The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde
"The Cancer Journals" by Audre Lorde is a poignant exploration of her experience with breast cancer, reflecting on how this health crisis interweaves with her identity as a black, lesbian feminist. The work captures her raw emotions of anger, pain, and fear associated with the disease, including the profound impact of radical mastectomy and the societal pressures surrounding femininity and health. Lorde shares intimate moments from her recovery, emphasizing the importance of community and support from other women, which she describes as a vital part of her healing journey.
Throughout her journal entries, she confronts her mortality and the realities of living with cancer, ultimately advocating for a voice in the narrative of illness that extends beyond societal expectations. Instead of accepting a prosthesis as a means to hide her altered body, Lorde champions the idea of embracing one's identity as a cancer survivor. Her reflections challenge the stigma around breast cancer while promoting empowerment and acceptance among women facing similar battles. "The Cancer Journals" serves not only as a personal testament to Lorde's struggle but also as a broader commentary on identity and resilience in the face of adversity.
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The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde
First published: 1980
The Work
The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde’s documentation and critique of her experience with breast cancer, is a painstaking examination of the journey Lorde takes to integrate this crisis into her identity. The book chronicles Lorde’s anger, pain, and fear about cancer and is as frank in its themes of “the travesty of prosthesis, the pain of amputation, and the function of cancer in a profit society,” as it is unflinching in its treatment of Lorde’s confrontation with mortality.
Lorde speaks on her identity as a black, lesbian, feminist mother and poet with breast cancer. She illuminates the implications the disease has for her, recording the process of waking up in the recovery room after the biopsy that confirms her cancer, colder than she has ever been in her life. The following days, she prepares for the radical mastectomy through consultation with women friends, family, her lover, and her children. In the days that follow, Lorde attributes part of her healing process to “a ring of women like warm bubbles keeping me afloat” as she recovers from her mastectomy. She realizes that after facing death and having lived, she must accept the reality of dying as “a life process”; this hard-won realization baptizes Lorde into a new life.
The journal entries for 1979 and 1980, written while Lorde recovered from the radical mastectomy she chose to forestall spread of the disease, show Lorde’s integration of this emergency into her life. She realizes that she must give the process a voice; she wants to be more than one of the “socially sanctioned prosthesis” women with breast cancer, who remain quiet and isolated. Instead, Lorde vows to teach, speak, and fight.
At the journal’s end, Lorde chooses to turn down the prosthesis offered her, which she equates with an empty way to forestall a woman’s acceptance of her new body, and thus, her new identity. If, Lorde realizes, a woman claims her full identity as a cancer survivor and then opts to use a prosthesis, she has made the journey toward claiming her altered body, and life. Postmastectomy women, however, have to find their own internal sense of power. The Cancer Journals demonstrates a black, feminist, lesbian poet’s integration of cancer into her identity.
Bibliography
Alexander, Elizabeth. “’Coming Out Blackened and Whole’: Fragmentation and Regeneration in Audre Lorde’s Zami and The Cancer Journals.” In Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, edited by Kimberly Wallace-Sanders. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Comparative study of physical and psychological pain and healing in two of Lorde’s autobiographical works.
Brooks, Jerome. “In the Name of the Father: The Poetry of Audre Lorde.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Brooks stresses Lorde’s courageous description of her emotions during and after the operation. Finds the subtitle of one chapter, referring to black lesbianism, irrelevant. Many feminist critics would disagree.
Herndl, Diane Price. “Reconstructing the Posthuman Feminist Body Twenty Years After Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals.” In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002. Looks at the legacy of Lorde’s work for feminist representations of unwell female bodies and the state of feminist disability studies in the early twenty-first century.
McHenry, Susan. Review of The Cancer Journals, by Audre Lorde. Ms. 9 (April, 1981): 42. Brief summary accompanied by McHenry’s evaluation that the book is akin to Lorde’s poetry, because it expresses “raw emotion with precision and clarity.” Also notes that the book is a powerful example of self-healing useful to anyone working through a crisis.
Perreualt, Jeanne. “’That the Pain Not Be Wasted’: Audre Lorde and the Written Self.” Auto/Biography Studies 4 (Fall, 1988): 1-16. This essay’s complex first half summarizes deconstructionist literary theory. The second half demonstrates Audre Lorde’s use of the changed physical self in her work.
Pinney, Nikky. “Vital Signs, Well Water: On Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals.” Social Policy 20 (Winter, 1990): 66-68. Relates a personal response to Lorde’s book, emphasizing Lorde’s insistence on an open response and the necessity of talking about an issue of such importance to women. Affirms Lorde’s questions about the causes of increased incidence of cancers as “mainly exposures to chemical or physical agents in the environment.”
Small Press Review. Review of The Cancer Journals, by Audre Lorde. 13 (March, 1981): 8. Emphasizes Lorde’s courage, passion, enormous poetic gift and craft, and feminist commitment.