Itinerary of an Amazon, Annick Parent

Itinéraire d'une amazone

This book (in French only) explores the innermost recesses of breast cancer and broaches, with extreme sensitivity, the question of surgical reconstruction following a mastectomy.
This testimony is a real message of hope, not only for those who have this illness, but also for those close to them who are equally overwhelmed by these events.
Humour is ever-present.

Extract :

After a mastectomy, in the shower...
“My hand, full of soap, makes its ritual way from my neck to my chest, asking only one thing, to make a figure of eight on my breasts then along my right arm to slide under the armpit. My scar stops it in its tracks, it becomes distraught, not knowing where to go. It hesitates a moment, then starts off again, tracing new, uncertain curves round the forbidden zone. It will never again go over my two breasts, it will have to forget a roundness and create new paths, become accustomed to the flat and forge new bonds between two dissonant contours. How many days will it take me to erase this memory and make these gestures, which are so hazardous today, seem familiar.”
 
Lien : www.ellebore.com

Faced with breast cancer, Audre Lorde, American writer and poet, shares her personal findings

« On Labor Day, 1978, during my regular monthly self-examination, I discovered a lump in my right breast which later proved to be malignant.
During my following hospitalisation, my mastectomy and its aftermath, I passed through many stages of pain, despair, fury, sadness and growth. I moved through these stages, sometimes feeling as if I had no choice, other times recognizing that I could choose oblivion – or a passivity that is very close to oblivion – but did not want to. As I slowly began to feel more equal to processing and examining the different parts of this experience, I also began to feel that in the process of losing a breast I had become a more whole person.

After a mastectomy, for many women including myself, there is a feeling of wanting to go back, of not wanting to persevere through this experience to whatever enlightenment might be at the core of it. (...) This regressive tie to the past is emphasized by the concentration upon breast cancer as a cosmetic problem, one which can be solved by a prosthetic pretense.» (...)

« I did not have to look down at the bandages on my chest to know that I did not feel the same as before surgery. But I still felt like myself, like Audre, and that encompassed so much more than simply the way my chest appeared. » (...)

Developing Strengths / The Quest for Self-definition and Power

« I am talking here about the need for every woman to reflect on her life. The necessity for that consideration grows and deepens as one faces directly one's own mortality and death. Self scrutiny and an evaluation of our lives, while painful, can be rewarding and strengthening journeys toward a deeper self. »

Excerpts from « The Cancer Journals »
Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1980 : p. 55, 57, 58

Itinerario de una amazona (Itinéraire d'une amazone), Annick Parent

Este libro (disponible en francés) explora todos los rincones del cáncer de mama y aborda, con extremada sensibilidad, el tema de la reconstrucción mamaria luego de una mastectomía. Este testimonio es un verdadero mensaje de esperanza, no sólo para aquellos que padecen esta enfermedad, sino también para sus allegados, quienes están igualmente abrumados por estos eventos. El humor esta siempre presente.

Extracto:
Luego de una mastectomía, en la ducha…

“Mi mano, llena de jabón, hace su ritual pasada desde el cuello hasta el pecho, preguntando solo una cosa, haciendo una figura en ocho alrededor de mis senos y luego sobre mi brazo derecho y resbalando hacia la axila. Mi cicatriz la para en seco, y se angustia, sin saber por donde seguir. Duda un momento, y comienza otra vez, trazando curvas nuevas e inciertas alrededor de la zona prohibida. Nunca mas pasara sobre mis dos senos, tendrá que olvidarse de los dos bultos redondeados y crear nuevos caminos, acostumbrarse a lo plano y crear nuevos lazos entre dos contornos disonantes. Cuantos días me llevará borrar esta memoria y hacer que estos gestos, tan peligrosos hoy, parezcan naturales ?”

* What is life like for a woman with only one breast ? Jacqueline Jullien

“What is life like for a woman with only one breast ?
1 breast + 1 breast = 1 woman

When I was faced with this fait accompli – an aggressive tumour from which I could expect nothing good, even after excision, - when they told me, rightly, that a mastectomy would be the best tactic to adopt, after a chemotherapeutical sweep in due form, I would have to, like thousands, like millions of women, take on board this imminent but irreversible strategical attack on my body image.

If they take out your appendix – especially in France, where apparently, this operation beats all the records -, whether you be a male or female child, your body image is not impaired. (...)

A breast is completely different. A woman's breast. Nevertheless, it is not a vital organ, even if its role is to nourish life; even if damaged by cancer, it can become a carrier of death. The breast is what we see of a woman ; with its left or right twin, it says for the woman : I am a woman. Look at me. And women have learnt - because it has been instilled into them since early childhood, well before the two little areolae peep out and swell – to recognise and accept that breasts are the visible and prominent part of their destiny as females. Those who would like them to be round and soft, will have small triangular ones, others see them becoming too heavy when they would have liked their obliteration into an ephibic body, agile in running and throwing balls. (...)

These two little fleshy mounds called breasts are there, and with them a whole society, a whole culture, a whole order saying, “Look at me, look at my two breasts, I am a woman”.

And health workers, men and women, you are so impregnated by this culture, this order, to which you obviously belong as (an) individual(s), private people, that you ask yourselves, “How do they survive, these women who, in losing their breast, have lost the obligatory anatomical quality that qualifies them? How to help them “recuperate”?” And health workers, you are conscious of this probative loss of qualification, and being engaged in a global and specific battle against this illness, you moreover devote yourselves to surgically reconstructing the amputated woman-identity of your patients, the supreme and basic hallmark of their feminity : this breast that you have removed for therapeutic reasons (as we say, “Reasons of state”). (...)

The first thing that was announced to me - once the dress-rehearsal had been set out, that's to say, the reasonable project of removing a too turbulent breast - was, “You will be reconstructed”.

But if I reformulate, the meaning was that, missing a breast, I was going to be destroyed, and that you, surgeons, will consecrate your time to reconstructing me. (...)

You will be reconstructed.

Is there not a semiological contradiction in this utterance which, on one hand, evokes the programmed destruction- identical to a recently flattened town, annihilated by bombing – and on the other at the same time, the repair, trivialised by the sybilline name of “reconstruction”?

On one hand the dramatisation of the annihilation (unformulated though implied); and on the other the trivialised reassurance of a quasi automatic re-shaping. ”

In « Prothèse du sein après un cancer : une injonction. Pour qui ? Pour quoi ? » N.Q.F. 1997 Vol.18, n°s 3-4.

* German website of Katharina Mouratidi

Berlin photographer who has created an exhibition of photographs of women with breast cancers (portraits and busts) which was shown in the Berlin underground and then in different European countries.

Lien : http://www.mouratidi.de/

* American website of Susan B. Markisz

Her goal in photojournalism is to bring a sensitive eye and heart to observe and record the human condition.



Lien : http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/news/journal/journal-o/archives/jour_v17n2_0019.html

* South African website created by Molebatsi Pooe-Shongwe

Lien : http://www.breastsens.com/

* French website of Marine Bureau-Kohn

A site which relates “in the form of photos, sculptures, paintings, film and installation, her days from the discovery of the “crab” until the end of her treatment.” “My experience has become an art object “Nib'Art” which I would like to share with you, whether ill or not : www.nibart-expo.fr”

Lien : http://www.nibart-expo.fr/

* Canadian website of Francine Gagnon

American website presenting works of artists dealing with breast cancer

Lien : http://www.francinegagnon.com/

* American website presenting works of artists...

American website presenting works of artists dealing with breast cancer
www.canceranswers.org/gallery

Lien : http://www.canceranswers.org/gallery/

* American website of top-model, Matuschka

American site of top-model Matuschka who appeared on the cover of the New-York Times Magazine in 1993, to show that the body can be beautiful after having been disfigured. www.matuschka.net

« In 1991 at the peak of Matuschka’s recognition for her Ruins (self) Portraits, the artist was diagnosed with breast cancer and her body much like her work changed significantly. Ironically she would reach a world-wide audience when she broke topless taboos, after appearing bare-breasted and bare-chested on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine in a self-portrait entitled Beauty Out of Damage. This imaged earned her the Rachel Carson Award, a Pulitzer nomination, and in 2003, “Beauty Out of Damage” was chosen by Life as 1 of 100 pictures that changed the world since the camera was invented.
"Her project is bold and simple: to show that the body can be beautiful, even in the most conventional ways, after it has been disfigured. She is most effective when she presents herself to us with direct seduction. We are forced to confront the scarred flesh and to admit that Matuschka is very desirable, that sexual power resides in the personality. »
Michael Einstein
Chicago Tribune, Illinois

Lien : http://www.matuschka.net/BODScrollingGalleryPageNov6.html

* Website of Myrtille Visscher, a young Dutch photographer

Breast amputation is not just sad. There are women who take an activist attitude towards living with an amputated breast and do things to help others. That is where I focused on: women who are open about it. I met two lively women who gave a remarkable twist to their breast amputation by designing clothes for women who do not want to wear a prosthesis. In this way Paula and Jeannette gave a growing number of women the strength to make their own choices, instead of accommodating to the expectations of husband, family or society, who also find it difficult to accept the physical change.

I am fascinated by the taboo on making visible the consequences of surgery. Breast cancer is such an actual issue and subject to much media attention. I am interested in the women who choose their own path, a path that can differ from our culturally determined concepts of feminine beauty.

I feel involved. Sometimes I’m ashamed of my ignorance or clumsy behaviour, at other moments I feel full of energy and passion. Sometimes I assumed the protective attitude often invoked by this subject. What I admire about the women I photographed is their openness. Sadness was soon replaced by the courage and conviction that the women let me share in.

Myrtille Visscher, 2007

Lien : http://www.myrtillevisscher.com/