When Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980)¹ and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)² were published, they arrived amid a kind of Renaissance in black women’s writing. Within the surrounding decade, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and other African American writers released works that have huge impacts on the expectations surrounding African American women’s work.³ The Salt Eaters, Tar Baby, Meridian, and The Color Purple each deals with the interior lives of female protagonists who are in the process of forming or reforming themselves. Each of these works features an African American female protagonist who suffers from an incomplete or fragmented sense of her self. Each central figure struggles with some of the same concerns: how to integrate what she feels about her sexuality and gender with the expectations placed on her; how to form a voluntary community; how to extract herself from oppressive situations; and how to balance her commitment to herself with her commitments to the outside world.

The protagonists created by these texts contrast those explored in black American women’s autobiographical work published around the same time.⁴ Angela Davis, Michelle Cliff, and black women writing in the United States, such as Jamaica Kincaid and others, wrote narratives of their lives. These writers refrained from dramatic displays of feelings such as grief, pain, or lust⁵ and focused on long-term goals more than on individual missteps on the way to attaining them. Their suffering comes from outside. And though they occasionally remark on their own personal weakness, they seldom present themselves as flawed in a way likely to invite audience scorn or community ostracism.

Audre Lorde’s writing differs from that of both these groups. The first set of authors, while exploring similar issues, do so from a distance created by elements such as third person narration, the epistolary form, temporal shift, and the overall expectation that fiction is highly crafted. Lorde shuns such distancing mechanisms, preferring to enmesh her life and writing. The aforementioned autobiographers focus on their public lives rather than on more intimate details. Lorde combines the two, creating work that has had a lasting impact on generations of writers, many of whom felt demographically dissimilar to her.

Lorde’s books might be stunning to readers approaching them for the first time. She elevates mundane details of daily life into laden symbols and novel metaphors. She exposes elements of her life that other black writers had kept hidden. Surprisingly, it is the depth of that exposure that prevents voyeuristic pleasure. She draws readers into her bodily experience, creating empathy rather than an outsider’s gaze. She paves the way for various readers to identify with a black woman’s bodily experience. Her writing of embodiment and her narrative dexterity provide the foundation for much of this project.

Those who appreciate Lorde have lauded her for writing herself into the history of the left in New York and for granting a detailed view of a twentieth-century black lesbian life. She has been a model for many who want to be working writers and who strive to integrate creative pursuits with their everyday activities. Her writing in The Cancer Journals paved the way for her prose to have an impact far beyond bookish circles, finding use in physicians’ offices and in the hands of patients who were not typically readers. Its exploration of physical life provided an example for others to use their own corporeal realities as rhetorical filters to discuss their experiences of the world. As a result of her boldness, her work is known for releasing the previously unsaid, thus diminishing the power secrets have over our lives.

As Lorde begins writing in the autobiographical tradition, she addresses a number of concerns typically seen in black American women’s work. During childhood, her relationship with her mother shapes her more than her other interactions do. Racism plays a formative role in her life, as does education. Of course she sometimes needs to rebel against the people working in schools so that she maintains her integrity and continues along her path. But she diverges from the other black women writers in the depiction of lesbianism, in her focus on the character’s participation in politics often considered separate from racial civil rights, in her detailing of intimate relationships, in her portrayal of international travel as a path toward increased freedom, and in her insistence—despite worries from others that such insistence might be essentializing—that her identity and body are inseparable.

The aspects of her work that I explore here are also ones in which she diverges from the paths set by other black American women. This chapter focuses primarily on Zami. However, The Cancer Journals serves as a foundation for both the taboo-breaking narrative and the highly constructed character the she creates in Zami. Lorde’s writing in both books creates alternate paths for black American women writers. The archival material held at Spelman College includes material that further illustrates her constructive processes. This material includes earlier drafts of these works as well as journals that cover the events of both books. Looking at these source materials helps show how Lorde mined her own life’s events. And the fact that she left so much to be examined implies that she wanted the creative process to be displayed as plainly as possible. Considering her openness with the books’ central figures, this is hardly surprising.

At the same time, she crafts theory that manages to encompass both rhetoric and living, successfully challenging several mainstream, longstanding philosophical paradigms that are based around embodiment, taboo, character development, and narrative structure. She always includes physical experiences as part of the central figures’ points of view and understandings of the world, thus demanding a place for the human dimensions of sexuality and pain. As a result, her central characters become hypervulnerable before they become personally more powerful. The combination of the always-present physical dimension with Lorde’s calculated narration of developmental missteps helps create the mythos that does rhetorical work. So does the manipulation of narrative distance and direction in order to allow her character to meander while the story goes inevitably in a single direction.

Coming into a context where propriety is paramount, writing about the body is fraught with risks. Such personal detail, especially in the absence of similar disclosure by peers, creates an atmosphere of hypervisibility and vulnerability. Faced with cancer, amputation, and all of the associated pain and loss, Audre Lorde chooses first to chronicle the processes of diagnosis, treatment, and grief and then to make her experiences available to the public. The Cancer Journals is a slim volume based around Lorde’s journal entries from 1978–1980. After an earlier biopsy of what turns out to be a benign tumor, Lorde receives a breast cancer diagnosis. Her fright is no surprise. But at the time when she publishes her account, her chronicling of her fear is unprecedented and shocking to the reading public, including those who approve of her choice to speak about the process. Her disclosure has the effect of stripping her of the privacy most women in her situation clung to as a last vestige of protection.

Lorde foregrounds her feelings of inadequacy. In an entry dated January 26, 1979, she writes, “I’m not feeling very hopeful these days about selfhood or anything else. I handle the outward motions of each day while pain fills me like a puspocket and every touch threatens to breach the taut membrane that keeps it from flowing through and poisoning my whole existence” (Lorde, Cancer, 9; italics in original). Lorde does at least two things here. While employing a bodily metaphor to explain how the disease has created a contaminant that threatens to infect her entire life, she also provides an example of how not to try to fulfill the superwoman archetype.⁶ She admits to enacting routine duties automatically, showing persistence and difficulty simultaneously. Then she complicates the vision of her duty-bound body—one that people might otherwise relegate to a type or a role—with signs of danger and damage.

“Puspocket” provides a complicatedly graphic image. Pus itself is a sign of infection, something that draws attention to a site of physical injury. Given the mastectomy, Lorde’s body may well be a site of pus. Readers are made to consider that possible result of surgery even though this is not where Lorde’s focus lies. This metaphor helps highlight that on a physical level, the mastectomy results in more than the absence of Lorde’s breast. It also produces a wound—one that does not mend immediately or cleanly. This image remains with readers even as Lorde describes her pain as a sign of infection and failed healing. Her corporeal aches remind her of the bodily damage but also signal what she has lost in her life. The entire ordeal affects the way she faces daily living in the same way that a puspocket might restrict movement. Touch itself, at other times a comfort, becomes a threat to her well-being because of the spills and further infection it might cause. She creates a portrait of agony becoming part of her routine, disrupting her life beyond the physical.

Despite the pain she reveals, Lorde moves through the difficulty toward a kind of literary empowerment. As Lester C. Olson writes in “Audre Lorde’s Embodied Invention,” “she actively transformed her fear, vulnerability, and even the surgical amputation of her breast into rhetorical resources as potential strengths and bases for concerted community actions” (Olson, “Audre Lorde,” 81). Lorde’s innovations in rhetoric matter here. Although her consistent placement of bodily experience in her narrative may have been deemed a result of obstinacy or of a diary-like impulse to narrate her pain and difference, everything about this choice fits into an approach that helps Lorde dismantle large swaths of Western theory while creating a space for innovations in autobiographical writing.

Lorde’s work in The Cancer Journals critiques the Cartesian notion of an irreparable mind/body split. In fact, her writing implies that the notion itself is a self-replicating rupture that forestalls healing, wholeness, and health by constraining the imagination to such a degree that people consistently artificially bifurcate themselves. Her writing does not bother to urge a mending of that split because she does not believe it exists. Instead, she writes as though those who would ignore one side or the other are either sadly mistaken or committing an assault on her humanity and womanhood.

This assertion and the accompanying narrative practices stand in contrast to traditions of black American women’s autobiographical writing. Lorde and the earlier writers share many goals. However, most would have been unlikely to share Lorde’s focus on the physical. From the times of slave narratives, a modesty demanding an elimination of all but the most oblique references to the body was standard practice. American black women wrote conservatively so as to be deemed properly reserved and thus deserving of freedom. It was believed that this practice could eventually convince readers of their morality. Therefore, it was seen as a means to gain safety and well-being. Yet Lorde seeks the same results through opposite means. Judging by the prevalence of writing focused on obscuring the physical, it appears that no one would have guessed that including the body in every aspect of a narrative could help prevent objectification by providing both enough specificity to resist typing and enough vividness to invite others to identify with her. That identification allows Lorde to begin crafting a central figure who can make mistakes without suffering ultimate condemnation. This practice in The Cancer Journals opens a place for final revisions of Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, in which Lorde extends this radicalization of the black female character through precise narrative strategies that lead the reader to where Lorde wants them to go.

Speaking of black women, Lorde writes, “In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear—fear of contempt, of censure, of some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the very visibility without which we also cannot truly live” (Lorde, Cancer, 19–20). She tackles that ambivalence about invisibility by depicting, from the inside out, the body in pain. Lorde immediately takes on those who advocate for silence around personal issues—first by naming it “silence” instead of “privacy” or “discretion.” Then she connects this reluctance to be open with fear. Speaking, according to Lorde, equals bravery. In The Cancer Journals Lorde privileges a kind of showing in which she bares her bodily experiences and ties them to her psyche.