ABSTRACT
Cathy Caruth highlights the importance of engaging in this kind of testimony by suggesting: trauma seems to be much more than pathology or a simple illness of a wounded psyche; it is always the story of a wound that cries out. Though the wound may cry out to be heard, trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub identify the innate difficulty in fully accessing and telling about traumatic experience because the traumatic past is not always speakable or easily crafted into a coherent narrative. Carol Dine draws on the resources of both poetry and prose to assimilate and heal the rupturing caused by cumulative trauma. Dine’s story of her father’s violent treatment of her as a child and her multiple recurrences of cancer as an adult traces the profound and sustained desecration of her selfhood and her inevitable sense of shattering.
