Back Stateside...

Oh my. So this is certainly not the end of the adventure, but the end of my Fellowship and the current Vagina World Tour have arrived. I hope to keep blogging/writing/publishing/learning/questioning and presenting about this experience, so stay in touch! Especially if you want to come to a presentation, or if you have any advice about publishing. I wanted to include my final Watson Report. My personal Vagina Monologue is at the bottom.


FINAL REPORT
Thomas. J. Watson Fellowship

Jennifer McKenzie

“Women Echoed Each Other”:
Breaking Silence with The Vagina Monologues

I have delayed writing this report, because I endowed it with a melancholic symbolism as The End of my Watson Year. I imagine you would respond by saying that the Watson experience is one that I will carry with me for the rest of my life, and that the perspective and direction it has nourished in me is but beginning, not terminating. I agree, and am trying to view this report as a reflection; a validation of sorts, an opportunity to truly thank the Watson Fellowship, to share what I have done, and to ruminate on how I have changed. Writing this and thinking about what I want to say, I do deeply feel this gratefulness- but even as I marvel at what this experience has meant, I also can’t help grieving its loss. This year I felt so incredibly alive. I was so enmeshed with my project and the daily business of creating and fully living a life in Mexico, England, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Thailand, Cambodia, India and South Africa; everything felt vital and somehow more vibrant.
Even now, as close to the experience as I still am, it can feel like a dream. Looking at my photos can feel unreal. To have been so many places in such a short time… But this was only a month ago, and it was my life, just as these more mundane days of the job search are. My backpack probably still smells like South Africa, but it is in my basement and not on my back. I’m going to fight against this though; I refuse to give in to nostalgia and rather choose to struggle to hold onto the truth of the experience. I don’t want the people I met, the stories I’ve imbibed, to reek of fantasy and glimmer with this nostalgia. It was real, I did these things, and I am changed. My goal I guess is to preserve this sense of wonder, of awareness, curiosity and openness that should be as vital here as it was traveling this year. Yesterday I was walking home from yoga along Division, the very street up which I walked to Elementary School. And yet, it was like I had never seen it before. It felt as new and unfamiliar to me as any random street in Budapest, Barcelona or Bangkok. And one thing I’ve learned this year is to take that fresh perspective, and instead of letting the unfamiliar be lonely, let that perception, whether it is actually a new street or one I’ve traversed for years, color my mind with new thoughts. So although this the end of my Watson journey, I am trying to remind myself that meaning is not dependent upon location, but rather my own attitude. I loved my life and hence myself while I was traveling this year. I want to be present and intentional “here” (wherever that ends up being) with as much passion as I was there (oh, there were so many “theres” this year).
This year I learned dozens of words for vagina in eleven different countries and even more languages. Of the over four thousand V-Day events this year, I covered twenty-five. My methodology included monitoring press reaction but was primarily based upon extensive interviews and participant observation among cast, crew, audience and beneficiary organizations. I also attended the V-Day European Organizers Workshop where I met V-Day staff and author Eve Ensler as well as influential activists. I completed over 200 interviews, and spoke with well over 225 informants in individual and group settings. But what do these numbers tell you about what this year was like, about what I learned and accomplished? The experience was so much more nuanced than mere statistics.
To my great surprise and joy I found that my project, while personally challenging and simultaneously gratifying, was a cathartic experience for my informants as well. And informants quickly became friends. I could never have realized before I stepped on that first flight (of many) how my role became so much more rooted in the personal validation I provided this year than on any final product. The Vagina Monologues portray real women’s stories. Just as most of these women had never shared these experiences with anyone before they became Vagina Monologues, most of my informants had never given themselves the chance to process what being involved in the play meant to their lives. I am honored to have helped them to feel legitimized, and delighted to find my work this year was often so reciprocal. I had feared being a story vulture. The first question I always asked was why they came to be involved. And I cannot stress enough the depth of the responses, the complex yet universal reasons women felt lured to speak out publicly, sometimes at great risk. Oh so naturally, my process of collecting testimonies about their experience with the play became about so much more; about their experiences being women, about their joys and trauma relating to their own vaginas. Often we both ended our interviews exhausted, but filled to the brim rather than drained. I think every interview ended with a hug, and as I left on the Mexico City metro, or the Bangkok BTS, or a Mumbai rickshaw, I would mull over the words I had just heard. And I knew that other soul heading off in another direction in the same city would be similarly holding in their mind the words they had just spoken- sometimes for the first time.
These conversations truly transformed The Vagina Monologues into dialogues. All of these incredibly poignant moments flicker through my mind. I found I would be thinking of Spanish abuelitas waving around bright pink vibrators while attending the Marathi dress rehearsal, in which some women were dressed in red sneakers and others in Saris. Or perhaps I would be chilling in the anti-trafficking NGO I studied in Belgrade, and something would conjure an image of the Mexico City AIDS Conference Vagina Monologues Open Mic, and I would be two places at once: preparing for the first rural performance in the previously war-torn former Yugoslavia and simultaneously remembering how thunderous monsoon rain couldn’t dampen the spark of stories that poured forth from HIV/AIDS activists. Though I am gone, or rather here than there, I still often have that experience of being many places at once. Because I know women are still speaking everywhere I went and beyond. I can almost hear them as I walk these familiar streets. I know what they are saying and I love them.
I used to make collages. I loved how all the pieces made a vibrant whole, and how seeing the images in bits or combined made me reconceptualize their meaning. In the same way I hope to collage what I have learned this year into a shareable product. I have an article that is being published (attached), and hope to expand this into a book. I also look forward to sharing a presentation about this year with communities around the city. I feel urgently responsible to do something with all that I have learned this year- as though I owe it to these women who so bravely spoke out to me, and who wished to share their stories with a wider audience than one.
I fell absolutely in love with my project. Just as past loves have busily occupied my mind and heart, during down time I was thinking about how to pack lighter, or about how to make informants feel more comfortable, or what sort of challenges they must be facing in their unique contexts. I was in love with my work and it also allowed me to focus on my relationship with myself. And, a year later, I’m convinced that I have found the equivalent of my soul mate in terms of the kind of work I want to do. I am still moved and engaged by it and would see The Vagina Monologues any day. I truly felt as though I was exactly where I was supposed to be, and doing what I needed to do. This year helped me to learn how important it is to give myself over to the work that I do; I enjoy being a vessel and feel I am most effective in this line of work. I have learned how to listen. I have learned when to talk. I am a witness. I now firmly believe that the world is smaller than I was led to believe, and am more sure of the role I am meant to play as an active citizen of this world.
After the kick-off event of the first V-Day ever done in Cambodia, I was getting late night eats with the leaders and their friends who had attended the screening of the documentary about The Vagina Monologues, ‘Until the Violence Stops’. In the humid night we were talking about how it has become a tradition at the end of the show to ask anyone who has survived abuse to please stand. Over curry and drinks the women were marveling at the strength of the women who stood in Brooklyn, in Kenya and beyond. They were chatting about how connected we are in the violence that is done to us, but more than that, connected in our strength and ability to feel empathy for one another. We could have been a scene in the movie. I listened intently, and noticed that one other woman was also silent. But hers was a brooding silence, her ears turned pinker and pinker, she had stopped eating. As I knew she would- she spoke. She said she felt like a liar sitting here at the table with us and speaking as though these were things that happened to other women, because that was her experience as well. She said she had never spoken about her abuse to anyone, but that when she saw all those women standing she desperately felt she had to do something. The organizer responded perfectly. As the women at her side reached out to her, as our eyes filled, Nora asked, “Would you like to stand now?” The woman considered it. And though we were in a rowdy crowd, she pushed back her chair and under the Cambodian sky she stood. She was regal. We all stood as well. I will never forget moments like these; how sometimes we have to stand, and how much easier it is when we stand together.


My Vagina's Watson Year

My vagina comes from a very female family My radical mother chose my genetics from a sperm bank and raised me to be always leaving her. Ever leaving her to follow the "wild collective song" that Eve Ensler shared with the world. She said, and I found, that women echoed each other. This song, these vagina monologues, became dialogues. They rang forth in cowsheds, hotels, restaurants, elderly homes, refugee camps, public parks, schools, malls, domestic violence shelters and antifascist festivals.

Danijela, a V-Day activist in Sarajevo, told me about one time when she was sitting on a beach. She was moved. Maybe it was the sea, or maybe it was what she calls the beautiful breaking of silence. She stood and started shouting monologues. I can picture her: surf in her hair and salt in her voice, spouting, "My vagina is angry! It is! It's PISSED OFF. It needs to talk. It needs to talk to you!" I imagine the shock this must have been to the sunbathers around her. I have learned this year that shock can be good. The moments when we are most jarred, most overwhelmed, open a little window of opportunity: for a
new thought; a new conversation; a new question, doubt, or validation. Opened up the window for a lot of joy.

Me and my vagina have been traveling this past year. We've been listening. We've been focused on the stories of others. The art of witnessing; the practice of empathy that sometimes swamps. Believe it or not, it wasn't sexy. Most of the time. I'm trying to absorb the survivorship, the hope and community instead of the rape and abuse and
fear. I'm hoping to put into practice what I advocate. I want a quizzical, questioning, intentional vagina. I am most present in my body when I am traveling.

My own vagina monologue has merged with the main players of my year. Their story is mine and mine is theirs, and taboos are broken and words created where they didn't exist. This year there were a lot of moans. Mine tended to be rooted more in the exchange rate, Mumbai traffic and computers crashing than in lust. I cried in most of my
interviews, and hugged in all. There was vagina art, lots of chocolate, alcohol, coffee, eighty year-old senoras auctioning dildos, massages, red lipstick, and vagina birthday cakes.

Lori in Serbia used to go to refugee camps alongside the medical services. Afterwards, they would do an informal reading of The Monologues: just there, behind the van, in the streets where they happened to be. She said afterwards, a woman inevitably said. "Ah.
Now we have all heard this... And so I will tell you my story." And like magic, they would begin to share. Lori said, ‘It's the end of the performance, and they are speaking. You are speaking with them. The performance is over, you are packing your stuff- you are leaving. They are staying and speaking more and more and more. You are gone and
they are still speaking." Though I am gone, or rather here than there, I know women are still speaking everywhere I went and beyond. I can almost hear them as I walk these familiar streets. I know what they are saying and I love them.

Women talking about their vaginas tend towards circles. They sit in circles, they hug in circles. What I learned, and tried to share, was the place where all these circles connect. Like links. Becoming ever stronger. Like ever widening ripples that touch individuals and catalyze communities. In the end of my own vagina monologue, there is no
end. There is only connection; there are only more stories.