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 points Petra makes, and rightly so, is that I misquote the passage that I’m analyzing. I want to correct that. So here’s the whole passage from Neil (pulled from a longer prose poem called “The Question of Cripple”):

“Neil writes:

when you call us crips
I can’t see or feel your ‘wink’
when you refer to me as a vegetable

or im vegetative
i feel more at ease

is there any humor in crip

maybe wry crips

is our history similarly known to ourselves or the public
as african americans is known

not yet

then why do we borrow a nigger equivalent–is it?–use
of oppressive term for ownership of power

this is my poorly developed opening discussion
even tho im nitwit –not without wit–”

So that’s the whole quote with line breaks. And now I want to go for the nuanced reading. (For a poet, I’m quite a literalist; I miss metaphors and puns and layered nuance all the time. It’s one of my weaknesses as a reader.) I’m struck this time by:

Neil’s playfulness in “wry crips,” which was also the name of a disabled women’s (I think?) theater/storytelling group in the 1980s in the Bay Area, and “nitwit.” This wide ranging exploration of cripple includes this playing with language.

“Our” and “ourselves” can be tricky, elusive words. Who is referred to in the line, “is our history similarly known to ourselves or the public”? I know why I assumed that “our history” means disability history and that disability history is being conceived of as white. My assumptions came partly from the juxtaposition of the very next line, “as afrrican americans is known,” making a simile between “our” history and African-American history. And my assumptions came partly from observing myself and other white activists/cultural workers all too often use “our” to mean white and to make similes with the experiences/histories of people of color. But still in Neil’s line, which singular history is “our history”?

The line “not yet” sits all by itself. Is it meaning to say that “our history” isn’t yet known in the ways African- American history is already known? Clearly that was my earlier reading, and part of my contention was that I don’t believe African-American history is known in such a definitive way. But could “not yet” also be questioning how well both histories are known and undercutting the simile that precedes it? Possibly.

Could I read “not yet” forward, and have it mean that we (who is this we?) haven’t yet borrowed cripple as “a nigger equivalent”? Possibly.

And finally the question, “is it?,” is the most ambiguous two words in a passage characterized by Neil’s spare and dense use of words. I want to explore that question, want to know how different kinds of hate language are connected or not or both. I need the word equivalent to be interrogated. Right here, right now, as a reader, I want/need more from Neil and Petra to entirely trust those two ambiguous words, “is it.” Neil writes in his response to my earlier post, “In the real world sense, would it be too much to suggest that the word “crip” comes from “nigger” a kind of ‘shorthand’ a reference no matter how thoughtless used commonly. Is it thoughtless? or is it a powerful statement? This is what im asking.” If crip does come from nigger, how do I read the word equivalent? How do I tie the very different histories of the two words together? And in this formulation, what happens to people who have been bruised by both words? Inside the book/poem, I have to strain to read/hear all this nuance.

In the end, I am a greedy, literal reader: I know that about myself. I can also be a grateful reader. And I hope my gratitude for Cripple Poetics and for Neil and Petra’s work is also clear and present.

–Crip Chick is so right on about intersectionality, there’s nothing left for me to say.

–What I think about the construction of the phrase “R-word” is completely influenced by Emily Bernard’s incredible essay, “Teaching the N-Word.” I’m wildly ambivalent about the turning of hate language into euphemisms–n-word, b-word, f-word, and now r-word–that somehow are to protect marginalized communities from the pain of hearing those words yet again and privileged peoples from having to repeat the violence. There are two pieces to my ambivalence.

1) The violence has already been done. The damage won’t be rectified by a refusal to say the words. In our activism and analysis around hate language, we need to be vigilant and conscious about triggers and re-creating the power dynamics put in motion by hate language, but I’m not sure that euphemistic substitutions for hate language is a good stand-in for vigilance and consciousness. At the bottom of this part of my ambivalence is a sense that the “r-word” construction is designed largely to protect those of of us who have been battered by the word retard and by the institutional, material, and attitudinal realities that come with it. As one of those people bruised by the dismissiveness, hatred, and physical violence of retard, I don’t need protection; rather I need compassion, rage, allies, and an end to ableism.

2) The “r-word” construction mirrors the “n-word” construction, which precedes it. I don’t know from where the “n-word” construction originates nor what mix of opinions/feelings/thoughts Black people have about it. But whatever the origins, the mirroring of the two constructions communicates that retard and nigger function in the same ways as hate language and carry the same violence and that all the repulsion and outrage white people supposedly feel upon hearing the word nigger should also be felt in the same measure by non-disabled people upon hearing retard. Here again is analogy failing to do the deeper work of intersectionality. Certainly racist hate language and ableist hate language share much in common. (The ways the word monkey has been used against disabled people (both poc and white) and people of color (both disabled and non-disabled) highlight these commonalities.) But there is so much historical and present-day difference between the usage of retard and the usage of nigger and such a lack of real anti-racist work among white disability activists that the analogy reads to me like white people appropriating the political work of Black activists yet again. The analogy sidelines Black disabled people’s experience, and assumes that disabled people are white and Black people are non-disabled. And the question isn’t asked: how does the snarl of hate sound in the lives of disabled people of color?

–Call me a crank but the Special Olympics “Stop the R- Word Campaign” makes me pause. Don’t get me wrong, organizing around retard as hate speech and even protesting Tropic Thunder as a specific cultural example of the use of ableist, as well as racist, hate speech is important work. But since when is the Special Olympics about justice for cognitively disabled people? For many years that organization has been one of the biggest creators of super crip images–that is “heroic” disabled people “inspiring” audiences with their “bravery”–and and have often fanned the flames of pity with its charity-model fundraising. Even the name Special Olympics sets up a charity-model context, rather than a social-justice-model context. I believe that an organization that frames disabled people as inspirational and/or objects of pity is also setting the stage for the unquestioned use of retard. If the Special Olympics is serious about its r-word campaign, it has a lot of internal work to do.

–The image below coupled with text from the Special Olympics website that says, “Historically, we have seen the elimination of other negative stigmatizing words through awareness and education campaigns and societal pressure. We no longer tolerate calling blacks, Jews, Chinese, physically handicapped, homosexuals, or Hispanics by the words nigger, kike, chink, crip, faggot, and spic, respectively,” frankly pisses me off. I want to say, “Oh, really.” What presumption to try to persuade people to take action regarding ableist hate speech by claiming that the the struggle against other kinds of hate speech has already been won. Presumptuous, naive, and privileged, I say. And to suggest that the Black, presumably disabled women in this image don’t hear the word nigger, at least occasionally, while using their images in the struggle against retard is so suspect on so many levels.

Two dark skinned young women stand next to each other dressed in shorts and tank tops with medals hanging around their necks and smiles on their faces. The headline next to them reads, 'R-word is hate speech.' Protest poster found at http://www.selfadvocacy.org/pdf/SpecialOlympics_ProtestSigns2.pdf

At the same time I kept expecting some queerness to appear in the art, the circus, the politics. I mean, it was all so resistant of capitalism, war, consumerism, greed with such an ethic of outlandish/outrageous creativity, all so bent, so queer in the general sense of the word, that I kept being surprised by the lack of specific queerness. I know white Vermont hippie culture, out of which B&P grows, is quite heterosexual; but probably because of my time with the radical faeries, where queerness, drag, outdoor community, and theater merge in a myriad of ways; I really did expect some flavor of queerness to rise to the surface. It didn’t.

On the other hand, I’ve come to practically expect racism and ableism at these kinds of events, and unfortunately my expectations were met in this regard. One of the performers in the circus yesterday was a woman of color and manual wheelchair user. Her roles–passive, limited, using her so clearly as a token woc–had me just shaking my head in disgust. For one, there were no attempts at creating any access in the performing space–a bumpy, slightly soggy pasture–leaving her to wheel over the lumps and softness and perform all at the same time. For two, she was totally not present in the big group song and dance numbers. (Has no one from B&P heard of or seen integrated dance?) For three, in one number she rolled out, followed by a white guy who held a sign saying “Ethiopia” over her head, while other white people in masks performed a dance about how the U.S. gives much more military aid than food aid to Ethiopia, and then at the end when she spoke about this disproportionate aid, the sign holder repeated her, as if the audience might not have understood or heard her. Arg! It was simply a big tangled wad of ableism and racism. And I was dismayed but not surprised.

I’m struck by the contrast between the ways I was surprised by the lack of queerness and the ways I was not surprised by the racism and ableism.

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

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.