By: Rachael Robertson
Audre Lorde writes with honesty and beauty that somehow manages to use language to capture moments and feelings that for most people are indescribable. She beautifully writes about breast cancer in ways that accept nuance and complexity as an inescapable aspect of life and illness. Never does she separate her experience with breast cancer from other aspects of her identity; in her eyes, her identity as a black lesbian feminist with breast cancer shapes every aspect of her life from her initial diagnosis onward. The very nature of providing a holistic and raw perspective on how illness and identity intertwine is political and radical because it does not buy into the idea that these experiences are separate or that there is a hierarchy between them. The ways that we talk about illness often work to categorize illnesses as mental or bodily and as detached from the social and cultural environment in which we experience them. Lorde subverts this way of talking about our minds, bodies, illnesses, and lived experiences by weaving them together and exploring the strengths, weaknesses, and complexities that each aspect illuminates. Because of the power of her words and captivating honesty of her reflections, I had to read the entire book in one sitting for I couldn’t stop myself from turning the pages. As someone terrified of cancer and mildly convinced that I will one day get it, I craved Lorde’s wisdom and thoughtfulness to make sense of fears I often suppress. I wanted to mentally be alongside her as she navigated through her diagnosis, treatment, recovery, and reflection.
I found her thoughts on getting a mastectomy particularly poignant and was one of the moments where I found myself being self reflexive. How do I conceptualize and value my own breasts? What do they mean to my femininity, my personhood, or my sense of self, and could I compromise those relationships? More broadly, how do I think of my own body? I ask myself questions similar to these relatively often, but driven by paranoia and fear rather than to prepare and challenge myself. Although I cannot speak for her, I interpreted Lorde’s words and story as advocating for accepting illness as part of life and as integrated within other aspects of your identity. Your mind and your life are inextricable from your body, and any factor that affects one sphere shapes them all. Having a mastectomy was much more than losing a breast. It was tied to her experiencing breast cancer - the diagnosis, the doctors visits, the surgeries, the altered perspective on life - in ways specific to her own individual mind and in connection with other black lesbian feminists and women with breast cancer. Her interactions with her partner were just as important as the medical care she received and her self reflexivity grounded her journey through stages of happiness, mourning, and confusion.
I was baffled by how she was able to use journaling as a means to connect herself and her own reflections and struggles to other women as she was experiencing breast cancer yet also use this same platform later on to connect women with each other. She was brave in not choosing to personally use a prosthetic but supportive and understanding to women who made any choice in between. She talked of reconnecting with her body post-surgery in ways that accepted it as different but still whole. She confessed her need to connect with other people who experienced the world in similar ways and who lived in bodies similar to hers. She expressed the importance of using words to connect each other and to end the silences that only serve to alienate and isolate us.
Above all else, I feel like her story told us to communicate with each other and value how we are connected and support the ways we go through the world differently. Her journals were about breast cancer, but she made her experiences about more than that through embracing the complexity of life and accepting illness and change as part of it. She writes, “What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me?” (I wrote down this quote but cannot find the page number). Death and disease aren’t topics we like to think about happening to us, but people like Audre Lorde have forged paths for us to have these tough and critical self reflections. For me, her words were somehow comforting although she wrote of some of the most difficult and soul-searching moments of her life. It challenged me to think of myself as a web of fluid and uniquely important identities and to confront my deepest fears about one day getting cancer. It was strange that one woman’s journal containing so many challenges and so much pain was able to also be uplifting, relieving, and empowering. Audre Lorde’s way of connecting her experiences and body to other women to support herself and to support others is radical in its narrative structure and in its endless reciprocity.
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Lorde, Audre. (1980). The cancer journals: Special edition. San Francisco: aunt lute books.
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