Eve and the Ethics of Story

Check out this reading by Eve Ensler of a section of her upcoming book, I’m an Emotional Creature: The Secret Lives of Girls Around the World. It’s called “The Teenage Girl’s Guide to Surviving Sex Slavery” and in it she speaks in the voice of a former sexual slave from the The Democratic Republic of Congo:

First let me say that I admire Eve’s bold insistence on speaking truth, on writing deeply emotional pieces, on insisting that we talk about and stay conscious of and do something about the most horrific suffering on this planet–things that the rest of us often don’t have the strength to face on a regular basis. V-Day is such an unbelievably successful movement–unparalleled in contemporary feminism. The idea that she got a nation of girls and women, and even a healthy number of men, thinking and talking about vaginas–as a metaphor for femaleness and violence and sexuality and so many other buried issues–is nothing short of a modern miracle. For all of this, I give her infinite props.
But I have to say that I find this piece really problematic and it makes me worried about the rest of the book that she’s almost finished with.
The girl does sound real in many ways, authentic in her interactions with her friends and her experience of being abducted and raped. It’s clear that Eve had spent a lot of time with these women, that she has talked to them about their lives and experiences in great detail. It’s clear that Eve has the best of intentions, that she sees her own voice, her own persona, as the most effective way to amplify the messages that these young women from the Congo need the world to hear.
But no amount of reporting adds up to understanding, adds up to truly inhabiting the lives and experiences of others. As a journalist, I have continuously struggled with this reality. The most painful part of my job involves attempting to tell others’ stories with empathy and clarity and honesty, while still respecting the living, breathing human being who owns them. I have a higher purpose–to paint a picture, for example, of the new normalcy of body hatred, to enrage people so they try to stop it, to lure people into a social issue with a good old fashioned story–but I also have an ethical commitment to respect people’s ownership over their own stories, and quite connected, respect my own limitations.
I feel like Eve has lost sight of her own limitations, like this piece reveals this story of a girl, but also the story of an activist and storyteller who has forgotten to be humble in the process. I haven’t read What is the What by Dave Eggers, but it seems that he tried to do something similar and he called it a novel (though he made clear that it was very grounded in reality). I totally get the impulse. You’re an activist, a writer, a well-intentioned, empathic human being who feels like the most important stories aren’t being told, so you think of the most immediate, palpable way to get them into the world. But it’s not that simple.
Why not write a personal essay in her own voice about the experience of getting to know this girl, of hearing these stories? Why not publish an anthology of these women’s stories or a collection of oral histories where we hear their voices exactly? Why not bring these women to the U.S. and let them stage their own play about what they’ve experienced? Why not make a documentary?
For me, Eve is taking too many liberties. She has the power to get these women’s voices and stories out into the world, and instead, she has usurped them.