In 2014, the writer Anne Boyer She lived with her teenage daughter in a two-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Kansas City, for which she paid $ 850 a month, taught at a prestigious Kansas City high school, and had bought a bed vintage Canopy, Queen Anne style, at a thrift store for $ 280. That year, too, a week after she turned 41, she was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer, the worst of its kind, and she immediately thought that bed would become her deathbed. “There is no furniture more tragic than a bed, because of how quickly it can decay and go from the place where we make love to the place where we could die,” she would write after the painful and exhausting process that led her to overcome the disease in to fall apart (Sixth Floor), a rabid and heartbreaking essay awarded last year with the Pulitzer Non-Fiction.
It was a long time since I had read something that shook me so much. The book is subtitled A reflection on disease in a capitalist world and it looks like a succession of ax blows. He dazzles the precision, rhythm and power of each of his descriptions and reflections, between fatality and hope, mixed with data, literary and cinematographic references, with the human and the divine, and underpins everything, in addition, with raw feelings and acid criticism of the health system, the cost of the “cure”, the overinformation on the Internet and the charlatans and opportunists who gravitate to a cancer patient. It talks about the care provided by family and friends, while exposing the differences between those who, afflicted by this evil, are poor or racialized or are men or women or are alone or accompanied in life. Squeeze with your analysis of the “culture of disease”, your feelings and ideology. Disarm with sensory details and annihilate with devious sentences.
Is that Anne Boyer is a poet and that is why her prose is so powerful. He has published five collections of poems (none of them translated into Spanish) about women, workers, destiny and immortality. She earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Wichita State University and in 2011 began teaching at the Kansas City Institute of the Arts. During the hardest part of his illness, he was a columnist for blogs and magazines where he emphasized the interrelationship between social class and medical care. In these texts is the germ of to fall apart.
Disease, and cancer in particular, is already a “literary genre.” They are there The sickness and their metaphors from Susan Sontag O The Cancer Diaries from Audre Lorde, to mention just two of the most popular examples. Poetry, of course, has also dealt with the subject. Remember the poem of Jaime Sabines on “The murderer” of his father: “We are going to talk about the Cancer Prince, / Lord of the Lungs, Man of the Prostate, / who amuses himself by throwing darts / at the smooth ovaries, at the withered vaginas, / at the massive English. (…) / Mr. Cancer, Mr. Pendejo, / is just an instrument in the dark hands / of the sweet characters that make life. “
Now, among all that bibliography, stands out Anne Boyer by the harshness of the language to express and name each and every one of the phases of suffering, by the use of words and phrases evocative of poignant images. “Being sick leaves excess space to think and overthinking leaves room for reflections on death,” he says, as if writing were the mental gym he needed to strengthen himself and move on or as if he had found the “restorative magic” in it. that actually healed her. The construction and structure of these pages allow us to see that, due to all the adversities in which it was involved, the literary challenge was very exhaustive. “I wanted to abandon this book at least a thousand times, a number that does not include the innumerable remaining destructions inherent in writing it: the deleted sketches, the erased pages, the deleted passages, the discarded structures, the crumbling arguments, the sentimentalities that I have forbidden myself, the anecdotes that I have not told ”, says the author in the epilogue.
After a 3-inch lump was detected on his left breast, Boyer received the highest allowable dose of adriamycin, a “drug” known as a “red devil” for its scarlet color and corrosive effect, and a type of mustard gas to sanitary use. All so she wouldn’t die, even though she actually felt dead. It was enough for her to look at herself in the mirror: bald, without eyelashes, with a swollen face, weak… “At the height of her treatment, breast cancer is close to a general strike: striking hair, striking eyelashes, striking eyebrows, skin on strike, thought on strike, language on strike, sentiment on strike, vigor on strike, appetite on strike, eros on strike, maternity on strike, productivity on strike, immune system on strike, fertility canceled, breasts canceled, ”he explains. So because of the “side effects”, she felt dead. “Feeling as if you are dead can have a mechanical cause in certain types of brain damage, such as the one I have suffered as a result of chemotherapy: I feel dead half the time,” he stresses.
But here we don’t just talk about that. Throughout the book we also come across Santa Águeda holding her amputated breasts on a tray, with a monument to collectively mourn, with a clinical fable and with the kingdom of the sick. Also with the value of pain, the spectacle of pain, the language of pain, the democracy of pain and strident, honest and gothic suffering.
Facing all these edges has more influence on the reader “trapped” in the middle of the pandemic? Maybe. Although it was written before the outbreak of the coronavirus, one suddenly comes across aphorisms like this: “Under the veneer of perfect health we were sick and totally healthy in a sickly world.” So know it well: in these times, from this reading one cannot get away with it. Of course: when reading to fall apart they are not going to pity Anne Boyer. They are going to admire it.
AQ
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