Audre Lorder

'A brave, beautiful book that could double as a handbook to accompany anyone on their journey through cancer' Jackie Kay, New Statesman

The Cancer Journals is an intimate, poetic and invigorating account of the experience of breast cancer, from biopsy to mastectomy, told by the great feminist and activist Audre Lorde.

Moving between journal entry, memoir, and essay, Lorde fuses the personal and political to reflect on the many questions breast cancer raises: questions of survival, sexuality, prosthesis and self-care. It is a journey of survival, friendship, and self-acceptance. 

'Grief, terror, courage, the passion for survival and for more than survival, are here in the searchings of a great poet' Adrienne Rich

'This book teaches me that with one breast or none, I am still me' Alice Walker

The Cancer Journals

joana ashley

Self scrutiny and an evaluation of our lives, while painful, can be rewarding and strengthening journeys toward a deeper self. For as we open ourselves more and more to the genuine conditions of our lives, women become less and less willing to tolerate those conditions unaltered, or to passively accept external and destructive controls over our lives and our identities.

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

In his eyes, obviously, this better quality of life will come, not through a woman learning to come to terms with her living and dying and her own personal power, but rather through her wearing a 'normal' bra.

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.

Dora Tominic

I dreamt I had begun training to change my life, with a teacher who is very shadowy. I was not attending classes, but I was going to learn how to change my whole life, live differently, do everything in a new and different way. I didn't really understand, but I trusted this shadowy teacher. Another young woman who was there told me she was taking a course in "language crazure", the opposite of discrazure (the cracking and wearing away of rock). I thought it would be very interesting to study the formation and crack and composure of words, so I told my teacher I wanted to take that course. My teacher said okay, but it wasn't going to help me any because I had to learn something else, and I wouldn't get anything new from that class. I replied maybe not, but even though I knew all about rocks, for instance, I still liked studying their composition, and giving a name to the different ingredients of which they were made. It's very exciting to think of me being all the people in this dream. 

audre lorde always always always had the right words. it does not serve living. 

aisha

The status of untouchable is a very unreal and lonely one, although it keeps everyone at arm's length, and protects as it insulates. But you can die of that specialness, of the cold, the isolation. It does not serve living. 

Tabea

The idea of knowing, rather than believing, trusting, or even understanding, has always been considered heretical. But I would willingly pay whatever price in pain was needed, to savor the weight of completion; to be utterly filled, not with conviction nor with faith, but with experience--knowledge, direct and different from all other certainties.

The Cancer Journals quotes

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