Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The End of the Animal – Literary and Cultural Animalities
- 1 Each Time Unique: The Poetics of Extinction
- 2 Posthuman New York: Ground Zero of the Anthropocene
- 3 J. G. Ballard's Dark Ecologies: Unsettling Nature, Animals, and Literary Tropes
- 4 Staging Humanimality: Patricia Piccinini and a Genealogy of Species Intermingling
- 5 “Sparks Would Fly”: Electricity and the Spectacle of Animality
- 6 The Nature of Birds, Women, and Cancer: Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge and When Women Were Birds
- 7 Animality, Biopolitics, and Umwelt in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide
- 8 Looking the Beast in the Eye: Re-animating Meat in Nordic and British Food Culture
- 9 Love Triangle with Dog: Whym Chow, the “Michael Fields,” and the Poetic Potential of Human-Animal Bonds
- 10 Bestial Humans and Sexual Animals: Zoophilia in Law and Literature
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
6 - The Nature of Birds, Women, and Cancer: Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge and When Women Were Birds
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The End of the Animal – Literary and Cultural Animalities
- 1 Each Time Unique: The Poetics of Extinction
- 2 Posthuman New York: Ground Zero of the Anthropocene
- 3 J. G. Ballard's Dark Ecologies: Unsettling Nature, Animals, and Literary Tropes
- 4 Staging Humanimality: Patricia Piccinini and a Genealogy of Species Intermingling
- 5 “Sparks Would Fly”: Electricity and the Spectacle of Animality
- 6 The Nature of Birds, Women, and Cancer: Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge and When Women Were Birds
- 7 Animality, Biopolitics, and Umwelt in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide
- 8 Looking the Beast in the Eye: Re-animating Meat in Nordic and British Food Culture
- 9 Love Triangle with Dog: Whym Chow, the “Michael Fields,” and the Poetic Potential of Human-Animal Bonds
- 10 Bestial Humans and Sexual Animals: Zoophilia in Law and Literature
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
What would you do if you were diagnosed with terminal cancer? Or, what are you doing right now if you have it already? Or, what are you thinking if you know someone facing it, or you are currently caring for them? Are you fighting it? Do you have a positive attitude? Or, to the contrary, are you accepting it: acknowledging that you cannot win so you might as well not resist? Are these the only choices? Your answers probably depend upon age, and circumstance, and where you are from. What do you think are the right narratives or metaphors to help you explain what looks like the end of life, for however long it might last? Some people run marathons or race for the cure. Some people write books. Terry Tempest Williams has written two memoirs about the illness and death of her mother Diane at the age of fifty-four. Williams continues to look to the natural world, to birds in particular, in order to try to come to terms with loss and life at its end. From the publication of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place in 1991 to When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice in 2012, Williams has inhabited the metaphor of women as birds and nature as a guide to both life and death. These two memoirs are, for me, both inspiring and infuriating.
My wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of thirty-one. We chose to engage with chemotherapy as far as it would go. When she died, less than six months later, our daughter was only nine months old. I, too, have tried to come to terms, if not blows, with terminal cancer. I have run marathons and written a book, although it is not a memoir. I am drawn to Williams's writing, to her advocacy, to her passion for speaking out, for her willingness to keep on resisting when it comes to working for environmental protection and an end to human suffering on a global scale, while the U.S. government continues to wage war on “terror.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- AnimalitiesLiterary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human, pp. 127 - 147Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017