Three essays (one based on a speech) related to Lorde's experience with breast cancer, a mastectomy, and dealing with the aftermath, are collected in this book.

Lorde's perspective as a Black lesbian feminist was an interesting one worth reading, and I appreciated her deftness with language and describing her emotions going through a mastectomy. However, I'm neither familiar with her work nor a breast cancer survivor, and I think I would've needed to be one or the other (or both) to fully connect to the work. ( )

De la mano de Audre Lorde "mujer, negra, poeta, feminista, madre, lesbiana, amante, guerrera" nos sumergimos en Los diarios del cáncer, publicado por primera vez en 1981. Este íntimo diario pone en evidencia cómo la escritura puede ser una preciada herramienta ante una crisis: permite revelar lo que duele, nombrar el sentir más desgarrador a través de la acción poético-política que implica decir, llevar a la palabra, inteligible para otras, lo que se hace alquimia en el cuerpo. Porque la palabra es la primera experiencia común. Y, desde ese gesto de desandar el silencio, Audre propone una cercanía que convierte su vivencia en la de una voz colectiva.
Su espléndida poética nos sumerge en su proceso de mastectomía. En las notas del diario personal que lleva en ese tiempo de su vida, Audre desovilla un dolor lacerante, nos invita a no quitarle la mirada al sufrimiento, a ese que habita en cada una de nosotras en forma de memoria-cuerpo. Y se zambulle en el análisis de lo que este cáncer le regala, como una oportunidad: acercarse a las potencias del autocuidado personal y colectivo, del cuerpo como territorio político, de la importancia de no ignorar lo que nos distingue como mujeres feministas, del poder de lo erótico, del amor lésbico y de lo indispensable que es la contención de un cálido círculo en el cuidado de un cuerpo enfermo.
Entrar en este diario es acompañarla en su incesante lucha desbordada de poesía: memorias a veces agónicas, pero cargadas de una profunda dulzura y amor hacia la vida, de una espiritualidad que se va reconociendo cada vez más con sus raíces afrocaribeñas, una conexión llena de fuerza y sabiduría que la sostiene hasta el final de sus días. ( )

Audre Lorde is everything. While there are still some arguments to be made, especially as this sits in 2nd wave feminism verging on 3rd wave, her writing gets to your core. ( )

Audre Lorde, with the nearness of death palpable and tangible, has written a profoundly insightful anecdote/reflection on her experience with breast cancer as a black, lesbian feminist in The Cancer Journals. Through journal excerpts, seminal speeches, and self-examining essays, Lorde bridges the personal and the political. Having had a mastectomy and a cancer diagnosis, she begins with the dangers of silence; how the sight of death makes us fear not having done or said what we needed or wanted to; how a realisation of doing nothing or doing something doesn't change the fact of mortality. Within this silence, desire subduedly courses. This desire is not solely driven by the want for words to crawl out of mouths in their truth and will. It includes the love of women, the intense wish for the desired to desire back.

As society continuously constrict the definition of "woman" based on her femininity, Lorde speaks of the struggles in accepting the loss of one of her breasts. While people around her insist on the use of silicone prosthesis instead of reserving a space on her full recovery or time to grieve this loss, it reveals how we reduce women to their body parts. Horrifically, a nurse got mad at Lorde for not wearing her prosthesis, proceeding to mention how one-breasted women in public make people uncomfortable. Having one breast is not shameful or embarrassing; physical asymmetry is not ugly. This constant need for women to adhere to society's brutal norms, its encouragement to hide or remedy appearances post-surgery, notwithstanding the mental, physical, and emotional toll of illness are deeply harmful. Several ideas aim at the fashion industry's blatant disregard for different bodies as well; its standards of beauty contribute to this cyclic demand. In turn, women lose themselves, solely clings to their identity through others' perception. And so Lorde wrote, "Women have been programmed to view our bodies in terms of how they look and feel to others, rather than how they feel to ourselves, and how we wish to use them."

The Cancer Journals is an intimate, thought-provoking look at a subject that doesn't often find its place in the public forum. It is a compelling dismantling of notions and expectations on women we don't otherwise notice, most we have come to embrace as ordinary. Lorde's sincerity and distinct voice reverberate across its pages, rare tears even surface in my eyes once. This is a crucial feminist text, where a much-needed societal and medical criticism reside. ( )

Krebstagebuch