The Cancer Journals

Lorde starts this chapter with a series of journal entries from March to December 1978. In October, Lorde writes about the pain she feels and how she tears up, though she’s not sure what she’s sad about—her lost breast or herself? Maybe she is wondering how she can meet this personal tragedy with grace. What she does know is that she’s tired. She wants to feel like herself again. Part of her thinks it’s all a dream and that she’ll soon wake up.

In an entry written the following month she transcribes a short dialogue with an unnamed woman. The woman asks how she spends her time. Reading, mostly, Lorde answers. This isn’t true. Lorde cannot tell the woman that she usually stares at blank walls. One day, when she discovered that she had the energy and desire to masturbate, she did this for hours. The pleasure was “a welcome relief to the long coldness” (23).

When Lorde shifts back to the essay form, she tells the reader that she must do her work alone. For months, she has wanted to write a piece about cancer and how it has affected her life and consciousness “as a woman, a Black lesbian feminist mother lover poet” (24).