Tricksters and Truth Tellers: Narrating Illness in an Age of Authenticity and Appropriation

The question of why ill people need to narrate their suffering segues into the issue of what narrative resources they have available to form their narrations. A story from Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals is discussed in terms of narratives that Lorde drew upon as resources to tell her story. These resources include political narratives of claiming suppressed identities and trickster narratives. Their effect was to make Lorde's experience a story waiting to happen. The concluding section considers how narratives can be hijacked, specifically, how Lorde's radical utopian vision of women demonstrating against environmental causes of breast cancer and how her emphasis on race as a determinant of quality of medical care have turned into apolitical civic fitness events with highly visible corporate sponsorship. The possibilities and the difficulties of being a truth teller are discussed.