Rhakima | A one-breasted Queen who refuses to let society define who she is.
Trying on the Crown that carries her name, Rhakima notices the lining first. It’s soft, she says, which matters after chemotherapy, when scarves were not always soft enough for her sensitive head.
Her story begins with a lump in her left breast and a GP who dismissed her. “You’re 34. You don’t have breast cancer,” she was told. Backed by a colleague, Rhakima went back and asked for a referral. It’s advice she now passes on:
“Being comfortable and strong enough to advocate for yourself is something really, really important.”
At the breast clinic, she didn’t need to be told. Having worked in clinical environments herself, she has learnt to read faces, so she asked her specialist simply, “‘It’s not a cyst, is it?’” By the time she left, “I had already made peace with it.” What finally made her cry was the leaflets she was meant to read and process alone, and the thought running through her head: “but no one looks like me.”
This is why Rhakima is so grateful to Black Women Rising, a charity that empowers women of colour through cancer. They create a space for support, education and connection, and amplify the voices and experiences that are so often missing from mainstream cancer media and campaigns.
When offered a lumpectomy, she was clear: “I don’t want a lumpectomy. I want a mastectomy.” Her strength, she says, comes from her faith: “My faith is why I am the way that I am.”
Where many people think of death when they hear the word cancer, Rhakima instinctively thought of life.
“Cancer doesn’t mean death. It also means life. It also means living. So I chose to live, and do life, and be a mum, and everything else that I’m supposed to be.”
Her children were 10 and 2 at the time, and she told her son, “Mum’s going to be fine because I’m going to fight and I’ll be okay.”
She didn’t do it alone. When these types of things happen, you realise who is your support system. Being diagnosed, she remembers getting home to find her girlfriends in the kitchen waiting for her. Her sisterhood showed up for her, bathed her after her mastectomy, did the school run and taxied her to and from chemo, checking in constantly with calls, texts and memes. “Thank you God for putting those women in my life [...] I was completely blessed to be surrounded by women like that,” she says. Some friendships fell away, and she doesn’t blame anyone for that, but she is forever grateful to the women who rallied around her.
Malka has always been a community of Queens, and this is what that looks like.
Through it all, her sense of self stayed put. Losing her hair, she says, “that’s not who I am. I might be that person for a time, but, you know, it will pass.” (For the record, she looked good bald, in a wig or in a headwrap.)
Headwraps, she says, are about more than comfort. “As Black women, our headwraps are very significant. It’s not just ‘Put anything on your head’, because it self-represents a Crown.” Choosing one for how it makes you feel is the point: “Like, girl, I feel empowered right now.”
Her message to the woman standing in front of the mirror who finds a lump is simple: “Knowledge is power and it will save your life, and early detection is key. Don’t be afraid to save your life.”
Rhakima’s story isn’t only about getting through cancer. It’s about choosing life, and showing the people she loves that it’s possible. It’s about not letting anyone else decide who you are, and finding your confidence and empowerment in whatever way feels right to you. And it’s about the women who hold you up while you do it, because no Queen should have to walk alone. That, more than anything, is why she is our October Muse of the Month.
Queens are not born. They are made.