Audre Lorde, _The Cancer Journals_

 I HAVE READ a fair number of poems and essays by Lorde, but not a whole book, until now. I picked up The Cancer Journals at this late date (published 1980) because I recently read (and will eventually blog about) Anne Boyer's The Undying, about her own experience with breast cancer. I was considering Boyer's book for a course I am soon to teach on the literature of illness, and Boyer mentions Lorde's book in passing. I remembered that The Cancer Journals had made a great impression on a few friends and acquaintances, so I decided to check it out as well.

The Cancer Journals is short (less than eighty pages). The first and last of its three sections read not exactly like journals but more like free-standing essays (for instance, one is mainly concerned with the topic of prostheses). The middle section, the longest, quotes often from Lorde's journals but for the most part reads more like a memoir, a reflection on experience at some remove in time, rather than the immediate impressions of a journal.

I thought Boyer's the better book on the whole, I'd say, but the Lorde seems like a better bet for the undergraduate classroom. Boyer steers as clear as she can of anything that seems at all like classic patient memoir, for one thing, and I suspect a lot of students would find that perverse and frustrating. For another, she is more than willing to plunge into the brambles of high theory. Teaching it, I suspect, would be quite a bit of work.

Lorde's prose is quite a bit closer to the ground: "my brain felt like grey mush," for instance, or "there was a tremendous amount of love and support flowing into me from the women around me, and it felt like being bathed in a continuous tide of positive energies [...]". Boyer is too fastidious a writer, I think, to go in for talking about tides of positive energies, and good for her. But my students talk quite a bit like the way Lorde writes, and I think The Cancer Journals is going to meet them just about exactly where they are.

Not that The Cancer Journals lacks for challenging material. Lorde foregrounds her identity as a black lesbian feminist and is perfectly willing to call out anything in her treatment or rehab that looks like sexism, racism, or homophobia. Students tend to be receptive to that sort of critique these days, though. I'm not sure how well they would navigate sentences like this one, from Boyer: "Patients become information not merely via the quantities of whatever emerges from or passes through their discrete bodies, the bodies and sensations of entire populations become the math of likelihood (of falling ill or staying well, of living or dying, of healing or suffering) upon which treatment is based."