The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde

As of just over a week ago, I’m now a full-time homemaker-slash-[miscellaneous]-freelancer-slash-unemployed (depending on who I’m speaking to) and spending the vast majority of my time as the primary carer of an infant child.

Something that I’ve added to my repertoire of childcare activities in week two (an act that both keeps the baby entertained and myself still feeling like an adult (for a bit)), is reading aloud to the baby from whatever book I’m reading otherwise only when the baby is asleep. This is why, for several minutes on a recent afternoon, I found myself trying to talk prose at a baby while bawling like it does when it’s hungry and has to wait more than 45 seconds for milk. Because I was reading the baby The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde…

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The Cancer Journals is a serious, short, angry, text by activist and poet Audre Lorde, and is about the procedure and the aftermath of a mastectomy she had in 1978 after being diagnosed with a malignant tumour in her right breast.

The process of deciding on the mode of treatment is discussed, as too is the way in which her sense of self was affected by a sudden awareness – in her early/mid-40s – of her own fragile mortality…

Although Lorde would later die of cancer (a detail – cruelly, imo – included by Penguin Classics in the bio at the front of the book) in 1992, she had been checked for and cleared off of malignancy the Summer before, so writes that a lot of the hefty soul-searching that results from the potential of a cancer diagnosis had been engaged with the Summer before.

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It’s a very serious and a very articulate book about emotion, and the ways in which emotionality is often denied to people after they’ve been diagnosed with cancer.

What Lorde focuses on at great length – particularly with the final part of the book – is the  ways in which medical professionals she spoke to post-procedure repeatedly chastised her for choosing not to immediately want to wear a prosthetic breast…

Lorde describes shocking comments from nurses and doctors, with strong reactions to her request to so much as have a conversation about whether or not to wear a prosthetic…

She writes about how she was made to feel absurd and strange for the fact that her key emotional reactions to cancer treatment were not immediate questions about how best to fix the exterior, aesthetic, look of her clothes and body…

It was dismissed as inexplicable to even question… Lorde has concerns and emotional responses more complex and serious than “How will I look good in a dress to a stranger?” and meaningful conversations about fear and grief are unwelcome… She is told at one point that she’s bringing down “the morale” of other patients at the breast cancer clinic by being there with the visible sign of a mastectomy, which she understandably finds confusing and upsetting …

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This is a short book, comprising direct excerpts from Lorde’s written during the period referred to, as well as commentary written about these (and inspired by these) at a slightly later date.

This is – understandably – raw and unfiltered writing, and though there are more repetitions of phrase and of idea than one would ordinarily associate with acclaimed nonfiction of this length, it is appropriate to poetry and the repetitions in the prose do help to expand and draw attention to the intended and the intentional meanings…

The Cancer Journals is about how it is difficult to engage with one’s own mortality due to the ways in which capitalism and patriarchy forces people (and tries to force people), particularly women, to think of themselves primarily as a reproductive and aesthetic individual, rather than as a living thing.

Lorde writes about how a focus on appearances – rather than real health outcomes – is a poisonous and a dangerous thing to happen in a medical setting, and her surprise at the recurrence of this mode of thought resounds pretty hard.

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It’s a sad text and a serious text and a rightfully angry text, and though Lorde would go on to have another full decade of life and work after this was published, sadly most of the problems she details here – the profitisation of healthcare, the unwillingness for wider society to look in detail at people as complex individuals rather than single problems to be solved – persist, and have arguably gotten worse…

With America’s “gloves off” fascistic capitalistic white supremacist government sworn in this week (Jan 2025), all of the terrible parts of that country are primed to accelerate in their descent to a very dark place…

Prices of medication have already risen…

The rich will get richer and the poor, the disenfranchised and the marginalised will only become more so…

The better future that was being fought for 50 years ago hasn’t arrived, and though there may have been moments in the past when it felt like a good world was a real possibility, it’s very clear and very stark (for anyone reading the news this week) that there’s no way to even pretend that a positive future is proximate for much of the world, especially in the United States of America, where its preexisting aggressive racism, bigotry, transphobia, misogyny and cruelty have in the last few days been exacerbated and expedited by hate-fuelled executive orders.

To read this sad book at this sad time emphasises what has been lost, and what was never really gained…

I don’t know what can be achieved by focusing on political writings and political actions at this time, but there has to be something…

It feels hopeless.

It feels utterly utterly hopeless.

It feels like hope is impossible, and I understand that this is exactly how the right wants people who aren’t dickheads to feel and to think, as it is that absolute sense of hopelessness that breeds the apathy that permits unforgivable, inhumane, cruelties to be perpetuated, so that’s… I suppose… the main thing to try and avoid.

But it’s hard, isn’t it?

It’s hard.

I don’t know what’s going to happen next in the world, but as of today, it really doesn’t look like the future’s bright at all, except if we’re talking literally, because fire is bright and there will be more and more and more fucking fires burning everywhere due to unrepentant climate collapse….

Sorry.