BLESS THE BLOOD

A young Black nonbinary activist copes with the enormity of a cancer diagnosis and medical racism, while facing the deep pain and deep love of the life they’re trying to save.

Upon being diagnosed with leukemia at 23, Nehanda embarked on a devastatingly steep learning curve about the cancer poisoning their blood and the pieces of their life and self that cancer had thrown into stark relief. Nehanda swiftly found that the casual bigotry, emotional abuse, and neglect they’d dealt with all their life were potently envenomed by ableism and might together kill them faster than the disease ravaging their body. Yet, as their struggles connected Nehanda more deeply to elders and ancestors, they were able to dig through the detritus of others’ expectations and harms and connect with themself as well. Told in a collection of poems and short essays, the book opens with warnings that readers won’t find a John Green novel in its pages and that the author-narrator will fail readers’ expectations—ghoulish and inspirational alike. Nehanda infuses queer Black disabled resilience and wretchedness into a poetic sinew that stretches, tears, and heals again and again, unspooling the mundane trauma of trying to survive as Black, fat, queer, trans, and disabled despite (and to spite) systems built to hasten their erasure. This memoir is kindred intersectional storytelling that searingly responds to Audre Lorde’s call in The Cancer Journals.

Shatters mirrors and windows to reveal the jagged shards of self-determination: “gently volatile” and absolutely crucial.