About three weeks ago I was in San Francisco and read at Modern Times Bookstore. It was the first reading from the new edition of Exile and Pride and turned into a celebration of the 10th anniversary of book, not an official launch party but with that feel. The store was packed, standing-room only, unless of course you were a wheelchair user, in which case you always bring your own chair (those of us who are walkies are at a disadvantage here). I’ve been delighted to have the new edition of Exile in the world but also hyper-aware that it’s a 10-year-old book and in many ways I’ve grown as a writer and an activist since it was first published. But the reading was such a good reminder for me that the book is still so important. Several people came up to me afterwards to excitedly let me know that they had just found the book.
In addition to reading from Exile, I also read several poems from The Marrow’s Telling, including “How to Talk to a New Lover about Cerebral Palsy.” As folks were leaving, I got a big thank you for this poem from a woman who said she had just been having this exact conversation with her new boyfriend who has CP. I can’t think of a better compliment because it means that this poem has been of use in such a practical and possibly profound way.
During Q&A, I was asked two questions that were overwhelming in their bigness and that I am still chewing on, thinking about how I would like to answer them now. The first one was about how to get non-disabled progressive organizations to include disability in their political agendas. I talked about three things: 1) the need to break isolation as disabled people (the material conditions of our lives are often such that many of us aren’t able to spend the time we want in communities of our own choosing, which in turn impacts the access we have to progressive activists to push them about ableism), 2) the need to talk about the ways ableism is twined at a fundamental level with other systems of oppression, and 3) the utter need for the disability rights movement to stop being a single-issue and single-identity driven movement. There are so many more things to add to this list — strategies, ideas, philosophies, tactics.
The second question was about political and social changes regarding social justice and disability that have happened in the last 10 years since Exile was first published. I really fumbled this question. I talked about queer disabled people and disabled people of color, both queer and not, finding each other, making community, and building culture. I wanted to talk about movement building work, but all I could think of were the many barriers and walls that a lot of us have encountered in the last 10 years trying to get disability onto a broader political agenda. I’d be delighted to hear other people’s ideas about what has changed in the last decade.
So here’s another story from the Queer Poetics class at Mills.
Among the poems I read in the class was “East Oakland,” which is essentially a love poem that occurred at Mills my senior year. Part of it reads:
…I want to twirl you
across the room,
my hand light
on the small
of your back, want
our bodies to catch
the rhythm, words
never ceasing.
You write:
At first
we held hands
like children
who bravely choose partners.
Then tell me: my second year
of college I took a field trip, busload
of white kids and me. We drove down
96th Avenue, right past the house
I grew up in, its square yard. Home
called ghetto for the first time.
…My tremors travel
through the arc of our walk,
hands swing into rhythm,
your palm cool and dry,
subway to 54th Street,
words never ceasing.
They taunted me weirdo, retard,
monkey, hey lezzie. Taunted you—
you don’t say the words. I spread
my body against yours, try
to imagine East Oakland, 1965….
As I read this poem 24 years after H gave me her poem reading in part, “At first/we held hands/like children/who bravely choose partners,” after hearing her story about the field trip (which also happened at Mills), after wanting to dance awkwardly and joyfully, after spreading my body against hers, most of which happened on-campus; body memory came flooding back–where we stood, the light on her face, the smell of eucalyptus, the feel of air on skin, the blue of sky. Several times as I read, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it through, the layers of emotion so deep, twined, literally taking of breath. What a reminder of the power, longevity, and absolute realness of embodied memory.
Two weeks ago I was in the Bay Area to see the Sins Invalid show and soak up disability culture and hang out with a variety of friends. Among other happenings, I visited the “Queer Poetics” class at Mills College, which is where I received my BA in Women’s Studies 24 years ago. The students had just finished reading The Marrow’s Telling, and we had rolicking, smart, firey conversation. Themes that emerged were about how a poem is made deeper by multiple readings/meanings and how in the threesome of writer-text-reader, the writer doesn’t hold the trump cards.
It started when I read “And Yet” to the class. Several stanzas read:
North on Baldwin Road, I walk my everyday walk.
Bottom of the hill, a dog barks, boy yells, “Hey mister.
Hey mister. Hey mister.” We’ve traded names a dozen times.
Then “Hey retard. Retard. Retard.”
Schoolyard to street corner: words
slung by the pocketful.
Crip skin marked,
white skin not.
And then towards the end of the poem:
Crip skin,
white skin:
which stories
do I tell the best,
and which
rarely begin—
turn, flutter,
settle?
Several students read “crip” to mean “Crips and Bloods,” which lead to a branching conversation about multiple meanings, rather than working toward a single “correct” meaning. And someone asked about issues of appropriation, since many of the disabled people using the word crip are white. Are white disabled people misusing or stealing the word from a particular African American context? I left campus that night high on ideas, connections, what it means to listen to readers listening and using my work.
Out of this mix, I wrote the following post to the Queer Poetics class blog:
Notes on the word crip
I left the Queer Poetics class and Mills full of the poetry and politics of crip etymologies, appropriation, and simultaneity. I asked Rebekah [the teacher] if I could write a blog post to both thank all of you for our plentiful conversation and extend it.
I know where crip comes from in disability communities—the long histories of folks who have had cripple used against us. We have taken the word into our own mouths, rolled it around, shortened it, spoken it with fondness, humor, irony, recognition. And yet I can’t remember the first moment I heard the shortened, reclaimed version (nor, for that matter, the longer pain-infused original), when I adopted it as my own, started calling myself a queer crip. What are the specifics to this history and etymology? Who said it first in which spaces; how did it catch on; when was it first written down as a way of inscribing pride and resistance; how did it come to be passed from person to person over the years so that now I find myself thinking, “But didn’t crip just arise organically from disability communities, movements, cultures?” These are the questions to map out personal and communal etymologies that have very little to do with the Oxford English Dictionary, often thought of as the final authority on the history and etymology of English words.
At the same time I know close to nothing about the etymologies of Crips in gang culture and African American communities of Los Angeles. And so I went to Google, which of course can be the beginning of inquiry but rarely the end. I read several historical accounts of the founding and early years of the club, the organization, the social and activist network that became the Crips. There is a good handful of stories about where the name comes from. One story tells that it’s an acronym for “Continuous Revolution in Progress.” Another that it comes from an associative trail of names rich enough for a poem of its own—the Baby Avenues morphing to the Crib Avenues morphing to the Crips. A third that it comes from an old Asian-American woman reporting to the police that she had been mugged by young Black men who were carrying walking sticks and whom she called cripples or, in accented English, maybe crips. And there are additional versions beyond these three. Because I read these stories on the Web rather than learning them in community, I have no idea how each of them may be embedded (or not) in communal and personal etymologies rooted in specific neighborhoods, historical moments, and experiences of racist violence.
But what is clear to me is that both uses of the word crip have long community histories of their own. Neither have been appropriated, borrowed, stolen, misused. Disabled people, particularly white disabled people, who call ourselves crips aren’t twisting an African American history for our gain or pleasure. Black boys and men inside the Crips aren’t referencing a word loaded with ableism. The two uses, histories, and etymologies aren’t akin to white people wearing our hair in dreadlocks; trans people claiming their transness as a disability or birth defect in order to explain and create empathy for their embodiment; or non-Native peoples romanticizing, simplifying, practicing, and assuming ownership of Native spiritual traditions. Instead crip and Crips trace simultaneous etymologies.
What do we learn when we lay them side-by-side? What do they share in common, and where do they diverge? Who has bodily, community, political connections to both traces/words? How does gun violence and injury link the two? And finally inside a poem, what do we as readers and/or writers gain or lose by bringing all the histories and etymologies to bear on a single word or by making choices among them?
Thank you for a plentiful conversation that embraced my poems and spun off from them, leaving me with unanswered questions that demand my writerly attention.
My editor just e-mailed me to say that copies of the new 10th anniversary classics edition of Exile & Pride have arrived at South End Press. I find myself excited, surprised, and a bit disbelieving. I mean the book isn’t in my hands yet. But more than that, I so clearly remember coming home 10 years ago to the first box of copies of Exile sitting on my doorstep. How and when did a whole decade pass? How did that book become a “classic”? Wow and whoa!
Here’s an offer and a shameless plug. I still have a dozen copies of the first edition. I’m selling them autographed for $10 each (includes shipping). E-mail me at eli (at) eliclare (dot) com if you’re interested.
I used to be the kind of reader who read one book at a time. I simply wouldn’t pick up another book before I finished the one I was reading. I don’t know when that changed, but it sure has. Here’s the maze of books I’m in the middle of right now.
1) I just finished Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, a novel about the German occupation of France during World War II. It’s a powerful story, set against Nemirovsky’s bio. A well-known author and Russian Jew living in France, Nemirovsky was mid-way through writing what she was planning as an epic novel when she was deported to Auschwitz. Her young daughters survived the Holocaust and the war and miraculously ended up with their mother’s partly finished manuscript, which 65 years later they published.
2) I’m halfway through Terry Tempest William’s newest book Finding Beauty in a Broken World, which is about learning to make mosaics, studying endangered prairie dogs, and spending time in Rwanda working with Rwandans to create a mosaic memorial for people who died in the 1994 genocide. I’m stalled a bit; the book’s brilliant, but I’m not ready yet to read about the Rwandan horror.
3) And then I’m listening on tape (well, actually on mp3) to Sherman Alexie read his The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. It’s such the story of poverty, being Native on the reservation, what it means to leave home, and disability (without ever saying the word disability). A few scenes of bullying with the word retard had me squirming with a sense of recognition. So that’s what I’m reading for leisure.
For work I’m in the midst of three books:
4) As research for an essay I’m writing about living in Vermont, I’m reading The Voice of the Dawn: An Autohistory of the Abenaki Nation, learning the details of land theivery, smallpox, and genocide on the piece of earth that white people call Vermont and Abenakis call Wobanakik.
5) In prep for the mini-course on freak show history that I’m teaching at Oberlin in March, I’m reading Sideshow U.S.A. and thinking right now about Batwa man Ota Benga displayed at the Bronx Zoo in 1906 and Yahi man Ishi displayed at the UC Berkeley Museum of Anthropology from 1911 to 1915.
6) And finally I’m reading Lennard Davis on the history of the concept of normal and Chris Bell on white disability studies, both in The Disability Studies Reader.
It feels like a maze of books, rather than a simple stack, because of the connections and shared themes among them, despite their apparent differences. Clearly genocide tracks through most of them, including a connection between the rise of the concept of normal and eugenicists of the late 1800s. Another connective thread is histories of imperialism. I so clearly can visualize the web, the legacy: Ota Benga living in a zoo, Ishi living in a museum, Abenaki people going further underground to escape eugenicists in the 1930s, Nemirovsky dying in Auschwitz, Rwandans dealing with the aftermath of genocide, a Spokane Indian teenager struggling to leave the Res due to poverty and violence. This web is about interlocking histories, none of which are entirely in the past. Throw in the ways “normal” has been used to bolster and justify so much–from gawking at the freak show, zoo, and museum to imperialist invasion–and the ways abuse, neglect, and disregard of the natural world mirror the same in the human world (as if I could separate the two worlds), and I find myself in a dense maze of reading right now.
One of the major joys of winter for me is snowshoeing. There’s a pasture near my house that I often tromp in, meandering along fresh deer tracks down to a grove of white pines and cedars. Sometimes I lay beneath the pines and listen to the wind in the muffled quiet of fresh snow, watch as it knocks snow off the high branches, white billows cascading to the ground. Other times I’ll tramp a path into the frozen marsh, dead reeds and cattails rustling above my head. Of course, I adore all the natural world stuff, but I also adore how steady I feel on snowshoes. It’s not that I pine for better balance in my day-to-day life as a disabled walkie, but the contrast between my balance with and without snowshoes is quite noticeable. In the years when I lived in places where winter meant rain, not snow, I would never have imagined snowshoes to be adaptive devices. They always looked so clumsy, those oversized frames to strap onto hiking boots. But now I love the places I can go on my snowshoes.
Friday after my last class of the semester, I went to the library on-campus to check out a couple of disability studies books to read over the next couple of slow weeks. After finding the books I was looking for, I started to browse the other disability studies books on the shelf. One of the books that caught my attention was called Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities. My first thought was “Oh, I wonder who’s included here.” I turned the book over to read the back cover, only to find much to my surprise that I was one of the writers being written about. Kind of flattering but also kind of weird at the same time. So of course I had to check the book out and read the chapter to satisfy my curiosity.
It’s funny reading academic writing about my writing. Because I’m not really an academic, the language of post-modernism and post-structuralism isn’t familiar or easy for me, all of which is to say that some of what I read doesn’t make sense to me. And some of it is just different from my intention. Of course there is nothing new or surprising to me that readers’ responses to my work differ from my writerly intentions. I’m bemused by some of the differences. I’m claimed as a self-defined “feminist hick,” and certainly I claim the word feminist and explore the word hick, but I don’t put the two together. But here’s my favorite: “Exile and Pride respells its authors name, presenting her as Eli rather than Elizabeth Clare….” This framing of my name change differs so immensely from the way it actually happened at the time.
In 1998 when I was working with South End Press to finish Exile, I had just started using the name Eli, some folks knew me by my old name and others by my new name and still others were making the slow transition from old to new. It was an awkward, uncomfortable, and exciting time, acknowledging my trans self and bringing that self into the world with a new name. I lived a somewhat double life, juggling two names, two pronouns, two restrooms, and more external perceptions of my gender than I care to count. I struggled long to figure out which name I wanted on the cover of Exile. On one hand, I had been publishing in periodicals under my old name for over a decade, and I was still trying on Eli. On the other hand I adored being called “Eli,” and it had started to truly fit. In the years since the publication of Exile, I’ve been more than grateful that I decided upon my new name for the front cover. And now my new name is no longer new but simply my name.
Telling this story isn’t meant to judge one academics reading of my name change but to remark on the difference between internal experience and external reality.
Confession time: About once a month I surf over to Amazon.com to see how my books are doing. Embarrassing but true. Tonight I found this link for the forthcoming Classics Edition of Exile and Pride. I barely recognize myself in their description. The timing is uncanny because earlier this evening I gave my editor at South End the first draft of the second of two new essays for this edition. Here’s a little teaser:
Eleven years ago in 1998 when I handed the finished manuscript of Exile and Pride to my editors at South End Press, I knew the gendered story I had just finished telling already trailed behind both my personal experience and the politics of the trans liberation movement. It was a true story, not one I wanted to abandon or disown, but no longer current, even then. Today do I try again, telling another, distinctly different, story about gender and race, class and violence, disability and sexuality, all crashing together in our tender, resilient bodies? Do I try to find another single, coherent narrative for myself that claims boyhood as far back as I can remember even as the doctors assigned me the categories girl and mentally retarded? Do I claim my current gender location as the most real? What happens when storytellers grow beyond stories to which they’re still connected?
I could tell you about being a white queer guy now, white privilege and men’s privilege wrapping around each other, learning what it means to be a man calling other men on their sexism…. I could explain, expose, trace the lineage of my gender as it has changed. Demonstrate how language, politics, and perception have shifted around it. Wrestle some more with nature and nurture, essentialism and social construction, rigidity and fluidity, binary and continuum, and how these ideas roil through cultures, histories, and communities. I could tell this story as if this moment, this body, this gender were an anchor.
But how do I write about change itself, a story of verbs—transform, crack, melt, resist, transmit, contradict, choose, translate, repeat, shift, yield, yearn? Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying everyone’s gender is fluid, but even if your gender has stayed as steady as a boulder left behind when the glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago, your body has changed over time. I want a story that narrates the span between 15-year-old girl and 80-year-old woman, between 10-year-old sissy boy and 45-year-old cross dresser, between transgender butch and genderqueer trans man.
This is another mundane post about daily life, this one about the trials and tribulations of a crip who has growing repetitive stress injuries, mostly tendinitis connected to my cerebral policy, that make typing sometimes uncomfortable and always slow, and speech that is slurred enough to make speech recognition software always more than a little frustrating. Today is a happy day because I’m dictating this blog post using MacSpeech Dictate. Don’t misconstrue this post as an endorsement or advertisement for this particular piece of software. But if this software proves itself as good as the initial trial is being, it will change the way I use a computer a lot and for the better. So I’m cautiously happy and hoping not to get frustrated with this software as I’ve gotten frustrated so much in the past by speech recognition.
Of course as mundane as this is, it is also connected to really deep and important issues about impairment, ableism — a word that the software obviously did not know — and disability. One of the sessions that I went to at SDS last summer was about a speech impairment and different modes of technology to either enhance or make possible communication, some of the strategies responding to impairment and others resonding to ableism. The panel of people who spoke included quite a range of different kinds of speech impairments. I ended up feeling very emotional and not very articulate or analytical about what I heard at the time. So many bits and pieces of what some of the panelists talked about struck personal chords, but those chords are very fragmented for me. Mostly now as an adult my speech is understood, or if it isn’t, then the miscomprehension, or the unwillingness to listen to a crip with slurred speech, doesn’t have a big impact on my life. But as a child I struggled with communication a lot, needing translation, facing harassment, and dealing with harmful assumptions all of the time. So listening to the adults on the panel, all of whom were talking about current strategies and the current twine of impairment and ableism in their lives, was really about remembering my past that is loosely connected to my present but not to my actual day-to-day present. Emotional but in ways that I’m still not being able to describe very well.
And this isn’t even beginning to think about the issues of being a writer for whom the act of fingers, or more precisely one finger, on a keyboard is the physical action of writing. If speech recognition works for me this time, how might it change my writing? It’s funny how these questions seem inconsequential because they are about impairment, not about ableism. And yet don’t I know all too well that the sheer physicality of our bodies has to be important too?
A week ago I presented at Access Living, a big Center for Independent Living in Chicago. The room was full of people–disabled people, queer people, trans people, lots of folks who crossed all those categories. It is always so good for me to bring my work to my home communities. I am so often working in rooms with only a few crips and/or a few queers and/or a few trans people. Those are also good, important rooms but so different than last Friday. I have nothing profound to write about the experience. I just get so fed by being and working in my home communities. And we had brilliant conversation about being victims vs. being survivors vs. reclaiming our bodies.