It’s no little irony that the two physical attributes which made Marsha Hunt a late ‘60s icon and Vogue model – her breasts and hair – became the focus of her life again 37 years later when she underwent a mastectomy plus subsequent chemotherapy.
Hunt, forever enshrined in London hippy lore as a cast member of the musical Hair, and who bore a daughter, Karis, by Mick Jagger, was five years into writing a book on Jimi Hendrix when she first noticed a tenderness in her breast.
Unwilling to forsake the work just then, she let it slide. When she finally had the complaint checked out in Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin, she was diagnosed as having breast cancer, and underwent a mastectomy last November.
Written in three months, her book, Undefeated, functions as an unfussy and unsentimental log of the experience. Throughout the account, Hunt draws on the image of one-breasted Amazonian warrior women for inspiration, rationalising that, being done with motherhood, the breast had no more practical use, and furthermore, she wasn’t about to put herself through reconstructive surgery in order to conform to conventional notions of the body beautiful.
She had, she admits, been somewhat prepared for the rigours of cancer treatment. Her former partner, documentary maker Alan Gilsenan, was diagnosed with cancer some years back. But with her daughter heavily pregnant and unable to fly, this time she was effectively on her own.
Undefeated also recounts how the experience resulted in a reunion with the Stones’ camp. Hunt found common ground with Charlie Watts, fresh from his fight against throat cancer, and Mick Jagger also showed his support, although his offer of a financial transfusion received an ambivalent response from Marsh. Incredibly, she also met Keith Richards for the first time, using the opportunity to solicit what she believed was crucial testimony from him regarding Hendrix’s London years.
“I was quite startled that he has the memory he has,” she says of the guitarist. “I mean, a huge memory. You almost wanna say, ‘But how do you remember the name of the guy who was at the door of that nightclub in 1962?’ He’s a gentle soul as well. He looks like a hard-ass, but he’s a puppy. And I guess that’s part of his personality. He probably is a hard-ass, but I got the puppy.”
In person, Hunt herself is a formidable character. She’s spent the last 20 years as a novelist and memoirist, and having taught writing to Mountjoy prisoners, is no stranger to this country. Shaven-headed and obviously comfortable in her skin, she comports herself with the calm of a tribal elder, albeit one with a raucous laugh that frequently precedes judicious deployment of the maternal-conjugal expletive.
Peter Murphy: The story told in Undefeated takes place over a short time span, and you tell it straight, with no fictional smoke and mirrors.
Marsha Hunt: “I taught at the ’Joy, and my one directive to them in writing from life was to let the story tell itself. Don’t keep writing. And if you have an interesting enough story, which I think every human being does, you focus on a certain thing that either made them very happy or very sad or was an extraordinary thing in their lives.”
Jimi Hendrix is a totem in the book. He’s usually seen as a sort of benign black angel, but your obsession with writing about him caused you to put off getting your breast checked out. Ultimately, the spell he cast was detrimental to your health.
“(Guffaws). Wait, wait, wait, ’cos this you’ll have to hear. I mean, I love you for saying that ’cos I didn’t even think about it in that way, but what you’ve got to understand is my Jimi book is not a biography as in the biography just written by (Charles R.) Cross. I am telling a piece of social history and using a figure to retain my focus. Around him one can see the dance that was going on in the ‘60s in an extraordinary way, that I was witness to. I haven’t just gone to libraries and read shit. I have often been travelling places to talk to people and they’re telling me shit and I’m thinking, ‘I was in the room – you can’t tell me that!’"
As a black American exile in late ‘60s London, you obviously identified with him.
“Our tribe, Jimi’s tribe, African-Americans or whatever the fuck they want to call us who are up out of slavery in the United States, we have not had enough articulation of how we have come to be. And when I discovered that Jimi’s life was showing me things about our culture, and having spent a lot of time at the ’Joy with junkies, this is what I put on my back, this is why my breast and my life meant no more to me than his life. I have to write this book. I have to. That is not my choice. And if I have to die to do that, then that is what my life is for. Maybe what I’m writing only a hundred people will read, but in my heart and mind, I’m doing something with purpose, and the purpose of it is to help define a tribe that has been too little defined. Nobody quite associates Jimi within our tribe. In other words, black fuckin’ history month comes up, you’re in Seattle, which is his hometown, and Jimi’s picture ain’t up. Why is Jimi’s picture not up there with Martin Luther King? Martin said a lot of shit, but Jimi said a lot of shit too. And if we of colour cannot respect that, somebody needs to tell us. So that’s why I’m doing it. And after five years, when a little lump comes up in your breast and you know that you could go to the doctor and it could turn into a circus… ‘No I’m not goin’ to the circus, motherfuckers, I’ve got a book to write!”
And you talk about men and their health!
“Well, having said all that – and you can bitch about me in this! – I did pay my health insurance ’cos I wanted to know if I got sick I could be taken care of properly. And thank god I did, ’cos now I’m on this drug called Hercepton, and that’s two grand a month until the end of the year. But the symbol on the Hercepton pamphlet is of this woman with a bow, and it’s a fabulous image.”
You seem to get great strength from images of Amazonian women.
“Absolutely. And part of the joy of it is that, you know, the history of the Amazon goes back 5000 years. And when I think of them, having gone through surgery: how did they do it? Where did they go to bleed? Did they have stitches then? Did a lot of them get infected ’cos they cut off a breast, and then die? What actually happened to these women, and were they really Syrian women as they were claimed to be, or were they from another part of the continent of the Middle East? And they’ve been painted enough that, even were they not real, the mythology of them is so intense and long enduring, that’s a reality.”
Throughout the book, despite the spiritual, financial and physical toll, you manage to remain pretty Zen-like.
“I think that’s age, I really do. People don’t bring that up, but I’m a minute off 60. And I think that in one’s life you go through many, many things, and one of the things we forget about the beauty of age is that you become more solid. You definitely have a space that is related to experience, and having gone through this with someone I loved and who was my partner and having really fought the good fight with him while he was too sick to fight it for himself, when it came around to me, the organ which had been attacked was so less relevant, I figured I was in a doddle anyway. Even if cancer was gonna take me out, it wasn’t gonna stop me eating or going to the toilet.”
You also mention in the book that being black in America means you grow up ready for, if not expecting, a fight.
“It’s hard for people to accept this: you grow up negro in the United States baby, and you’re ready for a whole lotta shit to go down from day one. Your family, your community, everything says to you, ‘Y’know what? This is gonna be a tough ride but you can have some fun.’ I learned more about being black living in Ireland than the United States or England or Australia. But unlike the subtlety of your uniform, be you Protestant or Catholic, my uniform is heir apparent (indicates her skin). Every minute of my life in the United States, I am constantly in a situation where that uniform agitates people, alerts people, frightens people, pleases people, and it has nothing to do with me. And what that does to you throughout your life, the day you leave the realm of family and enter the realm of world, it fuckin’ mobilises you, to such an extent that you are constantly prepared for agitation and aggravation.’
“I walk into a neighbourhood in the United States and I will be constantly ready for the police to stop me and say, ‘Excuse me, why are you in this neighbourhood?’ ‘Well excuse me muthafucka, I live here!’ Y’know what I’m sayin’? And that’s your deal and you carry that with you. So when something minor – but intrusive and real – comes into your life, like breast cancer, Throw Down Motherfucker is right there in your spine. So this is cultural, this isn’t just about me. That’s not to say that I get up every day waiting for agitation, but in a way it’s kind of the blessing that comes with being the outside oppressed.”
It’s funny how many of us sleepwalk through our lives and then get blindsided by mortality, like we expected to be immune until old age.
“I think they should teach us about death at school, honest to god. Really, why make it such a big deal? Why be scared to check out of here? The one great thing that every motherfucker in this room is gonna do, we are all gonna die. We’re gonna go over. We don’t know when or how it’s gonna happen, but we’re going, and whether you have everything or nothing in this life, your ass is gonna die. So just groove!”