Testimony and Transformation: Politics of body in Audre Lord’s The Cancer Journal

Abstract

This research discusses The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde’s chronicle and analysis of her breast cancer experience, is a meticulous investigation of Lorde’s journey toward incorporating this crisis into herself. The novel documents Lorde’s rage, anguish, and terror regarding cancer and is as candid in its subject matter of the travesty of prosthesis, the pain of amputation, and the function of cancer in a profit society, as it is unflinching in handling Lorde’s encounter with death. Lorde discusses being a black, lesbian, feminist mother and poet who has breast cancer. She sheds light on what the disease means for her, describing waking up in the recovery room after the biopsy which indicates she has cancer, colder than ever before in her life. The subsequent days, she prepares for the radical mastectomy by consultation with women friends, family members, her lover, and her children. In subsequent days, Lorde credits some part of her healing process to a ring of women like warm bubbles keeping me afloat as she heals after her mastectomy. She understands that after having cheated death and lived, she must confront the fact of dying as a life process such tough-earned insight rebaptizes Lorde into a new life. At the conclusion of the journal, Lorde decides to reject the prosthesis that has been made available to her, which she equates with an empty means of preventing a woman from embracing her new body, and therefore, her new self. If, Lorde comes to understand, a woman asserts her whole self as a cancer survivor and then decides to employ a prosthesis, she has traveled toward owning her changed body, and life. Postmastectomy women must, however, discover their own internal power. The Cancer Journals illustrates a black, feminist, lesbian poet’s incorporation of cancer into her sense of self. This pioneering text is both an intensely personal memoir and a compelling political manifesto.