Ground. I didn’t  want to cry. Professionals didn’t   cry. Professionals asked questions and transcribed answers. Playwrights  see people as characters. She is a doctor character. She is a strong  resilient traumatized woman character. I choked back my tears. I bore down  on the parts of my body where shakes were leaking out.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      During my first ten days in Zagreb, I slept on a couch in the Center for  Women War Victims. This was a remarkable place. Originally it had been  created to serve Croatian, Muslim, Serbian women refugees who’d been raped  in the war. Over three years it had evolved to serve more than five  hundred refugee women who had been not only raped but shattered and made  homeless by the war.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Most of the women who worked there were refu-  gees themselves. They ran support groups, provided emergency aid: food,  toiletries, medication, toys, et cetera. They helped women find  employment, affordable medical treatment, schools for their children.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In those first ten days, I spent between five and eight hours a day  interviewing women refugees in support groups in city centers, desolate  refugee camps, and local cafés. I interviewed mothers, widows,  grandmothers, lawyers, doctors, professors, farmers, teenagers. I heard  stories of atrocities and cruelty. I met a country of women dressed in  black: black silk blouses, black cotton skirts, black lycra T-shirts. The  courage, community, kindness, and miraculous sense of forgiveness I  witnessed on the part of these war victims threw me into moral chaos and  deep questioning.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In all these interviews either I was filled with an overwhelming desire to  rescue the women or I tried to maintain this “professional playwright”  position. I was observing these women as characters, hearing their stories  as potential plays, measuring the drama in terms of beats and momentum.  This approach made me seem cold, impervious, superior. Both postures were  attempts at maintaining a distance and, more important, maintaining my  security.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Thousands of journalists had already passed through these women’s lives.  They had visited for a day, a week at most. The women felt invaded,  robbed, ripped off. The reporters were interested only in the most  sensationalistic aspects of these women’s lives—the gang rapes, the rape  camps. One journalist had actually sent a fax (these were still the days  of faxes) saying, “Get me one raped woman, preferably gang raped,  preferably English speaking.” The women had taped the fax to the bulletin  board as evidence and a warning.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was a great honor and privilege that the refugee workers had brought me  into the camps, allowed me to be in their most intimate groups. They had  even, at times, focused their groups around my being there.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I felt I had not honored my end of the contract. I realized that if I  wasn’t “saving” these women—offering solutions—or transforming them into  literary substance, I had no idea what to do. My ways of relating were  hierarchical, one-sided, based on me perceiving myself as a healer, a  problem solver. All of this was based on a desperate and hidden need to  control—to protect myself from too much loss, chaos, pain, cruelty, and  insanity. My need to analyze, interpret, even create art out of these war  atrocities stemmed from my real inability to be with people, to be with  their suffering, to listen, to feel, to be lost in the mess.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On the tenth day in Zagreb, a woman who worked at the center generously  offered me her apartment for the weekend. I was actually terrified. It  would be the first time I’d be alone since my arrival in Croatia,   the first time I’d be able to digest the stories and atrocities.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In all my years as an activist—working in desolate shelters for homeless  women, tying myself to fences to prevent nuclear war, sleeping in city  parks in women’s peace camps with rain and rats, camping on a windy Nevada  nuclear-test site in radioactive dust—I had never   felt so lonely. I called the States. I reached answering machines in place  of loved ones. I paced the little apartment. I tried to read but was  unable to concentrate. I lay down on the bed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My heart was breaking from the inside like an organism giving birth to  itself, to the stories of itself: the lit cigarettes almost put through  the soldier’s wife’s eyeballs so “she could always see clearly,” the  decapitated heads of her old parents, the fifteen-year-old girl raped by  her soldier husband and his soldier friends in the car, the hand grenades  he stored in their house, the pistol they put in her three-month-old  baby’s little hand as a game, the food they didn’t serve the Muslim girl’s  mother, who had decided to give birth to the baby of the Serb who raped  her, the Canadian uncle who attempted to molest his fourteen-year-old  niece who had fled to him from Sarajevo for safety, the dirty stained  clothes that arrived in the bandaged boxes of humanitarian aid that the  refugee women were supposed to   be grateful for, the broken toys, the generic ammonia-smelling body soap,  the husband and son she last saw two years ago digging the graves of  friends and relatives in their village under orders from Serbs, the  waiting, her twisted waiting face, the big fang-exposed German shepherd  that the Chetniks held right near the little babies’ faces in her living  room as he forced the Muslim doctress to suck his dirty dick while her  mother was forced to prepare his dinner, the window the twelve-year-old  girl jumped out of eight stories high because she couldn’t comprehend how  her best friends from high school, her friends from the disco, had turned  so quickly against them with knives, guns, fire, and insults, the cows  they burned with bombs and left starving, the family cows.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Tears broke out of my eyes like glass cutting flesh, breaking me, breaking  through my craving for definition, authority, fame, somebodyhood, breaking  all that into little tiny pieces that became nothing I could identify,  nothing that resembled me or the matter of me. Me was lost. There was just  melting. Bandages unwrapping. Me becoming invisible.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It wasn’t the cruelty that broke my heart. Cruelty is boring, generic.  What hurt in my chest was witnessing the unsuspecting nature of the women,  how unprepared they were, how shocked and disbelieving. What hurt was  feeling love for these lost women who sat around a wobbly refugee table.  The woman who clung to her one plastic bag or made sweet pastry in what  was now her kitchen, bedroom, living room, bathroom, all in one. Made  pastry for me, a stranger. The woman who kept smiling with missing teeth,  who gave strength to the woman next to her, who smoked cigarettes and  smoothed her skirt or apologized for her messy hair. What hurt was that  their life was over. What hurt was that they kept going.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      After this experience, my journey was transformed. I began to re-perceive  the nature of my interviews, the nature of interviews in general. I began  to see these encounters as sacred social contracts. I, the interviewer,  could not simply take stories, events, feelings from my subjects. I could  not sit there icy and objective, absorbing. I had to be present. I had to  be in dialogue. I had to be insecure. I could no longer protect myself,  stand outside the stories I was hearing. I had to allow myself to feel the  sadness, torture, fear, loss, and particularly the courage and strength of  the women I was meeting. War was not natural. I would never be comfortable  with   atrocity and cruelty. I found myself crying often during the interviews. I  felt little, helpless. I experienced aspects of myself—defenses,  identities, approaches—dying away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I changed continents. I changed clothes. I went from a tiny village on the  Adriatic where I visited Croatian refugees to the hot dusty Asian  landscape of Pakistan, where I was covered in purple Indian cotton, the  traditional salwar kameez. I was there to visit a group of Bosnian  refugees who were living in dreadful circumstances. This particular group  of Muslim men and women had previously lived in a hostel in Croatia. There  they had been offered the choice of being moved either to a dangerous and  overcrowded Muslim refugee camp close to the Serbian border or to  Pakistan, where, they were promised, they could begin a new life of  “bungalows, swimming pools, and jobs.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    So about five hundred of them had come to Rawal-  pindi, Pakistan. The reality they found could hardly have been further  from what had been promised. The temperature was 120 degrees Fahrenheit  and higher during monsoon rainstorms. Initially they had to live thirteen  people to a room. Malaria was rampant, as were diseases from the water and  food.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The culture was radically different from their own. The majority of these  Bosnians were Muslim, but they were more modern and Westernized than they  were religious. Suddenly they were in a fundamentalist Islamic country.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Because their Pakistani hosts were offering them even more than they  offered most of their own citizens, more than most countries had offered  them anywhere in the world, the Bosnians felt guilty not feeling more  grateful. They spent their days waiting—waiting for the weather to cool  off, waiting to get out of Pakistan (those that were waiting for entry  into America had been waiting the longest), waiting for news of their  hometown, waiting for the nightmares to pass, waiting.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Each day I would sit with these refugees for many hours in a saunalike  room; we would form a huge circle and the people would tell their stories.  Everyone was sick in some way, everyone deeply traumatized from the  horrific events they had suffered in the war. And yet, there was great  humor, generosity, and community.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    During my last days there, I became very ill with some kind of flu. The  Bosnians overwhelmed me with kindness, offering me homemade remedies and  soups. There was this particular little bottle of nose drops that had  clearly passed through the entire community. When they offered it to me, I  felt I was undergoing a rite of passage. Now I was infected with refugee  illness, with a tiny bit of their suffering.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I had a fever and my nose was running. I felt all my defenses and  protection had been washed away, and that didn’t seem to matter anymore. I  sat on a mattress in a 120-degree room while an older woman with shaking  hands was telling her story.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “They came, a group of them, into our neighborhood. They took my first  neighbor, my best friend, into the street. There were fifteen soldiers.  There in front of her husband and children and neighbors they raped her  one after the other until all fifteen had raped her. They did this in  front of all of us. They did it to teach us a lesson.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Please, tell people in America what happened here. We want them to know  what happened here. We do not understand how they have abandoned us.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I asked her then, “Tell me, were they successful? Did the Serbs make the  Muslims feel bad about being Muslim? Did they take their dignity and  self-esteem?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No,” she said. “No. Not. They raped many women. Twenty-two thousand  women. They did not take our dignity though. They did not touch it. The  women who were raped did not lose their dignity. What they lost was their  minds.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I looked around and I realized a lot of us were crying, sweating, melting.  In that moment I loved these Bosnians completely. I loved their stove-made  bread and their meat-filled peppers that they cooked for us each day in  the heat. I loved that they had survived and their hearts were intact and  their kindness was so deeply present even now after everything. We got  lost in each other’s arms, we grieved their losses. We raged at the  cruelty they had suffered. And in the center of this weeping, in the  center of this sweating and running nose, I found an odd, perfect  strength. It is the strength that comes from surrender, from dissolving.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I returned to the States on a plane that nearly crashed over the Atlantic.  In midflight it simply dropped thousands of feet out of the sky.  Passengers went flying, luggage was released from the overhead  compartments, and objects were hurling through space. Parents were rocking  their children. Many were praying and chanting, some were crying, others  were perfectly still. The woman next to me took my hand and said she  needed to tell someone goodbye. We were walking through our final moment.  Then somehow the falling stopped, the plane got caught on some ledge of  air.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Flight attendants had brain concussions. Passengers had spiritual  experiences they felt compelled to share with strangers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      Eventually I came back to earth—well, the plane landed. In fact, something  crucial inside me had changed. Sure footing was gone. I had seen how  easily neighbors and supposed friends could turn against their friends and  neighbors. I had seen how in a split second a comfortable life could  become a nightmare. I had seen how quickly fascist thugs could rise to  power by manipulating the people with tactics of racism and terror.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Suddenly nothing was secure. Nothing was dependable. Nothing was what it  appeared to be. My life in the U.S. seemed bizarre and irrelevant for  months afterward. Most of me remained in Croatia and Pakistan with those  women. The memory of their stories and faces and beings made my falsely  constructed and misdirected life impossible. I was completely disoriented,  unwilling and unable to participate in business as usual. The  deconstruction of the notion of security threw me into the center of  sadness, rage, and a torrent of other emotions. Oddly though, I was not  depressed. Lost, searching, emotional, but not depressed. It had been my  denial itself, not the painful things I had been denying, that had been  depressing and isolating me. It had been my clinging to what I  instinctively knew were lies and illusions that had reduced and imprisoned  me.Author of The Vagina Monologues [quote]--O: The Oprah Magazine","brand":"Villard","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299688173797,"sku":"NP9780812973662","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812973662.jpg?v=1767730074","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/insecure-at-last-isbn-9780812973662","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}