In Lorde’s case, “a kindly woman” comes bearing “a soft sleep bra and a wad of lambswool pressed into a pale pink breast-shaped pad”. Then as now, it is other women who are selected to deliver the news regarding the requirements of conformity and compromise. The violence is not limited to the excision beyond the fog of pain lie the expectations of a culture that wants, even demands, that women look a certain way. It is not so the second time, and agonising days are spent in the hospital between the biopsy that bears the bad news and the mastectomy that excises her right breast. Her diagnosis comes months after an initial cancer scare and a lump that proves (after a harrowing period of waiting and wondering) to be benign.
Lorde’s account does not allow such prognostications of surrender. Does sickness, with its attendant infirmity, its gloomy shadow over the intellectual, represent feminist defeat?
In a letter to a friend, the tuberculosis-addled Kafka wrote: “My head and lungs have come to an agreement without my knowledge.” True for all the unwell, his description points to the particular irony that sickness represents for feminists, those against the equalling of a woman’s worth with her physical self. Sick writers, both male and female, have often reflected on how illness overwhelms their work. There is a particular dread, I’ve learned, in labelling oneself as “sick”: with its looming and corrosive reality, the word threatens to engulf everything else. I do not have cancer, but I am a feminist and one diagnosed with an avalanche of overlapping autoimmune diseases. She does do it, and her book radiates with rebellion, even four decades later. How am I going to do this now?” she asks. “I have cancer, I am a black feminist poet. Published first in 1980, Lorde’s book predates the popularity of the cancer memoir, now an established genre of sorts. “This is it Audre, you’re on your own,” wrote black feminist poet and writer Audre Lorde in The Cancer Journals, a collection of diary entries and essays in which she recorded her experience with breast cancer.
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