“What could we possibly be afraid of after having admitted to ourselves that we had dealt face to face with death and not embraced it?” Audre Lorde asked herself in her journal in 1978, a few days after undergoing a mastectomy for breast cancer. “For once we accept the actual existence of our dying, who can ever have power over us again.”
Lorde insisted on the new clarity, creativity and power enabled by the revelations of illness. The women she saw as succumbing to the lure of prosthetic breasts had for her refused enlightenment. This is empowering but also relentless: why should the ill be wiser than anyone else? What makes Lorde’s Cancer Journals genuinely revelatory is that insights of this kind are packed in amid despair and anger – accounts of staring out of the window and masturbating into exhaustion.
