“This is it Audre, you’re on your own,” wrote black feminist poet and writer Audre Lorde in The Cancer Journals, a collection of diary entries and essays in which she recorded her experience with breast cancer. Published first in 1980, Lorde’s book predates the popularity of the cancer memoir, now an established genre of sorts. “I have cancer, I am a black feminist poet. How am I going to do this now?” she asks. She does do it, and her book radiates with rebellion, even four decades later.
I do not have cancer, but I am a feminist and one diagnosed with an avalanche of overlapping autoimmune diseases. There is a particular dread, I’ve learned, in labelling oneself as “sick”: with its looming and corrosive reality, the word threatens to engulf everything else. Sick writers, both male and female, have often reflected on how illness overwhelms their work. In a letter to a friend, the tuberculosis-addled Kafka wrote: “My head and lungs have come to an agreement without my knowledge.” True for all the unwell, his description points to the particular irony that sickness represents for feminists, those against the equalling of a woman’s worth with her physical self. Does sickness, with its attendant infirmity, its gloomy shadow over the intellectual, represent feminist defeat?
Lorde’s account does not allow such prognostications of surrender. Her diagnosis comes months after an initial cancer scare and a lump that proves (after a harrowing period of waiting and wondering) to be benign. It is not so the second time, and agonising days are spent in the hospital between the biopsy that bears the bad news and the mastectomy that excises her right breast. The violence is not limited to the excision; beyond the fog of pain lie the expectations of a culture that wants, even demands, that women look a certain way. Then as now, it is other women who are selected to deliver the news regarding the requirements of conformity and compromise. In Lorde’s case, “a kindly woman” comes bearing “a soft sleep bra and a wad of lambswool pressed into a pale pink breast-shaped pad”. The message is clear: the absent breast must be made up for somehow, such that Lorde’s one-breasted deviation from the ideal female form is never visible. “You’ll never know the difference,” the woman insists. “I knew sure as hell I’d know the difference,” Lorde concludes.
She is both brave and right. Embracing her one-breasted self, Lorde refuses to render invisible her difference and the experience of pain that is somehow embarrassing to others. Not only does she refuse to wear the prosthesis home from the hospital, she shirks it completely, refusing to be cowed even when a previously decent nurse accuses her of damaging the morale of other patients. In this, a head-on, one-breasted confrontation with societal expectation, Lorde reveals the nobility and worth of strength that is tested. It is not an incidental or reactive position; in Cancer Journals, Lorde explains the feminist rationale behind it. Cosseted in prosthesis, literal or figurative, she argues, women are kept from confronting loss, of breasts or of formerly healthy selves. Entrapped in the “terror and silent loneliness” of denial, they experience a second victimisation. No feminist must permit this.
There is inspiration in Lorde’s position, for me and for all women who have spent time in doctors’ offices and surgeries, feeling estranged from the strong or whole selves of a bygone before. Before reading The Cancer Journals, I had long inhabited their ranks. Arming myself with many medications and some delusion, I believed in the words of the lady who first offers Lorde a prothestic breast; I would “never know the difference” between my pre- and post-sick self. Lorde’s argument proved the vacuity of this. Making my way through the book’s pages, I found a different model of feminist power – not a sidestepping of sickness, but a defiant avowal of the reality of pain and respect for the transformed self it leaves behind. I emerged as neither a contradiction nor an oxymoron, but a vanguard, a model, for others less brave.
The Cancer Journals record a new way for women to face ill-health
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