The African American writer and activist Audre Lorde (1934–92) first became known for a number of poetry collections published in the 1970s. Lorde made major contributions to second-wave feminism and the civil rights movement with publications such as Sister Outsider (1984), a collection of speeches and essays, including the seminal essay ‘The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House’, as well as her ‘biomythography’ Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982). Lorde is also well known in the Medical and Health Humanities for her writing on illness, in which personal experiences are inevitably linked to her political work: The Cancer Journals (1980), a collection of essays, speeches and diary entries chronicles Lorde’s experiences with breast cancer between 1977 and 1980; and ‘A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer’ (1988) is a collection of diary entries from January 1984 to August 1987 in which Lorde describes how she dealt with the recurrence of cancer in her liver. In these narratives, Lorde’s dominant metaphor is, as it is for so many, that of warfare.

This prevalence has been discussed in contrasting ways: scholars have either considered the metaphor to be a tool of empowerment for Lorde, or they have read it as a trap that confines and restricts her. These opposing readings echo the mutually exclusive categories to which metaphors are often assigned: they either heal or harm; they are either aggrandising or victimising. In this chapter, I examine Lorde’s writing on illness to flesh out my argument that an ‘either/or’ categorisation of metaphor misrecognises metaphor’s varied usability. As becomes evident in The Cancer Journals and ‘A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer’, Lorde is well aware of the constraints of the warfare idea – and yet she continues to use it, consciously navigating the metaphor’s constraints and activating its multiple affordances by challenging its connotations, stretching its meanings and combining it with other metaphors to produce new concepts and orientations. What these three strategies – challenging, stretching and combining – lead her to, I argue, is a more ethical form of comparison, one that foregrounds interdependence and connection without sacrificing difference. While Lorde’s comparative innovations certainly served her anti-racist, antimisogynist and anti-homophobic activism, I believe they also model an approach to metaphor in which comparison makes space for unexpected gains of illness.