greetings, readers & writers:
Today, I’m thinking about Audre Lorde’s magnificent work, The Cancer Journals, such a fascinating intersection of narrative medicine and feminist memoir.
Lorde would face cancer three times: breast cancer in 1978; liver cancer in 1984; and ovarian cancer in 1987. She knew that speaking out about her own experiences with cancer had the potential to liberate other women to talk about the effects of the disease on their own lives.
In 1979, she decided to publish a compilation of journal entries she had recorded before and after her mastectomy.
Source: Emily Bernard, “Audre Lorde Broke the Silence.”
Those journal entries, and that decision, would become The Cancer Journals—and as she had hoped, the book would become a pivotal text in the history of medicine and in the emergence of narrative medicine as a practice, genre, and interdisciplinary field.
“I am a poet to my bones and sinews.”
Audre Lorde
In 2020, Penguin Random House re-released of The Cancer Journals, forty years after its initial publication.
Tracy K. Smith, former Poet Laureate of the U. S., wrote the Foreword to Penguin’s new edition, an excerpt of which you can read here: “How Audre Lorde’s Experience of Breast Cancer Fortified Her Revolutionary Politics.”
Smith’s foreword includes a beautiful tribute to Lorde’s intellectual presence in the late twentieth century: “The Cancer Journals bears witness to Lorde’s radical reenvisioning of self, body, and society through the experience of illness, fear, pain, anger, and dawning clarity.”
If anything, the questions and urgencies driving her work before her diagnosis—How do we muster the faith, courage, and will to keep living and fighting? What does it mean to claim for ourselves a sense of wholeness and visibility when the world insists on us being hidden or disguised?—are catalyzed by her private, subjective journey through illness and recovery.
One of my earliest encounters with Lorde was through her 1977 essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” I recognized as familiar, and claimed as true, her description of poetry as a form of “illumination.” According to Lorde, poems don’t just deliver truth, they nudge something already alive within us into consciousness: “for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.”
The Cancer Journals is a confluence, as Smith writes, of “private survival and collective determination.” The individual and the social body; the personal and the political.
What reconciles these disparate forces, for Lorde, is the body.
“Both on the page and in person, she spoke from the body.” So writes Emily Bernard in this fascinating piece: “Audre Lorde Broke the Silence.”
In 1984, Lorde’s doctors had predicted she would live for only two or three more years. In 1991, she said in an NPR interview that she was grateful to be alive to share her experiences with other men and women. […]
That year Lorde was named New York State Poet Laureate, the first African American and first woman to be so designated.
Lorde’s writing of The Cancer Journals was a watershed moment for narrative medicine—because, as Susan Sontag had argued, the very word “cancer” was entangled in a mess of metaphors, some of them ancient. As Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor,
it is not naming as such that is pejorative or damning, but the name ‘cancer.’ As long as a particular disease is treated as an evil, invincible predator, not just a disease, most people with cancer will indeed be demoralized by learning what disease they have.
For many living with cancer diagnoses at this cultural moment, it was a revelation to hear women discussing cancer so openly. For instance, writer Alice Walker praised the volume in deeply personal terms:
Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals has helped me more than I can say. It has taken away some of my fear of cancer, my fear of incompleteness, my fear of difference.
A Litany for Survival
Across the past week, my students have been reading selections of Lorde’s work—including some of her most powerful essays and her stirring poem “A Litany for Survival.”
Read the opening lines here:
For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
What’s a litany? Many of my students have religious backgrounds, and some tend to know that a litany is a prayer of repetition, or a series of prayers. I learned that the word’s history can be traced back to the Greek λιτανεια (litaneia): prayer or supplication.
Notice the repeated phrases in the middle section of the poem:
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
The poem includes a series of plaintive and repetitive prayers, naming these fears as if reciting a familiar scripture. Against this repetition, the poem closes in a different key—with a recommitment to speech and advocacy:
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.
Listen to the poet read it herself here:
The poem has been circulating a lot, and I think my students can immediately understand why these words are having a moment. Maybe we’re all craving a “litany” by which we might make sense of the world.
What to read/watch next
“A Litany for Survival: the Life and Work of Audre Lorde
As you can see, the poem’s title also became the title of a documentary, which seems to be full of incredible footage of Lorde and her friends and colleagues:
On the topic of Alice Walker, check out this interview: “‘This is the time for poetry’: A Conversation with Alice Walker” for The Atlantic Monthly
Thinking about Audre Lorde, I was fascinated to learn about the super-close friendship she developed with Adrienne Rich, late in their lives. Read a bit more about that here: “The Many Lives of Adrienne Rich” by Stephanie Burt for The Atlantic Monthly
Among other interesting details, I learned that Rich had her own relationship to narrative medicine:
Few readers knew Rich’s own pain: It literally hurt to be her. (The “foils,” above, are hypodermics.) Diagnosed at 22 with rheumatoid arthritis, she kept her condition private for decades; “acute suffering could occur at any time,” Holladay writes. In 1969 she declined to attend a march, worried that she would slow her companions down. She used canes and wheelchairs beginning in the early 1980s, if not earlier; onstage, “she did not appear strong until she spoke.” The New England chill made her arthritis worse—one reason Rich and Cliff chose California. In a metaphor almost too good to be true, a 1992 spinal operation required Rich to wear, all day and all night, a metal “halo screwed into her head.”
From her biography of Rich, Hillary Holladay’s nuanced account of an infamous incident in the literary world, “When Adrienne Rich Refused the National Book Award”
In 1974, as Holladay describes, Rich took the stage with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker… and, well, I won’t give it away. Read it yourself, & enjoy.
A few more things to read
I loved this piece, by
, about quilting genius and fabric/textile artist Faith Ringgold:I was teaching a class about the magic of zine culture earlier this week, and thinking a lot about the subcultures of Olympia, Washington in the 80s and 90s. So, imagine my delight to find this piece about Kurt Cobain in
by in my inbox:whew, that’s all for this rainy Monday afternoon.
happy reading & writing!
as ever,
EJ