Tracy K. Smith Sees Cancer Journals as 21st-Century Guidebook

Literary Hub offers readers a glimpse at Tracy K. Smith's foreword to a 2020 edition of Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals (Penguin Classics), originally published in 1980.  "The Cancer Journals is many things," writes Smith. "It is a source of comfort and encouragement for those of us living with the specter of breast cancer." Further: 

It is also an invitation to compassion, fury, reflection, and action for all of us living in a world ravaged by myriad forms of violence, shot through by so many reminders of mortality. Reading these pages now, early in the year 2020, I am keenly aware that the threats Lorde defines—physical and psychic violence against bodies Black, female, queer, and otherwise marginalized—have not been vanquished.

On the contrary, we’ve seen these very same sources of annihilation, and these very same forces of invisibility, leveraged against a widening circle of outsiders. In light of this, I am inclined to regard The Cancer Journals as a guide to survival for the 21st-century body and soul.

In a journal entry from December 1978, Lorde asks, “What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying, as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?”

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