the cancer journals audre lorde sparknotes

Being “out” really means only that you can’t answer back or protect yourself from what you are absorbing through your ears and other senses. How, I didn’t know, but I suspect I had absorbed that fact from the operating room while I still was out. I woke up in the recovery room after the biopsy colder than I can remember ever having been in my life. No one could have a better weapon.Well, what we did for encore was the real thing. When the need arises, I press Audre’s book on the next unwitting warrior. What she reveals in The Cancer Journals allowed me-and legions of women-to confront the abyss, to draw nourishment, to share the mantle of her courage. “Audre’s words of survival and courage became my new bible, shaping me into a bold warrior in the army of one-breasted women. (…) 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.” “Audre Lorde’s courageous account of her breast cancer defies how women are expected to deal with sickness, accepting pain and a transformed sense of self. The Cancer Journals should be read by every woman.” Should cancer of the breast be in my future, as it is in the future of thousands of American women each year, Lorde’s words of love and wisdom and courage will be beside me to give me strength.

That the sum total of me is infinitely greater than the number of my breasts.

This book teaches me that with one breast or none, I am still me. It has taken away some of my fear of cancer, my fear of incompleteness, my fear of difference. “Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals has helped me more than I can say. More than this, her book offers women a new and deeply feminist challenge.” Lorde is the Amazon warrior who also knows how to tell the tale of battle: what happened, and why, what are the weapons, and who are the comrades she found. “Grief, terror, courage, the passion for survival and far more than survival, are here in the personal and political searchings of a great poet. “This empowering compilation is heartbreaking, beautiful, and timeless.Lorde’s big heart and fierce mind are at full strength on each page of this deeply personal and deeply political collection.”

The cancer journals audre lorde sparknotes