The Cancer Journals (1980) and A Burst of Light (1988) both use non-fiction prose, including essays and journal entries, to bear witness to, explore, and reflect on Lorde's diagnosis, treatment, recovery from breast cancer, and ultimately fatal recurrence with liver metastases.[10][42] In both works, Lorde deals with Western notions of illness, disability, treatment, cancer and sexuality, and physical beauty and prosthesis, as well as themes of death, fear of mortality, survival, emotional healing, and inner power.[17]
Lorde's deeply personal book Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), subtitled a "biomythography", chronicles her childhood and adulthood. The narrative deals with the evolution of Lorde's sexuality and self-awareness.[10]
Sister Outsider
In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), Lorde asserts the necessity of communicating the experience of marginalized groups to make their struggles visible in a repressive society.[10] She emphasizes the need for different groups of people (particularly white women and African-American women) to find common ground in their lived experience, but also to face difference directly, and use it as a source of strength rather than alienation. She repeatedly emphasizes the need for community in the struggle to build a better world. How to constructively channel the anger and rage incited by oppression is another prominent theme throughout her works, and in this collection in particular.[17]
Her most famous essay, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House", is included in Sister Outsider. Lorde questions the scope and ability for change to be instigated when examining problems through a racist, patriarchal lens. She insists that women see differences between other women not as something to be tolerated, but something that is necessary to generate power and to actively "be" in the world. This will create a community that embraces differences, which will ultimately lead to liberation. Lorde elucidates, "Divide and conquer, in our world, must become define and empower."[43] Also, people must educate themselves about the oppression of others because expecting a marginalized group to educate the oppressors is the continuation of racist, patriarchal thought. She explains that this is a major tool utilized by oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. She concludes that to bring about real change, we cannot work within the racist, patriarchal framework because change brought about in that will not remain.[43]
Also in Sister Outsider is the essay, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action". Lorde discusses the importance of speaking, even when afraid, because otherwise silence immobilises and chokes us. Many people fear to speak the truth because of the real risks of retaliation, but Lorde warns, "Your silence does not protect you." Lorde emphasizes that "the transformation of silence into language and action is a self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger."[44] People are afraid of others' reactions for speaking, but mostly for demanding visibility, which is essential to live. Lorde adds, "We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and ourselves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid."[44] "People are taught to respect their fear of speaking more than silence, but ultimately, the silence will choke us anyway, so we might as well speak the truth." Lorde writes that we can learn to speak even when we are afraid.
In Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference, Lorde emphasizes the importance of educating others. However, she stresses that in order to educate others, one must first be educated. Empowering people who are doing the work does not mean using privilege to overstep and overpower such groups; but rather, privilege must be used to hold door open for other allies. Lorde describes the inherent problems within society by saying, "racism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance. Sexism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one sex over the other and thereby the right to dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism. Classism." Lorde finds herself among some of these "deviant" groups in society, which set the tone for the status quo and what "not to be" in society.[45] Lorde argues that women feel pressure to conform to their "oneness" before recognizing the separation among them due to their "manyness", or aspects of their identity. She stresses that this behavior is exactly what "explains feminists' inability to forge the kind of alliances necessary to create a better world."[46]
In relation to non-intersectional feminism in the United States, Lorde famously said:[41][47]
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.
— Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
