“A Burst of Light” is a collection of Audre Lorde’s journal entries from the mid-1980s (so, after she had already published her Cancer Journals) about all kinds of things, always with the undercurrent of navigating liver cancer. Reading this piece, collected in The Selected Works of Audre Lorde by Roxane Gay, I just kept connecting to my own disabled experience and to the disability justice thinking I’ve been reading in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.
Audre Lorde writes to and for Black women; I want to make that clear. As much as I have gained from reading her prose, it wasn’t written for me. And Audre Lorde might not have ever identified herself as disabled (or maybe she does somewhere and I haven’t read it yet). But, at the risk of assigning her labels she didn’t adopt for herself, I see Audre Lorde as something like the mother or grandmother of disability justice. Indeed, Sins Invalid uses an Audre Lorde quote to explain the first principle of disability justice: intersectionality. The way she writes about all manner of observations and experiences through the lens of someone debilitated and disabled by cancer tapped into something profound for me: she articulates the importance of loving care networks in her quest to save her own life, the need to shed any energy-siphoning activities that aren’t aligned with her purpose, and the way it can feel alienating to occupy a body that doesn’t work the way everyone else’s does. She has the anti-capitalist politic that is central to disability justice and the knowledge of her limitations distills her purpose into crystal clarity. She touches on joy, satisfaction, and pleasure as well as revolution. Even with a better working brain, the impact of Audre Lorde’s writing on me largely feels beyond my ability to describe so I’d like to let her speak for herself.
Here are some quotes from “A Burst of Light”:
- “I wonder what I may be risking as I become more and more committed to telling whatever truth comes across my eyes my tongue my pen- no matter how difficult- the world as I see it, people as I feel them. And I wonder what I will have to pay someday for that privilege, and in whose coin? WIll those forces which serve non-life in the name of power and profit kill me too, or merely dismember me in the eyes of whoever can use what I do?”
- “But now that I am becoming less lonely and more loved, I am also becoming more visible and therefore more vulnerable.”
- “I want to write down everything I know about being afraid, but I’d probably never have enough time to write anything else. Afraid is a country where they issue us passports at birth and hope we never seek citizenship in any other country. The face of afraid keeps changing constantly, and I can count on that change. I need to travel light and fast, and there’s a lot of baggage I’m going to have to leave behind me. Jettison cargo.”
- “I am listening to what fear teaches. I will never be gone. I am a scar, a report from the front lines, a talisman, a resurrection. A rough place on the chin of complacency. … So what if I am afraid? Of stepping out into the morning? Of dying?”
- “… most days I feel like I’m going on sheer will power alone which can be very freeing and seductive but also very dangerous. Limited. I’m running down. But I’d do exactly what I’m doing anyway, cancer or no cancer.”
- “I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, love all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes- everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!“
- “As a living creature I am part of two kinds of forces- growth and decay, sprouting and withering, living and dying- and at any given moment of our lives, each one of us is actively located somewhere along a continuum between these two forces.”
- “…hope as a living state that propels us, open-eyed and fearful, into all the battles of our lives. And some of those battles we do not win. But some of them we do.”
- “… but that is because I feel filled with a fury to live- because I believe life can be good even when it is painful- a fury that my energies just don’t match my desires anymore.”
- “And of course cancer is political- look at how many of our comrades have died of it during the last ten years! As warriors, our job is to actively and consciously survive it for as long as possible, remembering that in order to win, the aggressor must conquer, but the resisters need only survive. Our battle is to define survival in ways that are acceptable and nourishing to us, meaning with substance and style. Substance. Our work. Style. True to our selves.”
- “What would it be like to be living in a place where the pursuit of definition within this crucial part of our lives was not circumscribed and fractionalized by the economics of disease in america? Here the first consideration concerning cancer is not what does this mean in my living, but how much is this going to cost?”
- “Most of all I think of how important it is for us to share with each other the powers buried within the breaking of silence about our bodies and our health, even though we have been schooled to be secret and stoical about pain and disease. But that stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, on the forces of things as they are.”
- “Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time and the arena and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle wherever we are standing.“
- “This is no longer a time of waiting. It is a time for the real work’s urgencies. It is a time enhanced by an iron reclamation of what I call the burst of light- that inescapable knowledge, in the bone, of my own physical limitation.”
- “In the best of circumstances surrounding our lives, it requires an enormous amount of mutual, consistent support for us to be emotionally able to look straight into the faces of the powers aligned against us and still do our work with joy.”
- “I am not ashamed to let my friends know I need their collective spirit- not to make me live forever, but rather to help me move through the life I have.”
- “I respect the time I spend each day treating my body, and I consider it part of my political work. It is possible to have some conscious input into our physical processes- not expecting the impossible, but allowing for the unexpected- a kind of training in self-love and physical resistance.”
- “What have I had to leave behind? Old life habits, outgrown defenses put aside lest they siphon off energies to no useful purpose?”
- “Visualizing the disease process inside my body in political images is not a quixotic dream. When I speak out against the cynical U.S. intervention in Central America, I am working to save my life in every sense.”
- “…another kind of power is growing, tempered and enduring, grounded within the realities of what I am in fact doing. An open-eyed assessment and appreciation of what I can and do accomplish, using who I am and who I most wish myself to be. To stretch as far as I can go and relish what is satisfying rather than what is sad.”