The Cancer Journals

“May these words serve as encouragement for other women to speak and to act of our experiences with cancer and with other threats of death, for silence has never brought us anything of worth.”

Lorde explains her purpose for writing The Cancer Journals, which is to offer other women the language and motivation to tell similar stories about suffering illness and being confronted with death. She acknowledges how silence has marginalized women and given them less agency in narrating their own stories.

“Each of us struggles daily with the pressures of conformity and the loneliness of difference from which those choices seem to offer escape.”

Lorde seeks to understand why those who get mastectomies choose to get reconstructive surgery. Instead of judging, she acknowledges that a woman who chooses to get prosthesis is merely trying to adjust herself to cultural standards of femininity. She wants to feel attractive and to know that her appearance gives her some social value.

“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.”

Lorde reiterates the importance of narrating her personal story. Her use of the adverbial phrase “over and over again” indicates that this is a conclusion that she has repeatedly drawn, despite deterrence and the fear of being hurt.

“Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism.”

Lorde describes how Black women exist on the margins of both race and gender. Black women experience paradoxical hypervisibility and invisibility due to the mainstream culture’s tendency to disregard or overlook them.

“For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”

The “we” to whom Lorde refers are women of all races and sexual orientations. The fear is the aversion to concretizing their own experiences through language, due to the expectation that one will either be ignored or diminished. Lorde insists, however, that one must speak, despite that fear. Remaining silent only further empowers oppressive forces.

“I felt as if I was always listening to a concert of voices from inside myself, all with something slightly different to say, all of which were quite insistent and none of which would let me rest.”

Lorde describes her feelings as she is enduring pain and fear and coming to terms with her choice to have a mastectomy, after considering alternative courses of treatment. The metaphor “a concert of voices” refers to her ambivalence and the difficulty in making sound choices when so many of the options she generates for herself were valid. Her feelings reiterate the sense that no single course of action is really the “right” one, but simply the one that may feel right at a particular time.

“There is the dispatch with which I have ceased being a person who is myself and become a thing upon a Guerney cart to be delivered up to Moloch, a dark living sacrifice in the white place.”

Moloch is a Canaanite deity associated with child sacrifice. Lorde’s invocation of Moloch signifies her vulnerability, while her use of the noun “dispatch” underscores the unexpectedness of going from being a healthy individual to someone lying on a Guerney cart, immobilized, as though being prepared for consumption.

“But support will always have a special and vividly erotic set of image/meanings for me now, one of which is floating upon a sea within a ring of women like warm bubbles keeping me afloat upon the surface of that sea. I can feel the texture of inviting water just beneath their eyes, and do not fear it. It is the sweet smell of their breath and laughter and voices calling my name that gives me volition, helps me remember I want to turn away from looking down. These images flow quickly, the tangible floods of energy rolling off these women toward me that I converted into power to heal myself.”

Lorde likens her community of women to the feeling of floating in a warm bubble bath. This sensory comparison, which also incorporates the olfactory and auditory pleasure she gets from the women, brings her comfort and seems to keep depression at bay.

“There is so much false spirituality around us these days, calling itself goddess-worship or ‘the way.’ It is false because too cheaply bought and little understood […] So when an example of the real power of healing love comes along such as this one, it is difficult to use the same words to talk about it because so many of our best and most erotic words have been so cheapened.”

Lorde comments on what was then a burgeoning industry in self-help based on commercial notions of female empowerment. True spirituality, for Lorde, rests in women having conversations with each other about their true experiences.

“Growing up Fat Black Female and almost blind in America requires so much surviving that you have to learn from it or die […] I carry tattooed upon my heart a list of names of women who did not survive, and there is always space left for one more, my own. That is to remind me that even survival is only part of the task. The other part is teaching. I had been in training for a long time.”

Lorde describes how the conditions of being overweight, female, Black, and nearly blind have, in a way, prepared her for her current ordeal. In this instance, she regards herself as more fortunate than other women who could not survive their respective travails. The responsibility of survival, however, also requires one to use the experience to try to prepare others for their inevitable and respective ordeals.

“I wanted to write in my journal but couldn’t bring myself to. There are so many shades to what passed through me in those days. And I would shrink from committing myself to paper because the light would change before the word was out, the ink was dry.”

Lorde describes the pain in her chest from where her breast used to be, and how that pain weakened her and diminished her motivation to write, or to express how she felt in the best way she knew how. Lorde also expresses how her pain impacted her mood, making her inner world seem erratic.

“The need to look death in the face and not shrink from it, yet not ever to embrace it to easily, was a developmental and healing task for me that was constantly being sidelined by the more practical and immediate demands of hurting too much, and how do I live with myself one-breasted? What posture do I take, literally, with my physical self?”

Lorde describes the contradictory needs that she had to meet in response to breast cancer, particularly her need to face her existential reality while coping with her pain. Her rhetorical questions reflect how she was contemplating her self-image, while also prodding the reader to think about how cancer reframes one’s understanding of the physical self, of how a person should look and function.

“I will never be a doctor. I will never be a deep-sea diver. I may possibly take a doctorate in etymology, but I will never bear any more children. I will never learn ballet, nor become a great actress, although I might learn to ride a bike and travel to the moon. But I will never be a millionaire nor increase my life insurance. I am who the world and I have never seen before.”

Lorde, like many people faced with their mortality, considers all the possibilities that will no longer be open to her, due to the changes that breast cancer caused to her body. Some of these possibilities were probably never open to her, though now it may seem silly even to contemplate them. Instead of ending on a note of resignation, she embraces the uniqueness of her life and what she has contributed to the world.

“Every once in a while I would think, ‘what do I eat? How do I act to announce or preserve my new status as temporary upon this earth?’ and then I’d remember that we have always been temporary, and that I had just never really underlined it before, or acted out of it so completely before. And then I would feel a little foolish and needlessly melodramatic, but only a little.”

Lorde describes being, for the first time, emotionally aware of her mortality, but also of the necessity to extend however many years she has left and to live them well. The notion of mortality is so intellectually obvious, but not something that feels immediate until one is confronted with an illness or another close encounter with death. Her feeling of foolishness likely stems from her sense that she is not unique here, though her feeling is still deeply personal and, at times, isolating.

“Breast cancer, with its mortal awareness and the amputation which it entails, can still be a gateway, however cruelly won, into the tapping and expansion of my own power and knowing.”

Lorde encourages women to regard breast cancer—an illness that is often associated with a loss of feminine identity—as a passage to understanding, or as a means to re-examine how gender identity has been constructed, so that women can consider other ideas about what it means to be a woman.

“This emphasis upon the cosmetic after surgery reinforces this society’s stereotype of women, that we are only what we look or appear, so this is the only aspect of our existence we need to address […] With quick cosmetic reassurance, we are told that our feelings are not important, our appearance is all, the sum total of self.”

Lorde considers the pressure to wear a prosthesis, which she regards as an attempt to disguise her condition and reintegrate her and other cancer survivors into society as “normal,” or devoid of the scars and alterations that result from mastectomies.

“With quick cosmetic reassurance, we are told that our feelings are not important, our appearance is all, the sum total of self.”

Lorde rejects prosthesis because she rejects societal pressure to focus her energy on her appearance. The purpose of writing about her experience with cancer is to encourage women who have survived the illness to use it to talk about the industries that threaten their health, and to reassess their relationships to their bodies and to each other.

“Here we were, in the offices of one of the top breast cancer surgeons in New York City. Every woman there either had a breast removed, might have to have a breast removed, or was afraid of having to have a breast removed. And every woman there could have used a reminder that having one breast did not mean her life was over, nor that she was less a woman, nor that she was condemned to the use of a placebo on order to feel good about herself and the way she looked.”

Lorde shares an anecdote about a nurse who disapproves of Lorde’s refusal to wear a prosthesis. Lorde was outraged by the nurse’s insistence that she wear the prosthesis to help maintain the morale of the office—a request that is both an imposition on Lorde’s right to bodily autonomy and an unhelpful appraisal of what cancer survivors truly need to feel better about themselves and to cope with their conditions.

“I refuse to hide my body simply because it might make a woman-phobic world more comfortable.”

Lorde takes a position of resistance on the matter of wearing a prosthesis. She describes a world that works to conceal the changes that occur inside and outside of a woman’s body as “woman-phobic.” Though, this endless demand for perfection is really a denial of the fullness of a woman’s humanity.

“I realized that the attitude towards prosthesis after breast cancer is an index of this society’s attitudes towards women in general as decoration and externally defined sex object.”

Lorde expands on her idea of woman-phobia and explains how the expectation that she wear a prosthesis is connected to the sexist demand that women be on display and valued largely for how they look. 

“Yet there still appears to be a conspiracy on the part of Cancer Inc. to insist to every woman who has lost a breast that she is no different from before, if with a little skillful pretense and a few ounces of silicone gel she can pretend to herself and the watching world—the only orientation toward the world that women are supposed to have—that nothing has happened to challenge her. With this orientation a woman after surgery is allowed no time or space within which to weep, rage, internalize, and transcend her own loss. She is left no space to come to terms with her altered life, not to transform it into another level of dynamic existence.”

Lorde accuses both society and corporations of working in tandem to suppress a woman’s understanding of how she has been impacted by the experiences of breast cancer and mastectomy. Both work to reinforce women’s self-defeating and self-negating habit of adjusting themselves for whoever may be looking at them. As Lorde has previously mentioned, the focus on maintaining attractiveness will diminish energy that may be more wisely expended elsewhere.

“There is nothing wrong, per se, with the use of prostheses, if they can be chosen freely, for whatever reason, after a woman has had a chance to accept her new body. But usually prostheses serve a real function, to approximate the performance of a missing physical part. In other amputations and with other prosthetic devices, function is the main point of their existence […] Only false breasts are designed for appearance only, as if the only real function of women’s breasts were to appear in a certain shape and size and symmetry to onlookers, or to yield to external pressure.”

Lorde explains her aversion to prostheses more carefully here, making it clear that women who choose to wear them are not the problem and prosthetic devices themselves are not the problem, though they differ from other prostheses in that they serve only an aesthetic function. She contrasts prosthetic breasts with prosthetic limbs or dentures, which are key to human function and survival.

“I am personally affronted by the message that I am only acceptable if I look ‘right’ or ‘normal,’ where those norms have nothing to do with my own perceptions of who I am. Where ‘normal’ means the ‘right’ color, shape, size, or number of breasts, a woman’s perception of her own body and the strengths that come from that perception are discouraged, trivialized, and ignored.”

Lorde addresses the ways in which society and media depersonalize a woman’s relationship with her own body and foist upon her pressure to conform to a physical ideal, however unattainable it may be. This ideal, as Lorde notes, is also racialized.