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A review by axmed
The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
i listened to the 1997 edition, which ends with Remembering Audre Lorde with obituary and other words of gratitude, celebration and more, from Barbara Smith, Evelyc C. White and others.
here is a fraction of the passages i highlighted.
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.
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 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 all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.
It was very important for me, after my mastectomy, to develop and encourage my own internal sense of power. I needed to rally my energies in such a way as to image myself as a fighter resisting rather than as a passive victim suffering. At all times, it felt crucial to me that I make a conscious commitment to survival. It is physically important for me to be loving my life rather than to be mourning my breast. I believe it is this love of my life and my self, and the careful tending of that love which was done by women who love and support me, which has been largely responsible for my strong and healthy recovery from the effects of my mastectomy. But a clear distinction must be made between this affirmation of self and the superficial farce of “looking on the bright side of things.”
------
What I am taking from Audre Lorde’s death is an absolute commitment to fearlessness. I am working toward eradicating fear completely from my life. I think this is necessary because so much of Black women’s existence is shackled to fear. Fear of speaking, fear of laughing, fear of crying, fear of shattering silences, fear of being rejected, fear of being seen and, perhaps worst of all, fear of being loved.
If I am to be loved (the right way), then I need to let go of fear and allow those who might come toward me (and my work) really to see me and the complexity of my life as a Black lesbian.
Evelyc C. White
Here was a woman who was born and raised in Harlem, who incorporated African cultures in her life and art long before the term Afrocentric even existed, and who challenged racism wherever she found it, and who was still a “sister outsider” in relationship to the Black cultural and political establishment because she had the integrity to say out loud and in print that she loved women.
The author of ten books of poetry and four books of prose, Audre was never satisfied merely to build a brilliant career, because in tandem with her art she was equally committed to freedom. Audre understood that in order for her work as an African-American woman, a lesbian, a feminist to make any sense at all, she had to do something to alter the actual political context in which that writing would be read. This was the understanding that led her to cofound SISA: Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. This was what motivated her, even when she was in Berlin this summer to get alternative cancer treatment, to write a letter to Helmut Kohl protesting racist violence against “immigrants” who happen to be people of color. She was the kind of artist, of which there are fewer and fewer, who took political responsibility for using her gifts to bring about revolutionary change.
Barbara Smith
here is a fraction of the passages i highlighted.
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.
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 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 all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.
It was very important for me, after my mastectomy, to develop and encourage my own internal sense of power. I needed to rally my energies in such a way as to image myself as a fighter resisting rather than as a passive victim suffering. At all times, it felt crucial to me that I make a conscious commitment to survival. It is physically important for me to be loving my life rather than to be mourning my breast. I believe it is this love of my life and my self, and the careful tending of that love which was done by women who love and support me, which has been largely responsible for my strong and healthy recovery from the effects of my mastectomy. But a clear distinction must be made between this affirmation of self and the superficial farce of “looking on the bright side of things.”
------
What I am taking from Audre Lorde’s death is an absolute commitment to fearlessness. I am working toward eradicating fear completely from my life. I think this is necessary because so much of Black women’s existence is shackled to fear. Fear of speaking, fear of laughing, fear of crying, fear of shattering silences, fear of being rejected, fear of being seen and, perhaps worst of all, fear of being loved.
If I am to be loved (the right way), then I need to let go of fear and allow those who might come toward me (and my work) really to see me and the complexity of my life as a Black lesbian.
Evelyc C. White
Here was a woman who was born and raised in Harlem, who incorporated African cultures in her life and art long before the term Afrocentric even existed, and who challenged racism wherever she found it, and who was still a “sister outsider” in relationship to the Black cultural and political establishment because she had the integrity to say out loud and in print that she loved women.
The author of ten books of poetry and four books of prose, Audre was never satisfied merely to build a brilliant career, because in tandem with her art she was equally committed to freedom. Audre understood that in order for her work as an African-American woman, a lesbian, a feminist to make any sense at all, she had to do something to alter the actual political context in which that writing would be read. This was the understanding that led her to cofound SISA: Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. This was what motivated her, even when she was in Berlin this summer to get alternative cancer treatment, to write a letter to Helmut Kohl protesting racist violence against “immigrants” who happen to be people of color. She was the kind of artist, of which there are fewer and fewer, who took political responsibility for using her gifts to bring about revolutionary change.
Barbara Smith