John Lee Clark

THE CASE FOR WRITING ABOUT DISABILITY*

I love disability literature. But I can't stand most disabled writers. The reason is simple: Most disabled writers don't write disability literature.

Instead of following that old but vital advice, "Write what you know," most disabled writers seem to think their best chance at success is to write "mainstream" material. This is a sadly misguided notion, one that pours talent down the drain, the very talent that could otherwise have quenched the thirst of not only disabled readers but also the rest of the reading public.

The first thing to understand is that trying to write mainstream fodder is a joke. There is no such thing as the mainstream. Yes, groups have been and continue to be oppressed by other groups with more wealth and power. But no matter how excluded they are from the privileges and rights of the elite, every and each minority is part of society. We disabled people have always shaped the world around us, and our fingerprints on every aspect of life cannot be removed. To remove our presence and influence on American culture is to remove American culture. It would be a totally different world without us, as it would be without any other minority community.

So the "mainstream" is a myth. However, it serves the interests of our oppressors to promote this myth, to make it clear to us that we don't belong and that we are not supposed to try and find a place in the imaginary landscape called the mainstream. Thanks to the continual brushstrokes of doctors, teachers, and parents, this canvas teeming with "normal" people and expectations for "normalcy" can seem so real. But it's a lie.

When disabled writers try to produce mainstream literature, then, it is doubly false, shallow, and implausible. In a word: crap. To make matters worse, such material then goes out there to compete against hundreds of thousands of pieces of crap produced by very bad writers who, too, have failed to heed the advice, "Write what you know." The pieces of crap are shockingly alike, one clone after another—the same garish flatness of characters, the same stilted non-voice, the same lack of any connection to reality.

I should know. I was for seven years the publisher of The Tactile Mind Press, which focused on the literature of the signing community. Almost invariably, Deaf content was better than "mainstream" content, even from the same writers. Let me tell you about one story I got from a talented Deaf writer. It was set onboard the Titanic. It was well-researched, which imbued the story with arresting historical detail. Better yet, the writing was smooth and luminous. The story of the couple who had to be separated at the end was touching.

I rejected the story. The problem was that the Titanic, especially with a pair of tragic lovers, has been done to death. Only two things could possibly redeem such a worn-down subject—if a genius injected it with life by the sheer force of literary brilliance, or if there was a twist in the classic storyline.

What if the Deaf woman had written what she knew? What if the couple were Deaf? They are jolted awake when the ship hits the iceberg. They peek out of the door and see people running around in a panic. They scribble questions and try to have someone explain to them what's going on, but nobody stops to write to them. The truth gradually dawns on them through what they see. A sailor tries to separate them, pulling the Deaf woman toward a lifeboat. They understand what this is, and the Deaf man encourages her to go, but she resists—the Deaf world is a small one, and going out there into the hearing world in a new land may be worse than death without the man who is not only the love of her life but also her guide to the Deaf world, because the man comes from a large Deaf family and is proud to be Deaf, but the woman is from a hearing family and never had the chance to go to a Deaf school . . . Will she insist on staying onboard to die hand in hand with him, or will she swallow hard and venture into the unknown?

Now that's far more interesting, and the writer would not have to be such a good writer to make it work. It's something new, and sheds fresh light on both the Titanic and the Deaf experience. This is why even the most successful non-disabled writers continue to forage for material from our own, poorly protected, territory. They may write crap, but it'[s useful, interesting crap and it sells. We hold a great treasury of possibilities in our own life experiences, more than any of them can muster. So it baffles me and disappoints me whenever a disabled writer neglects an opportunity to stand out and instead just writes another "mainstream" piece.

Any disabled writer who writes what she knows, carving out visceral parts of her life, her very being, and sews them together with her imagination is, right there, ahead of a lot of other writers. This is a mathematical fact because most writers are bad writers and most writing is crap. There are only a few writers who can write anything and it'd be important enough to be read for decade or maybe centuries. John Milton. Jonathan Swift. They were disabled and did not write disability literature, but that's because they are Milton and Swift. Writing what one knows remains the best hope for the rest of us. Take the supremely gifted African-American writer Richard Wright for a example: The only book of his that is not read is the one about white people, his attempt at writing a "mainstream" novel. Everything else he wrote is still in print and widely read. As wonderful a writer he was, his writing alone was not enough for posterity—it had to be his writing combined with what he knew.

That's why I always let my life as a deaf-blind man flow naturally into my poems. Sometimes it is direct and explicitly political. Sometimes it is oblique. But it's always there. That's my saving grace as a writer. I hope that more and more disabled writers will do the same, because the collective narrative on the human condition desperately needs our voices—real, bursting and soaring.

Let us write disability literature and in so doing write literature, period.

*Previously published in She Asks for Slippers While Pointing at the Salt.

John Lee Clark is a second-generation deaf-blind writer from St. Paul, Minnesota. His writings have appeared in many publications, among them The Chronicle of Higher Education, McSweeney's,and Poetry. His chapbook of poems is Suddenly Slow (Handtype Press, 2008) and he edited the definitive anthology Deaf American Poetry (Gallaudet University Press, 2009).