Blindness at the Donmar Warehouse

Image description: a photo of my standing to the right of a poster for the Donmar Warehouse's production of BLINDNESS. I am smiling broadly. Dark glasses cover my eyes and the top of my white cane stands next to me. On the poster, the cast and creatives are listed. My name appears in the list alongside the description 'Production Consultant'.

When I heard from my friends at VocalEyes that the Donmar Warehouse was planning a production of Saramago's problematic novel Blindness my heart sank. The all-too-familiar alarm bells started ringing in my mind. 'Will this be yet another sighted peoples' depiction of 'blindness as tragedy'? I wondered. 'How dare sighted people tell us what our blindness feels like!' I fumed. I worried about whether this supposedly 'non-visual' installation would turn into a wrong-headed simulation of blindness which might have the dangerous effect of further stigmatizing blind and partially blind people.

Luckily, the Donmar team were very receptive to my concerns. After a Zoom meeting with them, I was appointed 'Production Consultant' for the installation. My job? To help them understand why many blind and partially blind people find Saramago's portrayal of blindness so offensive, and to work with them to find ways of using the production to think about blindness in different - perhaps more positive - ways.

Saramago's novel depicts a world where sudden, contagious blindness leads to the disintegration of society. As people go blind, they lose their dignity: they become violent, sexually aggressive and ruthless and the world descends into chaos. Eventually, one group of blind people are saved by the only sighted person left. She finds them food, gives them shelter and makes them clean again. At first I wasn't sure there was anything the Donmar would be able to do to redeem this unremittingly tragic depiction of blindness. The production is an adaptation of the novel, so it needs to use the novel's words and actions. But then I realized that that potential of the piece lies not in its content, but in the ways this content is presented.

Lockdown has made traditional theatre impossible because live actor performances are not allowed. So the Donmar created a socially-distanced sound installation with binaural audio recorded in advance. Aside from some powerful lighting effects (which are audio-described at every performance), the production is entirely reliant on our sense of hearing. As such, it is compelling evidence that we do not need our sense of sight to enjoy the theatre. By asking non-blind people to temporarily relinquish their reliance on visual sources of information and focus instead on their often-neglected listening skills, the production performs a re-calibration of the 'hierarchy of the senses' where vision is dislodged from its traditional place at the top. The most powerful moment in the show is when the audience is plunged into absolute darkness. In this instant we become completely reliant on the beguiling voice of Juliet Stevenson's narrator, and we strain our ears to capture every sound of her presence. We are suddenly alone, with the intimate whispers of the character as our only guide. I did not find this plunge into the dark frightening, although I suspect some non-blind people did. I found it liberating. Finally I could devote my whole being to listening without worrying that I was missing some of the visual information which is so highly prized by my non-blind peers. I could have sat in the dark all day listening to the mesmerizing drama unfolding around me.

But light did return, and the audience gradually became visible once more. I expect most people were relieved at this return of daylight. I felt oddly disappointed as I was forced back into the sighted world I have such a problematic relationship with.

It would be easy - but perhaps a little lazy - to criticize this production for reiterating Saramago's negative depictions of blindness. But this would be to miss the point of the Donmar's use of immersive binaural technology. This adaptation is the perfect place to challenge misconceptions of blindness because it gives us a powerful aesthetic experience without any need of sight. Unlike the negative depictions of blindness in Saramago’s novel, this installation delivers important messages about the value of the non-visual senses, the creative and aesthetic benefits of blindness and the ways that the concept of ‘blindness gain’ might encourage non-blind people to reconsider their own misconceptions of blindness.

For more on the depiction of blindness in the installation, as well as my thoughts on blindness gain, reading blind and trying to 'pass' as sighted, listen to the podcast recorded by me and writer Simon Stephens to accompany the production.

Sustaining Disability: Lessons from French History

This week I am honoured to be speaking at the Society for Disability Studies annual conference in Minneapolis. Below is a transcription of my paper along with some useful links and the French originals of the English passages I'll be quoting. (All translations are my own).

Sustaining Blindness in Literature: 

A Lesson From French History

The ideal of sustaining - indeed celebrating - disability for its own sake tends to be thought of as a post-modern notion which is still being explored and argued for by Disability Studies scholars and activists. But nineteenth-century French blind activist and teacher Maurice de la Sizeranne developed a project in Paris – the creation of a book collection devoted to representations of blindness and to books by blind or partially blind authors - which can be seen as a forerunner of twenty-first century attempts to positively sustain disability.

This collection, which is now housed, in far from ideal conditions, in a meeting room in the Association Valentin Hauy, 5, rue Duroc in Paris, France, is an invaluable source of information not only about how the sighted saw blindness and blind people, but also about how blind writers saw, and continue to see, themselves. In its scope and ambition it is comparable to the Jacobus tenBroek Library at the National Federation of the Blind, the Hayes library at the Perkins School for the Blind and the Migel Library which was once at the American Foundation for the Blind and is now at the American Printing House of the Blind. But unlike these American collections, the Valentin Hauy library is the only one of its kind to deal with works in French. Unfortunately, the present directors of the Association Valentin Hauy do not fully appreciate the importance of sustaining historical archives. Not only are the books not being carefully preserved, the library catalogue only exists in print and can therefore only be consulted in person in Paris by people who can access small typefaces or who can take a reader with them. One of my aims in my current research project is to create a digitised version of the catalogue and of the most significant books it contains.

Inspired by the work of Cathy Kudlick and Zina Weygand, whose reclaiming of nineteenth-century French blind writer Thérèse-Adèle Husson has drawn attention to the existence of Sizeranne’s Valentin Hauy collection, my work seeks both to exploit and to sustain Sizeranne’s collection for current and future generations of Disability Studies scholars and students. In my paper today I would like to provide an insight into the collection by discussing how two texts which I found thanks to the Hauy archive encourage us to rethink received notions of value, normality and tragedy, notions, in fact, whose problematic sustainability poses ethical and representational challenges to Disability Studies.

In their work on Husson, Kudlick and Weygand focused almost exclusively on her autobiographical writings. But Husson also wrote sentimental novels primarily intended for the moral instruction of young ladies. In contrast to the modern and something surprisingly enlightened way that Husson talks about blindness in her autobiography (which you can read in both English and French online - her novels often reinforce traditional nineteenth-century myths or stereotypes of blindness (some of which, as David Bolt’s 2014 work The Metanarrative of Blindness shows, still persist to this day) whereby blindness is a tragedy, even a fate worse than death, and the category problematically labelled ‘the blind’ are either sub or super human beings who should be praised, pitied, neglected or avoided.

Indeed this quotation from Simi Linton’s 1998 Claiming Disability shows how widespread this problem is amongst the non disabled:

’Representations of disability and the representation of disabled people’s place in society are largely in the hands of people schooled in a particular vision of disability, one that is saturated with deterministic thinking and characterised by maudlin and morbid sentiments projected onto disabled people’s experience. The insistence not just that disability is an unfortunate occurrence but that disabled people are, perforce, “unfortunates”, seeps into most reports on the disability experience.’

But in one little-known collection of short moral tales, Moral Distractions or Virtue in Action [Le Passe-temps moral ou la vertu mis en action (Paris: Belin, 1837 3rd edition)], Husson presents an intriguingly modern approach to disability which seems to at least in part alleviate Linton’s worries and foreshadow the concerns of this conference by seeking to celebrate disability for its own sake.

In the story ‘The Good Father’s Lesson’ [‘Leçon d’un bon père’], an eleven-year-old boy, Adolphe, is playing in the park when he sees a so-called invalid, later introduced as Jean-Louis Grossard, talking to Monsieur Dupré, his tutor.

The boy’s reaction to Grossard, who has a wooden leg, a patch over one eye and two missing fingers, is blunt but not unexpected given the prevailing attitudes of the time: ‘How I pity you, you poor man’ [p. 208: ‘Combien je vous trouve malheureux.’] And indeed this exclamation echoes Husson’s descriptions of her own plight which she often describes as ‘unfortunate’ ‘pitiable’ and ‘sad’.

But it is Grossard’s response which is revealing: ‘ "Poor man, you say", said the invalid, getting up proudly, "I’ll have you know I have three sons, the oldest of which is no older than you, and if they ever spoke to me like that I would surely disinherit them!" ' [p. 208 : ‘ – Malheureux, dites-vous? reprit l’invalide en se relevant fièrement, j’ai trios fils, dont l’aîné n’est pas plus âgé que vous ; si jamais l’un d’eux me tenait un pareil langage, je crois que je le désavouerais !’].

It transpires not only that Grossard is proud of his disabilities – which he received during his thirty-six years of military service, but also that he wants to expose his sons to the risk of sustaining similar injuries by encouraging all three of them to become soldiers. Adolphe struggles to understand Grossard’s point of view:

‘The fact that this unfortunate man does not complain about his situation shows a resignation I can well understand even if this kind of resignation is very rare, but that he wants to expose his children to the same dangers, indeed that he attaches a kind of glory to this, is, in my opinion, a sign that he is taking his own enthusiasm much too far.’ [p. 210 : ‘que cet infortuné ne se plaigne point de sa situation, c’est une résignation que je conçois très-bien, quoi qu’elle doive être fort rare ; mais vouloir exposé ces enfants à de pareils dangers, à y attacher toute sa gloire, c’est, à mon avis, pousser l’enthousiasme jusqu’ à l’extravagance’.]

Unlike Adolphe, who is clearly horrified by the idea that Grossard’s sons might voluntarily put themselves in a position where they become as disabled as their father, all three boys do in fact want to be soldiers, despite, or perhaps because of, being confronted with their father’s disabilities every day.

Although it is possible to read this story as nothing more than a sentimental celebration of national pride and the glories of war, I would like to suggest that Grossard’s desire for his sons to risk their own limbs and sight foreshadows the late twentieth-century Disability Pride movement and encourages the nineteenth-century reader, who, like Adolphe, may not have been exposed to such feelings before, to think carefully about the assumptions which are too easily and quickly made about the value and quality of life.

Husson’s attempt to celebrate disability is extended in a 1882 story ‘Amongst the Blind’ [‘Entre aveugles’] by nineteenth-century Franco-Italian writer Marc Monnier. In this story the author offers a striking argument in favour of the sustaining of disability. He uses a question and answer style dialogue reminiscent of Cara Liebowitz’s persuasive blog post ‘Explaining Inspiration Porn to the Non Disabled’on her That Crazy Crippled Chic blog: like Cara’s piece, this short story is deliberately didactic and as such is written in a persuasive and provocative way in an attempt to both enlighten and convince an audience who may not have encountered such views before.

Indeed, in this short story, Monnier does a great job of avoiding the ableist traps which Linton highlights in her book.

A painter has come to a rural town to decorate its church when he happens across an old doctor friend he used to know in Paris. The Doctor lives in an institution for the blind [‘hospice d’aveugles’] and takes the painter to visit it. What follows is a dialogue in which the doctor – in a fascinating deconstruction of the medical model - debunks a succession of myths and misconceptions about blindness and 'the blind' voiced by the painter. One example occurs as the painter admires the beautiful scenery and then exclaims:

- How sad it is!
- Why?
- The poor blind people here can’t appreciate it.
- Who gave you that idea?
- Can they see the river?
- No, but they can feel it. They love to come and sit, as you are sitting, on the edge of the balcony.

[p. 238 : ‘C’est triste!
Pourquoi?
Les pauvres aveugles qui sont ici n’en jouissent pas.
Qui te l’a dit ?
Ils voient la rivière ?
Ils la sentent. Ils viennent, volontiers s’asseoir comme toi sur le parapet.]

The Doctor goes on to explain how the blind residents appreciate the smell and feel of the breezes coming off the river and that they notice sounds that the sighted do not.

The painter functions in this text as a symbol of ocularcentrism – he has an unshakeable belief that sight is the most important and privileged of the senses and that anyone who does not have it is necessarily doomed to have a lesser experience of life and the world. The Doctor counters by explaining that Milton’s gradual sight loss opened him up to a wider world of experiences than sighted poets like Dante, and demonstrates how 'the blind' are better placed to appreciate the finer qualities of poetry, arguing that the newly blind are sometimes so pleased with their new appreciation of poetry that they do not just find consolation but positive joy and pleasure in being blind. Even when the Dr goes on to reverse the normal-abnormal binary by arguing that he knows blind children who see sightedness as a disability, the painter remains unconvinced. Despite the fact that this statement still relies on the binary opposition between disabled and non-disabled which can be problematic, it nonetheless demonstrates a positive approach to blindness which celebrates it for its own sake. The Doctor’s opinions thus hopefully encourage the non-disabled to rethink what they assume to be their own privileged position in the hierarchy of perfection and normalcy.

The twist in the story comes when the doctor suddenly stops referring to the blind using ‘they’ as he says: ‘our other senses become sharper : we learn to listen, something we hadn’t known how to do until now.’

The Doctor’s switch from ‘they’ to ‘we’ in his discussions of the blind is intriguing. At this point in the story we have not been told whether he is blind or sighted but because we are reading from the point of view of the implicitly sighted reader, and because he is a doctor, we assume that he is sighted and lives in the hospice as a professional rather than a patient. His use of ‘we’ challenges the distinction made throughout the text between the two disparate groups ‘the sighted’ and ‘the blind’: it argues that sight or lack of sight is not a defining characteristic but one amongst many elements and that there exists a continuum between people with different levels of blindness or non-blindness. In this way it is a forerunner of David Bolt’s use of the ‘those of us who’ formulation which emphasizes that blindness is not a marker of inherent and inhuman difference.

In fact as the doctor continues to refute the painter’s increasingly ocularnormative assumptions, we learn that the doctor lives in the hospice because his parents, who met in the hospice as blind children, still live there. Before revealing his true identity to the painter, the doctor describes the love affair between these two blind children who were eventually allowed to marry despite some peoples’ concerns over the consequences of allowing two blind people to marry and have children. When the painter asks if their child was born blind, the doctor replies, ‘no more than me’ before revealing that he is in fact the son in question. By refusing to clarify how much the son - and thus the doctor - can or cannot see, Monnier frustrates the painter’s – and indeed the reader’s - attempt to construct a hierarchical relationship between blindness and non-blindness. Instead he playfully calls into question the non-disabled person’s tendency to see disability as lack by rendering the blindness (or not) of the doctor unknowable and thus ultimately inconsequential, indeed irrelevant.

In conclusion, I would like to suggest that the presence of such enlightened ideas within texts written in nineteenth-century France reveals that current arguments about the value of disability have been around for much longer than we might have thought. These texts have, until recently, remained hidden, buried in archives, and ironically inaccessible to the very people who need to use them as evidence against the kind of reductionist views represented in these stories by the boy Adolphe and the painter.

The Charity Dilemma

This blog was originally intended as a personal and professional response to my work as a partially blind academic in a resolutely sighted world. But as it has become more well-known, I am increasingly asked to write about various national and international initiatives related to sight and sightlessness. Whilst I am always happy to review books, films and other art works created by or featuring blind or partially blind people, I have very mixed feelings about helping charities promote their work. In this post I'd like to try and explain why.

Last week I was contacted by Blind Children UK who asked me to support their new campaign which aims to 'help raise awareness of the challenges faced by children with sight loss and the work that Blind Children UK is doing to help, by sharing their new 'Opening up the World' film online'.

A quick look round their website tells me that Blind Children UK do some great work. They help families access benefits and support services, provide mobility training for blind and partially blind children and produce customised large-print books for use at home and school.

Blind Children UK are clearly doing valuable and important work with children and their families. So why do I feel uneasy about endorsing their campaign?

There are a number of reasons. Firstly, as I said in my post about Children in Need, I don't think it should be up to charities to provide children and young people with essential services. Surely every child in the UK should have proper and equal access to educational and leisure activities no matter what their abilities. Shouldn't it be the duty of the government, funded by the tax payer, to ensure that every child's (and indeed adult's) access needs are met as a matter of course? By doing such excellent work, aren't charities actually letting the state off the hook? And the government isn't the only culprit. Why can't publishers work harder to provide a range of low-cost alternatives to standard print books? And why are libraries' large-print and audio collections always much more limited than their 'normal' print collections? After all, readers who can access 'normal' print can also read large print. And what if schools stopped mainly teaching using sighted methods and adopted a multi-sensory approach to learning where all children were taught to use all their senses to explore the world? Why not teach sign-language - or even Braille - as part of the national curriculum? If it is true that more and more children are being registered as blind or visually impaired each year, then surely it would make sense to put universal access into place now.

Secondly, a lot of work that Blind Children UK do is around what they call 'emotional support' for families. Unfortunately, we live in a society where the majority of people still think of blindness as a tragedy. This means that when a child is diagnosed with a visual impairment their parents have already been conditioned to experience feelings of sadness, worry or even mourning. But as I have said before, and will say again, blindness is not a tragedy. It is just a different way of being. Sure, it has its inconveniences, but life is often inconvenient for many reasons. People are not disabled by blindness, they are disabled by society's attitude to blindness. Whilst I'm sure Blind Children UK do a great job of supporting emotionally vulnerable parents, I would like to see a society where this kind of support is no longer necessary. What do we need to do in order for society to celebrate blindness? How can we rid blindness of its associations with stigma, weakness, passivity and failure?

Thirdly, I am very worried by the ease with which many charities - not just Blind Children UK - resort to the rhetoric of 'inspiration' 'overcoming' and 'triumph over adversity' to manipulate the public into pity giving. Perhaps I'm paranoid, over-sensitive or just plain critical, but I can't help seeing this kind of subtext in the 'Opening Up the World' film. I'd like to see this film as an illustration of the kind of pride that all parents feel when their children achieve things. But the combination of moving music, soft-focus shots and stirring visual metaphors (such as the swing's chain being slowly released) suggests that the film's producers want us to come away thinking that these children have achieved their various triumphs despite their blindness. One parent even says that her daughter is still smiling. In our minds we complete the sentence with 'even though she was born blind'. The subliminal message is that these are brave and determined children who have overcome great odds to get where they are. But children aren't born knowing what society thinks of blindness. They aren't born knowing that they see differently from other people. Walking, swinging and doing maths come just as naturally to blind children as to sighted ones. But if society conditions us to expect less of blind children, then even routine activities become momentous achievements in the eyes of parents, teachers and the world at large. And every time a blind child is called 'brave', the blindness-as-tragedy myth is reinforced. In their press release, Blind Children UK describe their film thus: 'It’s a beautiful film that shows how, with help, these children and their families are overcoming huge obstacles to build their lives. It really captures strength in the face of adversity.' This kind of sentimentalised description comes dangerously close to what Disability activists have called 'inspiration porn': read this brilliant blog post by Cara Leibowitz to understand how these kinds of images (which may be very well-intentioned) serve to perpetuate negative attitudes to disability.

Blind Children UK are no doubt doing a brilliant job of offering support to children and their families. But I'd also like to see them, and others, think about how to change attitudes to blindness amongst the non-disabled population more generally. For it is only when blindness has lost all its negative connotations and becomes an entirely unremarkable way of being that blind and partially blind children will be part of a society that is happy to have them.

David Bolt; The Metanarrative of Blindness (2014)

The image shows a hardback copy of David Bolt's The Metanarrative of Blindness: 

A Re-Reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Literature 

(Ann Arbor: Michigan U.P., 2014)

There is nothing quite like the combination of excitement and fear an academic experiences when they come across a book which is closely related to their current research. This is exactly how I felt when I heard about David Bolt's new book, The Metanarrative of Blindness. I was excited by the potential for new discoveries, discussions and connections which this book would provide, yet I was terrified that David's work would somehow duplicate or pre-empt what I am trying to say.

I am pleased to say that by the time I finished reading the book, my fears had vanished and my excitement had more than doubled. This is a fascinating and readable exploration of how a range of fictional and autobiographical texts represent ‘blindness’ and ‘the blind’. Its originality lies not so much in David’s discussions of the texts themselves, but more in his argument that fictional representations of blindness have created a set of myths and stereotypes of blindness which dictate how society treats the blind. Indeed David even makes the important point that blind people themselves have also been unwittingly influenced by such images. David’s book is different from much traditional literary criticism because it constantly compares his own experience of being blind with fictional representations of blindness in order to show the gap between reality and fiction.

Aside from this overarching argument, there are many useful elements in the book and I will certainly be using it with students in my new undergraduate course ‘Blindness and Vision in French Culture’ which I am teaching at Royal Holloway from September .The Introduction provides an excellent summary of the major trends and tensions in Disability Studies in general, with references to authorities including Goffmann, Garland-Thomson, McRuer, Davis, Mitchell and Snyder, and Chapter One explores the politics of blindness in particular. Here, David very carefully explains his somewhat controversial choice of terminology. Unlike many blind activists and scholars, including myself, David rejects the terms ‘the blind’ and ‘blind people’, preferring to use ‘those of us who have or do not have a visual impairment’. There are good reasons for him to do this, not least because his decision highlights the very problems of terminology he is trying to avoid, but I find his choice of words clumsy and at first I was frustrated by how much it disrupted the flow of both his prose and his arguments. Like Georgina Kleege in Sight Unseen, I prefer to proudly reclaim terms like ‘blind’ and ‘partially blind’ as celebrations of a state of sightlessness usually considered negative. But David’s explanation of the reasons behind his choice do make sense. In fact they do a great job of revealing the advantages and disadvantages of the medical, individual and radical social models of disability, the potential pitfalls (or possibilities) of political correctness and the power of even apparently neutral language to influence and (mis)inform. Like myself, David is speaking at the Society of Disability Studies conference in Minneapolis next month: I'm looking forward to discussing his choice of terminology with him and others at the event.

In the rest of the book, David explains how three interrelated neologisms - ‘ocularnormativsm’, ‘ocularcentrism’ and ‘opthalmocentrism’ - both belong to and persist in creating a 'metanarrative of blindness', in other words, 'the story in relation to which those of us who have visual impairments often find ourselves defined, an overriding narrative that seems to displace agency' (p. 10). David's analysis of a wide range of texts shows the persistent presence of a number of myths of blindness which I have also found in some of my nineteenth-century French texts. The ‘seeing-knowing metaphor’ (p. 18), the ‘blindness-darkness synonymy’ (p. 21) and the odd idea that people are either fully blind or fully sighted (pp. 69-70), are particularly widespread. In Chapter Two he shows how the use of labels such as ‘the blind man’ and ‘the blind girl’, creates a belief in blindness-as-difference which sets blind characters apart from the (implicitly sighted) reader. Chapters Three and Four both deal with a range of misconceptions surrounding blindness and sexuality. One of the most interesting arguments in Chapter Three is the discussion of how the recurrent infantilisation of blind characters frequently rests on the misguided assumption that independence is more valuable than dependency. By challenging the independence-dependency hierarchical binary which underpins traditional notions of rehabilitation, lifestyle and progress, David is able to criticise dominant medical and social discourses of disability. This is just one example of how readings of fictional representations of disability can help to problematise current ways of thinking. This is something which I hope my own analyses of blindness in fiction have also been doing.

In the following chapter, David criticises positive stereotyping by showing how 'more than being inaccurate, cultural representations of extraordinary senses serve, at best, to render magical the talent and achievements of people who have visual impairments and, at worst, to justify the ascription of various animal-like characteristics' (p. 67). Chapter Five is an insightful survey of blindness’s association with contagion in science-fiction writing (including readings of key works like H. G. Wells' 'The Country of the Blind', John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids and José Saramago's Blindness) in which David challenges the recent tendency to read references to successful blind characters as a celebration of disability. Instead he argues that stories featuring blind communities tend to emphasise the differences between the blind and the sighted which in turn suggest that ‘the blind' are somehow inherently different from the sighted. Chapter Six uses the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault to criticise the hierarchical binary relationship between the sighted gazer and the blind object of the gaze whilst Chapter Seven calls the blindness-as-tragedy myth into question.

David’s discussion of a wide range of twentieth-century texts represents an impressive survey of representations of blindness and the blind. I find him most convincing when he compares his discussions of fictional depictions with the lived experience of the blind and the partially blind: his use of examples from his own life, as well as extracts from the autobiographical writings of Georgina Kleege, Stephen Kuusisto and John Hull is particularly informative and should teach sighted readers much about their own misconceptions of blindness. This emphasis on lived experience is important because it demonstrates that the 'metanarrative of blindness' occurs in society as well as – or perhaps even more so than - in fictional representations. David is an accomplished social commentator who uses evidence from twentieth-century fiction to demonstrate how 'the blind' are perceived in modern society.

The main problem I have with David’s book does not in fact have anything to do with blindness as such and it feels a little churlish to mention it here, particularly as it is related to my (in fact unfounded) worries about overlap with my own work. I find the subtitle of the book, ‘A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Texts’ misleading, perhaps even insulting. Whilst the majority of his texts were written in English, David also pays sustained attention to several French authors – Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Gide and Jacques Derrida - whose works were neither originally written nor published in English. I am worried by this refusal to acknowledge the linguistic and cultural identities of these texts: not only does this negate the huge influence that French literature and culture has had on the history of representations of blindness, it also reflects a wider tendency amongst anglophone academics, publishers and readers to ‘claim’ such texts for the dominant Anglo-American canon when it suits them to do so. I am pretty sure that my French friends and colleagues would be outraged to see French classics like La symphonie pastorale and Histoire de l’oeil described as ‘anglophone’!

This niggle notwithstanding, this book is a crucial contribution to 'Blindness Studies' and comes very highly recommended.

Melody: how (not) to introduce children to blindness

Melody is a new BBC show for preschoolers which is designed 'to introduce children to a variety of classical music through stories and delightful, colourful animation'. The title character is partially blind and according to the BBC's Grown-ups Blog, the show uses techniques such as vivid colours. exaggerated gestures and slower-than-usual camera movements to appeal especially to visually impaired viewers. 

It is always wonderful (and still rare) to find positive disabled role models on television and the great thing about Melody is that her blindness is part of the show without ever being made into an issue or a problem. There is absolutely no sense of tragedy, no talk of triumph. Neither is her blindness down-played or ignored: neither Melody nor her mother are in denial about what she can or cannot see. No danger of her wanting to 'pass' as a sighted girl in later life. At the same time, Melody is a little girl like any other: she loves flowers, butterflies, the colour pink and her cuddly cat Fudge. Each time she listens to the day's music, she carries the viewer off into an imaginary world where she flies with birds, dances with butterflies and re-enacts fairy stories.

When I first watched the opening sequence I was delighted to see that the cartoon Melody is drawn with her white cane. As she happily dances through her imaginary landscape the cane is no longer a sign of stigma, but an enabling device which also happens to be a pretty cool accessory. There is a problematic moment in the opening sequence when the cane disappears as Melody's imaginary adventures progress. Surely, I wondered, this isn't an ableist suggestion that Melody is freer from her disability in her mind than she can ever be in real life? I needn't have worried. In the most recent episode, 'Flying High', Melody's cane is present both during her real-life trip to the park and in the subsequent imaginary adventure in the treetops. 

As we saw with 'Notes on Blindness', it is never easy to depict blindness in a visual medium. The show needs to be accessible to the blind and the partially blind whilst at the same time also appealing to sighted viewers so that it can become the mainstream hit it deserves to be. Imagine if Melody became a role-model for both blind and sighted children! Unlike the directors of 'Notes on Blindness', the makers of Melody do not try and depict the world from Melody's point of view. We are not shown what she actually sees. Instead we are shown how she relates to the world around her. And in some ways this is more powerful because it shows sighted children (and their parents) that her way of being in the world is surprisingly similar to theirs.

The programme is not perfect. Melody's Mum is unrealistically chirpy and patient, their home is always wonderfully tidy and Melody is the best-behaved child I have ever come across. More worryingly, she never seems to play with anyone her own age and lives a weirdly isolated existence. And there is one aspect of the programme's premise which is in danger of reinforcing out-moded stereotypes of blindness. Melody loves listening to classical music and her imaginary stories are always triggered by the music she hears on her headphones. The power that music exerts over her is reminiscent of the myth which says that a blind person's other senses are somehow magically enhanced as a kind of 'compensation' for their lack of sight. This myth is dangerous because it posits blindness as lack, as something missing which needs to be replaced. In fact the producers handle this potential pitfall well: without falling into the trap of a mawkish triumph-over-tragedy narrative, the show manages to represent blindness in a wholly positive way. In fact, Melody's world couldn't be fuller and her blindness is celebrated as an exciting and creative force.

These minor misgivings notwithstanding, this is a truly ground-breaking programme in many ways. I have never come across anything quite like it and I hope it becomes a staple of preschool viewing for years to come. My only real regret? That it didn't exist when I was a little girl.

The Voice Part 3: I Didn't See that Coming

I do not usually enjoy reading autobiographies and I am especially suspicious both of 'triumph over tragedy' disability narratives and of autobiographies written in haste after the subject has been shot into the spotlight by winning a TV talent show like The Voice. So it was with some trepidation that I curled up with the kindle version of Andrea Begley's account of her rise to fame, I Didn't see that Coming. I have already written two posts about how Andrea Begley's partial blindness has been depicted and discussed: the first when I initially came across her in the show's so-called blind auditions and the second as she unexpectedly (and somewhat controversially) went on to win the competition. In both these posts I made the point that the public have a much more disabling attitude towards blindness in general, and Andrea's partial blindness in particular, than she herself does. I am delighted to report that Andrea's book is exactly what I hoped it would be: a humorous, clever and personal debunking of many of the myths of blindness which are still so inexplicably embedded in society's collective consciousness.

Andrea is refreshingly honest, practical and open not only about what she can and cannot see but, more interestingly, about how she feels about her partial blindness. She is never sad, self-pitying or mournful. Her partial blindness is never a 'tragedy', a 'hurdle' or a something to be 'overcome' or 'cured'. Mostly it is not even an issue and occasionally it is an 'annoyance' or a 'frustration' which Andrea approaches with a wonderfully self-depreciating mixture of mischief and fun. But Andrea is very careful to emphasise that she is not a superhero. She has no extraordinary powers of hearing and is not one of those relentlessly perky 'super-crips' who feel the need to over-achieve as a kind of 'compensation'.  She is simply hard-working, well-supported and ambitious and she has got where she is through a combination of an unforgiving work ethic, lots of luck and a fair bit of talent. Anyone who voted for Andrea to win The Voice out of misplaced feelings of sympathy and pity has completely misunderstood what her partial blindness represents.

It is hugely important to have disabled people in the public gaze. But this is not so that other disabled people can feel 'inspired' to 'overcome' their own particular 'struggles'. Such an approach serves only to further stigmatise disability by distancing it. Rather, we need people like Andrea to write their stories so that the so-called 'able-bodied' can begin to understand that disability is not a necessarily negative condition deserving of pity and condescension. I think Andrea's book should be required reading for anyone who has ever looked at a disabled person with sadness. Not only does it answer many of the 'Is it okay to...' questions which worry the non-disabled, it also completely demystifies life with sight loss.

If I have one criticism of Andrea, it is that she readily admits that she relates to the world in a sighted way. She went to a mainstream school and has always learned by sighted methods where possible. She would still rather not use a white cane and has never learnt Braille. She does now use audio books and screen-reading software but I suspect that she would rather describe herself as 'partially sighted' than 'partially blind'. Andrea's resolutely sighted approach to the world is further evidence that we live in such an oculocentric world that even the partially blind feel the pressures to conform to sighted ways of being. But now that she is in such a prominent and powerful position, Andrea has the chance to further dismantle the sight-based myths which her book begins to attack. I'd like to see her wield her white cane in public more proudly and celebrate the power of the tactile by learning Braille.

Blindness in Fiction 7: Blind Spot by Laura Ellen

This novel is the first novel I have come across to feature a partially blind protagonist / narrator. 5 of the 6 other novels I have reviewed so far feature totally blind central characters and the 6th, the Adrian Mole series, only makes passing reference to the diarist's partially-blind friend Nigel. It is easy to think we know what it is like to be totally blind. We think that by closing our eyes we get a glimpse into the dark world of the unsighted. In fact, most people who appear blind perceive some light or movement. And the minority that see nothing at all do not necessarily experience the world as blackness. But for reasons that I have yet to fully understand, this is the image of blindness which popular culture favours. It is much more difficult to imagine what it is like to be partially blind.

Laura Ellen's first novel Blind Spot offers a detailed and emotionally-charged insight into the world of a teenager with juvenile macular degeneration. The narrator's descriptions of unknowingly walking past friends, struggling to read the board or take notes in class, fumbling with a tricky locker combination and failing to find people at lunch are a strikingly realistic portrayal of what it can be like to live with low vision in a sighted world. At the beginning of the book, Roz is not a particularly agreeable character: she is superficial, self-absorbed and aggressive. But worst of all, she is in denial about her blindness. She has internalised the American High School dream and desperately wants to 'pass' as 'normal'. She jumps at the chance of dating the captain of the hockey team and despises the other students in her 'Special Ed' class. In short, she is ashamed of her disability. She stubbornly hides her eye condition from her classmates and would rather appear rude, stupid and stand-offish than blind.

I found it difficult to like a protagonist who seemed to so uncritically subscribe to the 'blindness as tragedy' school of thought. But Roz's character was more complicated than I first gave her credit for and the book is about much more than her eyes. She was not in fact in denial about her eyesight, but shrewdly aware of high school society's inability to cope with difference and more ready to play along than to attempt to change the system. Nevertheless, her belief in Ruth's ability to get a job in the 'real world' testifies to her pro-disability-rights tendencies and her desire to understand how Tricia died crucially demonstrates her conviction that all individuals matter equally.

Aside from noting how the politics of blindness were explored in the novel, I was especially interested in how Roz's macular degeneration affected both her narrative and her crime-solving abilities. In a book about challenging both literal and metaphorical perception, it would have been easy for Ellen to equate Roz's poor vision with lack of knowledge, poor perspective or flawed insight. But although Roz's inability to distinguish faces, cars or the details of a photograph meant that it was hard for the authorities (and sometimes the reader) to believe her version of events, in the end it was not what Roz could or could not see which mattered, but what she did about it. Ellen seemed to be saying in fact that good eyesight was overrated, and that it was certainly not a necessary prerequisite to successful sleuthing.

This book could have become a saccharine story of redemption and acceptance. Instead it has no real conclusion. The mystery of Tricia's death remains unsolved and Roz's attitude to her disability unresolved. As well as perhaps promising a sequel, this lack of closure serves to highlight the ongoing nature of Roz's relationship with her blindness. Whether she likes it or not, she will spend her life answering the sighted person's favourite question: 'But what can you actually see?' and the answer she gives will change on an almost daily basis.  Her desire to 'pass' will co-exist with her need for magnifiers or white canes which mark her out as different in a world still obsessed with the normal.

It is wonderful to find a mainstream YA novel which features a partially blind protagonist. Disabled characters are still woefully absent from fiction and when they do appear they tend to reinforce rather than challenge stereotypes. This novel is refreshingly free of disability preconceptions and comes highly recommended.

Blindness in Fiction 6: She is Not Invisible

She is Not Invisible  is a Young Adult mystery thriller by Marcus Sedgwick. I was keen to read this book when I heard - via the facebook Disabookability group - that it is narrated by blind protagonist Laureth. Books with blind narrators are relatively rare. In my experience, most books featuring blind characters are narrated by a sighted person who describes the blind character from a sighted person's point of view. It is wonderfully refreshing for me to read a book whose vision of the world is close to my own. Not only is Laureth very attuned to the smells and sounds which surround her, she is also wonderfully self-aware. She is thoughtful and articulate about what it is like to be a blind person in a sighted universe, and she is particularly interesting when she talks about what she feels she has to do in order to make sighted people feel more comfortable around her.

By the end of the novel I was utterly in love with Laureth. And I really hope she reappears in future Sedgwick novels. But for the first few chapters I was very angry with her. Laureth spends the early part of the book pretending she is not blind. She goes to the most confusing of public places, an airport, and attempts to 'pass' as fully sighted. When I first read these parts of the book I was furious. Why, I thought, is she so intent on hiding her condition? Is she ashamed of being blind? Has she internalised all the stigmas associated with blindness to such an extent that she refuses to accept her own reality? Doesn't she realize that this kind of denial emphasizes the 'blindness as tragedy' trope which is all too common in both fiction and the media? Doesn't she know that a white cane can function as a badge of honour, not a symbol of shame? Doesn't she realize that by 'outing' herself as a strong, funny, capable and caring blind girl she could teach every sighted person she meets not to judge people on how they do (or do not) look?

I very nearly gave up the book at this point. But I was already hooked by the beguiling storyline. And I was curious to see how far she could get. I'm glad I persevered. As the book goes on it becomes clear that Laureth has very good reasons for hiding her blindness. And these are related to plot rather than to her own identity. She is in fact a mature, thoughtful, adventurous and practical teenager who will do anything to keep her family together. Throughout the book the author throws in a number of apparently incidental details which subtly tell us that Laureth lives a life which is just as fulfilling as that of any other sixteen year old.

More than Laureth's healthy attitude to her own blindness, what I like most about this book is its plot. Without giving anything away, I can say that the plot is fast-moving, complicated and utterly compelling. It is the kind of book which keeps you reading and which leaves your head spinning with its own possibilities. What is more, as soon as you have finished it you will want to turn straight back to the beginning and read it again. But what I like best about the plot is that it is not dependant on Laureth's blindness. Unlike so many books which feature blindness, the essentials of the story would have been more or less the same had Laureth been sighted (except, perhaps for the presence of her two travelling companions). Aside from the scene in the hotel room in the penultimate chapter, where Laureth uses her blindness to her advantage, the action would have run more or less the same course. This is important because it shows that blindness is not the be all and end all. It is one element which can influence a person's behaviour. But it is not the over-arching defining feature. Laureth is blind but she is so much more. And in the book we learn that her blindness is not the most important thing about either her or her story.

I do have some misgivings about the book's portrayal of blindness. Although I can now see why Laureth hides her blindness at the beginning of the book, I still don't understand why she doesn't use a white cane later on. It felt odd to me that she didn't refer to one at all, not even to explain why she has chosen not to use one. Unlike her brother, Laureth is a bit of a techno whizz yet it doesn't occur to her to use the GPS function on her iphone (which would have been especially handy in NYC). The author has clearly researched his topic well and this book does much to undermine several stereotypes of blindness. But in his Author's Note, when he thanks the students and staff of New College Worcester, he makes one slip which I'm sure Laureth would have hated. He describes this school for the blind as 'a genuinely inspiring place to visit'. 'Inspiring' is one of the words disavowed by Disability Studies because it tends to paint disabled people as either awe-inspiring heroes or victims to be pitied, and in both cases as unfortunate beings who spend their days overcoming obstacles and battling against adversity. This depiction is in danger of aligning itself with the 'blindness as tragedy' myth which this brilliant book does so much to dispel.

Guide Dogs for the Blind

This signed photograph showing Blue Peter presenters in 1985 was one of the exhibits in the 'Who is Blind' exhibition organised by the College of Optometrists

One of the most interesting papers I heard at the recent History of Blindness conference in Paris, was Dr Monika Baar's fascinating and thought-provoking presentation: 'Guide Dogs for the Blind: A Transnational History'.

Anyone who grew up in 1980s Britain will remember the Blue Peter Guide Dogs for the Blind campaigns. Blue Peter was a popular children's television programme which encouraged its young viewers to collect silver foil and milk bottle tops to raise money for Guide Dogs for the Blind and the programme often featured reports on the work of guide dogs and their trainers.

Baar's presentation made me wonder about the unintended consequences of Blue Peter's work with Guide Dogs for the Blind. There is no doubt that guide dogs have changed the lives of thousands of blind and partially sighted people. Indeed I met several blind people in Paris whose mobility and Independence have improved thanks to their partnership with their dog. But the image of blindness conveyed by Guide Dogs for the Blind is far from positive. And this is in danger of having an ironically detrimental effect on the lives of the very people the association is hoping to help. As the sentimental music and condescending tone of this promotional video suggest, blindness is presented here as a pitiful, even tragic state which leads to depression, isolation and misery. Sighted children (and adults) who are exposed to such material might be forgiven for thinking of the blind as a sub-group of needy and pitiful individuals. But none of the dogless blind I met in Paris were anything like these stereotypical images. They were classic conference delegates: clever, funny, disorganised, sociable, irreverent and always up for a drink. Guide dogs certainly have their uses, but they also have their limitations. One blind delegate, an experienced and enthusiastic international traveller from the States, explained to me that he thought having a dog would limit his Independence because 'it would be like travelling with a clingy three-year-old child'.

I can understand why Guide Dogs for the Blind are the most successful UK Disability charity. Their Labradors are unfailingly photogenic and it feels both easy and good to give money to such an aesthetically pleasing cause. And on one level I don't blame them for using whatever material they can to get money for their cause. But if their mission really is about improving the lives of the blind and partially sighted, perhaps they need to think again about the way they represent blindness. But in the UK, generations of children have grown up thinking of blindness as a tragic condition which only a beautiful dog can remedy.

Disability and Culture: Whose Tragedy? Workshop

** UPDATE: Audio from this event is now available here **

As part of my research on representations of disability, I am developing an interdisciplinary and collaborative research project called 'Disability and Culture'. The first event in this project is a study day to explore how the 'personal non-tragedy' approach to disability, which I have already discussed here for example, can encourage us to see disability differently. I also wanted to showcase some of the ways in which Modernl Languages is interacting with the discipline of Disability Studies.

Disability and Culture: Whose Tragedy?

Part of Royal Holloway’s Trauma, Fiction, History Series, jointly sponsored by the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures and the Humanities and Arts Research Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Thursday March 21^st, 2013

Centre for Creative Collaboration (c4cc)

16 Acton Street

London WC1X 9NG

Programme

11-11:30 Registration and Coffee

11:30-1pm Session One

Whose Disability? Challenging Stereotypical Representations of Epilepsy

Maria Vaccarella (Centre for the Humanities and Health and Comparative Literature Department, King’s College London)

Sur mes lèvres, Deafness, Embodiment: Towards a Film Phenomenology of a Differently Ordered Sensorium

Jenny Chamarette (Queen Mary, University of London)

Beyond the ‘Narrative of Overcoming’: Representations of Disability in Contemporary French Culture.

Sam Haigh (University of Warwick)

1-2pm: Lunch (Provided)

2-3:30:  Session Two

Ana García-Siñeriz, Esas mujeres rubias (2010): disability, gender, and the medical establishment

Abigail Lee Six (Royal Holloway, University of London)

The pain of itching

Naomi Segal (Birkbeck College, London)

‘Raw data’: autistic aloneness and the category of insight in Elle s’appelle Sabine

Vivienne Orchard (University of Southampton)

3:30-4pm: Tea

4-5:30pm Session Three

Telling, not seeing: blindness and travel writing

Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool)
Read Charles' account of the day here.

On not being deaf to the blind

Kate Tunstall (Worcester College, Oxford)

Disability and Sexuality: the poetry of Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin (1595-1670)

Nick Hammond (University of Cambridge)

5:30 Closing Remarks and Plans for Next Stages

Attendance at the study day is free and includes lunch and refreshments. Anyone interested in attending should contact me to register for catering purposes.

The Centre for Creative Collaboration is a neutral collaborative space near King’s Cross. We are using this space to think about the  interdisciplinary and collaborative potential of the Disability and Culture project. This workshop is the first step in a project which we hope will expand into a dialogue not only between academics, but also with artistis, medical professionals, charities, activists and community groups.

The Legacy of Helen Keller

Helen Keller is without doubt the most famous blind person alive or dead. But it is astonishing how many blind people have very mixed feelings about her legacy. I remember when we studied her at primary school along with other 'inspiratinal figures' like Florence Nightingale and Martin Luther King. I was embarrassed  and upset by her story of triumph over tragedy. She made me feel at once inadequate and angry: inadequate because I knew I'd never have her patience or tenacity, and angry because her story was told with a sentimentalising pity which assumed that blindness was a horrific affliction which only superlative amounts of courage and determination could help you escape from. Yet at the same time it felt confusing and disloyal not to like her when her story seemed to be saying that all blind people (myself included) should try to be like her.

When I started encountering other blind academics last year I realised that I was not alone in my misgivings. Both Cathy Kudlick and Georgina Kleege have written about the problems of the Helen Keller Legacy.

So when I was asked to write a blog post about a Kickstarter Fundraising Campaign which is making a film inspired by Keller's essay 'Three Days to See' I wasn't sure how to respond. The film aims to raise awareness about the nature of blindness and the difficulties faced by young blind and partially sighted adults as they leave the protected world of education and head out into the sighted world. I have no doubt that the film will present a more positive image of blindness than other recent films. And of course it is crucial to raise awareness of the reality of blindness by showing the general public that blind people are not deficient or lacking individuals who should be pitied, saved or cured. But I was worried that the film would (unknowingly) reproduce some of the insidious myths of triumph and tragedy which continue to haunt representations of disability.

The film will only be made if enough money is raised, but a trailer already exists. As I watched I was relieved to see that the film-makers seem to have avoided (almost all) sentimentality. They focus instead on the articulate and thoughtful blind student whose story structures the film. We hear her thoughts and fears alongside images of her and her classmates studying, relaxing and exploring the world around them. What comes across most strongly is the sense that these adolescents are just like millions of adolescents all over the world. They are individuals on the brink of adulthood. Their blindness does not define them: it is part of who they are, like hair colour or body shape but it is not a limit or a hindrance. It is a way of relating to the world which is just as valid as the more well-known sighted way. It turns out that blind people are not all the same.

The film combines images of today's teenagers with Helen Keller's words. Some of these quotations, particularly those that focus on humanity, made me think that I had judged Keller too harshly. Or perhaps I was only shown one side of her at school. I am still uneasy about her insistence that she is missing out on something by being blind, but in the end her legacy must be a good thing if it creates confident and articulate adolescents who have perceptive opinions about their place in the world.

This is a film that needs to be made because it will show the world that blindness is not a disabling affliction. It is people's attitudes to the blind that disable them, not their blindness. To help make this film happen go to their fundraising page.

Offensive Portrayal of the Blind Goes Viral

What do Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, an image by photographer Paul Strand and a recent web-based publicity campaign have in common? They all exploit the stereotype of the blind beggar for their own ends.

As part of their 'Change Your Words, Change Your World' campaign, online marketing company Purplefeather made a video a couple of years ago which I have only just come across. This video has been widely circulated via e-mail and has had over 15 million hits on youtube. I am guessing that most people like its sentimentality and apparent happy ending. I think it tells an entirely different story.

In fact there is so much wrong with this portrayal of the blind that I hardly know where to start. Firstly, it suggests a natural association between begging and blindness, as if begging is all that the blind are good for. This may have been the case for some blind people in Scotland a couple of hundred years ago (and is still the case in some developing countries), but it is certainly not the case in the UK now. Blind people are no more likely to beg on the streets than anyone else. But this film insidiously suggests that being blind will limit your life-choices, career path and earning power. It will mean you can't make friends, have a family or buy a house. Blindness, it implies, will leave you lonely, poor and at the mercy of society's do-gooders.

This man's blindness has reduced him to a passive object of pity. All he can do is sit. He is not even given the power of knowledge. Unlike the sighted viewer he does not even know what has been written on his sign. For someone who believes in the power of words, the young advertising star is not very communicative. Not only does she rudely fail to introduce herself, obliging him to recognise her only by her shoes, she also refuses to read out the changed sign to him. She both undermines his autonomy by changing the sign without his permission, and also insults him by failing to properly answer the direct question he asks her. Maybe she thinks he is stupid as well as blind.

As well as assuming that the blind are prone to misery and helplessness, the film also suggests that being blind somehow limits your enjoyment of life. The incredibly lucrative new message, 'It's a beautiful day but I can't see it' reduces a person's appreciation of life to merely what they can see. True, the blind man cannot see the street which surrounds him, but he can feel, smell and hear it. Sight loss is not the tragedy this sign suggests. It means that people relate to the world in different ways, perhaps realising that the world is not quite as occulocentric as the sighted would have us believe.

It is a horrible irony that this film is almost entirely inaccessible to the blind. It relies completely on sight to tell its story, with only the sentimental music and sparse dialogue as aural clues to its atmosphere. It perhaps unsurprisingly does not come with audio description. Can you imagine how mortified the audio describer would be at having to describe these images of debasement and vulnerability for the blind?

I am pleased to see that I am not the only person who objects to this video. This blog post is a great example of its impact on the disabled community. And yet inexplicably this film is still in circulation, ensnaring more uncritical viewers in its pernicious lies of pity and pwerlessness.

Blindness in Fiction 3: Ratburger

I have always loved being read to. Recently I have got into the habit of snuggling up with my boys as their Dad reads their bedtime story. We are going through a bit of a David Walliams phase at the moment. I was sceptical at first, after all, celebrities do not always make good writers, but I've been delighted with all his books, and so have my boys. They are inventive and exciting tales which are suffused with a gritty realism which makes them thought-provoking as well as entertaining. We were the first people to borrow Ratburger from the local library and were soon gripped by its appealing mixture of comedy and yuckiness.

Spoiler alert!

As its title suggests, the novel features an evil fast-food seller-cum-pest control operative who turns rats into burgers (and cockroaches into ketchup). He is a horrible character who oozes filth, grease and murderous nastiness. He is also completely blind.

When the novel's heroine, Zoe, first discovers the rat-catcher's secret blindness, which he successfully conceals until chapter 24 (promisingly entitled 'Childburger'), my first reaction was anger. I thought that in a cheap trick borrowed from the horror film genre, Walliams was using blindness as shorthand for evil. There are hardly any blind characters in fiction, and almost none in children's literature. Most children who read Ratburger will never have met or even seen an actual blind person. All they know about blindness is what they learn from books, films and tv. And children's television is not exactly brimming with positive blind role models. So I worried that this association of blindness with evil will plant a seed of suspicion and terror in the minds of children. Blindness will forever be associated with sinister, creepy characters who are out to hurt innocent little girls. Burt's blindness stuck me as a gratuitous slur on the blind, particularly as it is not necessary to the plot. True, his uncanny sense of smell does make it harder for Zoe to hide from him in the warehouse, but he would have had just as much impact had he been sighted.

It would be easy to leave my critique there. But I'm not a fan of the kind of political correctness which demands that disabled people are always presented in a positive light. Of course there are evil blind people just as there are evil sighted ones. And Burt does shatter at least one myth of disability: there is no way that he can be described as a victim. He is neither passive nor self-pitying and has not let his blindness prevent him from pursuing his somewhat unsavoury career. He navigates exclusively through his sense of smell and even drives a van (albeit with sometimes disastrous results). If children are influenced by the images of disability they are exposed to, at least they won't grow up thinking that the disabled are helpless and should be pitied.

Burt is a deeply unattractive character. For me, his most unappealing characteristic is neither his questionable food hygiene nor his violent streak but the fact that he is ashamed of his blindness. He hides his empty eye sockets behind dark glasses and does everything he can to 'pass' as 'normal'. As Zoe points out, he refuses traditional trappings of blindness like a white cane or a dog. Burt hates his own blindness so much that he goes to considerable lengths to hide it. In fact his own self-loathing might well explain why he is so horrible to everyone he meets. By killing off this blind blindness-hater, Walliams is actually doing something remarkably positive for blindness. He is saying that hiding one's difference, being ashamed of one's own physicality is an easy route to misery and self-destruction. Burt does not die because he is blind, but his death is caused at least in part by his unhealthy attitude to his own blindness. By letting this character die in such a gruesome way, I'd like to think that Walliams is implicitly criticising a society whose occulocentrism is such that sight loss becomes something to be ashamed of, denied or hidden. Maybe in a future book, Walliams will give us a character who is proud to be blind. Now that really would be a book I'd like my children to hear..

Night Vision

I have loved Suzanne Vega's music since I discovered it 25 years ago. Seeing her live at Newcastle City Hall on 1st June 1987 was my first experience of how extraordinarily moving seeing your favourite artist live can be. I've seen her live many times since then and can't wait to relive the experience again tomorrow when she celebrates the 25th anniversary of her platinum album Solitude Standing at the Barbican in London.

'Night Vision' is a beautiful and relatively unknown song from Solitude Standing. I had previously understood it in its literal sense, in the sense Vega meant it, as a description of a loved one falling asleep as night gradually fills the narrator's room. But earlier today I was listening to it whilst worrying about how to find my way to The Barbican in the dark. Suddenly the lyrics gained a new depth of meaning and it became a song about my own experience of partial blindness.

The opening lines: "By day give thanks, by night beware; half the world in sweetness, the other in fear" evoke the age-old myth that associates light and day with joy and happiness and darkness and night with danger and misery. Vega's lyrics frequently evoke received wisdom in this way before subtly overturning the listeners' expectations. (Think of the narrative of childbirth in 'Birth Day'; the unexpected sagacity of the unnamed lover in 'Gypsy', the beauty of asymmetry in 'Left of Centre' or the mischievous riff on misery in 'Straight Lines'.

The implications of the cliche evoked at the beginning of 'Night Vision' are familiar to the blind and the partially blind. Too often, blindness is seen as just as irrevocably negative as the darkness with which it is erroneously associated. As the song develops, however, Vega demonstrates that vision is not about seeing, but rather about using the available clues to fill in the gaps left by either partial blindness or nightfall:

"When the darkness takes you with her hand across your face,

don't give in too quickly, find the things she's erased:

find the line, find the shape through the grain,

find the outline and things will tell you their name."

This is a perfect description of the way my brain tries to make sense of the patchy, blurry world I inhabit. Like the narrator in Vega's song, I am always trying to make sense of edges, outlines, contours. I see a ghostly shape and my brain tells me what it is most likely to be. This song is - perhaps unknowingly - a celebration of the particular way the partially blind relate to the world. The narrator's promise to teach her child "night vision' ends the song. In this promise I hear a celebration of both literal and metaphorical darkness which invites the blind and the partially blind to enjoy and treasure their way of seeing in the dark.

(Vega's song may be exquisite and inspiring in equal measure. But it will not actually help me find my way to the Barbican in the dark. Luckily the Baribican provides an incredibly helpful and wonderfully detailed description of how to get to the venue on their site, complete with extremely helpful photo-maps of key points along the route.)

The Ethics of the 'Tragedy' Approach

Since I started thinking critically about blindness, I have repeatedly argued in this blog against the widely held view that blindness, or indeed any disability, is a tragedy. I have become interested in the 'personal non-tragedy' approach to disability and in March 2013 I am organising a study day to explore issues around tragedy and disability.

I thought that seeing disability as a tragedy perpetuated society's view of the disabled (and thus disabled people's view of themselves) as inferior, somehow lesser people. In a post on Tina Nash - the woman ferociously blinded by her boyfriend Shane Jenkin in 2011 -  I noted how Tina herself resisted the media's attempts to assign the traditional disability labels of 'brave' and 'courageous' to her. I was trying to argue that this resistance demonstrates that disability is not inherently tragic and that Tina's refusal to see herself as a victim was empowering not just for her but also for other disabled people. 

I recently received a very angry response to my Tina Nash post from Maria Brody. Maria's comments, which I found shocking and hurtful, accused me of being more immoral, more evil, than Tina's attacker. Maria's argument is that by refusing to see disability as a tragedy, I undermine the severity of Jenkin's crime and make disabled people feel guilty for wanting to be 'whole' again. Her comments, as well as demonstrating the alarming pervasiveness of myths of blindness and disability amongst the general public, raise important questions about the ethics of my 'personal non-ttragedy' approach. Maria sent me her comments by e-mail and I include them in full below in italics, with my responses in bold.

You do realize that it is a mindset such as the one you describe that contributes to torturers like Shane Jenkin getting only six years in prison? After which he can happily go out again and pluck out someone else's eyes. Creating more blindness. More tragedy, yes.
I think your post is a massive insult to victims of violence.

I did not intend to insult anyone nor to belittle Jenkin's actions. He subjected Tina to a brutal and violent assault and should be punished for it. How Tina is living with her blindness is a completely separate issue. She is living her life in a way which shows that blindness is not a tragedy and does not signal the end of life as we know it. Are you suggesting that she should give up on her life, her children and her self-esteem so that perpetrators of violence receive longer sentences? Surely this would signify a further triumph for her torturer.

Rape is probably also best responded to by "laying back and enjoying it", according to your morals?

Rape, like assault, is a violent act inflicted on somebody against their will. As such it is reprehensible and wrong. My post does not suggest that Tina enjoyed her attack. It argues that once blinded, she adopted a positive attitude to her new way of being in the world.

It's all in the mind, there's no difference really between good or bad, it's the victim's own fault if she thinks blindness is a tragedy, if only she'll stop constructing herself as a victim she'll be just fine.

 

I do not blame anyone for thinking that blindness is a tragedy. After all we are constantly bombarded by this message in language, in the media, in film and in literature. My post on David Rathband's blinding reminds us that feelings of mourning and depression are extremely common when affected by sudden sight loss. But might blindness feel less tragic if Western civilisation stopped fetishizing the eyes, vision and the sense of sight?

Oh yeah, does it really make a difference whether you see your loved one's faces or not, or a sunset, or a tree, or the sky?

 

You are asking the wrong person. I really don't think it does make a difference. But then I didn't lose my sight suddenly like Tina and David so there are lots of things that I've never seen and never missed seeing.  My life doesn't feel empty because I've never seen them. Unlike most people, I've never seen sight as the most important of the senses. I use touch and smell extensively in my contact with the world.  

Or permanent darkness.

All the same, of course!

"Black is just another color, full of possibilities."

"Rape is just another form of sex, stop calling it a problem."

Why these parallels between rape and blindness? How do you think this makes blind people feel? 

Etc.

No.

You are the one acting blindly here,

 

This is an interesting turn of phrase. Do you see how even the metaphoric language we use constantly tells us that blindness is negative? 

 

 denying that reality can sometimes be horrific. And that evil does exist.

I am not denying that Tina suffered a violent and painful attack. But I am saying that she is refusing to let Jenkin's act ruin her life.

If you believe you are benefitting disabled people, and victims of violence, by denying their feelings and the hardships of their reality, think again.

I have had first-hand experience of the negative feelings having a disability can cause. Remember that I have been living with my blindness for 39 years. But I know now that these feelings are the product of society's negativisation of disability. This in turn is a result of an occulocentric society obsessed with conventional notions of beauty and perfection and with sight, vision and the eyes. Having a disability is often annoying, inconvenient, time-consuming and expensive. But it is not a tragedy.

Please.

Look again at what you wrote:

"It is significant that Tina rejects the epithets of 'courageous' and 'amazing' that the interviewer dangles in front of her. By doing so, Tina does much to demonstrate that blindness in itself is not a tragedy: rather, it is the sighted world's view of blindness which might be described as 'disabling'. If I described Tina as 'an inspiration' I would be undermining my own argument by buying into the 'disability as tragedy to be overcome' mindset. So I'll just say that hearing her voice on radio 4 this morning made me glad to know that she is there."

The last sentence must, judging from the preceding argumentation, mean: "hearing her voice on radio 4 this morning made me glad to know she is blind."

The last sentence means that I am glad that she is handling her blindness in a refreshingly positive way.

Really? That is disgusting.

 

And if this was not what you meant, what is it then making you so glad? Tina was "there" too when she had eyes, remember? - But that did not give you any thrill, did it?

True. But only because I had never heard of her before her blinding. I am not glad that Tina is blind. I am glad that she is showing other people who lose their sight suddenly that life can go on.

The real significance of Tina's rejection of the description "brave" is exactly what she is saying: She is just surviving. Praising her for bravery would in a way absolve the assailant who tortured her, making the assault "meaningful" or "OK", "not so bad after all". And Tina wants, of course, to hold on to the truth: to keep insisting that this was wrong, that this was entirely horrific and should not have happened to anyone. And that we should do our utmost to prevent similar evils from happening. To deny that is as great an insult as what he did to her.

I think we are saying the same thing here. I agree that what Jenkin did was horrific. But it would have been just as horrific - no more, no less -  if he had cut off her hands, her ears or her legs. By saying that his crime is worse because it led to blindness you are fetishizing the sense of sight and thus perpetuating the myth that says that gouging out the eyes is the most horrific punishment. Jenkin went for Tina's eyes because of society's fetishization of them. Without this privileging of the sense of sight, he might have turned his attention somewhere else.   

You, in my view, are trying to do to her mind, and everyone else's minds, what he did to her physically.

No, I am trying to do the opposite. I am trying to ask people to think again about blindness and the sighted world's understanding of it. I am trying to metaphorically open people's eyes.

One is doing disabled people no favor by denying reality and placing upon them the addition burden of guilt for still feeling deep down that they would rather be whole.

I agree. By constantly telling disabled people that they are somehow less than whole, society makes them yearn to be whole again. This creates a struggle between acceptance and self-loathing which can lead to depression or even suicide. But the burden of guilt for this lies not with disabled people but with those who constantly reinforce the 'disability as tragedy' myth, thus encouraging self-pity and immobilising the disabled in a stagnant victim culture.

It is one thing to keep a positive attitude to life in difficult circumstances - and an entirely different thing to blatantly lie about the difference between ability and disability.

I am not lying. I am questioning received wisdom and trying to go beyond superficial appearances.  

True, one can choose to use whatever one has to the best of one's abilities, and that is an inspiration to us all. But that does not mean that being disabled is not a tragedy.

Nor does it mean that it is a tragedy.

Do not deny Tina her own language of ghostliness and death. Blindness does have similarities with these conditions. You can describe your own life exactly as you like. But don't try to blind others to the truth of life. Perspective is part of reality, but not all of it.

I am not denying Tina her language or her feelings. I am celebrating her own description of her situation. It is completely understandable that Tina is in mourning for her sight. But this is the fault of a society which privileges sight over the other senses.

You are not helping, but committing a form of violence with this invasive morality of yours.

I am not a disability activist. I am an academic working on disability studies. No one is obliged to read this blog if it offends them.

That demon, Shane Jenkin, had at least a shred left in him of true morality - he said he expected to get 20 years for the gouging out of a woman's eyes. In other words, he knew he was guilty, and evil.

Whereas you, madam, try to deny both these facts.

No I don't. I agree that he is both guilty and evil.

My advice to you is to not let your mind become clouded by the present academic faith (as it really is more than a science) that language and perspective can change reality a 100 percent.

We can only hope to change the world by understanding how it works, by unpicking the myths and cliches which govern how people think.

It can't. And thank God for that, for if it could, there would be no place outside power, and no room for true love, which can only live by freedom.

Language is not an absolute, nor a magic stick which can make all your worries go away. The world is real after all. Your body, your emotions, your mind are realities beyond your representation of them. Other people are real too. And the tragedies that happen to them are real tragedies.

It is precisely because language is not an absolute that its use can be so insidious. Your own use of metaphors of blindness has shown how misuse of language can led to the confusion of myth and reality.


Here is a test whether I am right in saying that there is a real difference between being blind or seeing, or not:
You write that you are partially blind. Now, if a new technique was created which would give you perfect vision - would you use it or not?

This is a good question which I have thought about a lot. It is an academic question, a theoretical one really because there is no cure for coloboma and there never will be. But if a cure was found I would not use it. My reason for this is simple: the way I see is part of me. It has defined the way I think, behave anf feel since I was born. I cannot imagine myself without my blindness. If I suddenly regained my sight I think I would experience the kind of mourning that the sighted feel when they suddenly lose their sight. I bet you don't believe me. I bet you think that I am just saying this to further my argument. But you are wrong. I am proud of the way I look (in both senses). I never wish I could see perfectly. Sometimes I wonder if seeing better would make my life less complicated but I have never longed for sight and I'm certain that I would refuse a cure.



With regards, Maria.

Oh, and a PS: It is not "literature" which has taught us that "intentional blinding" - as you euphemistically rename this form of torture - is atrocious. What teaches us this is

1) personal experience with pain

2) compassion.  

We agree that intentional blinding is atrocious. But it is impossible to separate fiction and reality, or literature and life: Jenkin got the idea for this form of torture from a film he saw. This film, in turn, was probably inspired, either knowingly or unknowingly, by Western civilisation's fascination with intentional blinding, a fascination both nurtured by, and reflected in literature.