글쓰기 치료와 실천적 증언으로서의 자전적 질병서사

Autopathography as Scriptotherapy and a Practical Testimony: Focusing on Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals

This study aims to reveal the process through which one’s particular experience of illness is transformed into a traumatic experience and narrative wreckage, and then provide a creative way to cope. This work analyzes The Cancer Journals, the autopathography of Audre Lorde. This book was written six months after her modified radical mastectomy for her cancer. As such, The Cancer Journals is not a simple diary; it is a kind of post-traumatic writing. In the process of losing a breast, Lorde suffered a sense of fear, the terror of death, pain, and humiliation. However, these experiences are suppressed and silenced by a life-threatening reality and patriarchal medical discourse. A tremendous gap between her inner reality and the outside reality keep wounds fresh, crying out for healing. The Cancer Journals rereads materials on cancer written in different circumstances, on different timelines, and in different modes of address. In the book, she is both reader and writer of her text, witness to the writing as well as to the layers of lived experiences. The significant result of her writing process is to take her from “cry of raw pain” to the contextualizing retrospective provided by later commentary and elaboration, and then to activism. The act of retracing and reweaving the strands of her life becomes a practical testimony as well as therapy for herself and others. In short, The Cancer Journals as a practical testimony and scriptotherapy shows a creative the after-the-fact reaction to a particular experience of illness which entails a traumatic experience and narrative wreckage.