Reviewed by Kate Champlin
The Department of Work and Pensions Assesses a Jade Fish is a meditation on several subjects including embodied identity, motherhood, and discrimination. Some poems are heartfelt. Others are remarkably playful even as they describe exasperating or dehumanizing situations.
“Disabled Person’s Travel Card” describes the almost endless process of reapplying for an accommodation; in this case, it’s a card that allows free or discounted travel on buses. The poem begins with short lines, an appeal, and a pattern of repetition that combine to nearly mimic a nursery rhyme:
Council, council, let me on the bus
That you let me on last week (16)
Each short stanza begins with this petition, chronicles the obtaining of some new piece of information, and ends with the hopeless refrain, “But the council tore it up” (16). The demands for information become increasingly extravagant until the council announces that they “require a note from God” to restore benefits (17). The poem ends when the narrator meets this impossible demand, is rejected anyway, and officially abandons her petition. The council’s reply to her distress is a cynical:
Oh good. Your application went
Exactly as we planned. (17)
Anyone who has to reapply for benefits despite an unchanged situation will relate to this poem. Many may laugh in recognition of the tedious and frustrating process that the poem depicts. Readers will relate equally to the cynicism displayed unapologetically by the poem. The suspicion that benefits applications are made needlessly difficult to reduce the number of people who receive benefits is a common one. In this sense, the poem both reminds readers that this frustrating experience is a shared one and takes the bite out of a common humiliation by allowing readers to laugh. Moreover, the poem draws attention to a pervasive problem which is often overlooked by the general population. This amusing poem is also one that will spread awareness.
Watt shows a similar blend of cynicism and humor in “A Prayer to be Released from Prayers.” Like the earlier “Evangelist,” this poem discusses a woman who encounters the narrator several times a week and asks to pray for her feet each time. The narrator always allows this—because acceptance prompts the evangelist to leave her alone—but inwardly seethes. As the narrator tells us, she is fine; she is actually on her way to see a friend. However, her would-be savior cannot imagine a full, rich life lived with disabilities. The evangelist frames the narrator as a figure of lack and forces her to briefly see herself through the same distorted perspective. Fortunately, Watts turns the situation around in her poetry. Her poem offers a perspective which puts the distorting stigma squarely on the other woman:
I ask to be healed
of these moments
that cripple the morning. (59)
In the narrator’s view, the evangelist’s relentless questions are the pain that requires healing, and the morning becomes the thing that is crippled (or rendered unusable) through pain or lack. Those who have experienced stigma will certainly agree that such moments are painful enough to ruin entire days. The devastating lack, in turn, becomes the evangelist’s failure of imagination. As long as this evangelist cannot see a disabled neighbor as a whole person, she remains the crisis that devastates the body politic. Those who have had similar encounters will appreciate the reversal, both because it places the stigma outside the disabled body (for once) and because it acknowledges the pain that those who attempt to save disabled people often end up causing. Once again, Watt’s poetry uses humor to turn a common humiliation on its head. The poems draw attention to pervasive problems—ones to which readers may personally avoid contributing.
Watt tackles the disability movement and popular identity labels like the reclaimed “crip” with similar irreverence. As the poem’s first line points out, crip is “…just one vowel away from crap” (48).
In Watt’s narrator’s opinion, “cripple” is not a term worth reclaiming, both because of its history and its connotations of uselessness. She points out that any word chosen for the disabled community—even disabled—is bound to offend someone in that community. Even her own word, “squint,” is a self-label that she could not impose on other people. There is no label that both encompasses all possible embodied experiences and will not seem offensive or unfair to someone.
Another poem “the disabled,” puts the same sentiment in more succinct terms:
as if we could
all occupy
one phrase (47)
This three-line poem makes its point with startling clarity, and the point is impossible to argue against. Those with disabilities and their allies represent every possible form of embodied experience. We often have little in common except for discrimination based on our perceived differences from the norm.
Nuala Watt’s The Department of Work and Pensions Assesses a Jade Fish tackles stigma, official discrimination, and disability politics and does all three with humor and insight. The work also provides readers with a profound meditation on several other subjects including motherhood, the social challenges faced by disabled parents, found objects, and bonds with family members and friends. This masterful work will provide interest and insight to audiences for decades to come.
Title: The Department of Work and Pensions Assesses a Jade Fish
Author: Nuala Watt
Publisher: Blue Diode Press
Date: 2024
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About the Reviewer
Kate Champlin (she/her) is a late-deafened adult and a graduate of Ball State University (Indiana). She currently works as a writing tutor and as a contract worker for BK International Education Consultancy, a company whose aim is to normalize the success of underserved students.