Good News about Exile and Pride
My first book Exile and Pride is approaching its 10 year anniversary. I still remember the thrill of coming home from work to the box of books in September 1999. I just learned that for the anniversary South End Press is going to release a Classics Edition of Exile to join an esteemed line up in its Classics Series. The book’s been a bit hard to get hold of since the first printing sold out and the second printing has been on a print-on-demand system. I’m excited it’ll be easily available again. SEP and I are working out what new content will be added. It’ll be out in Spring 2009. Exile and Pride a classic: I would have never dreamed.
Metaphor
As a poet, I’m fascinated by metaphor, and as an activist, I’m often puzzled and dismayed by it. The recent Society for Disability Studies conference gave me a lots of grist for my continued musings about metaphor.
In their excellent presentation/paper “How Disability Studies Stays White and What Kind of White It Stays: A Call for Intersectionality within Disability Studies,” Nwadiogo Ejiogu and Syrus Marcus Ware challenge the metaphoric use of the word colonize to describe the ableist marginalization of disabled bodies/minds, which are often presumed both in Disability Studies and the Disability Rights Movement to be white. Ejiogu and Ware write: “While it’s necessary to pay close attention to the many violences done onto particular bodies in order to maintain notions of able-bodiedness, intelligence, sanity, and productivity within a capitalist market, the appropriation of the term colonialism erases violent histories and contemporary realities. As people who carry with us transgenerational injuries as a result of legacies of colonialism and slavery, but who also benefit from ongoing gendered colonial violence enacted onto First Nations peoples in Canada, this (mis)use erases these violences while ignoring the messy ways in which power, privilege, and domination work.” What do white disability activists and academics gain by using the concept/metaphor of colonialism to describe ableism’s impact on disabled people without exploring the specificities, histories, and lived realities of colonialism? Do we (ie white disability activists and academics) think we gain legitimacy? Do we believe colonialism is actually understood in all its horror? Are we trying to disown the ways in which we’re complicit with and privileged by colonialism? What are the ways of talking about the shared forces that insist on owning a multitude of different peoples’ bodies, cultures, and cultures? The answer is certainly not through analogy. As an activist, I am suspicious of metaphor.
The next day at the conference, Riva Lehrer, Sunny Taylor, and Katherine Sherwood spoke at a plenary panel about disability and visual art. In her presentation about her new work, Riva talked about metaphor as a way to communicate bodily experiences, which she framed as ultimately individual experiences of aloneness. She called metaphor a “method of being porous to each other.” I know in my work as much as I rail against disability being transformed into metaphors and signifiers (Peter Pan’s Captain Hook being marked as evil by, among other things, his prosthetic device, to give an easy example), I return repeatedly to metaphor to describe and engage bodily experience. I’m not sure I could abandon metaphor, even if I wanted.
All of which leads me to the complex work of evaluating each metaphor as it appears. Does it appropriate experience? Does it run roughshod over specific histories? Does it ignore, rewrite, or simplify certain kinds of specificity? Does it open a door or close it? Is it a shorthand for analysis or feeling? Does that shorthand hold legitimacy or not and with whom?
I have no conclusions, just a slosh of thoughts.
Celebration
My last day at my day job as the office manager at the University of Vermont’s LGBTQA Services was eight days ago. I am officially freelancing now. In other words the wild experiment begins. So far I’m not really scared but thrilled and am taking time to slow down and collect myself after a hectic nine months leading up to this moment. Soon I’ll start a writing routine but for now weeding the sunflowers, riding my trike, reading stuff that has nothing to do with work, and relishing summer abundance is more than enough.
Website Launch
Whee! My website, although not done, is in one piece. As some folks know already, I’ve decided to quit my day job at the University of Vermont in July and go freelance as a writer, speaker, and teacher. It’s a wild experiment that I hope works in the midst of a recession. Ultimately what I want is more time to write.
The website is both a kind of extended business card and advertisement for what I do and hopefully a bit of a resource for issues around queerness and disability/Deafness. To that end, I’m developing a Queer and Trans Disability/Deafness Resources Page. I want to make it as comprehensive as possible. It’s being interesting to figure out what the boundaries of this webpage are:
*what about AIDS writing and cancer writing that don’t name disability or Deafness but are intensely about bodily difference
*what about queer folks whose impairments influence their work but who rarely or never reflect upon disability or Deafness directly
*what about communities and cultures that frame disability in ways very different from the mostly white, mostly physical disability perspective of the disability rights movement
*what about issues of outness both around queerness and disability and Deafness
*how to include Deaf resources without conflating Deafness and disability.
I have few answers but am enjoying working through the layers.
The page is far from comprehensive yet. If you have resources you’d like to add, please drop me a comment or e-mail
Marrow’s Telling is a Lammie finalist
The Marrow’s Telling is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in the transgender category. Embarrassingly, that’s been a goal of mine, to be a Lammie finalist. My sweetie took me out for the best celebratory dinner last night.
On a side note about the odd quirks of how self esteem works: The book was also nominated in the LGBT poetry category but didn’t make the finalists there. It was a much bigger, more competitive field, and my I-can’t-just-be-happy-and-assured brain wants to say, “But if the book was really good, it would have been a poetry finalist.” And I want to say to that brain, “Shut up!”
And finally, which books become Lammie finalists and which don’t has always puzzled me. This year in the trans category, neither Julia Serano’s book nor Helen Boyd’s made the cut. Both omissions make no sense.
Recent Media Attention
File this under I-can’t-win-for-losing or something like that:
Recently The Ann Arbor News, in an announcement of a book reading I did at the Common Language Bookstore, described me as follows: “Self-identified as a gay, transsexual man with cerebral palsy, Clare has long been a poet and activist both under that name as well as his birth name of Elizabeth Clare. His 1999 book Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation has been heralded as a landmark text in queer/disability studies.” None of these supposed self-identifiers (they never asked me) are quite accurate–not gay nor transsexual nor man. Rather if the blurb had been interested in self-identity, particularly as it plays out in the book, rather than sensationalism, it would have used the words queer, transgender, and genderqueer. And yes, I have cerebral palsy–that’s no secret in my work–but I never lead who I am with a medical diagnosis. And then to use my given name–again no secret, it’s on the back cover of Exile and Pride and easily found on the Web–is to establish so clearly which kind of freak I am.
Of course you could reasonably ask why I am spreading this mainstream media drivel by quoting it in my blog. And the answer is because this drivel has followed me and my work around in one way or another for a long time, and the way for me to deal isn’t to try to hide it away. And it’s not only mainstream media.
Burlington’s alternative weekly Seven Days recently wrote, “…the book [The Marrow's Telling] tells a harrowing life story, taking the poet in stutter-steps from childhood abuse to adult activism. Clare’s language grounds itself in vibrant evocations of the natural landscape. In a prose piece called ‘Gaping, Gawking, Staring,’ he demonstrates what he’s learned about people’s reactions to ‘difference’ and disability from a lifetime with cerebral palsy. But he offers advice to those who’ve suffered for such differences: ‘Resist the urge to ignore your body.’” I know this blurb is overall complimentary, but let me point out the spelling out of cerebral palsy and the predictable use of the words suffering and harrowing.
I don’t object to being a queer poet, trans poet, disabled poet. That is, after all, who I am. I just hate the sensationalizing. It makes me appreciate even more the folks who read and respond to my poems as poems.
Battle Rock
I.
“We were landed at Port Orford on the morning of the 9th of June 1851.”–Capt. J.M. Kirkpatrick
Driftwood lines the cliffs,
bone white and rough,
a jungle gym of logs.
remember when
surf at low tide
could knock you over
June 1851: nine white men
drew the port on their maps,
summer wind bellowing,
“We found the Indians, who made their appearance when we
first landed, to be somewhat friendly, manifesting a disposition
to trade with us.”
and still Main Street whistles,
creaks, fishermen tie
their boats tight.
from “Battle Rock” in The Marrow’s Telling
