Blindness Arts: a Disability Studies Quarterly Special Issue

Co-organizing the 2015 Blind Creations conference with Vanessa Warne was one of the highlights of my academic career. As this post written in the conference's aftermath shows, the event was memorable above all for the sense of celebratory community it created. Almost as soon as the conference was over, Vanessa and I began making plans to continue the many productive conversations which started during those few summer days in Egham. We did not want or need to produce a traditional 'conference proceedings': our wonderful audio archive means that all the papers delivered at the conference are still available. Instead we wanted to extend the legacy of Blind Creations by publishing new work which responds to questions raised by our speakers in 2015. Just over three years after the conference, we are pleased and proud to announce the publication of a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly which we have called 'Blindness Arts'. In our co-authored Introduction we explain that this title functions "in contrast with and as a companion to ‘visual arts'". This extract from later in the Introduction gives a flavour of the intersections between blindness, creativity, performance and access which the issue explores:

In the first section of our issue, we share a set of essays that explore methods for accessing cultural works. These essays take up a range of media, namely sculpture, film, theatre and the comic book, all of which have traditionally been understood as visual forms. The authors in this section challenge this overly narrow perception and share experiments with both audio description and the role of touch. As Fayen d’Evie’s and Georgina Kleege’s individual contributions to blindness studies are noted by other authors throughout our issue, it is fitting that we begin with their co-authored essay, in which they share their work on tactile interpretations of the collections at the KADIST Art Foundation, and call for new opportunities and methods for touching art. Like d’Evie and Kleege, Hannah Thompson also calls for a collaborative approach to blind access. In her essay on audio description (AD) in cinema, she engages with four films with blind protagonists in order to compare extradiegetic and intradiegetic approaches to AD and to argue for its creative potential. Louise Fryer also explores the possibilities and challenges of integrated AD by sharing her experiences as an audio describer who, in a break with traditional models of objectivity and neutrality, took an active role in a play written and performed by a blind theatre group. Arseli Dokumaci shares a video project and essay that together use an exploration of the everyday travel strategies of two disabled people to propose an AD practice shaped by crip time. The final essay in this section, Brandon Christopher’s comparative study of an audio version of a conventional comic and of Philipp Meyer’s tactile comic Life, explores audio and tactile access questions raised in other essays in this section and extends our issue’s exploration of blindness arts to include the comic book genre. Remaining attentive to questions of access, we turn in the next section to the experiences of artists and to works of art that comment on blindness, either explicitly or through their use of design elements associated with blindness. Sculptor Aaron McPeake opens this section by reflecting on the making, exhibition and reception of his works in bronze, offering insight into the role of sound and touch in experiences of them. The role of touch is also important to the art made by Florian Grond and David Johnson. In the issue’s second co-authored piece, they share their experiences as artists collaborating at a distance and they reflect on the central role of blindness in their creation of accessible art. As blind artists, both McPeake and Johnson have encountered sighted misunderstandings of their practices. In an essay that responds to the misrepresentation of blind artists and their working lives, Catalin Brylla proposes filmmaking methods that challenge supercrip narratives and make possible nuanced depictions of the creative lives of artists who are blind. In an essay on the contemporary proliferation of braille as a design element in creative works, including public art installations, made by and for sighted people, Vanessa Warne explores the appropriation of braille as a visual code. Heather Tilley offers an historical perspective on the visual depiction of blind people, analyzing nineteenth-century images of blind people reading by touch and messages about blindness that the visual record shares. A pair of essays in our final section explores different kinds of performances that have been shaped by blindness. Piet Devos analyzes two non-visual contemporary dance pieces and his experiences of them. He also discusses the practice of blind dancer Saïd Gharbi. Offering a personal reflection on her own vocal practice, Emily K. Michael moves between sacred and secular spaces to map the relationship between blindness, vocal performance and persistent myths of compensatory ability. We close the volume with a co-authored essay by Rod Michalko and Tanya Titchkosky that uses a trans-Atlantic journey and a dialogue between the authors to explore the theme of travelling blind and the ways that blindness transforms sighted understandings of the world when it enters into dialogue with them. The presence in this final essay of a series of ‘excurses’ functions as a kind of crip time, similar to the audio description method proposed by Dokumaci. In both cases, the contents of the narrative are translated into a different format so that an ableist timeframe is replaced with space for creative reflection. 

Unlike much academic writing, this volume is free, open access and accessible. Please read, enjoy, respond and share widely.

Towards a Multisensory Aesthetic: Jean Giono's Non-Visual Sensorium

Next week I am delighted to be travelling to Montreal to speak at the International Visual Literacy Association Annual Conference. Along with my Blind Creations co-organiser Vanessa Warne, and Blind Creations speakers Georgina Kleege, Florian Grond and David Johnson, I am presenting some of the work from my forthcoming book Visions of Blindness in French Fiction in a panel organised by Piet Devos and wonderfully entitled: 'The Distorting Mirror of Blindness: Visual Literacy and Non-Sighted Aesthetics'. Whilst I am in Montreal I am also looking forward to exploring some of the places evoked by Jacques Semelin in his recent blind travel journal Je veux croire au soleil and I will be presenting some of the highlights of the Blind Creations conference at a talk (in French) at the Institut Nazareth et Louis Braille. (Click here for more details about this event and how to watch and listen via videoconference).

Below is a sneak preview of part of my work on Jean Giono which I will be presenting at the IVLA conference:

La nuit. Le fleuve roulait à coups d’épaules à travers la forêt, Antonio avança jusqu’la pointe de l’île. D’un côté l’eau profonde, souple comme du poil de chat, de l’autre côté les hennissements du gué. Antonio toucha le chêne. Il écouta dans sa main les tremblements de l’arbre. (Night. The river was shouldering its way through the forest, Antonio went as far as the tip of the island. On one side was deep water, as supple as a cat’s fur, on the other side the whinnying of the ford. Antonio touched the oak. He listened with his hand to the quivering tree.)

These opening lines from Jean Giono’s 1934 novel Le Chant du Monde, are a characteristic example of the kind of sensuous prose description Giono has become famous for using to describe his beloved Provençal landscapes. Giono’s descriptions have long been celebrated by critics for their power to capture the beauty of southern France. But if we look closely at this passage, we notice that it somewhat unexpectedly rejects the kind of visual description we expect from the realist novel in favour of a sensorium more overtly focused on a powerful combination of touch and sound. This challenge to the usual hierarchy of the senses is in fact announced in Giono’s decision to begin the novel in the dark. The novel’s opening words, ‘la nuit’, tell us that because the sighted protagonist Antonio - through whose consciousness most of the third-person narrative is filtered - does not need sight to navigate, the reader is also asked to imagine the setting without recourse to visual elements. Instead of telling us what the river looks like, Giono evokes it through Antonio’s perception of it, that is, by how it feels (as supple as a cat’s fur) and how it sounds (the whinnying of the ford). The surprising use of words associated with animals to describe a body of water adds to our sensory immersion in the scene by combining different sense impressions in vivid and evocative ways whilst reminding us that we are in a profoundly natural setting. The ford does not really sound like a whinnying horse: through the noise it makes, which is impossible to capture in language, it reminds Antonio of the unpredictable power of a skittish foal. The combination of touch and hearing is continued in Antonio’s relationship with the oak tree. The phrase ‘il écouta dans sa main’ (he listened with his hand) uses a synesthetic combination of the sense impressions of touch and hearing to capture the strength of Antonio’s feeling for the tree. 

Passages of this kind are found throughout Giono’s oeuvre. But their relevance only becomes clear when they are read alongside Giono’s depiction of the blind character Clara whom Antonio encounters later in the novel. Antonio and Clara are mutually fascinated by each other’s relationship with the senses. When they talk about blindness and sightedness the usually visually reliant reader is invited to rethink their preconceived notion that blindness is a kind of lack.

When Clara asks Antonio to describe night, day and light to her, Antonio struggles to evoke darkness without recourse to visual language. Like blindness, darkness is here unspeakable because it exists outside the limits of ocularcentric language, a language whose very existence depends on a celebration of sight and thus a negation of sightlessness. Antonio emphasises this link between darkness and blindness by evoking the one in relation to the other, and by paradoxically using a vocabulary of seeing to describe this non-sight. Clara, on the other hand, is not hampered by the constraints of ocularcentric language. Her insistent questioning of Antonio’s language encourages not only Antonio but also the reader to analyse what lies beneath the words non-blind people too often take for granted. She can thus combine sense impressions in creative and liberating ways. In an echo of the description of the river at the novel’s start, she merges two distinct sense impressions, (non)sight and smell, in her assertion that for her, ‘day is smell’.

Later, Clara offers us a more immersive and sustained experience of her impressions of the countryside. Rather than detecting spring through its visual clues, she can tell its arrival by its smells and sounds. As she explains: « Ça sent […] et puis ça parle » («It smells and also it speaks ».). Clara tries to explain how she experiences the world. She recognises flowers but does not give them the same names as everyone else. According to her it is not the names of the flowers which are important, but the multi-sensual way in which she experiences them: 

Toutes les choses du monde arrivent à des endroits de mon corps (elle toucha ses cuisses, ses seins, son cou, ses joues, son front, ses cheveux) c’est attaché à moi par des petites ficelles tremblantes. Je suis printemps, moi, maintenant. (Everything in the world comes to a place on my body (she touched her thighs, her breasts, her neck, her cheeks, her forehead, her hair) it is attached to me by tiny trembling threads. I am spring now.)

Clara’s relationship with the world is intense, multi-sensorial, corporeal and all-encompassing. She combines sense-impressions to create highly evocative and sensual descriptions of nature in a way which reminds us again of the novel’s opening lines:

Dans toute la colline il y a des pattes, des ongles, des museaux, des ventres. Entends-les. Des arbres dures, des tendres, des fleurs froides, des fleurs chaudes. Là-bas derrière, un arbre long. On entend son bruit tout droit. Il fait le bruit de l’eau quand elle court. Il a de longues fleurs comme des queues de chats et qui sentent le pain cru. (All over the hill there are feet, claws, muzzles, bellies. Listen to them. Hard trees, soft trees, cold flowers, warm flowers. Over there a long tree. We can hear its noise straight ahead. It sounds like running water. It has long flowers like cats’ tails which smell of uncooked bread.)

These descriptions are striking because they evoke the landscape with no need for visual references. But importantly these descriptions do not alienate the ocularcentric reader. Clara’s evocation of nature is so powerful that we are immediately immersed in it without even noticing her lack of reference to visual elements. It is only because Giono foregrounds her blindness that we notice her non-visual language. By describing her non-visual acquisition of knowledge as ‘seeing’, Clara rids the verb of its associations with eyesight and thus disentangles notions of perception and detection from their persistent association with physical looking. Giono is thus using Clara to destabilise the hierarchy of the senses,

The ease with which Clara discusses her multi-sensual way of not seeing, together with the way in which non-visual descriptions of nature are incorporated into the novel’s prose even when recounted via the consciousness of a sighted character, invite us to read both Clara and Antonio as authorial figures whose discussions function as reflexive comments on Giono’s own non-visual creative processes. In addition, Clara’s non-visual relationship to nature functions to overturn sight’s expected place at the top of the hierarchy of the senses whilst celebrating the creative potential of the non-visual senses. Giono’s prose thus redefines notions of ‘sight’ and ‘seeing’ by detaching them from the physical act of looking, in order to encourage his reader to rethink her own relationship with the visual.

Bravo for live Audio Descrption at Euro 2016!

When I applied for tickets for the UEFA Euro 2016 football tournament I did so because I wanted to experience the passion and excitement of live high quality football and I wanted to do so in my favourite country. I have attended live football before and know that nothing beats the thrill of the build-up, the noise of the fans and the atmosphere inside the stadium. I also (thought) I knew that it would be almost impossible for me to actually follow what was happening on the pitch. The players would be blurry smears of contrasting colours and the ball would move far too quickly for me to follow. I would have to guess the general pattern of the match from the reactions of the crowd around me and would fill in the gaps later by watching the highlights with my nose inches from the television screen.

Imagine my excitement when I discovered that a team of volunteers would be providing live audio description at the match! Armed with my portable FM radio and headphones I duly tuned in to 91.8 once settled in the stands. AD can often be fraught with technical problems so it was a relief to immediately hear a recorded message informing me that the service was working and that live commentary would start shortly before the match. Coincidentally, our seats were next to the press stand from where the audio description would be delivered: as soon as the technical team spotted my white cane they came over to check that everything was working and they lent me some special headphones so that the commentary would not be drowned out by the very noisy Swedish fans sitting round me. When I explained that I have a professional as well as a personal interest in AD they even introduced me to the two volunteer describers.

Lucas Carcano and Leandra Iacono are studying sports journalism in Nice and they have been specially trained in live football audio description. When we met before the match they described the layout of the stadium to me, gave me an idea of the look and behaviour of the two groups of fans and told me a little bit about the players’ warm up which was going on below us. Most importantly, they explained the system of zones they were going to use during the description. By dividing the pitch into four areas, labelled A-D, they could accurately give me the position of the ball throughout the game: for the first time I would be able to get a real sense of where the ball was on the pitch and follow the players as they moved around it. Like a television camera focusing in on the part of the pitch in play, Lucas and Leandra’s references to zones would allow me to focus my attention on the requisite section of the pitch.

Unlike AD tracks on film, which begin at the same time as the film does (thus rendering ads and trailers inaccessible), Lucas and Leandra started their description with the pre-match ceremony and described the arrival of the players, the display of flags, the national anthems and the fans’ reactions to it all. Without them I would not have known that all the Swedish fans were jumping up and down in unison whilst unfurling a giant flag with a tribute to Italy in one corner. By making me feel more involved in the build-up, their words pulled me into the atmosphere in a way I have never experienced before.

 As the game began I was immediately astonished and delighted by the energy and enthusiasm my describers put into their work. It was very soon apparent that as well as being accomplished journalists they were also extremely knowledgeable and passionate football fans. Without ever seeming to pause for breath they told me who had the ball, where they were passing it, who was waiting to receive it, who was tackling whom, when there were fouls and what the referee was dong about them and how and why the crowd was reacting as it did.

As well as focusing on the detail of the match, they also managed to give me a sense of the teams’ positions as a whole and how their tactics varied. I learnt that Sweden prefer long balls which are not always successfully recuperated, that the Italian goalie takes his time before every goal kick, that some players get up immediately after falling whilst others lie there moaning. They told me about near-misses and awkward turns, substitutions and injuries, yellow cards and free kicks; off-sides and corners. In lulls in the action they gave their impressions of the game, who was playing well, who looked tired, who was having fun. They combined detail with knowledge and facts with analysis in a unique and very appealing way: I felt not only that I knew what was happening on the pitch but also that I understood why it was happening and what it might lead to.

I was astonished by how much their audio description differed from radio commentary. Whilst radio commentators give more of a sense of the game’s action than television commentators do, they (paradoxically) fall far short of the detail of AD. Radio commentators tend to do as their name suggests: they comment on the action, often comparing the current game to previous performances or listing statistics and interesting facts about the players. They privilege banter over description and lapse into silence without explaining why the game has paused. On the other hand, Lucas and Leandra worked really hard to provide a rich and enriching aural experience. Whilst they did include some helpful background information, such as which players on opposing sides were team mates in club football, and how they were dealing with this on the pitch, they were focused on the flow of the game. This meant that I felt more immersed in the experience that I have ever done before. I must have experienced hundreds of match commentaries on television and radio. But this is the first time that I have felt so involved and included in the action. It was as if the detail of television close-ups was combined with the thrill of live action. There is no doubt that I got just as much - and probably more – out of the game thanks to Lucas and Leandra than the sighted fans around me.

After the match, and after I’d thanked them both about a thousand times, my describers asked me how they could make the service even better. I couldn’t really think of much that they themselves could do to improve what had been a truly remarkable description. But perhaps live sporting events could take some inspiration from current practices in accessible theatre: as well as offering live AD of selected performances, some theatres also offer pre-show touch tours where blind audience members are able to familiarise themselves with the set and even the actors. No doubt my experience would have been even more memorable had I been able to walk the pitch, touch the goal netting and perhaps even fondle Ibrahimovic’s muscles…

Lucas and Leandra are on duty again tonight for the match between Russia and Wales and I wish them both 'bon courage'. I also wish I could be there with them. Nothing I experience on TV or radio in the next weeks of the tournament will come close to the intensity and impact of their amazing live audio description.

With thanks to Julie Bertholon from the Federation des aveugles de France for telling me about the service, to my Dad for accompanying me to the match, to all the volunteers who helped me find seats, toilets and transport, and of course to Lucas and Leandra for quite simply transforming my experience of football.

Book Review: 'Je veux croire au soleil' by Jacques Semelin

Jacques Semelin, Je veux croire au soleil (Paris: les Arènes, 2016)

Part travel journal, part guide to living creatively with blindness, Jacques Semelin’s humorous description of his stay in Montreal is a charming and honest account of the day-to-day annoyances and joys of life as a blind academic.

Readers familiar with Semelin’s first memoir, J’arrive où je suis étranger (which I write about here) will remember that his gradual journey from sightedness to blindness was not an easy one. Semelin's internalised ableism meant that he spent many years doing his best to 'pass' as a sighted person before finally 'coming out' as blind. In Je veux croire au soleil he celebrates the new creativeness which his blindness has given him and reflects on how to make sense of his non-visual life for a sighted reader:

Je me suis mis en quête d’un autre vocabulaire, de métaphores, de mises en scènes, bref, de tous les moyens de mieux saisir le réel par l’imaginaire.

I found myself identifying particularly strongly with Semelin's description of the 'saut psychologique' (psychological leap) he had to make from independence to dependence. Like him I spent years finding ingenious ways of doing things for myself. And like him I resisted asking for help for as long as I could:

Se faire aider conduit bien plus tôt à reconnaître un effondrement de soi. On ne peut plus faire ceci ou cela. […] Se faire aider revient ici à devoir admettre son infériorité physique en quelque chose, une infirmité en somme.

Whilst the wealthy willingly pay for assistance as a way of asserting their dominance, Semelin recognizes that asking for - and knowing how to graciously accept - help is one of the hardest things a blind person must do. Having to be helped can feel like a loss of personhood and an acknowledgement of inferiority. But knowing when to accept help can feel like a liberation. I recognise in Semelin's references to pride and honour my own (sometimes unhelpfully stubborn) reluctance to ask for help. Perhaps this explains my dislike of taxis and my preference for public transport.

Il faut trouver la force de se pousser dehors. Quand on n’y voit pas il est toujours tentant de rester bien au chaud dans un lieu clos. L’extérieure reste angoissant. Mais la volonté de se prendre en charge et la curiosité de la découverte peuvent aussi vous attirer vers l’inconnu de la rue.

As well as learning how to fight his natural urge not to ask for help, Semelin also describes how he forces himself to leave his cosy flat and explore Montreal. His description of his solitary adventure down the busy rue Saint-Denis is a powerful illustration of the appeal of the sensual world he inhabits. His descriptions of snippets of conversation, cooking smells and the changing feel of the air on his face provide a non-traditional - but equally valuable - visitor's guide to one of Montreal's most famous streets. Semelin's sensual appreciation of Montreal is an evocative celebration not only of non-visual travel but also of the unexpected pleasures of being blind and alone in an unfamiliar environment. Semelin's wanderings are often punctuated by encounters with strangers and these chance meetings, and the stimulating and rewarding conversations which ensue, are a reminder that blindness's enforced dependence on others is a gateway to a shared humanity which is often denied the more self-reliant sighted traveller.

Les personnes qui n’ont pas l’habitude de côtoyer des non-voyants ont souvent tendance à craindre le pire pour leur sécurité à tort.

One of the most appealing aspects of Semelin's memoir is that it is not unremittingly cheerful. He is frustrated and annoyed by his landlady's pessimistic prediction of the problems he will have with dustbins and domestic appliances. Whilst appreciative of the new technologies which make his academic work possible, he is also right to point out that screen readers and talking smart phones are hampered by their reliance on sight-dependent software:

Ce sont les instruments quotidiens d’une dictature qui ne dit pas son nom et qui transcende les régimes politiques, celle de l’image.

In both Montreal and Ottawa Semelin was disappointed that museums - especially those dealing with the persecution of minorities - were largely inaccessible to him. I wonder what he would make of Canada's new human rights museum which recently opened in Winnipeg and which I write about here.

Pourtant une certaine amertume ne m’a pas vraiment quitté. Cette promenade a-t-elle ravivé la mélancolie que je sais toujours au fond de moi comme une nostalgie pour ce monde dont j’ai dû abandonner les rives voici bien longtemps ? Cela fait des années et des années que j’en suis exclu mais quoi que je fasse, une vieille douleur se réveille de tems en autres, comme en ce moment.

Semelin's work made me both smile and cry out in recognition. But it also made me nostalgic. Unlike him, I do not miss the sighted world, but I do miss the time when I too was a lone traveller in a francophone land. Maybe I'll go alone to Montreal one day. And maybe like Semelin I'll do battle with a recalcitrant microwave, relish the sounds and smells of the rue Saint-Denis and explore the wonderfully multisensory Cour des Sens at the Jardin botanique.

Travelling Blind in Japan

Recently I was lucky enough to visit Japan with my family. Like most tourists, we spent our time admiring the country's temples, palaces and pagodas, shopping for chopsticks and yukata and enjoying the wonderful food on offer. But I also spent some time thinking about what it might be like to be blind in Japan. Below I list my three favourite blind-friendly Japanese experiences, in no particular order....

This image shows the hustle and bustle of Shibuya crossing after dark, with its giant neon adverts overhead.

1) Multi-Sensory Tokyo 
Japan's capital city is well-known for its stunning sites and dazzling neon and we certainly found much of interest to look at in the city. But it is also a place which appeals to the other senses much more strongly than other cities I have visited. I was particularly struck by the way the smell of incense pervades the city. Temples, shrines and many shops burn incense at their entrances and this leads to a kind of olfactory beckoning: it felt to me like the wafting aromas acted as a non-visual window display inviting me in to pause and explore. Add in the enticing smells of cooking coming from all sides and a walk through the city becomes a richly evocative smellscape.

The image shows a group of people, including my youngest son Zac, lighting incense sticks outside a temple in Nara.

2) The Bath-House
Communal bathing is a favourite social activity in Japan and we were excited to discover a bathhouse next to our hotel in Tokyo. I'll admit that I was nervous about visiting at first. Not only would I have to visit on my own (my husband and sons were sent to the male side of the establishment) but I knew my glasses would be rendered useless by the steamy atmosphere. Once I had got my bearings though, I realised that the bathhouse is an environment where other senses take precedence over the sense of sight. I found that the ritual of washing and then immersing my body in a series of pools of varying temperatures (from very hot to very cold) was a holistic experience which spoke especially to my sense of touch. And the uninhibited way the Japanese women at the bath-house were happy to walk around naked suggested that unlike our obsessively body-conscious Western culture, Japanese people are perhaps more accepting of bodies of all different shapes and sizes.

3) Tactile Streets
From the moment we stepped off the plane at Haneda International Airport, I was struck by the amount of tactile signage provided. Paths of large raised dots on the ground indicated the routes to passport control and bag claim, and a Braille display even explained the layout of the airport toilets. These helpful floor markings continued throughout the city's public transport network and beyond. Even in small hostels and hotels, both indoor and outdoor flights of stairs were marked by tactile panels and many flights also had Braille on the handrails to indicate the start and end points. All escalators and lifts has audio prompts, as did traffic lights and many vending, ATM and ticket machines. As a pedestrian I felt both well-guided and safe and this attention to the blind person's ease of mobility made navigating unfamiliar places a surprisingly pleasant and relaxing experience.

This image shows me with my husband and eldest son Raffy standing on a bridge over the Sumida river. There are trees laden with cherry blossom in the background.

Skiing Blind

As my adventures at Go Ape show, I have always been a bit of a dare devil. But despite my love of adrenalin-fuelled activities like ice-skating and trampolining, I always assumed that my partial blindness would prevent me from taking part in really dangerous sports like skiing.

When I first 'came out' as blind at work and started using my white cane to get around campus, a colleague surprised me by recommending that I take my family on a skiing holiday. Her insistence that skiing is an essentially tactile sport which relies much more on touch and even hearing that it does on sight intrigued me and after watching some blind skiing online, I decided to give it a try. So last week me, my husband and our two boys travelled to Saas-Fee in the Swiss Alps to learn to ski.

Everything about skiing was completely new to me. I had never held a pair of skis, never been to a ski resort and I soon discovered that I didn't even know how to get into my salopettes. My first challenge, aside from familiarising myself with the layout of the hotel, was understanding what equipment I needed and how it worked. The first thing we did when we got to Saas-Fee was visit the ski-hire shop to pick up our boots, skis, poles and helmets. Luckily there were plenty of staff on hand to help us and I had been forewarned to bring all our height, weight and (continental) shoe measurements with us. Trying on ski boots was an adventure in itself. They come with a bewildering array of fastenings, straps and layers of padding and I soon discovered that putting on ski boots is a long and complicated process.

Properly-fitting boots are crucial for confident and controlled skiing 

because heels and toes are often used to control turns and improve balance.

Having managed to find some boots that fitted, I did not pay very much attention to the skis themselves. This turned out to be a mistake. Although my white skis looked very stylish as I carried them back to the hotel, it was only the following morning that I realised that they were not very easy to see on the snow! During the week, my biggest problems (and toughest tumbles) occurred when my skis crossed without me noticing. Next time I go skiing perhaps I'll try and get myself a bright orange pair instead.

When we finally got all our kit back to the hotel, I was relieved to find large and well-lit storage areas for boots, helmets and skis. Sighted readers might find this trivial, but one of my main worries before our trip had been what if I struggled to find my unfamiliar stuff (which looked and felt a lot like everyone else's stuff) in a badly organised and jumbled boot room. Happily there was enough space for me to find a familiar corner in which to keep my gear and this made getting ready each morning a little bit easier.

On our way to meet our instructor, I discovered that walking in ski boots is almost as tricky as learning to put them on. Even though our hotel was only a couple of minutes from the beginners' slopes, it felt like a long and difficult journey over bumpy snow and patches of ice. Without my white cane to guide me the unfamiliar route made me feel lost and disorientated, especially as I wasn't yet used to wearing my OTG (over-the-glasses) goggles. I arrived at the meeting point flustered and hot (which further steamed up my goggles) and was beginning to think that learning to ski hadn't been such a great idea after all.

When Simon and I booked our holiday we signed up for regular group beginners' lessons but as I watched the 2014 Winter Paralympics and saw the specialist guiding needed by the partially blind skiers I began to worry that group lessons would not give me the support and attention I would need to build my confidence. After several phone conversations and email exchanges with Esprit Ski in England who were in turn liaising with the hotel manager, the resort rep and the ski school in Saas-Fee, I was delighted to discover that there was a ski instructor in the resort who had worked with blind skiers before and who would be able to give us lessons for the whole week. 

Simon and I with our wonderful instructor/guide Jolanda: 

note our smart 'blind skier' bibs.

When we met Jolanda Stettler I was immediately struck by her openness and tact. One of the first things she did was ask me whether I would be happy to wear a 'blind skier' vest over my jacket. Given the stigma that still surrounds blindness, it must have been difficult for Jolanda to bring up this tricky subject which can make blind and partially blind people uncomfortable. A couple of years ago this suggestion would have upset me, but since then I have done a lot of work on feeling happy with my white cane and proud of my blindness and I was delighted to wear the vest. It immediately made me feel safer and more secure: I hoped it would remind other skiers to keep out of my way and encourage the ski lift attendants to give me a bit of extra help with those tricky drag lifts...

Jolanda's next job, after guiding me onto the nursery slopes, was to help me get into my skis. This was another challenge. Not only did I find it difficult to tell the front of my skis from the back, I found it impossible to position my boot so that it would easily snap into place. At first I was annoyed that this part of skiing seemed to depend on having enough vision to see the boots and skis. How would I ever become an independent skier if I always needed help before I even got started? But as the week went on, and I got more practised at putting on my skis, I found that I didn't need to see my skis or  boots at all. Once I'd felt my toes into position, trial and error helped me locate the right place for my heel. And if I'd judged it right, a very satisfying click told me that I was good to go. (Later in the week, after watching me struggle with the fiddly task of removing skis by fitting the ski pole into the back of the binding, Jolanda also taught me an alternative 'blind-friendly' way of removing each ski with the other boot.) 

After so much complicated preparation, gliding down a gentle slope on my skis felt easy.

The gymnastics I did as a child taught me balance and co-ordination and I have surprisingly good spatial awareness. Once Jolanda had shown me what position my legs and feet should be in, how I should lean and which parts of the skis should touch the snow, I quickly got the hang of turning and stopping.

And my colleague was right! Skiing is a very tactile sport. Even if I had been able to see my skis I wouldn't have wanted to look at them: it is much better to point your head in the direction you want to travel, and rely on the movement of your body to steer the skis. And feeling the contact between skis and snow helped me tell what kind of snow I was dealing with, which in turn told me how much weight to put into my turns.

As I became more confident on the snow I was more and more pleased that we had decided to opt for private lessons with an instructor/guide. Skiing itself might be a tactile sport but navigating down the slopes certainly isn't. Even with my glasses and goggles, I quickly discovered that I could not see well enough to distinguish the sides of the piste, other skiers or changes in the snow's consistency. Even on a slope I knew well I could rarely tell where I was in relation to its top or bottom. Without my guide I would not have got down even the gentlest of slopes. But when I was following Jolanda's bright orange guide vest and listening to her instructions I didn't have to worry about where I was or where I was going. Jolanda's movements and the sound of her voice and skis told me when to turn, when to be in parallel or snowplough and when to stop. I knew she would get me down safely. And she always did. And in the afternoons, when Jolanda was working elsewhere, Simon quickly got the hang of guiding me too.

Most ski instructors would be (understandably) nervous about teaching a partially blind beginner. After all, skiing is a dangerous sport and it is easy to imagine how a skier who cannot see where she is going could be a risk to herself and others. But Jolanda didn't seem nervous at all: her previous experiences with blind skiers had given her a clear sense of what I was able to do and whilst she never took any risks, she did encourage me to attempt more challenging lifts and runs every day so that by the end of the week I felt like I had made real progress. I was never terrified or panicky, but I was never completely in my comfort zone either: as soon as I felt confident doing something, we moved on to something harder.

I am not (yet) an amazing skier. I still like to go quite slowly and am cautious with my turns. But I can ski. And when I am following a guide I can reasonably confidently go down blue (beginner) slopes without stopping or falling over. I am so glad I took my colleague's advice. Learning to ski was an exciting, empowering and liberating experience which has given me a powerful feeling of self-confidence and a real sense of achievement.

With thanks to Abigail for giving me the idea in the first place, Soph and Dom for making it happen, Simon for being there with me the whole time, the staff at Esprit Ski and the Hotel Annahof for all their help, hard work and very welcome food and drink, Raffy, Zak and Cesca for getting me back out on the slopes every afternoon, Merri for cuddles and walks in the snow when skiing got a bit much, and of course Jolanda for her skill, enthusiasm, patience, generosity and sense of humour as well as for the photos.

  

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.

The Unintended Consequences of Mobility Training

There is no doubt that the thing I hated most about being a partially blind pre-teen was the dreaded 'mobility training'. When I was 11 years old, a well-meaning lady (let's call her 'Doris') started coming to my house once a week in an attempt to teach me how to get around. I loved the idea of Independence and couldn't wait to be allowed to walk home from school alone or go into town on my own, but I hated the reality of the training. It felt so infuriatingly patronising to be taught how to use a bus timetable or read a metro map. When I'd mastered these basics, 'Doris' would devise complicated journeys around the Tyne and Wear public transport network for me to complete whilst she followed at a distance to make sure I didn't come to any harm. I couldn't bear being watched by her and after one particularly nasty 'spying' incident I only reluctantly (and tearfully) agreed to continue with the training because I knew it would lead to my much-craved Independence.

Thirty years later I still feel angry when I think back to those sessions, but I can now also appreciate their consequences. Thanks to 'Doris' I have always been a confident and proficient traveller. I have no qualms whatsoever about undertaking long journeys alone, have travelled solo in the UK, Spain, France and the US and have always felt a thrill of excitement in the bustle of a busy train station. Perhaps this is why I do a job that involves around 15 hours of bus and train journeys each week.

My 'mobility training' certainly taught me how to find my way in both familiar and unfamiliar settings but I wonder now if it had a more profound effect on my approach to travel. I love getting to grips with unfamiliar public transport networks and can be quite geeky about the intricacies of various bus routes. Before undertaking a journey to a new place I can spent hours studying timetables, route maps and plans in an attempt to create a mental map of the journey before me and once I'm on my journey I love the sense of community and belonging that public transport brings. When most of my friends and colleagues would automatically jump into a taxi in an unfamiliar place, I feel a huge buzz when I get where I'm going via complicated combinations of buses, trains and trams. It may take longer, but it is so much more satisfying. Resorting to taxis feels like failure to me. So each time I successfully complete a tricky journey and triumphantly conquer another public transport network I think that just perhaps the 'Doris' sessions were not as bad as I thought at the time. Would I have become such a happy and enthusiastic traveller without her?