Book Review: Able-Bodied (Leslie Swartz)

Reviewed by Michael Northen

In Europe and North America, where, despite continuing difficulties, many of the wars about services have been won, it is easy to reject service provision as an old 'medical model' way of confusing disability rights with a kind of patronising welfarism, in which disabled people are seen to be vulnerable and in need of care from Able-Bodied professionals. There's much to recommend this view, a view which has gained credibility in part because of the successes of generations of struggle by disabled people. But in Africa, things are different.
          Leslie Swartz, Able-Bodied

In this statement, Leslie Swartz, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Stellenbosch University, not only crystallizes the underlying thesis of Able-Bodied: scenes from a curious life (Zebra Press, 2010) but provides the most compelling reason for reading it. Cast as a family biography and personal history, Swartz's book reminds American and British scholars that even in the realm of disability studies what is good for the United States or the UK is not necessarily good for the rest of the world.

Swartz rightly calls the structure of his book "scenes." Less a weaving than a pastiche, Swartz draws from his father's life with a disability, his childhood upbringing, and his professional life as a psychologist involved in the emerging South African disability rights movement. If the overall thrust of the book is begrudgingly linear, the compilation of individual scenes that make it up is not. This works in the books favor. What might have come off as a psychologist's attempt to overanalyze his life is infused instead with the edge of a favorite uncle who is just reminded of another thing that happened to him his childhood.

As the title of the book indicates, Swartz himself is able-bodied, but he was introduced to disability early in life in the person of his father, a father "with whom I had such a difficult and in many ways distant relationship." Swartz's father had a Hemingway-like attitude towards his physical difficulties that amounted to the philosophy that although he had an impairment, he did not have a disability. As a result, he had no tolerance for people who complained of pain or relied upon medications and distanced himself from behavior that he considered burdensome to other people.

Despite his father's attitude, Swartz did eventually get involved with disability activism – albeit almost happenstance – by way of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in 2002. At that time the HSRC was trying to revamp their image because it had originally been an organization that used pseudo-scientific studies to bolster Apartheid in South Africa – a fact that added to Swartz's growing wariness of politically motivated research. As of 2002, little formal research had been done in South Africa on disability. The Department of Social Development gave HSRC a grant to do a study and they wanted Swartz to head it up. He turned it down partly because the contract proposed that they would work within the social model of disability.

Swartz's explanation of why he made this decision sets the reader up for the most important bifurcation in the book – that between the researcher who holds fast to canonic principles of the scientific method such as quantitatively measurable goals, verifiability and repetition, and the social activist who considers the elimination of inequality the higher value. It is a dual path that Swartz tries to toggle between for the length of the book. Swartz reports that he had come into the study of psychology at the time when clinical science was on the outs, neurological causes were dismissed and everything was attributed to the environment. Anything connected with medicine or a white coat was considered the enemy. The upshot was that he received little actual training in brain dysfunction. When he later became interested in the organic causes of psychiatric disorders, Swartz writes, he was told by colleagues that his was an unacceptable viewpoint. Thus, what Swartz brought to the table at the 2002 HSRC proposal was both a desire to do something that would make a difference in the lives of people with disabilities and an inherent belief in the medical (aka scientific) model. Whether or not one agrees with Swartz's analysis, there is no denying that Able-Bodied presents a number of interesting scenarios culled from his own experiences to make it clear that – at least in South Africa – there are no ideologically correct quick fixes.

Interestingly, one of these experiences has to do with evolution. To a greater extent than even the United States, disability research in the South Africa tends to be a largely white, middle class enclave. To these characteristics are added the fact that theories of evolution were used in the recent past to support racist policies and that many disabilities activists are black Africans. The result is that people with disabilities are frequently anti-evolution, accepting instead tribal and religious views about the causes of disability. While it is fairly easy in the U. S. to be dismissive of "intelligent design," Swartz found himself at a conference facing a black disabilities activist in a chair saying, "I don't like this evolution stuff. It says I come from monkeys and baboons. I am not a baboon!" Although on a far subtler level, some U.sS observors will see here concerns echoed in the work of American disablity scholars like Rosemarie Garland Thompson, who argue that modern trends in genetic research are essentially leading to a new eugenics movement.

In another scenario involving conflicting opinions, Swartz recalls how able-bodied South African disability workers were pitted against Tomas, a European disability activist. Tomas' view is that his having a disability not only gives him insight into what a lived life with disability but also makes him an authority on disability issues around the world. Swartz points out that if Tomas were able-bodied, no one would take seriously his view that he knew what was best for Africans, yet having a disability, Tomas feels a comparable authority is automatically conferred upon him. The lesson Swartz drew from this experience reaffirmed what he learned from life with his own father, "Having an impairment confers no necessary nobility or understanding of the oppression of others." He concludes:

As more and more disabled researchers enter the field, the issue of able-bodied researchers having to be brought in will probably dissipate to some degree; but in the parts of the world where I work, able-bodied researchers are still very much needed.

Throughout Able-Bodied, Swartz recounts many similar situations he has been involved in that probably would not present themselves in non-African countries. While, as a clinical psychologist, Swartz would be the first to agree that one man's experiences cannot be generalized to characterize a whole nation, using Popper's principle of falsifiability he could argue that some theories regarding disability that apply elsewhere, may not apply in South Africa.

As the subtitle of the book "scenes from a curious life" imply, Swartz means his book to be as much a personal history as an essay on the progress of disability studies in South Africa. Like most people, the author has relatives that he would rather not claim, and in describing the antics of "me and the vaudeville that is my family," Swartz's own writing style sometimes becomes as contorted as the thinking processes of the people he is trying to describe. One paragraph on page 5 and another on page 8 each contain five parenthetical expressions that veer the reader from the main thread of thought. At times it takes on a Groucho Marx quality, especially in the section describing an aunt dubbed the "Buchenwald Chicken." Beneath this, however, is the very real social situation that is family faced. Jewish immigrants in Johannesburg were about as popular as they were in Mississippi in the pre-Civil rights U.S. era. Moreover, the marriage of an able-bodied woman to a disabled man was looked at not only a mixed marriage but one in which the woman was sure to be left a widow. These were the conditions that Swartz parents faced and formed the cauldron of the author's upbringing.

In the final chapter of the book, "Home," Swartz describes an ad hoc detour that he took on a trip with his two daughters to show him them a house he had lived in during his childhood. It's the kind of side trip that many parents would like to be able to take with their children and it includes some of the books most effortless writing:

We found Hennenman without difficulty, and it was much more prosperous than I had anticipated – in this Free State dorp there was even a Pick n Pay mini market. The one women's clothing store – Die Mode – was gone, but I was able to point out to the girls the location of the two men's clothing stores which were a block apart and had both been owned by the Isaacson family. One shop had been for whites and the other, a shabbier and dingier shop, had been for blacks. I was sad but not surprised to see that the Dukas Café was no longer in business, though its curving glass shop front was still there. Before the days of Pick n Pay and the Spar, when we lived in White's we would go for supplies to the Dukas Café. During the long holidays when I was home from boarding school, my mother would buy me ice lollies while she chatted with Mrs Dukas and bought what she needed. Mrs Dukas was always pleasant, and habitually punctuated her conversations with customers with the question 'And what else?' as she bustled backwards and forwards behind the counter, assembling what people needed and chatting all the while.

It's writing that makes it difficult for anyone who is over forty not to mentally break off into their own idylls of childhood.

Over the past few years, disability memoir has really come into its own. Works like Stephen Kuusisto's Planet of the Blind, Simi Linton's My Body Politic, Anne Finger's Elegy for a Disease and Harilyn Roussou's Don't Call Me Inspirational all attest to the health of the genre. Despite its emphasis on the development of disability politics, Able-Bodied, like the works above, is still autobiographical at heart. In this context, Swartz's words on his approach to writing memoir are worth noting. While not quite conceding the post-modernist notion that all autobiography is fiction, Swartz says, "It is my memory I'll be relying on, a memory as unreliable as anyone else's. I will choose what to leave in and what to leave out of my story…I will choose where to massage facts deliberately, change names and places, tell lies." There are times when readers and even authors of life writing themselves are naively tempted to take autobiographical writing as truth. Swartz's words reminds us what Kuusisto, Linton, Finger and Rousso all know well, that what they are writing are creative works that take ethical and political stances. Able-Bodied can be purchased by contacting the author at Lswartz@sun.ac.za.