Ibarra, 11
Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals:
Self-revelation, Self-analysis, Self-healing
By : Lily Ibarra
It is very important for me, after my mastectomy, to develop
and encourage my own internal sense of power. I needed to
rally my energies in such a way as to image myself as a fighter
resisting rather than as a passive victim suffering. (Audre Lorde, 73)
For feminist and social activist Audre Lorde it is important to transform silence and fear into language and action. This ideology did not take full-fledged meaning in her life until she was faced with one of her greatest fears, the reality of death. Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer in September of 1978 and as a result was forced to have a mastectomy, a crisis that compelled her to put into perspective the value of her life and her body. The result of this self-analysis was made public through her inspiring work, The Cancer Journals. This work, published in 1980, is composed of personal exposition, a speech, narrative-essays, and a selection of dated journal entries, embedded in and set apart from the main text in Italics. Her autobiographical work recounts her experience as a Black lesbian feminist with cancer and the removal of her right breast in a mastectomy.
My essay traces the journey of self-analysis taken by Lorde throughout her work and delineates how the transformation of her body allows for the transformation of her sense of self. I then examine here Lorde’s use of journal writing as a medium for self-healing and the importance of transforming her personal experience with cancer into a public and political testimony.
In September of 1978, Audre Lorde checked into the hospital for her second breast biopsy, wanting so desperately for it to be a benign tumor like the first biopsy, she was disappointed by the awful reality; Lorde was diagnosed with cancer in her right breast. Even before she was told by her doctors that she had cancer, Lorde awoke to an intuitive affirmation that was stronger than her own reality, “I woke up in the recovery room after the biopsy colder than I can remember ever having been in my life. I was hurting and horrified. I knew it was malignant. How, I didn’t know, but I suspect I had absorbed that fact from the operating room while I still was out”(27). Although we are presented with a frail and scared image of Lorde here, we also get a glimpse of a woman sharply acute to her body and about to embark in a painful, but liberating “journey.” Within three days of her diagnosis Lorde would have to make a decision, she would have to find an alternative treatment for the cancer or take the more terminate path by undergoing a mastectomy.
Lorde experiences a variety of emotions before arriving to her decision; the most “visible” example is her sense of personal fragmentation. Lorde recounts being tormented by dissonant voices within herself, she describes one as “a thin high voice,” screaming to her that none of what she was experiencing was true, that it was all a bad dream, while the others demanded sleep. Another part of her fragmented consciousness is represented as a “big bird,” which flies outside of her and observes all of her actions and then provides a running commentary, complete with “suggestions of factors forgotten, new possibilities of movement, and ribald remarks”(31). The fragmented self, represented here by the dissonant voices and the big bird, mirrors not only the scarred self, that has been consciously separated by this harsh new reality, but the many selves that compose her identity as a Black lesbian poet, mother, teacher and warrior. The power in the multitudinous self is not to envision it as a fragmentation, but a concert of voices that constitute the complete self. Although the multitude pieces of her self often seem to contradict each other, certain entries from the journal reveal that no central “I,” when referring to herself, separate from the other parts. In narrating the decision to have a mastectomy, Lorde says, “I would have paid even more than my beloved breast…to preserve that self that was not merely physically defined”(32). Nevertheless, the surgery later shows to be transforming that very self: “I want to write of the pain I am feeling right now, of the lukewarm tears that will not stop coming into my eyes-for what? For my breast? For the lost me? And which me was that anyway?…I want to be the person I used to be, the real me”(24-5). Here it is evident that Lorde struggles to accept all of the “I’s” even those dissonant ones that do not appear to be as real as her true self. In his article, “that the pain not be wasted”: Audre Lorde and the Written Self,” critic Jeanne Perreault, reinstates this idea by stating that Lorde encourages a multiplicity of selves; “the spirals of selves that touch, meet, cross, and blur according to context must all be given voice”(13).
Conflicted by the idea of her own fragile mortality and the anticipation of more physical pain and the loss of her breast, Lorde decides to listen attentively to that concert of voices, be led by them, as well as consider her alternatives. She contemplates straight medical profession, radiation, chemotherapy, and holistic health approaches of diet. While having more dramatic results, the mastectomy is the most assured procedure to end the growth of fatty cysts in her breast. Overcome by the strong feeling of wanting to live, love, and do more of her work, Lorde decides that these feelings are more important than the loss of her breast. Lorde confirms the power of this awareness by writing in her journal: “I’m going to have the mastectomy, knowing there are alternatives, some of which sound very possible in the sense of right thinking, but none of which satisfy me enough…Since it is my life that I am gambling with, and my life is worth even more than the sensual delights of my breast”(35). Making her body the central unit from which she expresses herself and makes decisions, Lorde is willing to sacrifice the physical pleasure that is attained through the breasts in order to live.
After the surgery takes place, Lorde goes through a period of mental anesthetization, which separates for a brief period all possible reflection on the physical loss of her breast. For Lorde it is this brief period, which she calls “quasi-numbness,” that is most crucial for mastectomy patients; they experience a childlike susceptibility to ideas, started by patterns and networks for women after breast surgery that encourage them to deny the realities of their bodies. Soon after her surgery, a woman, representing the Reach for Recovery program, brings Lorde a prepared packet containing a bra with lambswool pressed into a pale pink breast-shaped pad. Her message to Lorde is that she could look just as she did before the surgery by wearing this special bra, and “no one would know the difference”(42). In order to assure her of this, the woman opens her trim powder-blue man-tailored jacket to show Lorde her own “special” bra and asks her if she could tell the difference. Lorde mentally responds to her action as follows, “In her tight foundation and garment and stiff, up-lifting bra, both breasts looked equally unreal to me”(42). The woman continues by assuring her that the special bra would not have any affect on her love life. Not realizing that Lorde is a lesbian; the woman rambles on about her own unaffected heterosexual relationship. This woman’s visit compels Lorde to reflect on her situation after the mastectomy and what it means for her to have lost a breast. She begins to ask herself what her relationship with her lover will be like, whether she would still be found attractive and desirable. Lorde reflects on this idea:
…for the first time deeply and fleetingly a ground swell of sadness
rolled up over me that filled my mouth and eyes almost to
drowning. My right breast represented such an area of feeling
and pleasure for me, how could I bear never to feel again? (43)
Here, the writer shows both a physical and mental unity, she is now beginning to sense her physical loss and reflecting on her psychological response to this loss. Lorde attempts to wear the special bra and realizes that it is awkward, inert, and lifeless. After trying it on and feeling completely unmoved, she looks at her new physical landscape in the mirror and says, “I looked strange and uneven and peculiar to myself, but somehow, ever so much more myself, and therefore so much more acceptable, than I looked with that thing stuck inside my clothes”(44). Lorde demonstrates the beginning of her transformation in this passage, as a result of being presented with an insubstantial substitute for the loss of her breast, she is forced to either reject or accept the alteration of her body.
On another occasion, feeling more comfortable with her body, more wholesome and beautiful, she goes to her doctor’s office for a routine check-up. As she walks into the office Lorde is immediately confronted by one of the nurses for not wearing her prosthesis. Disapprovingly, the nurse tells Lorde that she would feel better with it on and that by not wearing one she is placing the morale of the office at risk. Outraged by the comment, Lorde feels assaulted upon her right to define and claim her own body. The nurse’s question suggests her discomfort at seeing Lorde’s “imperfect” female body, a highly visible and physical disruption in a social environment where thin, young, white, heterosexual bodies serve as the norm. In this episode, the nurse is emblematic of the social view of one-breasted women as aberrant. In her insightful article, “Writing the Body: From Abject to Subject,” Allison Kimmich comments on Lorde’s reaction to this social view: “Lorde claims the abjection as a means of self-definition. Instead of internalizing the dominant culture’s view of her body as Other, Lorde insists that it is “others” who seek to undermine her sense of self”(228). As a result of the social pressures, she is not only forced to defend her right to walk freely without a prosthesis, but to politically analyze the social impact on women experiencing breast surgery. The nurse’s words help Lorde to acknowledge the social power at work in defining and categorizing the female body. As a way of reclaiming the body, Lorde finds it urgent to politicize her view of prosthesis in a final essay included in this collection entitled, “Breast Cancer: Power vs. Prosthesis.”
In the last essay, “Breast Cancer: Power vs. Prosthesis,” Lorde writes profusely against the insistence of prosthesis by post-surgical counselors. Lorde states that after a mastectomy, women experience a period of nostalgia, a desire to regress, not wanting to persevere through their experience and examine whatever enlightenment might be at the core of it. The writer views this moment as the “target” time for post-surgical counselors; this regressive tie to the past is emphasized by the concentration upon breast cancer as a cosmetic problem, one which can be solved by a prosthetic pretense. Quick cosmetic reassurance implies to the woman that her feelings are not important, that appearance is all. Thus, the emphasis upon physical pretense at this sensitive point in a woman’s reclaiming of her self and her body image has two negative effects, according to Lorde:
(1)It encourages women to dwell in the past rather than a future.
This prevents a woman from assessing herself in the present and
from coming to terms with the changed planes of her body. (2) It
encourages a woman to focus her energies upon the mastectomy as
a cosmetic occurrence, to the exclusion of other factors in a
constellation that could include her own death. (57)
For Lorde, the time for a woman to claim her own body and in the process accept the change and reclaim the new self is of utmost importance and crucial for her survival. With the insistence of prosthesis immediately after, women are impeded from self-acceptance and self-transformation.
Further, Lorde argues that the attitudes toward the necessity for prostheses after breast surgery are merely a reflection of those attitudes within society towards women in general as objectified and depersonalized sexual conveniences. Women have been socially conditioned to view the body only in terms of how they look and feel to others, rather, than how they feel to themselves. Lorde’s analysis of prosthesis and its social implications follow a well-established feminist idealism that places the female body at the center of social manipulation. Feminist writer, Susan R. Bordo articulates this classic ideology in her essay, “The body and the reproduction of femininity:” “Through the pursuit of an ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity-a pursuit without a terminus, a resting point, requiring women constantly attend to minute and often whimsical changes in fashion-female bodies become ‘docile bodies’-bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation, ‘improvement’”(14). Due to the ever-changing ideal of femininity, as described by Bordo, the woman is pressured to constantly maintain a physical ideal, thus, making her body subject to “external regulation.” Here Bordo, like Lorde, implies that the woman never has the right to claim and regulate her own corporal ideal, it is done for her; she is to “improve” her body so as to fit the social norm. Given the illusory effect that prosthesis provides for the post-mastectomy woman and the obstacle it places in attaining self-transformation, Lorde rejects it altogether and stands in political protest. Deciding to live in her own body without the “disguise” of prosthesis is part of her integrating the private and the public aspects of female selfhood. Thus, she affirms, not conceals, differences; and by showing herself as one-breasted, she makes herself visible to other women.
As Lorde experiences a physical transformation by way of the mastectomy, she also journeys through a transformation of the self. The writer is forced to place her life through meticulous scrutiny when she is diagnosed with cancer. She is also impelled to examine the significance of her physical alteration and come to terms with her new physical landscape. Lorde achieves the examination of her self and her experience via her journal writing. Thus, how does the journal serve as a medium for self-healing? In her analysis, “Therapeutic Dimensions of Autobiography,” Suzanne Bunkers discusses the concept of diary/journal writing as a therapy and states that it is by nature an introspective and reflective act, and that such writing contributes to the writer’s emerging sense of individuality and self. (66) It is evident, through out Lorde’s collection of journals that this medium of writing allows for the connection of the self with the self, the constant and close self-analysis.