Thread by @healthy_scept

🧵#ODT in 1934 #AudreLorde was born. To celebrate the 87th birthday of the great “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”, we are going to tweet excerpts on her cancer #livedexperience & politics from The Cancer Journals (1980) and A Burst of Light (1988) #histmed #bcsm #bccww

"The Cancer Journals"

“Each woman responds to the crisis that breast cancer brings to her life out of a whole pattern, which is the design of who she is and how her life has been lived. The weave of her every day existence is the training ground for how she handles crisis.

Some women obscure their painful feelings surrounding mastectomy with a blanket of business-as-usual, thus keeping those feelings forever under cover, but expressed elsewhere.

For some women, in a valiant effort not to be seen as merely victims, this means an insistence that no such feelings exist and that nothing much has occurred. For some women it means the warrior’s painstaking examination of yet another weapon, unwanted but useful.

I am a post-mastectomy woman who believes our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use.

I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence, nor to rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined.

For other women of all ages, colors, and sexual identities who recognize that imposed silence about any area of our lives is a tool for separation and powerlessness, and for myself,

I have tried to voice some of my feelings and thoughts about the travesty of prosthesis, the pain of amputation, the function of cancer in a profit economy, my confrontation with mortality, the strength of women loving, and the power and rewards of self-conscious living.

Breast cancer and mastectomy are not unique experiences, but ones shared by thousands of American women.

Each of these women has a particular voice to be raised in what must become a female outcry against all preventable cancers, as well as against the secret fears that allow those cancers to flourish.

May these words serve as encouragement for other women to speak and to act out of our experiences with cancer and with other threats of death, for silence has never brought us anything of worth.

Most of all, may these words underline the possibilities of self-healing and the richness of living for all women.

There is a commonality of isolation and painful reassessment which is shared by all women with breast cancer, whether this commonality is recognized or not.

It is not my intention to judge the woman who has chosen the path of prosthesis, of silence and invisibility, the woman who wishes to be ‘the same as before.’ She has survived on another kind of courage, and she is not alone.

Each of us struggles daily with the pressures of conformity and the loneliness of difference from which those choices seem to offer escape.

I only know that those choices do not work for me, nor for other women who, not without fear, have survived cancer by scrutinizing its meaning within our lives, and by attempting to integrate this crisis into useful strengths for change. […]

I have learned much in the 18 months since my mastectomy. My visions of a future I can create have been honed by the lessons of my limitations.

Now I wish to give form with honesty and precision to the pain faith labor and loving which this period of my life has translated into strength for me.

Sometimes fear stalks me like another malignancy, sapping energy and power and attention from my work. A cold becomes sinister; a cough, lung cancer; a bruise, leukemia.

Those fears are most powerful when they are not given voice, and close upon their heels comes the fury that I cannot shake them.

I am learning to live beyond fear by living through it, and in the process learning to turn fury at my own limitations into some more creative energy.

I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I’ll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side.

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid.

As women we were raised to fear. If I cannot banish fear completely, I can learn to count with it less. For then fear becomes not a tyrant against which I waste my energy fighting, but a companion, not particularly desirable, yet one whose knowledge can be useful.

I write so much here about fear because in shaping this introduction to The Cancer Journals, I found fear laid across my hands like a steel bar.

When I tried to reexamine the 18 months since my mastectomy, some of what I touched was molten despair and waves of mourning—for my lost breast, for time, for the luxury of false power.

Not only were these emotions difficult and painful to relive, but they were entwined with the terror that if I opened myself once again to scrutiny,

to feeling the pain of loss, of despair, of victories too minor in my eyes to rejoice over, then I might also open myself again to disease.

I had to remind myself that I had lived through it all, already. I had known the pain, and survived it. It only remained for me to give it voice, to share it for use, that the pain not be wasted.

Living a self-conscious life, under the pressure of time, I work with the consciousness of death at my shoulder, not constantly, but often enough to leave a mark upon all of my life’s decisions and actions.

And it does not matter whether this death comes next week or 3 years from now; this consciousness gives my life another breadth. It helps shape the words I speak, the ways I love, my politic of action, the strength of my vision and purpose, the depth of my appreciation of living.

I would lie if I did not also speak of loss. Any amputation is a physical and psychic reality that must be integrated into a new sense of self. The absence of my breast is a recurrent sadness, but certainly not one that dominates my life. I miss it, sometimes piercingly.

When other one-breasted women hide behind the mask of prosthesis or the dangerous fantasy of reconstruction, I find little support in the broader female environment for my rejection of what feels like a cosmetic sham.

But I believe that socially sanctioned prosthesis is merely another way of keeping women with breast cancer silent and separate from each other.

For instance, what would happen if an army of one-breasted women descended upon Congress and demanded that the use of carcinogenic, fat-stored hormones in beef-feed be outlawed?

The lessons of the past 18 months have been many: How do I provide myself with the best physical and psychic nourishment to repair past, and minimize future damage to my body? How do I give voice to my quests so that other women can take what they need from my experiences?

How do my experiences with cancer fit into the larger tapestry of my work as a Black woman, into the history of all women? And most of all, how do I fight the despair born of fear and anger and powerlessness which is my greatest internal enemy?

I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks of effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us.

It means teaching, surviving and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that battle.

It means, for me, recognizing the enemy outside, and the enemy within, and knowing that my work is part of a continuum of women’s work, of reclaiming this earth and our power, and knowing that this work did not begin with my birth nor will it end with my death.

And it means knowing that within this continuum, my life and my love and my work has particular power and meaning relative to others.

It means trout fishing on the Missisquoi River at dawn and tasting the green silence, and knowing that this beauty too is mine forever.

'The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action' (originally given a speech, December 28, 1977, at the Lesbian and Literature Panel of the Modern Language Association)

I would like to preface my remarks on the transformation of silence into language and action with a poem. The title of it is “A Song for Many Movements” and this reading is dedicated to Winnie Mandela.

Winnie Mandela is a South African freedom fighter who is in exile now somewhere in South Africa.

She had been in prison and had been released and was picked up again after she spoke out against the recent jailing of black school children who were singing freedom songs, and who were charged with public violence…

“A Song for Many Movements”:

Nobody wants to die on the way
caught between ghosts of whiteness
and the real water

none of us wanted to leave
our bones
on the way to salvation
three planets to the left

a century of light years ago
our spices are separate and particular
but our skins sing in complimentary keys

at a quarter to eight mean time
we were telling the same stories
over and over and over

Broken down gods survive
in the crevasses and mudpots
of every beleaguered city
where it is obvious there are too many bodies to cart to the ovens
or gallows
and our uses have become more important than our silence
after the fall

too many empty cases
of blood to bury or burn
there will be no body left
to listen
and our labor has become more important
than our silence

Our labor has become
more important than
our silence.
(from Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn, W.W. Norton & Co., 1978)

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

I am standing here as a black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been.

Less than two months ago, I was told by two doctors, one female and one male, that I would have to have breast surgery, and that there was a 60 to 80 percent chance that the tumor was malignant.

Between that telling and the actual surgery, there was a three week period of the agony of an involuntary reorganization of my entire life. The surgery was completed, and the growth was benign.

But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced by many women, by some of you here today.

Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action.

In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences.

Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change, or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence.

And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words.

And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.

The women who sustained me through that period were black and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence.

They all gave me a strength and concern without which I could not have survived intact.

Within those weeks of acute fear came the knowledge—within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not—I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior. […]

And, of course, I am afraid—you can hear it in my voice—because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger.

But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside of you that wants to be spoken out,

and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth.”

In the cause of silence, each one of us draws the face of her own fear—fear of contempt, of censure, or 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.

Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism.

Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our blackness.

For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, black or not.

And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.

We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned, we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we still will be no less afraid.

In my house this year we are celebrating the feast of Kwanza, the African-American festival of harvest which begins the day after Christmas and lasts for seven days.

There are seven principles of Kwanza, one for each day. The first principle is Umoja, which means unity, the decision to strive for and maintain unity in self and community.

The principle for yesterday, the second day, was Kujichagulia—self-determination—the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined and spoken for by others.

Today is the third day of Kwanza, and the principle for today is Ujima—collective work and responsibility—the decision to build and maintain ourselves and our communities together and to recognize and solve our problems together.

Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us.

In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation, and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation. […]

And it is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death.

And I remind myself all the time now, that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.

And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. […]

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.

For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

The fact that we are here and that I speak now these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.

‘Breast Cancer: A Black Lesbian Feminist Experience’

October 10, 1978
I want to write about the pain. The pain of waking up in the recovery room which is worsened by that immediate sense of loss.

Of going in and out of pain and shots. Of the correct position for my arm to drain. The euphoria of the 2nd day, and how it’s been downhill from there.

I want to write of the pain I am feeling right now, of the lukewarm tears that will not stop coming into my eyes—for what? For my lost breast? For the lost me? And which me was that again anyway? For the death I don’t know how to postpone? Or how to meet elegantly?

I’m so tired of all this. I want to be the person I used to be, the real me. I feel sometimes that it’s all a dream and surely I’m about to wake up now. […]

December 29, 1978
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? […]

This is work I must do alone. For months now I have been wanting to write a piece of meaning words on cancer as it affects my life and my consciousness as a woman, a black lesbian feminist mother lover poet all I am.

But even more, or the same, I want to illuminate the implications of breast cancer for me, and the threats to self-revelation that are so quickly aligned against any woman who seeks to explore those questions, those answers.

Even in the face of our own deaths and dignity, we are not to be allowed to define our needs nor our feelings nor our lives. […]

So this fall I met cancer, as it were, from a considered position, but it still knocked me for a hell of a loop, having to deal with the pain and the fear and the death I thought I had come to terms with once before. […]

In September 1978, I went into the hospital for a breast biopsy for the second time. It all happened much faster this time than the year before.

There was none of the deep dread of the previous biopsy but at the same time there was none of the excitement of a brand new experience. […]

I woke up in the recovery room after the biopsy colder than I can remember ever having been in my life. I was hurting and horrified. I knew it was malignant.

I would have given anything to have been warmer right then. The gong in my brain of “malignant,” “malignant,” and the icy sensations of that frigid room, cut through the remnants of anesthesia like a fire hose trained on my brain.

All I could focus upon was getting out of that room and getting warm. I yelled and screamed and complained about the cold and begged for extra blankets, but none came.

The nurses were very put out by my ruckus and sent me back to the floor early. […]I couldn’t believe this hospital couldn’t shut off the air-conditioning or give me more blankets. […]

Frances was there by the door of my room like a great sunflower. I surfaced from anesthesia again as she took my hand in her deliciously warm ones, her dear face bent over mine.

“It is malignant, isn’t it, Frances, it is malignant,” I said. She squeezed my hand and I saw tears in her eyes. “Yes, my love, it is,” she said, and the anesthesia washed out of me again before the sharp edge of fact. “Baby, I’m so cold, so cold,” I said. […]

The decisions seemed much easier. The whole rest of that day seemed a trip back and forth through the small pain in both breasts and my acute awareness of the fact of death in the right one.

This was mixed with the melting and chewing over of the realities, between Frances and me. Our comforting each other—“We’ll make it through this together”—and the cold, the terrible cold of that first hour. […]

Our friends came and were there, loving and helpful and there, brought coats to pile upon my bed and then a comforter and blankets because the hospital had no spare blankets, they said, and I was so desperately chilled from the cold recovery room […]

Off and on I kept thinking. I have cancer. I’m a black lesbian feminist poet, how am I going to do this now? Where are the models for what I’m supposed to be in this situation? But there were none. This is it, Audre. You’re on your own.

In the next two days, I came to realize as I agonized over my choices and what to do, that I had made my decision to have surgery if it were needed even before the biopsy had been done. Yet I had wanted a two-stage operation anyway, separating the biopsy from the mastectomy.

I wanted time to re-examine my decision, to search really for some other alternative that would give me good reasons to change my mind. But there were none to satisfy me.

I wanted to make the decision again, and I did, knowing the other possibilities, and reading avidly and exhaustively through the books I ordered through Frances and Helen and my friends. […]

From the time I woke up to the slow growing warmth of Adrienne’s and Bernice’s and Deanna’s and Michelle’s and Frances’ coats on the bed,

I felt Beth Israel Hospital wrapped in a web of woman love and strong wishes of faith and hope for the whole time I was there, and it made self-healing more possible, knowing I was not alone. […]

I considered the alternatives of the straight medical profession, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. I considered the holistic health approaches of diet, vitamin therapy, experimental immunotherapeutics, west german pancreatic enzymes, and others.

The decision whether or not to have a mastectomy ultimately was going to have to be my own. I had always been firm on that point and had chosen a surgeon with that in mind.

With the various kinds of information I had gathered together before I went into the hospital, and the additional information acquired in the hectic three days after biopsy,

now more than ever before I had to examine carefully the pros and cons of every possibility, while being constantly and acutely aware that so much was still not known.

And all the time as a background of pain and terror and disbelief, a thin high voice was screaming that none of this was true, it was all a bad dream that would go away if I became totally inert.

Another part of me flew like a big bird to the ceiling of whatever place I was in, observing my actions and providing a running commentary, complete with suggestions of factors forgotten, new possibilities of movement, and ribald remarks.

I felt as if I was always listening to a concert of voices from inside myself, all with something slightly different to say, all of which were quite insistent and none of which would let me rest. […]

On Wednesday afternoon I told Frances that I had decided to have surgery, and tears came to her eyes. Later she told me that she had been terrified that I might refuse surgery, opting instead for an alternative treatment,

and she felt that she was prepared to go along with whatever I would decide, but she also felt surgery was the wisest choice. […]

I deluged my surgeon with endless questions which he answered in good faith, those that he could. I weighed my options. There were malignant cells in my right breast encased in a fatty cyst, and if I did not do something about that I would die of cancer in fairly short order.

Whatever I did might or might not reverse that process, and I would not know with any certainty for a very long time. […]

I could not choose the option of radiation and chemotherapy because I felt strongly that everything I had read about them suggested that they were in and of themselves carcinogenic. The experimental therapies without surgery were interesting possibilities, but still unproven.

Surgery, a modified radical mastectomy, while traumatic and painful would arrest any process by removal. It was not in and of itself harmful at this point, since whatever process might have been started by surgery had already been begun by the biopsy. […]

I remember screaming and cursing with pain in the recovery room, and I remember a disgusted nurse giving me a shot. I remember a voice telling me to be quiet because there were sick people here, and my saying, well, I have a right, because I’m sick too. […]

The next day, when I was still not thinking too much, except about why was I hurting more and when could I reasonably expect to go home, a kindly woman from Reach for Recovery came in to see me,

with a very upbeat message and a little prepared packet containing a soft sleep-bra and a wad of lambswool pressed into a pale pink breast-shaped pad. She was 56 years old, she told me proudly.

She was also a woman of admirable energies who clearly would uphold and defend to the death those structures of a society that had allowed her a little niche to shine in.

Her message was, you are just as good as you were before because you can look exactly the same. Lambswool now, then a good prosthesis as soon as possible, and nobody’ll ever know the difference.

But what she said was, “You’ll never know the difference,” and she lost me right there, because I knew sure as hell I’d know the difference.

“Look at me,” she said, opening her trim powder-blue man-tailored jacket and standing before me in a tight blue sweater, a gold embossed locket of no mean dimension provocatively nestling between her two considerable breasts. “Now can you tell which is which?”

I admitted that I could not. In her tight foundation garment and stiff, up-lifting bra, both breasts looked equally unreal to me.

But then I’ve always been a connoisseur of women’s breasts, and never overly fond of stiff uplifts. I looked away, thinking, “I wonder if there are any black lesbian feminists in Reach for Recovery?” […]

The emphasis upon wearing a prosthesis is a way of avoiding having women come to terms with their own pain and loss, and thereby, with their own strength. I was already dressed to go home when the head nurse came into my room to say goodbye.

“Why doesn’t she have a form on?” she asked Frances, who by this time was acknowledged by all to be my partner.
“She doesn’t want to wear it,” Frances explained.

“Oh you’re just not persistent enough,” the head nurse replied and then turned to me with a let’s-have-no-nonsense-now look, and I was simply too tired. It wasn’t worth the effort to resist her. I knew I didn’t look any better. […]

Breast Cancer: Power Vs. Prosthesis

[…] After a mastectomy, for many women including myself, there is a feeling of wanting to go back, of not wanting to persevere through this experience to whatever enlightenment might the at the core of it.

And it is this feeling, this nostalgia, which is encouraged by most of the post-surgical counseling for women with breast cancer.

This regressive tie to the past is emphasized by the concentration upon breast cancer as a cosmetic problem, one which can be solved by a prosthetic pretense. […]

The woman from Reach For Recovery who came to see me in the hospital, while quite admirable and even impressive in her own right, certainly did not speak to my experience nor my concerns. […]

My concerns were about my chances for survival, the effects of a possibly shortened life upon my work and my priorities.

Could this cancer have been prevented, and what could I do in the future to prevent its recurrence? Would I be able to maintain the control over my life that I had always taken for granted? […]

So my concerns were quite different from those spoken to by the Reach For Recovery volunteer, but not one bit less crucial nor less poignant.

Yet every attempt I made to examine or question the possibility of a real integration of this experience into the totality of my life and my loving and my work, was ignored by this woman,

or uneasily glossed over by her as not looking on “the bright side of things.” I felt outraged and insulted, and weak as I was, this left me feeling even more isolated than before. […]

This emphasis upon the cosmetic after surgery reinforces this society’s stereotype of women, that we are only what we look or appear, so this is the only aspect of our existence we need to address.

Any woman who has had a breast removed because of cancer knows she does not feel the same. But we are allowed no psychic time or space to examine what our true feelings are, to make them our own.

With quick cosmetic reassurance, we are told that our feelings are not important, our appearance is all, the sum total of self. […]

In this way women are kept from expressing the power of our knowledge and experience, and through that expression, developing strengths that challenge those structures within our lives that support the Cancer Establishment.

For instance, why hasn’t the American Cancer Society publicized the connections between animal fat and breast cancer for our daughters the way it has publicized the connection between cigarette smoke and lung cancer?

These links between animal fat, hormone production and breast cancer are not secret. (See G. Hems, in British Journal of Cancer, vol. 37, no. 6, 1978.)

Ten days after having my breast removed, I went to my doctor’s office to have the stitches taken out. This was my first journey out since coming home from the hospital, and I was truly looking forward to it. […]

I felt really good, within the limits of that grey mush that still persisted in my brain from the effects of the anesthesia.

When I walked into the doctor’s office, I was really rather pleased with myself, all things considered, pleased with the way I felt, with my own flair, with my own style.

The doctor’s nurse, a charmingly bright and steady woman of about my own age who had always given me a feeling of quiet no-nonsense support on my other visits, called me into the examining room. On the way, she asked me how I was feeling.

“Pretty good,” I said, half-expecting her to make some comment about how good I looked.
“You’re not wearing a prosthesis,” she said, a little anxiously, and not at all like a question.

“No,” I said, thrown off my guard for a minute. “It really doesn’t feel right,” referring to the lambswool puff given to me by the Reach For Recovery volunteer in the hospital.

Usually supportive and understanding, the nurse now looked at me urgently and disapprovingly as she told me that even if it didn’t look exactly right it was “better than nothing,” and that as soon as my stitches were out I could be fitted for a “real form”.

You will feel so much better with it on,” she said. “And besides, we really like you to wear something, at least when you come in. Otherwise it’s bad for the morale of the office.”

I could hardly believe my ears! I was too outraged to speak then, but this was to be only the first such assault on my right to define and to claim my own body.

Here we were, in the offices of one of the top breast cancer surgeons in New York City. Every woman there either had a breast removed, might have to have a breast removed, or was afraid of having to have a breast removed.

And every woman there could have used a reminder that having one breast did not mean her life was over, nor that she was less a woman, nor that she was condemned to the use of a placebo in order to feel good about herself and the way she looked.

Yet a woman who has one breast and refuses to hide that fact behind a pathetic puff of lambswool which has no relationship nor likeness to her own breasts, a woman who is attempting to come to terms with her changed landscape

and changed timetable of life and with her own body and pain and beauty and strength, that woman is seen as a threat to the “morale” of a breast surgeons office!

Yet when Moishe Dayan, the Prime Minister of Israel, stands up in front of parliament or on TV with an eyepatch over his empty eyesocket, nobody tells him to go get a glass eye, or that he is bad for the morale of the office.

The world sees him as a warrior with an honorable wound, and a loss of a piece of himself which he has marked, and mourned, and moved beyond. And if you have trouble dealing with Moishe Dayan’s empty eye socket, everyone recognizes that it is your problem to solve, not his. […]

For me, my scars are an honorable reminder that I may be a casualty in the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air pollution, McDonald’s hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2, but the fight is still going on, and I am still a part of it.

I refuse to have my scars hidden or trivialized behind lambswool or silicone gel. I refuse to be reduced in my own eyes or in the eyes of others from warrior to mere victim,

simply because it might render me a fraction more acceptable or less dangerous to the still complacent, those who believe if you cover up a problem it ceases to exist.

I refuse to hide my body simply because it might make a woman-phobic world more comfortable.

As I sat in my doctor’s office trying to order my perceptions of what had just occurred, I realized that the attitude towards prosthesis after breast cancer is an index of this society’s attitudes towards women in general as decoration and externally defined sex object. […]

Prosthesis offers the empty comfort of “Nobody will know the difference.” But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women.

If we are to translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then the first step is that women with mastectomies must become visible to each other.

For silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness. By accepting the mask of prosthesis, one-breasted women proclaim ourselves as insufficients dependent upon pretense.

We reinforce our own isolation and invisibility from each other, as well as the false complacency of a society which would rather not face the results of its own insanities. […]

As women, we cannot afford to look the other way, nor to consider the incidence of breast cancer as a private nor secret personal problem. It is no secret that breast cancer is on the increase among women in America.

Yet there still appears to be a conspiracy on the part of Cancer Inc. to insist to every woman who has lost a breast that she is no different from before,

if with a little skillful pretense and a few ounces of silicone gel she can pretend to herself and the watching world—the only orientation toward the world that women are supposed to have—that nothing has happened to challenge her.

With this orientation a woman after surgery is allowed no time or space within which to weep, rage, internalize, and transcend her own loss. She is left no space to come to terms with her altered life, not to transform it into another level of dynamic existence.

There is nothing wrong, per se, with the use of prostheses if they can be chosen freely, for whatever reason, after a woman has had a chance to accept her new body. But usually prostheses serve a real function, to approximate the performance of a missing physical part.

In other amputations and with other prosthetic devices, function is the main point of their existence. Artificial limbs perform specific tasks, allowing us to manipulate or to walk. Dentures allow us to chew our food.

Only false breasts are designed for appearance only, as if the only real function of women’s breasts were to appear in a certain shape and size and symmetry to onlookers, or to yield to external pressure.

For no woman wearing a prosthesis can even for one moment believe it is her own breast, any more than a woman wearing falsies can. […]

The real truth is that certain other people feel better with that lump stuck into my bra, because they do not have to deal with me nor themselves in terms of mortality nor in terms of difference.

Attitudes toward the necessity for prostheses after breast surgery are merely a reflection of those attitudes within our society towards women in general as objectified and depersonalized sexual conveniences.

Women have been programmed to view our bodies only in terms of how they look and feel to others, rather than how they feel to ourselves, and how we wish to use them.

We are surrounded by media images portraying women as essentially decorative machines of consumer function, constantly doing battle with rampant decay.

As women, we fight this depersonalization every day, this pressure toward the conversion of one’s own self-image into a media expectation of what might satisfy male demand.

The insistence upon breast prostheses as ‘decent’ rather than functional is an additional example of that wipe-out of self in which women are constantly encouraged to take part. […]

As women we have been taught to respond with a guilty twitch at any mention of the particulars of our own oppression, as if we are ultimately guilty of whatever has been done to us.

The rape victim is accused of enticing the rapist. The battered wife is accused of having angered her husband.

A mastectomy is not a guilty act that must be hidden in order for me to regain acceptance or protect the sensibilities of others. Pretense has never brought about lasting change or progress. […]

Within the framework of superficiality and pretense, the next logical step of a depersonalizing and woman-devaluating culture is the advent of the atrocity euphemistically called “breast reconstruction.”

This operation is now being pushed by the plastic surgery industry as the newest “advance” in breast surgery. Actually it is not new at all, being a technique previously used to augment or enlarge breasts.

It should be noted that research being done on this potentially life-threatening practice represents time and research money spent

—not on how to prevent the cancers that cost us our breasts and our lives—but rather upon how to pretend that our breasts are not gone, nor we as women at risk with our lives.

The operation consists of inserting silicone gel implants under the skin of the chest, usually shortly after a mastectomy and in a separate operation.

At an approximate cost of $1500 to $3000 an implant (in 1978), this represents a lucrative piece of commerce for the cancer and plastic surgery industries in this country.

There are now plastic surgeons recommending the removal of the other breast at the same time as the mastectomy is done, even where there is no clinically apparent reason. […]

Any information about the prevention or treatment of breast cancer which might possibly threaten the vested interests of the american medical establishment is difficult to acquire in this country.

Only through continuing scrutiny of various non-mainstream sources of information, such as alternative and women’s presses, can a picture of new possibilities for prevention and treatment of breast cancer emerge. […]

Cancer is not just another degenerative and unavoidable disease of the ageing process. It has distinct and identifiable causes, and these are mainly exposures to chemical or physical agents in the environment.

In the medical literature, there is mounting evidence that breast cancer is a chronic and systemic disease. […]

Every woman has a militant responsibility to involve herself actively with her own health. We owe ourselves the protection of all the information we can acquire about the treatment of cancer and its causes,

as well as about the recent findings concerning immunology, nutrition, environment, and stress. And we owe ourselves this information before we may have a reason to use it. […]”