Creative Nonfiction: The Christian Dior woman

Abstract This work of creative nonfiction emerges from ethnographic research on Arab women's testimonies of their cancer experience conducted in 2016–2018. It focuses on the account of one Lebanese woman diagnosed with breast cancer and highlights her feelings, thoughts, and perceptions from the time of the initial medical examination through to final diagnosis. The woman's monologic voice dramatizes the fact that her experience of cancer diagnosis takes the form of an alienation of the self from everything around it. In this sense, what is central to this piece are a series of questions around the unhomeliness of being in the world. What happens, phenomenologically, to the patient upon cancer diagnosis? How is the existential dislocation of their world following a cancer diagnosis registered and experienced? What is the place of language and particularly the place of one's native language and second language in the articulation of this sense of foreignness? Finally, how are familial encounters and relations disrupted, othered, and distanced?