The whole of our life history
is held in our physical form. - Mij Ferrett
"Ah Jesus, all the regrets and lost dreams of being a cowgirl."
Cari Kastama said that. I went because I wanted to know about cancer.
Knowledge is power. It must be true. So I have trawled the libraries
and the internet for women and words (I am a fisher of women, I
am a fishwife). And they are there in their thousands, both women
and words.
There is the weirdness of not knowing which of these women might
be dead even as I turn over their words, sifting the ashes, treasure
hunts for tumour talk, wondering what my nets might throw up, wondering
about the ones that got away.
With each search I learn something that horrifies me anew with
its casual ineptitude. The journals and poems are a reaction against
that: they have titles like "When I became an Amazon" and "Slow-dancing
at the Med-Inn". These women have seen things I will never see.
They are the talking heads, and it's time to take a listen.
Again and again there is the notion of change, of being unrecognisable
to yourself as a result of the disease. The new life must always
be a better one. And that is just as well. Because there is no going
back. Just ask Doctor Frankenstein: "Jealousy of thy love makes
me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall once more be virtuous."
Afterwards - much later afterwards - there is the idea that it
was perhaps as you were to yourself before you fell ill that was
alien. That the amputated, invaded you is instantly recognisable,
a return to some familiar childhood of the body.
It is always a desexing, to be given a non-standard body. Where
does your vanity go when your breasts are the first casualties?
Surgeons are keen to lop them off to avoid the whole messy issue,
regardless of the fact that "radical mastectomies" are no longer
in vogue. Such lucky girls we are in the textbooks, in the medical
journals, but in real life "surgery is still the most obvious
response."
Picture self-worth, trickling away from the scalpel, pooling like
mercury in the hollows that are left. Even in Well Woman
(the containment pun in the title seems to have escaped the good
doctor thus far), Miriam Stoppard admits that "Cancer cures do depend
to a certain extent on the determination of the sufferer to beat
the disease."
It seems that the beating we will do is with our heads. Against
the under-funded and over-protected walls of the medical establishment.
The body has always been an instrument of change, a barometer,
a pillow book, a manuscript. Why not a map? Imagine your new world
as one of the slow stages of continental drift, Gondwanaland growling
itself together and fusing whole; Atlantis rising again from the
deep, stinking of seaweed and shaking its head. You have suffered
a sea change, into something rich and strange, oh yes indeedy. Even
Shakespeare knew that 400 years ago.
* * *
Cancer is about emotion, the immune system in suspension in the
physical frame. It's not a difficult concept. Think of the common
cold, of depression and AIDS and Victorian fiancées who've died
of broken hearts.
But first think of the common cold.
Most of the cancer poets come to the same conclusion: that the
amputation of a body part is a fair exchange for your life entire.
Maybe it is, if death is your other option. If death is your other
option.
Wolf, is what they used to say:
A wolf is eating up her flesh before she's dead.
But I'm a lucky one:
I live in a time of knives and anaesthesia.
I live in a time where becoming half a woman
Is considered cheating death.
- Fiona Curnow, "Crying Wolf"
if the
scars
upset
you
that
much
she said,
just stop
looking
at them.
you can
take a
shower
without
looking
down.
yes
you
can.
- Alysa Cummings, "Survivor's Guide to Post-Operative Body
Image Issues"
There must be another way.
Cancer is like love. You let it eat away at you and call it something
else until it leaves and you can look over your shoulder and see
it for the sickness it was.
Cancer is not like love. Having your heart broken is good for you:
it makes your meat longer-lasting and tougher, something more substantial
to sink the teeth into. All those trekker wives could not have been
wrong.
Naturally, eating your heart out is problematic: you can do it
only once. Stephen Crane says in the desert he saw a creature, naked,
bestial, that squatted on the ground and ate of his heart. "Is it
good, friend?" the poet wanted to know. "It is bitter-bitter," replied
the beast, "but I like it because it is bitter-bitter, and because
it is my heart."
There is a word for this in Afrikaans, and it is smartvraat
(glutton for hurt). And we know this beastie too. We have seen him
in our dreams because we know that everything after sunset turns
to tokoloshe time.
It is a lifestyle disease that leads us here, to stray into the
desert, to link our hands with the scaly paw of the tokoloshe, to
get lost in the woods. Each of us has a weak spot, an organ or system
within the body where death gains access. There's a reason orifices
are called "entrances to the body". Salman Rushdie thought of them
as portals, the bridges where the traffic of the outside world asks
to come inside. And sometimes they do not even ask: they are the
illegal immigrants from a kingdom of sickness, ruled by a one-eyed
king who has produced only daughters.
Cancer waits. It incubates. It is a dreadful Virgin Birth, complete
with the half-willed acceptance of some terrible visitation, a messenger
angel with an offer you can't refuse because the alternative is
too frightening: to subvert the system, to break free of your destiny
as a vessel. "I am a wall, and my breasts like towers: then was
I in his eyes as one that found favour."
And the horror was not that Our Girl Mary, the Wandering Jewess,
was used in the same way that Zeus liked to come to earth, as a
swan, as a shower of coins (rape, we call it now, rape, now we are
permitted to call it) - the horror is that a song of praise sprang
from this forced submission: the Magnificat.
"Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord!"
If you can't beat them, believe them.
The parthenogenesis of cancer follows the same story, with its
three wise men in white peering at the stars and divining your future.
Come a long way to visit you, my girlie, and ultimately bringing
you nothing that can help - the old cold gifts of the lost world:
gold (those coins again, and the knowledge they bring of the essential
uselessness of your wealth, the horror that the Beatles might have
been right after all); frankincense (the impossible hospital corridors,
smelling of cherry blossom in winter); myrrh (for the bitterness
because everything you have been taught will not help you now).
The bitterness.
Tea with the cancer ladies throws up more poetry. They see monsters,
animals, things that will devour them in the forests of the long
night, their second childhoods:
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
but then again,
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
- Adrienne Rich, "Planetarium" (for Caroline Herschel)
My mother also wrote some, just before she died of bone cancer.
It makes me wince to read it: it contracts the heart. Partly this
is because it is terrible poetry, poetry suffering from the fatal
affliction (like medieval beggars with their quivering sores, their
own cancers also called something else back then) of self-pity.
I step,
shivering,
onto the blessedly warm tiles.
I don't mean that self-pity is not all-consuming, because it is.
Like preparing for a birth. Nine months you can easily spend, nurturing
this parasite, giving your womb, your bones and blood over to it.
It takes your calcium and changes your teeth.
Cancer is the Final Child, the overgrown neglected dreaming girl
who's spent twenty years on her knees in the kitchen, in the bedroom,
at the altar. Cancer, very simply, is the revenge of Cinderella.
Cancer is your body tired of beating at the door, no stranger or
Angel of Death. It is the last desperate semaphore from the cerebral
cortex, and this time there will be no Passing Over. There is only
one word in the message: it is written large in the sand so that
the rescue helicopters can see it in the desert. And the word is
HELP.
There's a reason it happens in middle-aged women, happens over
the, yes, heart, happens when children leave home, when Mother Hubbards
go to the cupboard and find what they always knew they would: the
poison harboured inside their bodies, the treasure in their chests.
Middle-aged women do not want to hear about this. Middle-aged women
shout at me, about who I think I am, about daring to blame
them for their disease, that they will just trust their doctors,
thank you very much, and wait five years until they're cured.
But they never say or dead, because they will not allow
themselves to think of it. Oh, the middle-class preoccupation with
fantasy, this refusal to acknowledge that terrible things have happened
in their lives, have happened to them already and will happen also
to their equally diseased offspring: It will not happen to me.
They repeat it to themselves and all it does is make them more afraid.
But we have poetry for this too, don't we? The soporific, the fabled
solution: avoidance.
Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight,
And hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I had then wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak'd
I cried to dream again.
- Shakespeare, The Tempest (III, iv)
And especially, the middle-aged women like to fall back on that
sorry human excuse: you don't know what it's like.
Except that I do. I do know what it's like. I know exactly what
it is to lie on your back in a pastel room, with the smell of your
diseased parts being burned away. And then to spend the next years
wondering if the cells are spreading. Because sometimes they come
back. Sometimes at night there is nothing to do but feel the creep
of it inside you, a fungus like the mushrooms they grow in the old
mineshafts: your lover says when you fuck he can feel the scar.
People shrug when I talk this way: they do not want to encourage
this kind of craziness. The craziness that is chemotherapy is of
a different kind altogether, an allowable craziness that is based
on the stubborn Western idea that it's possible to "fight fire with
fire". Isn't it crazy to sit in a tiny room and have poison dripped
slowly into your veins, to hope that after the holocaust you can
start over?
If you're looking for crazy, that's a good place to start.
"Hey," the shruggers say, "we all have to die. When it's your
time, it's your time. It may as well be cancer." And then they always
add the fatuous bass note of indifference, the sentiment of people
unfamiliar with suffering, an idea passed down without having been
examined: "Obviously, I'd want to go peacefully. You know, in my
sleep."
And then they turn and talk of other things.
As if anyone chooses to die in screaming inches as the painkillers
wear off! You can feel the bones in your body, you know. They glimmer
and dissolve like celestial termites have been at your woodwork.
Some lazy Carpenter didn't do his job and you are reduced at last
to splinters.
As if.
I say God damn the middle: the middle-aged, the middle class, the
middle of the road more travelled. Not choosing to save yourself
is also a choice. Don't talk to me about faith or feminism or advances
in medical science. They have failed us.
There must be another way.
What I want is a simple thing: only to call it what it is.
I want people to understand that the immune system is as good as
you feel on any given day, a reliable measure of happiness - and
not some mysterious and uncontrollable entity squatting in the skin
along with its natural inhabitant, waiting to betray us into colds
and cancer and AIDS. Your own body is familiar, and it is also a
familiar.
But you remember what happened to the last women who claimed to
have those. It seems we are back in tokoloshe territory. And there
are mermaids and wolves and all the tall tales from our childhoods,
still.
Ah, the futility of trying to refute medical terms in medical terms!
Metamedicine. Pseudoscience. Newspeak. I will not talk the talk.
I have seen it and lived it, and it is in me. And I am not afraid.
I want to believe.
It will not happen to me. |
Diane Awerbuck taught English and History at Rustenburg
Girls' High School until 2002; she was Head of English and also a
member of the Governing Body. She completed a Masters in Creative
Writing (UCT), awarded with distinction. Her novel Gardening at
Night was reprinted by Vintage in March 2004. It won the Commonwealth
First Book Award (African region) in 2004. She is currently working
on its sequel, The House of Bread. She teaches Narrative and
Aesthetics part-time at the film school AFDA. Her short stories appear
regularly in publications - mainly because her ex-students all seem
to be journalists. Awerbuck is a freelance journalist and reviewer,
mostly for the South African Sunday Times. She also writes
and edits for Maskew Miller Longman, and writes a column for 
Click here to receive our newsletter - your weekly cultural fix!