Sheila BlackELIZA DOOLITLE AND ME: VOICE, TONE AND POWER IN THE POETICS OF DISABILITYAs a disabled poet I think a lot about power. I should probably state that more gracefully, but I feel that my poetics—and I am an uneasy academic, wary of the comfort offered by any overarching theory of the art—has been shaped most forcibly by my disability in that my relationship to language or poetic language is often concerned with questions of silencing and invisibility, erasure and a kind of doubling of consciousness. Recently I had an experience that brought this home to me. My youngest child is named Eliza and wanted to see My Fair Lady. We checked the film out of our local library. What did I expect? Pretty costumes, fabulous floral hats, some singing in Cockney, some kicking up of heels. Some kind of fine romance, but the film itself appalled me, or rather I found myself weeping, which felt a bit shameful like weeping over an old episode of Star Trek or a midnight rerun of Cagney and Lacey. And yet there was something so raw and so heartfelt about the general agreement in the film that Eliza Doolitle, cockney speaker, self-supporting flower girl is "disgusting, depressing…has no right to live," to quote Henry Higgins, and something so insidious about how her re-formation (both literal and spiritual) is intertwined so forcibly with the suggested romance or even love that blooms between Eliza and Henry, a truncated sad sort of love though it may be. Any modern mother, I think, would be unsettled by the virulent (and it would be fair to say cultural) misogyny expressed in the film or perhaps heartened that to my nine-year old none of it made any sense. Indeed, she lost interest fairly rapidly. I was the one who watched to the end. In the 1960s, when I was a child there was no political correctness around disability. Disgust and/or a program of forcible erasure was the norm. My third grade teacher once said to me it was a good thing "I had such pretty eyes because then people might not notice the rest of you." Another teacher—a nun—suggested I might consider joining a convent, because then it would not matter so much if I did not get married because I would be married to God. Another time my father's best friend from high school spent a whole evening tying to convince me to study biology "because if a girl was not so pretty she could still have a pretty terrific career in the sciences." As for the erasure, it was pervasive, it was physical, it was medicalized. From the ages of four to nine, I wore nightly a brace into which I was strapped in every bedtime. The brace—and why do I have such trouble reconstructing it as an actual appliance, why must it assume such fantastic shapes in my imagination?—it had leather pads, it had bits of curved and polished steel, it had bolts, it had screws---was designed for two purposes: To straighten my crooked leg bones and also (a function at which it proved sadly unsuccessful) to stretch or lengthen them so that I would achieve "a reasonable approximation of normal height." (I should mention that XLH—or x-linked hypophosphatemia is usually classed as a form of dwarfism). Hard to picture better training for a poet, since the brace, as it hurt, led to a semi-permanent condition of insomnia. To get back to power and poetics though, what is the function of such an experience, or what can it tell us? As an adult, when I began to write poems, and fairly cautiously, poems about disability, I was often frustrated by my own descriptions of "being" disabled or the paucity of stories or stances which seemed available. Popular culture stories of disability fall generally into two categories—first the triumphant overcoming in which the disabled person though will or targeted intervention overcomes his or affliction. That this story is linked both overtly and covertly to erasure of the disability goes without saying—like Eliza Doolitle who does, after all, in the end become "a lady." The second—and we are surely living though the golden age of the misery memoir—tends to be a bit more honest but trained perhaps too much on the particular anger of the "victim," which covers in the end a plea for sympathy: Look at me and how I have suffered. The problem—and I am putting this crudely—is that both positions that are in some sense powerless or which fail to adequately interrogate the motions of power or the operations of power around and through and within the disabled body (or to put it better: person). Watching My Fair Lady I was a struck by a curious fact. At the end of the film (as at the end of Shaw's Pygmalion) the heroine Eliza is presented as essentially the only adult or fully realized conscious being within the story. To say she has power is perhaps a stretch, but she is the only one we can term complexly cognizant of both herself and her world. Strangely this occurs specifically because she has been forced to erase or remake herself. She is both lady and cockney flower girl, and we are encouraged to understand or empathize with her precisely because she can occupy neither identity reflexively or without some consciousness of conflict and loss. The story is thus both more subversive and more coercive than it first appears. Such erasure is presented as necessary—what must be done if one is to survive— but also personally valuable because to be so divided is the condition of at least modern—consciousness or of the adult mind. At thirteen—the brace having succeeded, but my legs in short order having fallen off the wagon and gone back to their crooked nature—I underwent surgery, a double oesteotomy, in which the leg bones are broken and pinned together again. Afterwards, I was handed a body that could almost but not quite, pass for normal. I mourned persistently and over a considerable period. I had a feeling of being in disguise, in drag even. I also felt I had betrayed my other, truer self, who I often conceived of as almost another person—"that girl, crip girl," as I put it in one poem. Doctors characterized this to my parents as "pathological" but also as "not unusual." I think now often about the terms of such categorization—what does the word "pathology" mean in such a context, why is that pathology more important than "not unusual" It is not unusual for a disabled person to love herself as she is, but it is also pathological for such a love to exist? Perhaps more germane to the topic under discussion, this was the beginning of my sense of myself as doubled—or the first time I truly understood in my bones that there was a sharp contrast between how I viewed myself and my condition and how the world viewed me. I also felt not coincidentally a rising pressure to shape or decide on a story—was I triumphant in having overcome or erased my cooked legs or was that incomplete erasure what counted—the fact that I was a visible sufferer? I now think in terms of power, in terms of disability itself, that the stories I would like to tell, the poems I would like to write, trace another arc altogether. In short, I am interested in such doubling, such divided consciousness as both the signal fact of disability and a source of its power. In his essay "Constructing Normalcy," Lennard J. Davis says that in order to understand disability, we must focus on "the construction of normalcy." He also quotes Adorno, who says: "If such a thing as a psycho-analysis of today's prototypical cultue were possible….such an investigation would needs show the sickness proper to the time to consist precisely in normality." Davis makes the point that many of our ideas of normal, which appear so central to our thought, are in fact fairly recent inventions, products of the Enlightenment. And indeed it is striking in the reading of disability literature from the 18th century on how quickly most texts move from the tracing of a particular disability story to critiques of the very structure of post-Enlightenment thought. I think, for example, of Mary Webb's novel, Precious Bane, which begins as the story of Prudence Sarn's cursed face—she has a hare lip—but rapidly develops into a study of her brother's frantic efforts to strike capitalist gold with the family farm. In the novel, which purports to tell a story of disability, notions of order, reason, progress, improvability are set again a more holistic or experiential view of human life. Prudence Sarn is aware of and able to critique her brother's mad pursuit of money (he attempts, as it were, to turn himself into a machine) because as a disabled woman (deformed woman) she is outside the normal chain of production. When Adorno says that normalcy is the disease of modern times, he is essentially asserting the negative power normal has to reduce everyone to cogs in the machine of normal—such that even those who are "normal" or "more normal" are driven by this ideal to present themselves in ways that are ultimately not about happiness or harmony. Davis, too, takes pains to point out that it is precisely in the notions of evaluation and improvability—reason applied forcibly to real experience—that the modern discourses of disability as we know them emerge. I am interested in this and more particularly in Eliza Doolitle's change of voice, because, simply, I so often feel that when I speak of my own disability I am essentially putting myself in quotations—there is my disabled self—the self as constructed by the regard of others—and somewhere else, behind, within in, and contained by it, there is me, who is also "a disabled person." And how curious that this word to be dis-abled as in dis-mantled or dis-armed has become the PC word of choice. On a list-serv of women in disabilities I belong to, a women recently posted. "You can mandate any form of speech you want. It won't change the fact that if people want to exclude you, they will." And so often they do. In fact, part of what we circle around in disability studies is precisely our relationship to the notion of value—what it is to be beautiful or powerful or an object of desire? Charles Taylor says that most liberation movements consist of an oppressed group confronting self-images harmful to their own identity by "replacing negative historical self-images with positive ones of their own making." What is hard in the case of disability is that the self image in question appears so foundational, arising from the very structure (and/or function) of body and/or mind. Plainly, for the disabled the challenge lies in torquing the habits of thought or construction—even in the most basic ways--of what makes a self, what makes a body. I think again of what the woman on my listserv said, for in the world as it is there are countless examples of the disabled being excluded—not hired, not let in, not seen. I dream of a world in which Vogue Magazine features every month the complete range of human bodies or a world where ways of thought or behavior considered "off" or "not profitable" are looked at intently, directly, so that their quality is seen clear. If I was to write a manifesto—I would say that I dream of a poetics of disability that would force the interrogation of the most basic habits of thought, which have constructed the version of disability I so often speak (and in quotes). And this, which sounds so simple, is in fact a battle which must be fought in the hardest of spaces, the alleyways and byways of thinking, idea, the processes by which we arrive at our definitions of quality and value. I am equal opportunity about the poetic strategies I would engage in such a battle. I think the strategies of language poetry have much to offer —the simple insight that language has a role, a power in creating how we view the world, ourselves. At the same time, I am a poet who likes to write from my own experience, and this leads me to focus perhaps more on quality of voice and tone—and their potential for interrogating or subverting the expected or coercive stance, the stories we tell about the disabled self and who we are. Perhaps this is why I wept when Eliza now a lady says to Henry Higgins "That's done you, 'Enry 'lggins, it 'as," and these words which once she would have spoken without thinking now she can only utter as if in quotations. Stephen Dobyns says "Tone is the speaker's emotional distance from a subject," while Tony Hoagland says "Tone is how we carry what we know." Tony Hoagland also says tone contains within it our attitude about the language we speak. It is this slight angle between word and thing—an angle metaphor also relies on or helps build—that I find the most comfort in speaking about my disability. One thing that often gets overlooked is that because disability is so much a negotiation between self and world, it tends to be a dynamic experience, and out of that dynamism, for me, the real points of tension are revealed and power is built. One problem I have always had with the "victim story" of disability is the pressure it places on one to be exemplary, more noble, more understanding, an idealized or reified object. I remember this from childhood when for a time the popular high school girls wanted to make a pet of me because I was the poor girl with braces. I remember how I hated it. I remember, too, how I loved the Helen Keller in my Scholastic Book Club biography, pre-reformation, Helen who tossed her food across the room, broke plates, bit the hands that tried to feed her. I am not advocating such extremes of resistance, but I do think some of that bad attitude is surely tonic as we begin to develop a poetics that reflects the disability experience. Lennard Davis points out discourses of the disability tend to arise around critiques of the Enlightenment and function as a challenge to an essentially materialistic view of "reality," a concern, which has been for legions of thinkers the dilemma of our time. Do we want a world relies on function and performance or one that is more experiential,, a more spiritualized--call it romantic capital R-- grasp of the matter of living? It seems to me that any poetics of disability must circle such questions of power. In his book Practical Ethics, Australian philosopher Peter Singer writes from a fairly head-on materialist or utilitarian perspective: When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him. (Singer 186) I love and hate this quote. I love it for saying outright what I believe many people think but would never utter. I hate it for—well, what it says. But mostly I find it incredible that Singer should feel qualified to pronounce so authoritatively on what constitutes human happiness. When I began to write this essay, I came down to this simple question--what is the power I feel I have most as a person with a disability? Answer: the odd body, odd mind of "disability" which is precisely what cannot be incorporated into the standard definitions, the naked norms of beauty or function. In short, I, we, the disabled have the powerful effect—often simply by our mere presence—of interrogating those standards. (And it is here that we can begin to see why such pressure is put upon the disabled—why we are seen as so subversive, so needful of silencing). This is our burden and our power. And in my poetics I think it is these questions I continue to circle around. What are the terms of that interrogation and how can that interrogation be used to make the space of the mind of the world larger? |