In this foreword by adrienne maree brown, she reflects on Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood and Caitlin Breedlove’s writing to explore cancer as both a personal and political condition shaped by capitalism, environmental harm, and competing narratives of illness, survival, and meaning.

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The first time I read Octavia E. Butler's Lilith's Brood, I had not, to my knowledge, lost anyone to cancer. Now, that seems wild and miraculous. Now, I often think of cancer as both a personal and generational enemy, stealing my loved ones from their bodies, exhausting them as they try to live, drowning them in their bodies.

Octavia's Oankaki aliens saw cancer as something generative, of immense genetic value. They wanted to harness its power; they saw it as the contribution humans were making to the universe. I have struggled trying to look through this lens, despite the beauty and rigor of Octavia's reimagining.

From an analytical standpoint, I see cancer as a way the toxins we have unleashed into the world are cycling back in and through us, because we are literal parts of the world we overuse, misuse, and abuse. In All In, my comrade Caitlin Breedlove describes her experience as a consequence of life under capitalism, where exploitation-and self-exploitation is standard operating procedure. The machine of overwork often convinces us our pain is normal, setting our standards of suffering to autopilot, set to run until we just fall down one day," she writes.

She also calls cancer a disease of overproduction. As Breedlove observes, "overproduce is what [cancer] does. How do we heal from a disease that does that in a society obsessed with excess and overproduction? Cancer is an inability in the body to decipher between healthy and unhealthy cells. It is a disease that is without boundaries, a system that uncontrollably spawns its deadly and damaging products."

Cancer is also such a clear consequence of nuclear bombs and radiation and pollution and eating plastic and poisoning water, and forgetting to honor the land as we swallow it. And in the same way that the choices that most harm us and the earth are imprecise and fatal, cancer is currently an imprecise and often fatal consequence, generating death in the bodies of humans who have spent their lives loving the earth and fighting the toxins.

From an emergent strategy standpoint, I have been long- ing for more wisdom directly from the heart of those battling with, dancing with, cancer. And in her memoir, Caitlin describes her frustrating search for authentic narratives about living with cancer, and about finding very little that resonated with her. "Most of the literature that I find feels like it found its way to recognition and audience through experiences, stories, and energies that are nothing at all like what I am going through," she writes. "Much of it feels so saccharine, so positive, pink-ribboned, white, straight, and suburban. It is sugarcoating things that are not and should not taste sweet."

Indeed, we need books that help us understand what is happening from the inside out, and how to be in community, how to hold each other tight as we embody the huge shifts necessary to make a cancerous world part of our collective past, instead of an inevitable future. It is what is right now, and for the foreseeable future. To understand it, survive it, and shift our relationship to both cancer and our loved ones in cancer's grip, we need texts from those surviving cancer for others who are touched by it.

Caitlin says she searched for "stories, accounts, and reckonings of this experience from the perspective of outsiders from the dominant story of how this all goes ... for stories of going through this told by women, queers, people of color, immigrants, poor people, by parents. I find some. Not a lot."

Thankfully, for those of us engaged in the same quest, Caitlin is a trustworthy, vulnerable, and eloquent guide, inviting us to walk with her, suffer with her, grieve with her, and learn with her. "Swimming in seas of all things privatized, numb, and individual, our times make our own shapes more difficult to feel. We're overstimulated but spiritually starving," she writes. This living from within outward can allow us to push out new bulbs, leaves, and flowerings; and, in doing so, the rotted, the addictive, the stuck matter can be pushed out of us. There is no nobility in how I change; I simply am new growth because the old has run out of space on the branch."

I believe her amazing chronicle is in deep conversation with a sister text, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals, a lodestar since its publication in 1980. "The Cancer Journals," Caitlin writes, "stands alone." Because, as she continues, Lorde is "the only woman writer who lived with cancer I have ever read who wrote with raw truth about what it meant for her body, her sexuality, her mind, her relationships, and her children to suffer like this."

The rarity of such text makes me even more grateful for Caitlin's singular book, a gift that she calls "a science experiment, a faith experiment, a magical alchemical experiment." As an organizer, activist, and thinker, I have known her to be a human of deep questions, thorough research and emotional integrity. When Caitlin received her diagnosis, when she shared it, I could immediately feel how much it meant to her to tell the truth about what she was experiencing. What surprised me, and deeply moved me, was her capacity to make the truth beautiful, even as she told the ugliest parts. Caitlin puts life into each sentence, even as she moves too close to death. Her survival is a miracle, and so is her testimony.

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