The Cancer Journals

Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy. A Penguin Classic First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself on her own terms and offers her voice, grief, resistance, and courage to those dealing with their own diagnosis. Poetic and profoundly feminist, Lorde's testament gives visibility and strength to women with cancer to define themselves, and to transform their silence into language and action.

“This empowering compilation is heartbreaking, beautiful, and timeless...Lorde’s big heart and fierce mind are at full strength on each page of this deeply personal and deeply political collection.”
—Kirkus, starred review

“Grief, terror, courage, the passion for survival and far more than survival, are here in the personal and political searchings of a great poet. Lorde is the Amazon warrior who also knows how to tell the tale of battle: what happened, and why, what are the weapons, and who are the comrades she found. More than this, her book offers women a new and deeply feminist challenge.”
—Adrienne Rich
 
“Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals has helped me more than I can say. It has taken away some of my fear of cancer, my fear of incompleteness, my fear of difference. This book teaches me that with one breast or none, I am still me. That the sum total of me is infinitely greater than the number of my breasts. Should cancer of the breast be in my future, as it is in the future of thousands of American women each year, Lorde’s words of love and wisdom and courage will be beside me to give me strength. The Cancer Journals should be read by every woman.”
—Alice Walker
 
“Audre Lorde’s courageous account of her breast cancer defies how women are expected to deal with sickness, accepting pain and a transformed sense of self. (…) 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.”
—Rafia Zakaria
 
“Audre’s words of survival and courage became my new bible, shaping me into a bold warrior in the army of one-breasted women. What she reveals in The Cancer Journals allowed me—and legions of women—to confront the abyss, to draw nourishment, to share the mantle of her courage. When the need arises, I press Audre’s book on the next unwitting warrior. No one could have a better weapon.”
—Phyllis Kriegel

Auteur

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) published nine volumes of poetry and five works of prose. She was a recipient of many distinguished honors and awards, including honorary doctorates from Hunter, Oberlin, and Haverford Colleges, and was named New York State Poet (1991-1993).

Échantillon de lecture

I

 

The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action

 

I would like to preface my remarks on the transformation of silence into language and action with a poem. The title of it is "A Song for Many Movements" and this reading is dedicated to Winnie Mandela. Winnie Mandela is a South African freedom fighter who is in exile now somewhere in South Africa. She had been in prison and had been released and was picked up again after she spoke out against the recent jailing of Black school children who were singing freedom songs, and who were charged with public violence . . . "A Song for Many Movements":

 

Nobody wants to die on the way

 

caught between ghosts of whiteness

 

and the real water

 

none of us wanted to leave

 

our bones

 

on the way to salvation

 

three planets to the left

 

a century of light years ago

 

our spices are separate and particular

 

but our skins sing in complimentary keys

 

at a quarter to eight mean time

 

we were telling the same stories

 

over and over and over.

 

Broken down gods survive

 

in the crevasses and mudpots

 

of every beleaguered city

 

where it is obvious

 

there are too many bodies

 

to cart to the ovens

 

or gallows

 

and our uses have become

 

more important than our silence

 

after the fall

 

too many empty cases

 

of blood to bury or burn

 

there will be no body left

 

to listen

 

and our labor

 

has become more important

 

than our silence.

 

Our labor has become

 

more important

 

than our silence.

 

(from Audre Lorde's The Black Unicorn, W.W. Norton & Co., 1978)

 

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here as a Black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been. Less than two months ago, I was told by two doctors, one female and one male, that I would have to have breast surgery, and that there was a 60 to 80 percent chance that the tumor was malignant. Between that telling and the actual surgery, there was a three week period of the agony of an involuntary reorganization of my entire life. The surgery was completed, and the growth was benign.

 

But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced by many women, by some of you here today. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action.

 

In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change, or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else's words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.

 

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had ever made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of al…