On Audre Lorde’s “The Cancer Journals”

http://christhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/wpid-o-women-holding-hands-facebook.jpg

The doctors say that a woman with breast cancer is receptacle, that she is passive doors extending to receive - always. They say that both disease and medicine invade her, and she is just landscape. She is just warzone, witness to her body’s plunder. If she dies, she is victim, and if she lives she is survivor. Either way she will be remembered as casualty, not subject - never. Audre talks back. She says, “...women with breast cancer are warriors, also” (Lorde 61).

What if women with breast cancer are warriors? What if cancer is not the enemy but the weapon? What if the real enemy is corporate America - how it sieves human bodies for profit, deploying environmental toxins, fossil fuels, artificial growth hormones, carcinogens, “radiation, animal fat, air pollution, McDonald's hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2” etc. (Lorde 62) to create graves out of bodies? What if the war is not individual, not excising cancer from individual bodies, but rather “an army of one-breasted women descend[ing] upon Congress and demand[ing] that the use of carcinogenic, fat stored hormones in beef feed be outlawed” (Lorde 15)? What if women were to choose the war that is not sanctioned? What if they slung their personhood over their shoulders, and claimed subjectivity in spite of permission? What if they realized that if cancer has drafted them into a war, they are warriors and not casualties?

Instead, doctors become storytellers. They spin intricate mythologies of war, of doctor heroes and evil villain cancer cells, siphoning women into combat not of their choosing - enmity with their bodies. “Women are enlisted in a battle against the self, their bodies made war zones, with cancer as the enemy, medical professionals as infallible heroes, and treatments of search-and-destroy by any means possible” (Garrison). The corporate puppeteer remains the phantom that will not be named, visible to noone but haunting all. In the aftermath of mastectomy, however, women with breast cancer are sanitized; the evidence of colonization is razed by “the mask of prosthesis or the dangerous fantasy of reconstruction” (Lorde 14). “Lambswool and silicone gel” (Lorde 62) and the pink ribbon must cleanse the woman of her awakened consciousness, her lack, her scars, her pain, and the gores and crimes of war that converged upon her body. There is a nostalgia that is shed over the whole affair, burying like blizzard, “a regressive tie to the past…to be the same as before surgery...of not wanting to persevere through the experience to whatever enlightenment might be at the core of it” (Lorde 56 and 58) and resume the “pink, pretty, feminine, and norma[tive]” (Pink Ribbon, Inc.) construction that is American patriarchal, neoliberal and “enlightened femininity”. It is the kind of reparation that relegates breast cancer to the cosmetic and exiles women’s experience along with the knowledge that spills out from it.

Audre talks back. She refuses to swallow her words, to become the ghost of her silences, to make her body a graveyard laying waste to her life, her joy, her anger, her anguish, her fear, and her precarious rhumba with her own mortality. Rather than hunt for the past, as is acceptable to our "woman-phobic world" (Lorde 62), she crafts power from searching into the intimate folds of her mind, her flesh, her experience as well as her affect and from reaching into that of others. Neither women’s power nor their identities can be generated out of consumer negotiated citizenship; they are not found in big pharma produced medical technologies and treatments like prosthesis and reconstruction that dismiss women’s subjectivities from their bodies. Audre invokes again and again her lifetime of loving women and “women loving” in itself - the love and care women forge together, with each other and for each other, and the liberation that it produces. Her work is tied to love, to community, to rejecting isolation, and pouring bridges out of the personal labor of self-examination. For her, transformation, knowledge, resistance, and the reclamation of subjectivities begin in the honest and passionate work of loving, and of bearing witness to one’s own and each other’s lived realities.  

[W]omen are kept from expressing the power of our knowledge and experience, and through that expression, developing strengths that challenge those structures within our lives that support the Cancer Establishment… For as we open ourselves to the genuine conditions of our lives, women become less and less willing to tolerate those conditions unaltered, or to passively accept external and destructive controls over our lives and our identities (Lorde 59).