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4.49 AVERAGE
4.49 AVERAGE
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cancer, Terminal illness, Medical content
This is very brief, just an essay really, but very influential. You can feel the passion and conviction in every word. As she deals with breast cancer, Lorde writes about pain, fear, and mortality issues, and she tells us her process as she comes to terms with these powerful inner forces. Mostly, she writes about being true to your feelings, not trying to cover them up in order to make the people around you feel better.
She writes at length about the ways society sees women’s bodies as mainly decorative, the way it encourages women to look “normal” after breast cancer surgery. She had to deal with a lot of pressure to wear a prosthetic device or to have reconstructive surgery, and she writes about the way this just makes women feel alienated from their own bodies.
Some quotes:
< I must let this pain flow through me and pass on. If I resist or try to stop it, it will detonate inside me, shatter me, splatter my pieces against every wall and person that I touch. >
< I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I’ll be sending messages on aouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side. When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid. >
She writes at length about the ways society sees women’s bodies as mainly decorative, the way it encourages women to look “normal” after breast cancer surgery. She had to deal with a lot of pressure to wear a prosthetic device or to have reconstructive surgery, and she writes about the way this just makes women feel alienated from their own bodies.
Some quotes:
< I must let this pain flow through me and pass on. If I resist or try to stop it, it will detonate inside me, shatter me, splatter my pieces against every wall and person that I touch. >
< I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I’ll be sending messages on aouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side. When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid. >
Got this for a dear friend last year when she had a cancer diagnosis. Was re-issued not long after. It's only short but, as you'd expect from St Audre, it's gorgeous. Clear and touching and not harrowing but tender and detailed without being gruesome and fundamentally tied to her love of the women in her life.
There's a lot of information in here about the oppressive effects of female beauty standards and fertility but fundamentally you should read this Audre is one of the 20th century's kindest, most warming writers, despite the heaps of shit she got dealt.
There's a lot of information in here about the oppressive effects of female beauty standards and fertility but fundamentally you should read this Audre is one of the 20th century's kindest, most warming writers, despite the heaps of shit she got dealt.
This work really emphasizes and combats the silence that exists in so many areas of our lives. It addresses the pain of cancer and how to deal with it to have power and overcome. Audre Lorde along with providing an account of her own life and position as "black lesbian feminist warrior poet" reaches out to women all over to help them gain insight into the power which they can have. She speaks of acceptance and of what can be done in order to improve many of the systems of power that our society places on us. A provocative and healing read that is full of the insight and wisdom that Audre Lorde represents.
the way Lorde writes is as if I were in a conversation with a friend.
reading this book, I had no idea she had passed away.
In a way, I think this lack of knowledge made the message hit me harder.
reading this book, I had no idea she had passed away.
In a way, I think this lack of knowledge made the message hit me harder.
Audre Lorde's writing is full of strength, vitality, and power. It is clear she draws this power not only from her wisdom, but also from her connection to love as a life force. The Cancer Journals, covering Lorde's personal and political reckoning with breast cancer from 1978-1980, captures precisely the totality of Lorde's strength of self. I am in awe of it. I have learned so much from engaging with her words.
The Cancer Journals is a thesis against silence, which serves only as a "tool for separation and powerlessness." The silence Lorde speaks to specifically is that of women who have received mastectomies who then are conditioned to internalize their own pain without processing it, to wear a prosthesis to hide their experience and satisfy the expectations of a misogynistic society. Lorde acknowledges that the silence imposed on survivors of breast cancer is but one manifestation how women are socialized to be objects, reduced only to their appearance. Lorde pushes against this, refusing to hide her body "simply because it might make a woman-phobic world more comfortable." For Lorde, breast cancer can "still be a gateway, however cruelly won, into the tapping and expansion of my own power and knowing." She sets an example for how to speak out against the imposed silence and its political sources and consequences. Her writing is first and foremost an "encouragement for other women to speak and to act out of our experiences with cancer and with other threats of death, for silence has never brought us anything of worth."
There is much wisdom, much of it highly quotable, packed into the 69 pages of this book and I can't help to copy some of it into this review for later reference:
"I want to write rage but all that comes is sadness. We have been sad long enough to either weep or grow fertile." (5)
"In the recognition of the existence of love lies the answer to despair." (6)
"Is letting go a process or a price?" (19)
"Once I accept the existence of dying, as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?" (18)
"My work is to inhabit the silences with which I have lived and fill them with myself until they have the sounds of brightest day and the loudest thunder." (38)
"The only answer to death is the heat and confusion of living; the only dependable warmth is the warmth of the blood. I can feel my own beating even now." (40)
"I must consider what my body means to me. I must also separate those external demands about how I look and feel to others, from what I really want for my own body, and how I feel to my selves." (58)
The Cancer Journals is a thesis against silence, which serves only as a "tool for separation and powerlessness." The silence Lorde speaks to specifically is that of women who have received mastectomies who then are conditioned to internalize their own pain without processing it, to wear a prosthesis to hide their experience and satisfy the expectations of a misogynistic society. Lorde acknowledges that the silence imposed on survivors of breast cancer is but one manifestation how women are socialized to be objects, reduced only to their appearance. Lorde pushes against this, refusing to hide her body "simply because it might make a woman-phobic world more comfortable." For Lorde, breast cancer can "still be a gateway, however cruelly won, into the tapping and expansion of my own power and knowing." She sets an example for how to speak out against the imposed silence and its political sources and consequences. Her writing is first and foremost an "encouragement for other women to speak and to act out of our experiences with cancer and with other threats of death, for silence has never brought us anything of worth."
There is much wisdom, much of it highly quotable, packed into the 69 pages of this book and I can't help to copy some of it into this review for later reference:
"I want to write rage but all that comes is sadness. We have been sad long enough to either weep or grow fertile." (5)
"In the recognition of the existence of love lies the answer to despair." (6)
"Is letting go a process or a price?" (19)
"Once I accept the existence of dying, as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?" (18)
"My work is to inhabit the silences with which I have lived and fill them with myself until they have the sounds of brightest day and the loudest thunder." (38)
"The only answer to death is the heat and confusion of living; the only dependable warmth is the warmth of the blood. I can feel my own beating even now." (40)
"I must consider what my body means to me. I must also separate those external demands about how I look and feel to others, from what I really want for my own body, and how I feel to my selves." (58)
is almost like life/death circumstances make you realize what’s really important
emotional
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced