Reviews with content warning for Grief - The Cancer Journals

“Sometimes despair sweeps across my consciousness like Luna winds across a barren moonscape. Ironshod horses rage back and forth over every nerve. Oh Seboulisa ma, help me remember what I have paid so much to learn. I could die of difference, or live—myriad selves.”

TITLE—The Cancer Journals

AUTHOR—Audre Lorde

PUBLISHED—1980

GENRE—nonfiction, memoir, diary entries

SETTING—1980s America

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—cancer, chronic illness, fear & hope, intersectional feminism, Black womanhood, queer love, motherhood, & community

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

PRESENTATION OF INFORMATION—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

BONUS ELEMENT/S—Good to know I need to bring my own blanket with me for the recovery room when I go in for surgery. 😅😬

PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “I want to write about that battle, the skirmishes, the losses, the small yet so important victories that make the sweetness of my life.”

“I am not supposed to exist. I carry death around in my body like a condemnation. But I do live. The bee flies. There must be some way to integrate death into living, neither ignoring it nor giving in to it.”

This was a short but powerful book about dealing with the experience of cancer—specifically, breast cancer and mastectomy. But the applications of Lorde’s words extend beyond this specific example. As a genderfluid person who has dealt with chronic illness most of their life, I found that there was a lot of wisdom in Lorde’s examination of her own situation that could be extrapolated and put to use in many different aspects of any woman’s or gendernonconforming person’s dealings with similar issues in their community and the health industry.

I think this is an important read for anyone regardless of their proximity to the specific subjects of this book as it challenges the way we approach things like death and fear and emphasizes the importance of self-conscious living and community that could help humans in general better approach the bigger themes of life and living.

“I would never have chosen this path, but I am very glad to be who I am, here.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

TW // cancer, racism, misogyny (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—

Sister Outsider & Zami

Favorite Quotes: (favorite favorites are ***)

“The weave of her every day existence is the training ground for how she handles crisis.”

“…our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use.”

“…the power and rewards of self-conscious living.”

***“Sometimes despair sweeps across my consciousness like Luna winds across a barren moonscape. Ironshod horses rage back and forth over every nerve. Oh Seboulisa ma, help me remember what I have paid so much to learn. I could die of difference, or live—myriad selves.”

“Is this pain and despair that surround me a result of cancer, or has it just been released by cancer? I feel so unequal to what I always handled before, the abominations outside that echo the pain within. And yes I am completely self-referenced right now because it is the only translation I can trust, and I do believe not until every woman traces her weave back strand by bloody self-referenced strand, will we begin to alter the whole pattern.”

“I can look directly at my life and my death without flinching. I know there is nothing they can ever do to me again.”

“I want the old me, bad as before.”

“I must let this pain flow through me and pass on.”

***“There is no room around me in which to be still, to examine and explore what pain is mine alone—no device to separate my struggle within from my fury at the outside world’s viciousness, the stupid brutal lack of consciousness or concern that passes for the way things are.”

“I don’t feel like being strong…”

“I am defined as other in every group I’m a part of… Yet without community there is certainly no liberation, no future…”

***“I want to write rage but all that comes is sadness. We have been sad long enough to make this earth either weep or grow fertile.”

***“I am not supposed to exist. I carry death around in my body like a condemnation. But I do live. The bee flies. There must be some way to integrate death into living, neither ignoring it nor giving in to it.”

—reminds me of ZNH’s ‘Magnolia Flower’: “Nature knows nothing of death.”

***“I want to write about that battle, the skirmishes, the losses, the small yet so important victories that make the sweetness of my life.”

***“I do not have to win in order to know my dreams are valid.”

“In the recognition of the existence of love lies the answer to despair.”

“I am 46 years living today and very pleased to be alive, very glad and very happy. Fear and pain and despair do not disappear. They only become slowly less and less important.”

“Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.”

“But somehow this summer which is almost upon me feels like a part of my future…”

***“But fear and anxiety are not the same at all. One is an appropriate response to a real situation which I can accept and learn to work through just as I work through semi-blindness. But the other, anxiety, is an immobilizing yield to things that go bump in the night, a surrender to namelessness, formlessness, voicelessness, and silence.”

“My visions of a future I can create have been honed by the lessons of my limitations.”

“Those fears are most powerful when they are not given voice, and close upon their heels comes the fury that I cannot shake them. I am learning to live beyond fear by living through it, and in the process learning to turn fury at my own limitations into some more creative energy. 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.”

“Living a self-conscious life, under the pressure of time, I work with the consciousness of death at my shoulder… this consciousness gives my life another breadth.”

“…how do I fight the despair born of fear and anger and powerlessness which is my greatest internal enemy?”

“…teaching, surviving and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that battle.”

“…this beauty too is mine forever.”

“Broken down gods survive

in the crevasses and mud pots

of every beleaguered city”

“Our labor has become

more important

than our silence.”

“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.”

“…what I most regretted were my silences.”

***“My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”

“What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”

“…that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.”

“Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.”

***“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.”

***“…all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.”

“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 again?”

***“…it made self-healing more possible, knowing I was not alone.”

“Well, I’m dealing with it as best I can. I wish I didn’t have to, and I don’t even know if I’m doing it right…”

“In a way, therefore, the physical pain was power, for it kept that conscious part of me away from the full flavour of my fear and loss, consuming me, or rather wearing me down for the next two weeks.”

***“There is so much false spirituality around us these days, calling itself goddess-worship or “the way”. It is false because too cheaply bought and little understood, but most of all because it does not lend, but rather saps, that energy we need to do our work. So when an example of the real power of healing love comes along such as this one, it is difficult to use the same words to talk about it because so many of our best and most erotic words have been so cheapened.”

***“I carry tattooed upon my heart a list of names of women who did not survive, and there is always a space left for one more, my own. That is to remind me that even survival is only part of the task. The other part is teaching. I had been in training for a long time.”

“But I needed to talk with women who shared at least some of my major concerns and beliefs and visions…”

“…I don’t want this to be a record of grieving only. I don’t want this to be a record only of tears. I want it to be something I can use now or later, something that I can remember, something that I can pass on, something that I can know came out of the kind of strength I have that nothing nothing else can shake for very long or equal.”

“…a welcome insulation within which I could continue to non-feel.”

***”I am who the world and I have never seen before… But you can die of that specialness, of the cold, the isolation.”

“It was the urge, the need, to work again, to feel a surge of connection begin with that piece of yourself. To be of use, even symbolically, is a necessity for any new perspective of self…”

“…an important function of the telling of experience.”

“…I could choose oblivion—or a passivity that is very close to oblivion—but did not want to.”

“…the mistaken belief that women are too weak to deal directly and courageously with the realities of our lives.”

“…did not speak to my experience nor my concerns.”

“My concerns were about my chances for survival, the effects of a possibly shortened life upon my work and my priorities.”

“This emphasis on the cosmetic after surgery reinforces this society’s stereotype of women, that we are only what we look or appear, so this is the only aspect of our existence we need to address… we are allowed no psychic time or space to examine what our true feelings are, to make them our own. With quick cosmetic reassurance, we are told that our feelings are not important, our appearance is all, the sum total of self.”

“Yet once I face death as a life process, what is there possibly left for me to fear? Who can ever really have power over me again?”

“We live in a profit economy and there is no profit in the prevention of cancer; there is only profit in the treatment of cancer.”

“Every woman has a militant responsibility to involve herself actively with her own health.”

***“Like superficial spirituality, looking on the bright side of things is a euphemism used for obscuring certain realities of life, the open consideration of which might prove threatening or dangerous to the status quo.”

“…the best of all possible infernos…”

“…what depraved monster could possibly be always happy?”

***“The idea that happiness can insulate us against the results of our environmental madness is a rumor circulated by our enemies to destroy us… We are equally destroyed by false happiness and false breasts [in the context of forced prosthesis after cancer, not as gender-affirming surgery], and the passive acceptance of false values which corrupt our lives and distort our experience.”

“So I guess I do have to be careful that my urgencies reflect my priorities.”

“I alone own my feelings. I can never lose that feeling because I own it, because it comes out of myself. I can attach it anywhere I want to, because my feelings are a part of me, my sorrow and my joy. I would never have chosen this path, but I am very glad to be who I am, here.”

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emotional informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

5.0

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