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.

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.

That said, I have been so caught by Neil and Petra’s conversation about the word cripple in Cripple Poetics. The book starts with these wonderful lines from Neil:

“How can I speak of cripple and not mention the wind.
How can I speak of crippled and not mention the heart.
Heart, wind, song, flower, space, time, love. To leave
these absent is to leave cripple in stark terms.
As if we were made of medical parts and not flesh and bone.

There is always wind in my cripple….

Cripple is not extraordinary or ordinary.
Cripple is a full plate….”

Cripple is such an an ambivalent word, ugly word, a bully’s word, an insider’s word, a word that’s used as metaphor all the time. (For instance, after 9/11 we heard repeatedly how the attacks were meant to cripple the U.S. The examples of this kind of metaphoric usage abound.) Neil and Petra take all of this up.

The poet who writes, “There is always wind in my cripple,” later says “I don’t use the word crip to describe myself. I don’t wish to take on its painful history.”

Petra’s poem “Crip Language” addresses the stark violence of that word:

“Kruppel Cripple Fickle Tickle
playground ground go round again
last out on the line
Cripple Fucking Kruppel Madchen
tickle fickle root…
Cripple Ripple Cripple Ripple
stick that stick across your feet
fall on down
fall on down
that stick is harder than your bone”

Yet–and because–Petra also says, “In terms of word sound, I personally do not like crip–I like cripple, rippling across my tongue, little explosions, waves in my mouth. Liquid, and reminding me of Kruppel, my German word…. I am not sure the English crip has the same richness, at least not for me: it’s too short, too hip.”

I adore this tangle, dipping down into association, emotion, history, metaphor, not arriving at any one question or answer. At the same time Neil uses an analogy to explain some of what he’s thinking/feeling about cripple that makes me stop and and need to expand a dialogue that’s fairly single issue and narrowly focused. Neil writes, “is our [disability] history similarly known to ourselves or to the public as african americans [history] is known. not yet. then why do we borrow a nigger equivalent–is it?–use of oppressive term for ownership of power.”

Leslie wrote to me in her e-mail: “What that question [about African-American history] assumes: that African Americans’ histories of oppression and resistance are known, acknowledged, and, to some degree, understood. It also implies that crip history is not, in part, African American history; it erases the stories of African Americans with dis/abilities. The inclusion of both of these questions–the broad assumptive question [about history] and the delicate truth-seeking question [about the relationship between cripple and nigger]–could be read as documenting a specific moment in both Neil’s internal dialog and discussions happening across Disability Studies. Or, it could be read as an irresponsible choice to reinforce the perception that intersectionality of race, ethnicity, and dis/ability is merely tangential to dis/ability culture, and to crip-culture building.”

I so want it to be the former–a moment in a bigger dialogue that’s moving toward deep intersectionality. But for it to cleanly and clearly be that moment, I would need the book to be more intentionally multi-issued; for issues of race to be woven into who the “our” of “our [disability] history” is (white disabled people?) and who the “we” of “why do we borrow a nigger equivalent” is (white disabled people?); for acknowledgment of white privilege to be part of the finding of connection between different kinds of ugly words that arise from different histories and systems of oppression. I need Petra and Neil and white disability culture (myself included) to really explore Neil’s two word question: why do we borrow a nigger equivalent–is it?. And analogy and metaphor doesn’t in any way function in this context as deep exploration.

I want to pause here and reflect upon how miserably often white activists make analogy to African-American community, culture, and activist struggle as if the Black Civil Rights movement was entirely successful and is essentially finished and is now simply the measure of other social justice movements. This dynamic serves both deflect attention away from present-day racism and mask the actual role the Black Civil Rights movement had in giving rise to and feeding other liberation movements in the U.S. Of course this reflection isn’t directed specifically at Cripple Poetics, even as it is one of the perspectives through which I’m reading the dialogue about cripple.

I mean these criticisms in the best possible way. As Leslie wrote near the end of her e-mail: “Oh there’s so much to love in this book! Space travel. Disabled food, disabled clothes. ‘Bad crips’ making out under the guise of dance performance…. But isn’t it also a gesture of love for the community and culture that Neil and Petra co-create to keep pushing, asking questions, calling one another on our shit?”

In the end, I can easily say Cripple Poetics provokes me, and that’s a good thing

Early in the book in the form of a personal ad, Neil describes himself as a “handsome romantic 53 yr old spastic revolutionary with vision.” The pairing of the words spastic and revolutionary has made me catch my breath and hold it, letting it out ever so slowly, as I roll those words around. Spastic is one of those one word metaphors: the phrases “spazing out” or “he’s such a spaz”–meaning uncoordinated, incompetent, foolish, to be discounted–have currency because of cultural and institutional assumptions about bodies that are spastic, bodies that move in uncontrolled, jerky ways, muscles tense, constricted, spasming. If those bodies were appreciated as sexy, beautiful, desirable, then “she’s so spastic” would be a compliment rather than a put down.

The words lame, black, crazy, gay, retarded, fag function in the same way. They have become generalized put downs or associations with badness/negativity precisely because the bodies they describe are pitied, marginalized, and/or hated. Of course many of these words are also used as slurs in primary ways: fag used to bully/harass gay and bi men/boys specifically, crazy used specifically to shame people who have psych disabilities.

A slogan like “Lame is sexy” or “Black is beautiful” takes much of its power from not only an affirmation of identity but also from reversing the metaphor. This is the context and function of “handsome spastic revolutionary” and has struck me so because it strikes so close. Even with all my politics about using the ugly words as insider language (LGBT peoples using queer, disabled people using crip, Black people using nigga, however ambivalently with a lot of community disagreement in all these examples), I have always ducked spastic. I’ve tried not to pay attention to it; I’ve not challenged its metaphoric use; I’ve always felt raw in its presence. And so the identity affirmation and the metaphor reversal feel particularly potent to me who lives in a body full of tremors, tics, spasms, tension: spastic revolutionary.

For next time, more about Cripple Poetics and the word cripple itself and what it means for a white person to think about race and ugly language (I certainly paused long and hard before I wrote the n-word).