The opening scene of “The Bold Type”, an American television show about three women navigating glamourous careers, involves them holding hands and screaming in a sub-way station. Even though I could relate to nothing, but also everything that these women from the Global North underwent in the show, the opening of the series struck a chord with me. Many times during the 8 months of my breast cancer treatment and even now, as I try to live a “normal life” in remission, I have been wanting to go to the crowded Dadar station in Mumbai and scream into the approaching local train to vent out my frustration.
Fair warning, I will be citing a lot of women who gave words to my feelings, as I felt choked to express my emotions post-treatment. As much as I did not want to pour my emotions to my support system during the breast cancer treatment, I did not want to fossilize my emotions into silence and make it seem like a cake walk. So, I kept a journal. I kept a journal without knowing that women before me used that to record their stream of consciousness when they were not given prominence. It is also a fact that, you need privilege to have the ingredients to voice out your feelings. When people expressed sympathy to me for not having any defining features of a woman – head full of hair, readily functioning uterus, and healthy rounded breasts, I choose to remain silent and take out the pent-up anger in my journal. To my benefit, I had access to the works of Audre Lorde and Susan Sontag. These women, who also completed their breast cancer treatment back in the 1970s, shaped my understanding of self-expression, and empowered me to articulate my experiences as a person who completed cancer treatment.
Finding these “third spaces” with women before me, was essential if not fundamental to my life after the treatment. I was and still am unable to articulate in words what I feel, when random brain-waves take me back to my treatment. The metallic taste that memories of chemo bring in my throat contain grief which needs airing. When I wear a front-open shirt, it grounds me to the days that I was dependent on my partner and his brother to even be fed after the surgery. Whenever I shared this with someone, they stressed on how lucky I was, or how grateful I could be. My question then is, do they want to be this lucky like me? No one wanted to share the load of my helplessness and cry with me.
Time became stagnant for me, like Rahel’s toy wristwatch which had time painted on it. Rahel is a character that features in the novel titled ‘God of Small Things’ written by Arundhati Roy. “Ten to two. One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she (Rahel) could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place”. I also wanted time to do its thing – pass.
The treatment protocol using military warfare terminology against the body which I had only begun to love at the age of 30, consumed me. As Sontag said, the treatment inflicted a kind of suffering that degraded the individual. And through all these stuck “Ten to two”s, my journal gave me the space to scream and aerate my grief, than letting it fester.
Intersection of Identities and Silencing
Even though Virginia Woolf wrote “[men believed that] publicity in women is detestable” in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ in 1929, I do not think we have progressed much beyond that. Attention-seeking women are still looked down, by the seemingly “non-attention seeking” women along with men. Society has always applauded women who suffer, even though I am still waiting for a global award to be issued to such women or a “Top 10 women who were silent” board. As Audre Lorde reminded “we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence”. My journal was a space where I screamed against the fetishized endurance of pain with grace. This helped me to deal with the mad world outside the contours of the book which always demanded a cheerful face from me. Lorde made me feel seen when she wrote “what depraved monster could possibly be always happy?”
As it is, my intersectional marginalized identities (queer, woman, non-practising oppressed caste Muslim) did not let me join collectives where I could express myself beyond the boxes that were assigned to me. Breast cancer diagnosis felt like a bitter frosting on the already bad situation. There were moments when I felt reduced to a stereotype—either too “modern” or not Muslim “enough.” These perceptions weighed heavily on me, as they framed my illness in moralistic terms rather than treating it as a universal human experience.
I find it hard to make peace with the memory of a nurse from a leading private hospital’s oncology department, who was so bothered by me holding a seemingly Hindu sounding first name and a Muslim sounding second name. It rattled her further that the person waiting outside – my partner, was a Christian. Or how a nurse upon hearing my accent (South Kerala) asked how I ended up for cancer treatment in North Kerala, and if I visited my parents in South Kerala, after marriage to a person in North Kerala. Even within medical spaces, there were microaggressions and implicit biases that reminded me how deeply entrenched these perceptions are in every aspect of life, even when one is battling for survival. I just wanted to be treated with attention and care, than being questioned on which boxes I tick.
Together, each of these intersecting identities already weighed down by layers of stigma, prejudice, and stereotyping only made my treatment journey lonelier and more exhausting than it needed to be. But these battles also strengthened my resolve to find spaces where I could exist in my entirety, unapologetically. In journaling and connecting with voices like Audre Lorde, I found the voice for my story, to scream against the weight of societal perceptions, and to create a voice loud enough to be heard.
Even though being grateful has a positive connotation, the 8 grueling months shifted the narrative of being grateful for me – grateful that my partner did not abandon me when diagnosed with breast cancer, grateful that I do not have to rinse my brain of the need to wear a hijab, grateful that even though there is no social security system in India for post-cancer patients that I am able to hold a job from the 10th day after treatment ended, grateful that my in-laws did not kick me out of the house during the treatment. It was exhausting to just list out these instances. Imagine, living through these and being grateful for them.
It is in this context that third spaces gain significance to accommodate people easily, inexpensively and regularly as they re-integrate into workplaces and social life. In a place like India where social security is non-existent (for example, I am not eligible for any insurance after my treatment), society should mature to accommodate diverse people by giving them space than celebrating the able-bodied and seemingly able-minded segments alone.
Cancer: A New Silence that was Louder
As much as I am able to work 8 hours or more a day, travel for work, manage a 1 BHK by myself, cook my own meals (which even people without any history life-threatening illness are unable to do), the knowledge of my pre-existing condition changes the lens with which my employer and the society around perceives me. The silence is so loud, that I gaslight myself into thinking if I am giving into my old ways of overthinking. One of my biggest annoyance is caused by the silence around the subject of breast cancer.
How could people recede into the background despite enduring such pains – why was it still a matter that brought shame to women? When waiting at the hospital, people would ask “Evdeya”, meaning which body part of mine was affected by cancer, and I would say ‘breast’ and touch my right breast, they would not ask anything further. Whereas, I noticed that brain tumor patients were very vocal about their diagnosis story. There was no support in the larger female environment for the loss and pain that I endured. I turn to Audre again, who wrote: “What would happen if an army of one-breasted women descended upon Congress and demanded that the use of carcinogenic, fat-stored hormones in beef-feed be outlawed?”. I felt a co-wallowing in my grief was the closest thing that could have been facilitated. That co-wallowing could help us be seen and be connected to each other and process the emotional and physical hurt that came back like cud in the mouth of a cow, signaling that the processing isn’t complete. It would help each other understand if we still got the remains of anesthesia in us as the “real world” seems very surreal.
I was recently approached by a hospital to conduct a journaling workshop for cancer patients, but the prompts I made were dismissed as too heavy for people undergoing the treatment. The rejection came from the doctors who silence our minds, who dismiss our pains by saying “Oh it’s a normal side effect of chemo”, “Is there pain which demands a higher dose of painkiller?”. The medical infrastructure does nothing to pamper the patient. The patient is told that the professionals would engage in counter-attacking the invasive cells. But they were quick to jump to dismiss a journaling prompt which read “Does fear stalk you? Does fear sap your energy and power? Where in your body do you feel the impact of fear the most?”
I want to scream against this tyranny of silence and reject the reductive narratives of strength of the mind being more efficient than the medicines. “You have been pricked so many times, you should not be the one to have needle phobia”. Who will tell them that it doesn’t work that way?
Audre’s and Sontag’s Screams
Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as a Metaphor, “No one asks, ‘Why me?’, who gets cholera or typhus. But ‘Why me?’ (meaning ‘it’s not fair’) is the question of many who learn they have cancer.” The narrative surrounding cancer is viewed as a form of self-betrayal by your own body. And while undergoing a rigorous treatment for a year, the system demands you to have a strong mind, without which the medicines may not have the desired effect. Sontag wrote “Recovery from a disease depends on the will assuming ‘dictatorial power in order to subsume the rebellious forces’ of the body. Cure is thought to depend principally on the patient’s already sorely tested or enfeebled capacity for selflove.” This shifts the blame onto the patients and pushes them more into melancholy and misery.
Although remedy does not exist in a painless treatment protocol, more than half of all the cases can be cured by existing methods of treatment. I have met and continue to meet during my routine medical reviews, countless humans who have gone back to living their lives with all the beauty and toxicity that life presented them before the diagnosis.
As Audre wrote, “I would never have chosen this path, but I am very glad to be who I am, here”. It feels right being on this side, as if unconsciously I had been waiting for a gathering of women who would be so honest about the pain of the treatment and the traumas it
presented them with. Unlike childbirth, surgery for cancer is not seen as victory or sacrifice. So, unlike childbirth, there is no covering up of trauma with a gloss of happiness even though it is mired by post-partum depression – which is again a matter which is perceived as shameful among women.
Reclaiming the Scream: A Personal and Political Act
It felt cathartic to post about my diagnosis on Instagram, it felt very normal to say the cells in my right breast have decided to multiply without giving me any heads up about it. I released the weight of my silence into the world, for it is not another weight I wanted to shoulder.
Screaming into spaces I felt safe around, and then to unsafe spaces where those screams were unwelcome, became an act of reclaiming my space in a world that was not designed for me anymore. Coupling Susan and Audre, I would like to scream and end this rant by saying “We need not accept a social death that precedes the physical one, as your silence will not protect you”.
Here’s to finding our safe spaces to scream and to our collective liberation from conformist forces! <3
Written by Meera Pazhampori
