A Burst of Light Read online

  February 19, 1984

  NEW YORK CITY

  Last night at Blanche and Clare’s house was a celebration of my first fifty years. Liz Maybank called—such a wonderful gift to hear her voice across all these years since she helped care for my children. Black Women’s Survival 101. I’ve had many teachers.

  Forever is too long to think about. But the future has always been so real to me. Still is. Chances are I don’t have liver cancer. No matter what they say. Chances are. That’s good. That’s bad. Either way I’m a hostage. So what’s new?

  Coming to terms with the sadness and the fury. And the curiosity.

  March 18, 1984

  EN ROUTE TO ST. CROIX, VIRGIN ISLANDS

  I’ve written nothing of the intensity with which I’ve lived the last few weeks. The hepatologist who tried to frighten me into an immediate liver biopsy without even listening to my objections and questions. Seeing the growth in my liver on the CAT scan, doing a face-off with death, again. Not again, just escalated. This mass in my liver is not a primary liver tumor, so if it is malignant, it’s most likely metastasized breast cancer. Not curable. Arrestable, not curable. This is a very bad dream, and I’m the only person who can wake myself up. I had a talk before I left with Peter, my breast surgeon. He says that if it is liver cancer, with the standard treatments—surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy—we’re talking four or five years at best. Without treatment, he says, maybe three or four.

  In other words, western medicine doesn’t have a very impressive track record with cancer metastasized to the liver.

  In the light of those facts, and from all the reading I’ve been doing these past weeks (thank the goddess for Barnes & Noble’s Medical Section), I’ve made up my mind not to have a liver biopsy. It feels like the only reasonable decision for me. I’m asymptomatic now except for a vicious gallbladder. And I can placate her. There are too many things I’m determined to do that I haven’t done yet. Finish the poem “Outlines.” See what Europe’s all about. Make Deotha Chamber’s story live.

  If I have this biopsy and it is malignant, then a whole course of action will be established simply by their intrusion into the suspect site. Yet if this tumor is malignant, I want as much good time as possible, and their treatments aren’t going to make a hell of a lot of difference in terms of extended time. But they’ll make a hell of a lot of difference in terms of my general condition and how I live my life.

  On the other hand, if this is benign, I believe surgical intervention into fatty tissue of any kind can start the malignant process in what otherwise might remain benign for a long time. I’ve been down that road before.

  I’ve decided this is a chance I have to take. If this were another breast tumor, I’d go for surgery again, because the organ comes off. But with the tie-in between estrogens, fat cells, and malignancies I’ve been reading about, cutting into my liver seems to me to be too much of a risk for too little return in terms of time. And it might be benign, some little aberrant joke between my liver and the universe.

  Twenty-two hours of most days I don’t believe I have liver cancer. Most days. Those other two hours of the day are pure hell, and there’s so much work I have to do in my head in those two hours, too, through all the terror and uncertainties.

  I wish I knew a doctor I could really trust to talk it all over with. Am I making the right decision? I know I have to listen to my body. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all the work I’ve done since my mastectomy, it’s that I must listen keenly to the messages my body sends. But sometimes they are contradictory.

  Dear goddess! Face-up again against the renewal of vows. Do not let me die a coward, mother. Nor forget how to sing. Nor forget song is a part of mourning as light is a part of sun.

  March 22, 1984

  EN ROUTE TO NEW YORK CITY

  This was a good trip. Good connections with the Sojourner Sisters and other women in St. Croix. And I finally taught myself to relax in water, swimming about under the sun in Gloria’s pool to the sound of Donna Summers blowing across the bright water, “State of Independence,” and the coconut tree singing along in the gentle tradewinds.

  There was a poetry reading last night at the library, with a wide range of age and ability among the poets, but the audience was very responsive. It reminded me again of how important poetry can be in the life of an ordinary Black community when that poetry is really the poetry of the lives of the people who make up that community.

  I suspect I shall have to concentrate upon how painful it is to think about death all the time.

  In the spring of 1984, I spent three months in Berlin conducting a course in Black American women poets and a poetry workshop in English for German students. One of my aims for this trip was to meet Black German women. I’d been told there were quite a few in Berlin, but I had been unable to obtain much information about them in New York.

  May 23, 1984

  BERLIN, WEST GERMANY

  Who are they, the German women of the Diaspora? Where do our paths intersect as women of Color—beyond the details of our particular oppressions, although certainly not outside the reference of those details? And where do our paths diverge? Most important, what can we learn from our connected differences that will be useful to us both, Afro-German and Afro-American?

  Afro-German. The women say they’ve never heard that term used before.

  I asked one of my Black students how she’d thought about herself growing up. “The nicest thing they ever called us was ‘war baby’,” she said. But the existence of most Black Germans has nothing to do with the Second World War, and, in fact, predates it by many decades. I have Black German women in my class who trace their Afro-German heritage back to the 1890s.

  For me, Afro-German means the shining faces of Katerina and Mai in animated conversation about their fathers’ homelands, the comparisons, joys, disappointments. It means my pleasure at seeing another Black woman walk into my classroom, her reticence slowly giving way as she explores a new self-awareness, gains a new way of thinking about herself in relation to other Black women.

  “I’ve never thought of Afro-German as a positive concept before,” she said, speaking out of the pain of having to live a difference that has no name; speaking out of the growing power self-scrutiny has forged from that difference.

  I am excited by these women, by their blossoming sense of identity as they’re beginning to say in one way or another, “Let us be ourselves now as we define us. We are not a figment of your imagination or an exotic answer to your desires. We are not some button on the pocket of your longing.” I can see these women as a growing force for international change, in concert with other Afro-Europeans, Afro-Asians, Afro-Americans.

  We are the hyphenated people of the Diaspora whose self-defined identities are no longer shameful secrets in the countries of our origin, but rather declarations of strength and solidarity. We are an increasingly united front from which the world has not yet heard.

  June 1, 1984

  BERLIN

  My classes are exciting and exhausting. Black women are hearing about them and their number is increasing.

  I can’t eat cooked food and I am getting sicker. My liver is so swollen I can feel it under my ribs. I’ve lost almost fifty pounds. That’s a switch, worrying about losing weight. My friend Dagmar, who teaches here, has given me the name of a homeopathic doctor specializing in the treatment of cancer, and I’ve made an appointment to see her when I come back from the Feminist Bookfair in London next week. She’s an anthroposophic doctor, and they believe in surgery only as a last resort.

  In spite of all this, I’m doing good work here. I’m certainly enjoying life in Berlin, sick or not. The city itself is very different from what I’d expected. It is lively and beautiful, but its past is never very far away, at least not for me. The silence about Jews is absolutely deafening, chilling. There is only one memorial in the whole city and it is to the Resistance. At the entrance is a huge grey urn with the sign, “This urn co
ntains earth from German concentration camps.” It is such a euphemistic evasion of responsibility and an invitation to amnesia for the children that it’s no wonder my students act like Nazism was a bad dream not to be remembered.

  There is a lot of networking going on here among women, collectives and work enterprises as well as political initiatives, and a very active women’s cultural scene. I may be too thin, but I can still dance!

  June 7, 1984

  BERLIN

  Dr. Rosenberg agrees with my decision not to have a biopsy, but she has said I must do something quickly to strengthen my bodily defenses. She’s recommended I begin Iscador injections three times weekly.

  Iscador is a biological made from mistletoe which strengthens the natural immune system, and works against the growth of malignant cells. I’ve started the injections, along with two other herbals that stimulate liver function. I feel less weak.

  I am listening to what fear teaches. I will never be gone. I am a scar, a report from the frontlines, a talisman, a resurrection. A rough place on the chin of complacency. “What are you getting so upset about, anyway?” a student asked in class, “You’re not Jewish!”

  So what if I am afraid? Of stepping out into the morning? Of dying? Of unleashing the damned gall where hatred swims like a tadpole waiting to swell into the arms of war? And what does that war teach when the bruised leavings jump an insurmountable wall where the glorious Berlin chestnuts and orange poppies hide detection wires that spray bullets which kill?

  My poems are filled with blood these days because the future is so bloody. When the blood of four-year-old children runs unremarked through the alleys of Soweto, how can I pretend that sweetness is anything more than armor and ammunition in an on-going war?

  I am saving my life by using my life in the service of what must be done. Tonight as I listened to the ANC speakers from South Africa at the Third World People’s Center here, I was filled with a sense of self-answering necessity, of commitment as a survival weapon. Our battles are inseparable. Every person I have ever been must be actively enlisted in those battles, as well as in the battle to save my life.

  June 9, 1984

  BERLIN

  At the poetry reading in Zurich this weekend, I found it so much easier to discuss racism than to talk about The Cancer Journals. Chemical plants between Zurich and Basel have been implicated in a definite rise in breast cancer in this region, and women wanted to discuss this. I talked as honestly as I could, but it was really hard. Their questions presume a clarity I no longer have.

  It was great to have Gloria there to help field all those questions about racism. For the first time in Europe, I felt I was not alone but answering as one of a group of Black women—not just Audre Lorde!

  I am cultivating every iota of my energies to do battle with the possibility of liver cancer. At the same time, I am discovering how furious and resistant some pieces of me are, as well as how terrified.

  In this loneliest of places, I examine every decision I make within the light of what I’ve learned about myself and that self-destructiveness implanted inside of me by racism and sexism and the circumstances of my life as a Black woman.

  Mother why were we armed to fight

  with cloud wreathed swords and javelins of dust?

  Survival isn’t some theory operating in a vacuum. It’s a matter of my everyday living and making decisions.

  How do I hold faith with sun in a sunless place? It is so hard not to counter this despair with a refusal to see. But I have to stay open and filtering no matter what’s coming at me, because that arms me in a particularly Black woman’s way. When I’m open, I’m also less despairing. The more clearly I see what I’m up against, the more able I am to fight this process going on in my body that they’re calling liver cancer. And I am determined to fight it even when I am not sure of the terms of the battle nor the face of victory. I just know I must not surrender my body to others unless I completely understand and agree with what they think should be done to it. I’ve got to look at all of my options carefully, even the ones I find distasteful. I know I can broaden the definition of winning to the point where I can’t lose.

  June 10, 1984

  BERLIN

  Dr. Rosenberg is honest, straightforward, and pretty discouraging. I don’t know what I’d do without Dagmar there to translate all her grim pronouncements for me. She thinks it’s liver cancer, too, but she respects my decision against surgery. I mustn’t let my unwillingness to accept this diagnosis interfere with getting help. Whatever it is, this seems to be working.

  We all have to die at least once. Making that death useful would be winning for me. I wasn’t supposed to exist anyway, not in any meaningful way in this fucked-up whiteboys’ world. I want desperately to live, and I’m ready to fight for that living even if I die shortly. Just writing those words down snaps every thing I want to do into a neon clarity. This European trip and the Afro-German women, the Sister Outsider collective in Holland, Gloria’s great idea of starting an organization that can be a connection between us and South African women. For the first time I really feel that my writing has a substance and stature that will survive me.

  I have done good work. I see it in the letters that come to me about Sister Outsider, I see it in the use the women here give the poetry and the prose. But first and last I am a poet. I’ve worked very hard for that approach to living inside myself, and everything I do, I hope, reflects that view of life, even the ways I must move now in order to save my life.

  I have done good work. There is a hell of a lot more I have to do. And sitting here tonight in this lovely green park in Berlin, dusk approaching and the walking willows leaning over the edge of the pool caressing each other’s fingers, birds birds birds singing under and over the frogs, and the smell of new-mown grass enveloping my sad pen, I feel I still have enough moxie to do it all, on whatever terms I’m dealt, timely or not. Enough moxie to chew the whole world up and spit it out in bite-sized pieces, useful and warm and wet and delectable because they came out of my mouth.

  June 17, 1984

  BERLIN

  I am feeling more like an Audre I recognize, thank the goddess for Dr. Rosenberg, and for Dagmar for introducing me to her.

  I’ve been reading Christa Wolf’s The Search for Christa T., and finding it very difficult. At first I couldn’t grapple with it because it was just too painful to read about a woman dying. Dagmar and a number of the women here in Berlin say the author and I should meet. But now that I’m finished I don’t know if I want to meet the woman who wrote it. There is so much pain there that is so far from being felt in any way I recognize or can use, that it makes me very uncomfortable. I feel speechless.

  But there is one part of the book that really spoke to me. In Chapter 5, she talks about a mistaken urge to laugh at one’s younger self’s belief in paradise, in miracles. Each one of us who survives, she says, at least once in our lifetime, at some crucial and inescapable moment, has had to absolutely believe in the impossible. Of course, it occurs to me to ask myself if that’s what I’m doing right now, believing in the impossible by refusing a biopsy.

  It’s been very reassuring to find a medical doctor who agrees with my view of the dangers involved. And I certainly don’t reject nondamaging treatment, which is why I’m taking these shots, even though I hate giving myself injections. But that’s a small price balanced against the possibility of cancer.

  June 20, 1984

  BERLIN

  I didn’t go to London because I loved bookfairs, but because the idea of the First International Feminist Bookfair excited me, and in particular, I wanted to make contact with the Black feminists of England. Well, the fact remains: the First International Feminist Bookfair was a monstrosity of racism, and this racism coated and distorted much of what was good, creative, and visionary about such a fair. The white women organizers’ defensiveness to any question of where the Black women were is rooted in that tiresome white guilt that serves neither us nor them. I
t reminded me of those old tacky battles of the seventies in the States: a Black woman would suggest that if white women wished to be truly feminist, they would have to examine and alter some of their actions vis-à-vis women of Color. And this discussion would immediately be perceived as an attack upon their very essence. So wasteful and destructive.

  I think the organizers of the Bookfair really believed that by inviting foreign Black women they were absolving themselves of any fault in ignoring input from local Black women. But we should be able to learn from our errors. They totally objectified all Black women by not dealing with the Black women of the London community. Now if anything is to be learned from that whole experience, it should be so that the next International Feminist Bookfair does not repeat those errors. And there must be another. But we don’t get there from here by ignoring the mud in between those two positions. If the white women’s movement does not learn from its errors, like any other movement, it will die by them. When I stood up for my first reading to a packed house with no Black women’s faces, after I’d gotten letter after letter from Black British women asking when was I coming to England, that was the kiss-off. I knew immediately what was up, and the rest is history.

  Of course, I was accused of “brutalizing” the organizers by simply asking why Black women were absent. And if my yelling and “jumping up and down” got dirty looks and made white women cry and say all kinds of outrageous nonsense about me, I know it also reinforced other Black women’s perceptions about racism here in the women’s movement, and contributed to further solidarity among Black women of different communities.

  Feminism must be on the cutting edge of real social change if it is to survive as a movement in any particular country. Whatever the core problems are for the people of that country must also be the core problems addressed by women, for we do not exist in a vacuum. We are anchored in our own place and time, looking out and beyond to the future we are creating, and we are part of communities that interact. To pretend otherwise is ridiculous. While we fortify ourselves with visions of the future, we must arm ourselves with accurate perceptions of the barriers between us and that future.