Liberation After/life: Narrative Connectivity and Black Women’s Cancer Mortality

This paper explores the hauntology of cancer mortality in the context of the Black feminist struggle for liberation. Looking at the lives and deaths of Audre Lorde and Henrietta Lacks, I argue that transcendent narratives, and the connections they draw between past and future, living and dead, offer a degree off liberatory flight in the face and aftermath of terminal cancer. Narrative connectivity resists the silencing, medicalizing, and structural violence of cancer in the context of a racist medical system, by allowing for Black women, their families, and those who love them to tell their stories, reaching other Black women, rather than being flattened into patients, into single moments in time, into resources for extraction. Instead, through a continuing care network of readers and family, Lacks, Lorde and millions of less famous but no less important Black women who have died from cancer, live on in these moments of interconnectivity through memory, freed from the boundaries of time itself.