The Cancer Journals

In these sections, Lorde focuses on the importance of using language to express the experience of having breast cancer. Lorde outlines the book’s major points in the introduction, including the controversy over wearing prostheses. She emphasizes the importance of elucidating these experiences and figuring out how to use them constructively. Her sense of urgency reflects her commitments to both writing and activism.

Lorde also introduces her concept of breast cancer survivors being warriors. The traditional image of a warrior is typically masculine. Lorde reappropriates this image, feminizes it, and places it in a non-Western context. In this way, she also revives the lost histories of historical women warriors, particularly those who existed in pre-colonial West Africa. In the text, Lorde invokes Seboulisa, goddess of Abomey. Lorde has mentioned Seboulisa numerous times in her work, including in her poem, “Dahomey,” in which she mentions how Seboulisa’s breast was “eaten away by worms of sorrow.” She mentions the goddess again in “125th Street and Abomey.” In this poem, she addresses Seboulisa directly, as she does in The Cancer Journals. The mention of Seboulisa ties into Lorde’s celebrations of West African goddesses in her work. Seboulisa is also a source of connection due to the idea that she has only one breast. Lorde’s mention of a breast eaten away by sorrow connects to her feeling of mourning over the loss of her own right breast.

In her first journal entry, Lorde shares her thoughts about how her experience with cancer correlates with the ease with which Black lives are extinguished, as well as the convention of presenting women according to heterosexual men’s ideas of what is attractive. In neither instance are women valued as human beings. Instead, their lives are weighed against money and, in comparison, often come up short. Meanwhile, Lorde struggles to improve her quality of life and to perpetuate her existence in a world that is blind toward and indifferent to her pain.

Lorde writes from the tail-end of the second-wave feminist movement. Reagan era, which entailed a shift toward consumerist excess and a retraction of advances in reproductive rights, was only two years away. Lorde criticizes the indifference to race and class that many white, middle-class feminists have demonstrated, despite their dominance of the movement’s public narrative. Lorde expresses her exasperation with this dominant wing of the feminist movement when she criticizes her peer, Mary Daly, who died in 2010. Daly was a radical lesbian feminist, like Lorde, and a theologian who taught at Boston College until she came under fire for barring male students from her classes in the interest of creating safe spaces in which women could talk about their experiences. Daly and Lorde were aligned in their emphases of encouraging women to use language both to clarify their experiences for themselves and to connect with other women. However, Daly’s dismissal of racism as a problem that impedes feminism reinforces the patriarchy that oppresses them both.

Lorde also mentions her completion of her first novel, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), a chronicle of her childhood in New York and the women who shaped her early on. Lorde’s revisitation of her past through the writing of this novel, alongside her metaphor of feeling “de-chrysalised,” reflects the theme of personal transformation that is key to this text.

Lorde reads numerous books both before and after her mastectomy, including Carl Simonton’s best-selling classic Getting Well Again: A Step-by-Step, Self-Help Guide to Overcoming Cancer for Patients and Their Families (1978). Dr. Oscar Carl Simonton was a radiation oncologist who popularized the mind-body connection as key to fighting cancer—an approach referred to as psychoneuroimmunology. He also created the Simonton Cancer Center to promote his approach. Simonton believed that people with positive attitudes lived longer and had fewer side effects due to cancer. This is a position that Lorde critiques later in the text. Lorde’s reading of Simonton’s book doesn’t assuage her fears about looming illness and death. Instead, she embraces the importance of work, a point that Lorde reiterates in her poem “A Song of Many Movements.” The poem’s refrain, “Our labor has become more important than our silence” frames Lorde’s impetus for writing The Cancer Journals. Lorde describes the small silences that impede women—that is, the hesitation to speak, particularly among those who are marginalized. Small silences are brought on by the fear of being wrong, fear of being ignored, and fear of being attacked. Lorde reminds the reader that silence cannot protect anyone from the inevitability of these events. Instead, silence only reinforces divisions between women, as well as the suppression of one’s full expression of being.

Lorde illustrates her reliance on a community of women who share her feminist goals and commitments to equity. She also expresses a commitment to protecting children and the environment—interests that are concomitant with her kind of feminism. Alongside these social goals is her active reclamation of language. The assertion that she makes in this speech is similar to the one that she makes in her seminal essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” featured in Sister Outsider. Among the “master’s tools” are the “mockeries of separation,” which reinforce racial and class boundaries, as well as keeping women from sharing their personal experiences and learning from them. To Lorde, the secrecy that exists between and separates white women and women of color maintains a white supremacist and patriarchal status quo.