YEAR OF PLAGUES

A chronicle of a year of trauma.

In the fall of 2019, British Guyanese poet, novelist, and playwright D’Aguiar, a professor of English at UCLA, was diagnosed with prostate cancer, the first of three plagues that he recounts in a memoir notable for its uncommon candor. If cancer was the most immediate threat to his life, Covid-19 proved no less fearsome. To undergo tests in a hospital, he had to enter “spaces dominated by the pandemic.” The virus, he writes, assumed “the role of an aid to my cancer.” Equally assaulting was the “society-cancer” of anti-Black racism, as evidenced by the police killings of George Floyd and others. D’Aguiar reports in detail the trajectory of his illness from the time he first noticed bladder problems through the tests that confirmed the existence of cancer. He also writes about the four drugs—and their insidious side effects—that he took to control it and the eventual surgery to remove his prostate and the lymph nodes to which the disease had spread. Cancer affected both body and spirit: Because one of the drugs blocked the production of testosterone, for example, he began to experience hot flashes and to develop breasts, a disturbing side effect that challenged his “male gender outlook.” Trying to marshal “restorative powers” of mind, the author took to chanting, singing, and dancing to create an atmosphere conducive to cure, hoping to stop the disease from metastasizing “with a firewall of meds and positive vibes.” Writing poetry, he realized, had the power to rescue him “from catatonic shock and stasis” by opening up “a psychic space of awareness” of the world around him. Interwoven with his illness narrative, D’Aguiar shares some of his poems along with recollections of his childhood in Guyana, tales of the trickster god Anansi, and reflections on inequality in the health care system and the plight of Black men in America.

A visceral account of personal illness and social ills.