V for Victory, Valentine & Vagina | Feature

The strained, despondent voice of woman number 5 reverberates in the room, at the rehearsals of The Vagina Monologues. I am intrigued by this in a somber way; I imagine what it could do to an unprepared audience. Director Eelum Dixit cringes as the word purush hits him harder with every practice session. Later, in a much lighter air, during a one-on-one with his actor, he says, 'Hey! can you stop saying it like that? It makes me feel guilty!" The play entitled 'Any One of Us: Words from the Prison', is sure to leave an incorrigible impact on everybody who watches it.

The play is being staged on occasion of V-day, a global movement to end violence against women, inspired by Eve Ensler's play, The Vagina Monologues. "The main idea of doing the monologues is to give out the message that every women is entitled to share her story, that if nobody else listens to her, at least those of her kind will", says Shailaja Kasaju, coordinator of the V-day event. And this sharing of each others lives, "allows them to bond", she adds.

V-day Nepal, the organising group, was formed when a word-to-mouth message was spread to anybody interested to join the cause, "As of now, we have 52 members and almost all are from different organisations, it's a group initiative", says Shailaja, "Our actors are volunteers themselves". The charity raised from the event is going to Biswas Nepal, an organisation formed by women who rescued themselves out of the
sex-trade, and who want to save others from the same.

Apart from the monologues, the event has two other programs lined up, a singing performance by a choir, and a short documentary celebrating womanhood, made by Jeet Gurung. The event is scheduled for 7 March at Nepal Academy Hall and will start at 6PM.

How it all began

The first draft of the monologues was written in 1996 by Eve Ensler based on interviews she took of 200 women about their views on sex, relationships, and violence against women. The interviews began as casual conversations with her friends, who then brought up anecdotes they themselves had been told by other friends, which began a continuing chain of referrals. Each monologue somehow relates to the vagina, be it through sex, love, rape, masturbation or birth. Ensler stated that she first wrote the monologues to 'celebrate the vagina' but that in 1998, the purpose changed from a celebration of femininity to a movement to stop violence against women..