A Burst of Light

by Audre Lorde

  There is no more time left to decide upon strange afflictions.

  December 20, 1985

  ARLESHEIM

  A men’s choir from the village sang Christmas carols tonight in the hospital stairwells, their voices echoing through the halls, sweet and poignant, and I cried for Christmases I have had that are past. But I simply cannot allow myself to believe that there will never be any more of them, so there surely must be. How different this season is from any holiday season I could possibly have foreseen. Dear Goddess! How many more?

  Frances’ being here makes it complete in an essential way no matter what, and at least we can wander about the village in the afternoons together looking at the shops, or walk the hills enjoying the countryside and the manicured little winter gardens. I stretch to be able to appreciate the loveliness in its own—European—right, before it is gone, too, and I no longer have a chance to explore it for whatever it can mean for me.

  December 21, 1985

  ARLESHEIM

  I sleep well here when I sleep. Yesterday was another horrendous communal dinner. Difficult as it is for me to get anything down, I find the genteel smugness, the sameness, infuriating. It’s better now that Frances has started taking her meals here with me. At least we can talk to each other.

  I had to do battle between the soup and the salad with an Australian pig who proved that racism is as alive and well in Arlesheim as it was on that wretched bus in Melbourne when that drunken Aussie accosted me thinking I was Koori (Aborigine).

  The choir really got to me tonight, mellow and measured and very civilized, so long as you accept their terms of living and their way of life and values. The sweet voices, the smell of pine and the lovely candle arrangements with red and green holly in every hallway, the Christmas decorations in all the corridors, the determined cheerfulness. Nurses go around and open every door a bit so that everyone can hear the music. Soft lights shining in the twilight windows. Very lovely. Just don’t be different. Don’t even think about being different. It’s bad for you.

  Today is the day the sun returns. Sweet Solstice. Mother, arm me for whatever is ahead of me. Let me at the very least be equal to it, if not totally in charge of changing it. Last night Gloria called. As she said, take whatever you can use there and let the rest go.

  Another choir is singing now in the halls. If I had the strength, I would get up from this bed and run out into the starlit freezing night and keep running until I collapsed into a heap of huffs and puffs of effort and strained muscles. But I can’t quite manage that, and Frances has gone back to her hotel, and my heart aches from strangeness. The sound of these voices singing familiar melodies in a foreign tongue only reminds me of the distance between me and my familiar places.

  Yet this is the only place I know right now that offers me any hope, and that will treat me and my liver seriously.

  December 22, 1985

  ARLESHEIM

  I have brought some of my stones and macramé threads with me. I’ve laid out the stones on my windowsill, and they are beautiful in the light. I’m going to make a new healing necklace for myself from them while I’m here, and I’m going to make the heart-piece from carnelian, which is a specific against melancholy. And that’s my answer to Sister Marie’s cautioning me against the dangers of an excess of joy!

  It’s the nights after Frances goes back to the hotel that are the hardest. I spend my day racing around between those dreadful public meals and the eurhythmics and painting and baths and tests and running over to Frances’ hotel for a quick cuddle then back here for a liver compress or to take my temperature or something else equally vital in this half-seen scheme of things that feels like a pact I’ve made with myself to do as they believe is best for a stated period of time—three weeks. In other words, to give the Lukas Klinik my best shot because it is the only thing I have going for me right now, and tomorrow the results from all my liver tests and other diagnostic analyses will be back. I haven’t really thought about what they will be because I just can’t spend any more energy in being scared.

  What I have to fight the hardest against here is feeling that it is just not worth it—too much fight for too little return, and I hurt all the damn time. Something is going on inside me, and it’s interfering with my life. There is a persistent and pernicious despair hovering over me constantly that feels physiological, even when my basic mood is quite happy. I don’t understand it, but I do not want to slip or fall into any kind of resignation. I am not going to go gently into anybody’s damn good night!

  December 23, 1985, 10:30 a.m.

  ARLESHEIM

  I have cancer of the liver.

  Dr. Lorenz just came in and told me. The crystallization test and the liver sonogram are all positive. The two masses in my liver are malignant. He says I should begin an increased Iscador program and antihormone therapy right away, if I decide that is the way I want to go. Well. The last possibility of doubt based on belief is gone. I said I’d come to Lukas because I trusted the anthroposophic doctors, and if they said it was malignant then I would accept their diagnosis. So here it is, and all the yelling and head-banging isn’t going to change it. I guess it helps to finally know. I wish Frances were here.

  I cannot afford to waste any more time in doubting, or in fury. The question is what do I do now? Listen to my body, of course, but the messages get dimmer and dimmer. In two weeks I go back home. Iscador or chemotherapy or both?

  How did I ever come to be in this place? What can I use it for?

  December 24, 1985

  ARLESHEIM

  I feel trapped on a lonely star. Someone else is very sick next door, and the vibes are almost too painful to bear. But I must stop saying that now so glibly. Someday something will, in fact, be too painful to bear and then I will have to act. Does one simply get tired of living? I can’t imagine right now what that would be like, 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.

  December 25, 1985

  ARLESHEIM

  Good morning, Christmas. A Swiss bubble is keeping me from talking to my children and the women I love. The front desk won’t put my calls through. Nobody here wants to pierce this fragile, delicate bubble that is the best of all possible worlds, they believe. So frighteningly insular. Don’t they know good things get better by opening them up to others, giving and taking and changing? Most people here seem to feel that rigidity is a bona fide pathway to peace, and every fibre of me rebels against that.

  December 26, 1985

  ARLESHEIM

  Adrienne and Michelle and Gloria just called from California. I feel so physically cut off from the people I love. I need them, the sharing of grief and energy.

  I am avoiding plunging directly into the nightmare of liver cancer as a fact of my life by edging into it like an icy bath. I am trying to edge my friends into it, too, without having to deal with more of their fury and grief than I can handle. There is some we share, and that mutual support makes us closer and more resolved. But there is some that they will have to deal with on their own, just as there is some fury and grief that I can only meet in a private place. Frances has been so true and staunch here. It is more difficult for her sometimes because she does not have the fount of desperate determination that survival is generating inside me.

  There is so much to keep track of. I think it’s crucial that I not only suffer this but record, in the fullness and the lean, some of the raw as well as digested qualities of now.

  Last night there was a Christmas full moon, and it felt like a hopeful sign. I stood out in the road in front of the hospital under the full moon on Christmas night and thought about all of my beloved people, the women I love, my children, my family, all the dear faces before my eyes. The moon was so clear and bright, I could feel her upon my skin through Helen’s fur coat.

  After I had gone to bed she called me back to her twice. The first time I c
ould not pierce through the veil of sleep, but I saw her light and heard her in my dreams. Then at 4:30 in the morning, her little fingers of light reached under the lined window curtains, and I got up as if bidden and went out onto the terrace to greet her. The night was very very still; she was low and bright and brilliantly clear. I stood on the terrace in my robe bathed in her strong quiet light. I raised my arms then and prayed for us all, prayed for the strength for all of us who must weather this time ahead with me. My mother moon had awakened me, calling me out into her brightness, and she shone down upon me as a sign, a blessing on that terrace with the soft gurgle of flowing water in my ears, a promise of answering strength to be whoever I need to be. I felt her in my heart, in my bones, in my thin blood, and I heard Margareta’s voice again: “It’s going to be a hard lonely road, but remember, help is on the way.” That was her farewell Tarot reading for me, seventeen years ago.

  December 27, 1985

  ARLESHEIM

  Last night I dreamed I was asleep here in my bed at the Klinik and there was a strange physical presence lying beside me on the left side. I couldn’t see it because it was dark, but I felt this body start to touch me on my left thigh, and I knew that this meant great danger. “It must think I’m dead so it can have (claim) me,” I thought, “but if I moan it will know I’m awake and alive and it’ll leave me alone.” So I began to moan softly, but the creature didn’t stop. I could feel its cold fingers beginning to creep over my left hip, and I thought to myself, “Oh, oh, nightmare time! I’ve got to scream louder. Maybe that noise will make it go away, because there is nobody else here to wake me up!” So I screamed and roared in my sleep, and finally after what seemed like a very long time, I woke myself up calling out, and of course there was nothing in my bed at all, but it still felt as if death had really been trying.

  December 30, 1985

  ARLESHEIM

  Frances and I went to the Konditorei in town this afternoon to have a cup of tea and be together away from the hospital, when the elderly schoolteacher with the rhodonite necklace came in and wanted to sit down with us. It was so apparent how badly she wanted to talk that we couldn’t say no, even though we never have enough time alone together.

  It was actually quite sad. Dr. Lorenz had just told her that her breast cancer has spread to her bones, and she doesn’t know what she is going to do. She has to make plans for her elderly mother for whom she now cares at home but will no longer be able to. There is no one she knows to whom she can turn for help because her sister died last year. I felt very sorry for her. Here it is, almost New Year’s Eve, and there isn’t even anyone she can talk to about her worries except two strange Americans in a teashop.

  Then she went on to explain that she and her sister had had to live with foreign workers (she meant Italians) in the factory where they worked during World War II, and that the foreigners were very dirty, with lice and fleas, so she and her sister would sprinkle DDT in their hair and their beds every night so as not to catch diseases! And she is sure that is why the cancer has spread to her bones now. There was something so grotesque about this sad lonely old woman dying of bone cancer still holding on to her ethnic prejudices, even when she was realizing that they were going to cost her her life. The image of her as a young healthy aryan bigot was at war inside me with the pathetic old woman at our table, and I had to get out of there immediately.

  December 31, 1985

  ARLESHEIM

  Old Year’s Day, the last day of this troubled year. And yes, all the stories we tell are about healing in some form or the other.

  In this place that makes such a point of togetherness and community, Frances and I sat through an ornate New Year’s Eve dinner tonight surrounded by empty chairs on each side of us, an island unto ourselves in the festive hall. It’s good that we have each other, but why should I have to suffer through this ostracism and pay for it as well? I guess because the point is not that I enjoy it but that I gain from it, and that’s up to me. As Gloria said on the phone, “Take what you can use and let the rest GO!” They don’t have to love me, just help me.

  My Maori jade tiki is gone forever, either lost or stolen from my room. How much more do I have to lose before it is enough?

  I cannot bear to think that this might be my last New Year’s Eve. But it might be. What a bummer! But if that’s true at least I have had others which were sweet and fall past comparing, and filled with enough love and promise to last forever and beyond me. Frances, Beth and Jonathan, Helen, Blanche and Clare, our loving circle. I hold now to what I know and have always known in my heart ever since I first knew what loving was—that when it truly exists it is the most potent and lasting force in life, even if certainly not the fastest. But without it nothing else is worth a damn.

  After Frances went back to the hotel I washed my hair (wishing I had some white flowers to put in the water for a blessing), listened to Bob Marley, and went to bed.

  . . .this is my message to you-u-u-u-u-u,

  every lil thing------is gon be allright-t-t-t. . .

  January 1, 1986

  ARLESHEIM

  Today Frances and I hiked to the top of a mountain to see the Dornach ruins, and the whole Rhine valley spread out beneath us. It felt so good to be moving my body again. My mother always used to say that whatever you do on New Year’s Day you will do all year round, and I’d certainly like to believe that’s true.

  It was very cold and sunny and bright, three miles up and back. The ruins rang with that historical echo and the presence of trials labored and past, although not as profoundly as the stones of El Morro in Cuba, and certainly not as desperately as the walls of Elmina Castle in Ghana, from whence so many Black women and children and men were sent to hell—slavery.

  February 20, 1986

  ANGUILLA, BRITISH WEST INDIES

  I am here seeking sun on my bones. A dry little island with outlandishly beautiful beaches, and soft-voiced West Indian people living their lives by the sea. Anguilla’s primary source of income is from import duties, second comes fishing. I go out at dawn to see the fishermen put out from Crocus Bay, and when they return they sometimes give Gloria and me fish. An intricate network of ownership and shares governs the dividing up of each catch.

  Fossilized sand dollars wash out of the sand banks onto the beaches of Anguilla and out of the claystone bluffs that grade downward toward the beach. I spend hours wandering the beaches and searching for them, or collecting shells that I rinse at the water’s green edge. I would never have known about this island except for Gloria. Anguilla feels like a piece of home, a very healing, restful place, but with the rich essences of life.

  The sun and the sea here are helping me save my life. They are a far softer cry from the East River, Spuyten Duyvil, and the Lower New York Bay. But always, the sea speaks to me no matter where I get to her. I suppose that is a legacy of my mother’s, from when we used to stand, all those years ago, staring out over the sooty pebbles at the foot of 142nd Street and the Harlem River. Anguilla reminds me of Carriacou, the tiny island off the coast of Grenada where my mother was born.

  When I am next to the sea, the wide spread of water laps over me with an enduring peace and excitement that feels like finding some precious rock in the earth, a sense of touching something that is most essentially me in a place where my past and my future intersect along the present. The present, that line of stress and connection and performance, the intense crashing now. Yet only earth and sky last forever, and the ocean joins them.

  I hear the waters’ song, feel the tides within the fluids of my body, hear the sea echoing my mothers’ voices of survival form Elmina to Grenville to Harlem. I hear them resounding inside me from swish to boom—from the dark of the moon to fullness.

  April 2, 1986

  ST. CROIX, VIRGIN ISLANDS

  This is the year I spent spring beachcombing in St. Croix, awash with the trade winds and coconuts, sand and the sea. West Indian voices in the supermarket and Chase Bank, and the Caribbean f
lavors that have always meant home. Healing within a network of Black women who supplied everything from a steady stream of tender coconuts to spicy gossip to sunshine to fresh parrot fish to advice on how to cool out from academic burnout to a place where I can remember how the earth feels at 6:30 in the morning under a tropical crescent moon working in the still-cool garden—a loving context within which I fit and thrive.

  I have been invited to take part in a conference on Caribbean women, “The Ties That Bind.” At first I didn’t think I’d have the energy to do it, but the whole experience has been a powerful and nourishing reminder of how good it feels to be doing my work where I’m convinced it matters the most, among the women—my sisters—who I most want to reach. It feels like I’m talking to Helen, my sister, and Carmen, my cousin, with all the attendant frustrations and joys rolled up together. It’s always like this when you’re trying to get people you love mightily to hear and use the ways in which you all are totally different, knowing they are the most difficult to reach. But it is the ways in which you are the same that make it possible to communicate at all.

  The conference was organized by Gloria and the other three Sojourner Sisters, and it’s an incredible accomplishment for four Black women with full-time jobs elsewhere to have pulled together such an ambitious enterprise. They orchestrated the entire event, bringing together presenters from ten different countries, feeding and housing us royally, as well as organizing four days of historical, cultural, and political presentations and workshops that were enjoyable and provocative for the more than 200 women who attended.

  Johnetta Cole’s moving presentation of the Cuban revolution and its meaning in the lives of Caribbean women; Merle Hodges’ incisive analysis of the sexism in calypsos; Dessima Williams, former Ambassador from Grenada to the Organization of American States, proud and beautiful, recalling Maurice Bishop and Grenadian liberation with tears in her eyes.