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Abstract

Poetry and narration are among the most distinctive expressions of lifewriting. Poetic and narrative representations of the self, often associated with discrimination and disease, have got a psychotherapeutic effect. Ideally, collaborating agents in life- writing and narrative would produce a kind of societal knowledge with a global dimension, transcending the individual selfawareness, creating thus a framework for a would-be social integration. This paper is concerned with Audre Lorde’s poetic and narrative report on breast cancer, preceding her years in Berlin as a visiting professor in the 1980s, when her own experience as a “black lesbian poet or feminist lover” testified for the discrimination against African-German women, claiming their African heritage. Discussions in and out of the classroom had led to joint-publication of these women’ individual stories about diversity and to full autobiographical memories. The shared experience of diversity between the American poet and the German women, as strangers with social and medical stigmas, remembered and relived in individual and collective narratives, became a prerequisite for integration. The documentary on Audre Lorde’s liberating work in Berlin, Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984-1992, presents the poet’s feeling and her new partners in the anti-discrimination cause. It adds a performance aspect to life writing. At the same time, it reveals the state of diversity before and after the fall of the Wall of Berlin in 1989 and the differences in the political climate and attitudes toward racism as a form of cancer. Lorde’s consultations with the German physiotherapist, as part of her postoperative treatment, can be associated with her outreach to German women. These consultations turn into a form of medical narrative. In the final analysis, this struggle against the social disease of racism as a cancer, has created transnational selves, overcoming ethnicity, and paving the way for multicultural societies, not only in Europe, but beyond.

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