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suzanneke's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
fast-paced
4.5
Powerful and (still) very relevant.
alsoknownasno's review against another edition
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
fast-paced
4.5
whaliensong's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
There's just so many meaningful passages in this book from Audre Lorde that I feel like highlighting here. The Cancer Journals is a powerful meditation on living as a woman with a cancer that is claimed to sacrifice a woman's femininity in order to live (which is an insane thing to say). This is actually the first of Audre Lorde's works that I have gotten the chance to read and I am in awe of her ruminations and insight of the politics of women's bodies, especially when their lives are at stake.
In this collection of journal entries and essays following her experience in being diagnosed and treated for breast cancer, Audre Lorde reflects deeply on mortality, femininity, sexuality, and the need to act now with the time we have. After losing her right breast, she reflects on the feeling of this loss that can never be replicated or replaced by prosthesis. She describes instances of others feeling uncomfortable by her decisions to not use fake bra fillers made of lambswool or silicone, of medical staff appearing to be more concerned with the appearance of her chest rather than the fact that she had just battled death itself.
Here, she assures women to allow themselves to feel, to grieve this loss. She calls to confront and scrutinize our own lives as they become drastically changed. She calls for women to take charge of their lives and push through fear, to take what little we have and SPEAK for what's better for us and the women around us. Our very lives are political, and we must push for them to be valued as they should be.
"For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson - that we were never meant to live. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned, we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we still will be no less afraid."
In this collection of journal entries and essays following her experience in being diagnosed and treated for breast cancer, Audre Lorde reflects deeply on mortality, femininity, sexuality, and the need to act now with the time we have. After losing her right breast, she reflects on the feeling of this loss that can never be replicated or replaced by prosthesis. She describes instances of others feeling uncomfortable by her decisions to not use fake bra fillers made of lambswool or silicone, of medical staff appearing to be more concerned with the appearance of her chest rather than the fact that she had just battled death itself.
Here, she assures women to allow themselves to feel, to grieve this loss. She calls to confront and scrutinize our own lives as they become drastically changed. She calls for women to take charge of their lives and push through fear, to take what little we have and SPEAK for what's better for us and the women around us. Our very lives are political, and we must push for them to be valued as they should be.
"For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson - that we were never meant to live. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned, we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we still will be no less afraid."
shona22's review
5.0
"If 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'm so grateful to have read and learnt from Audre. Before reading the Cancer Journals I never would have considered how my gender, sexuality and disability have impacted my cancer experience.
This book is a call to action, it is inspiration to find an internal source of strength, and a reminder that female spaces have a special healing power. Audre's anger and love hover over every page and somehow manage to coexist. I cannot recommend it enough to other cancer patients.
I'm so grateful to have read and learnt from Audre. Before reading the Cancer Journals I never would have considered how my gender, sexuality and disability have impacted my cancer experience.
This book is a call to action, it is inspiration to find an internal source of strength, and a reminder that female spaces have a special healing power. Audre's anger and love hover over every page and somehow manage to coexist. I cannot recommend it enough to other cancer patients.
ralowe's review
5.0
it is disabling to even approach the structure/agency dilemma. this insovereign whirl is (near as i can tell, anyway) the field of ability; norms, categories, scenes, power relations. it's a spinning maelstrom that feels unnavigable, ungovernable. what happens to care, let alone social justice, in all this mess? i enjoyed the last essay the best. reading audre lorde reminds me of a moral ideal for how to be queer while providing care while confused and immobilized above the maddening circumabulating trigger spiral vortex. that's a lot, and it's a lot, and audre... i don't really want to reduce her to a mode or a style but something modal and stylish is in the utility of what is here. as she copes with cancer. so, yes, it also feels ghoulish. but in this book is what is generally good about an awareness of bodily modality, its finitude, and how care forms the self and is robust inspiring interpersonal relation, persons as ends-not-means. its good to momentarily know the/a self in the midst of all this mess. to find a grounding kinship in audre lorde. a way to pay queer attention to the body to dream of transformed power relations. i missed anything in lorde's text about aids, those moments seem to have missed each other in history, although her antiauthoritarian insurgent insight applies. cancer like aids is a product of many systems of domination and targets the most vulnerable. something that's interesting is her consideration of prosthesis, another opportunity for structure/agency headaches; diverging from the norm can be satisfying against the wake of the classist, racist and misogynist conditions that resulted in the mastectomy; the self is held within this fraught and contradictory space, or seems to be. i'm reminded of act up as she plots the living to follow the operation amid compulsory heteronormativity and legacies of colonialism, the numerous institutions working towards her undoing, how oppression inhibits a truthful social articulation of being with one's own body. i am in awe of audre lorde's anger, a moral ideal of coherence.