Cancer--

In 2018 well over 1.5 million people will be diagnosed with some form of cancer, the most common being breast, lung, and bronchus cancer. Besides the money-making business (or charities; you decide) and the occasional film depicting the sad events, why is no one talking about this all too common occurrence?  

There is something to be said about the need for empowerment, the need to not break down another woman, and there are many ways to do so. In Chikako Takeshita’s book, The Global Politics of the IUD, we see how many women have battled the medical community to get a form of birth control and arguably created an encouraging community of users in the process of. Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals works in a completely different way. She uses her own venerability and lets other experience alongside her the trial and tribulations of treatment and healing. This is not a single experience to share to the world, Lorde’s book has been handed out time and time again to let women know they are not alone, as explained in Rafia Zakaria’s article in The Guardian.

She says, “Making my way through the book’s pages, I found a different model of feminist power – not a sidestepping of sickness, but a defiant avowal of the reality of pain and respect for the transformed self it leaves behind. I emerged as neither a contradiction nor an oxymoron, but a vanguard, a model, for others less brave.” She is not the only one to feel these things.

In my own experience, I can see that it is beyond encouraging and supportive, but I have had no bodily experience with sickness beyond my own mind. My sister however struggled with a major surgery and two rounds of treatment in order to rid herself of sickness present in her thyroid. In her process of treatment and healing she shut out from the world in a lot of ways.  She refused to let her high school classmates know what she was even going through, and she refused to take a step back from her workload. I wish I could go back in time and give her this book, even if she pretended not to read it; she’s a sucker for a good read. This book would have been able to lend a helping hand in something none of my family members could have been able to do. Besides the small gifts and prayers every corner she turned- there would have been someone relating to many of the things she experienced in constant doctors’ appointments, surgery, treatment, and post ops.

The only argument possible against any form of poetry and writing Lorde graces society with would be is details; about women’s bodies that still seem to be taboo in many parts of society. In her writing, Lorde tries to break these barriers and plenty of others.  

Cancer occurs often, it is a sickness constantly trying to be cured and prevented. Although it grazes news headlines occasionally, one often has to seek out information on their own. Audre Lorde in her book tries to make it a conversation, a support system, and works to combat the ideas of cancer and healing ‘taboo’.