Prayer can be a Black lesbian
singing about taking care
of everybody but herself
and wanting to drive,
without a nap,
to the middle of nowhere.
From “‘Fast Car’ –Tracy Chapman”
Bless the Blood: a cancer memoir, by Walela Nehanda, is an unflinching and unashamed window into the author’s diagnosis and treatment for leukemia. Nehanda signals, within the first sentence of the memoir, that “this here ain’t a john green novel.” Readers are warned that they are “‘bout to step into [the author’s] world” where the author readily admits they are “indeed the bad cancer patient” and acknowledges that they do sometimes “self-sabotage.” This is not a memoir that aims to glorify survival or offer the author up as a victim. In fact, Nehanda specifies that the book is, at its core, a witnessing. Bless the Blood is, from start to finish, characterized by the strength and insistence on autonomy that Nehanda speaks to in the opening two pages, but readers should not mistake this strength for the sugary, feel-good perseverance of traditional cancer stories.
Rather, Nehanda’s strength relates to their sense of self, their resolve to center themselves and their care despite the countless people who dismiss or minimize their needs, both within their personal life and across a medical system that continues to refuse proper treatment for Black patients. Alongside medical racism, a central theme in the memoir, the author centers relationships with their mother and a lover, Ivie. Readers watch as the author, in coming to terms with their past, their present, and the potential lack of a future, also comes to terms with the complexity of relationships that are often toxic, but also deeply rooted in love. Nehanda resists a flat or one-dimensional view of these relationships, instead offering an honest and aching depiction of people learning to exist—together and apart.
Bless the Blood is composed primarily through free verse poetry, as well as a handful of prose poems and essays, that are reflective in nature and mirror the tone of diary writing. The book begins with the poem, “Hopscotch for Leukemia Was Apparently for a Real Disease,” a poem which opens with the author’s diagnosis: “You have a white blood cell count of 660,000. / That is 600 percent more than normal. You likely have leukemia. / You will be getting admitted to the oncology unit’ flatlines the room.” The poem pivots to a scene of young children at a Montessori school who are helping to raise money for “sick kids pictured in colorless pamphlets” to the speaker Googling exactly what leukemia is. The use of “colorless” alludes to the myriad representations of kids with cancer that center Whiteness, rendering the author and others like them even more confused when they realize that cancer affects children of color, too.
What makes Bless the Blood such a vital and timely memoir is that Nehanda speaks to dozens of sociopolitical issues with frank and relatable, yet always poignant, language that will no doubt resonate with a broad spectrum of underrepresented voices. “The Assumptions” confronts the many ways that people misinterpret aspects of Nehanda’s identity, while “nonbinary as in” more explicitly defines what the term means for them. Nehanda also describes their struggles with disordered eating, roots their estrangement from their mother in a series of text exchanges, and unpacks their relationship with Ivie through several memory boxes. Though Nehanda prioritizes a narrative language that resists obvious poetic device, their ability to craft images and infuse lyricism permeates every poem, such as their description of survival as “surrendering to the scream of salvation.”
The importance of Nehanda’s debut memoir cannot be understated. Bless the Blood is sure to appeal to readers of Ellen Hopkins and Audre Lorde alike. This book should be in every classroom library, and in the hands of anyone fighting to survive.