தமிழ்நாடு மத்தியப் பல்கலைக் கழகம் (திருவாரூர்) நடத்திய நேற்றைய இணையவழி கருத்தரங்கில் நான் ஆற்றிய உரைக்கான குறிப்புகள்:
Problems of Reading and Writing Disability - notes
“In American literature, disabled characters are often portrayed as “that other” and used to generate fear, pathos, and hatred.”
The dominant feelings held by nondisabled persons toward disabled persons are so very often sympathy, fear, or distaste; these reactions are often accompanied by avoidance or patronization. These terms also describe how disabled people are treated in American literature—that is, the subject of disability is avoided or the individuals are generally presented in a stereotypical, and often negative, manner. Disabled people are portrayed as helpless, super- abled (pure and good), or evil monsters.
Fear of the Morbidity
Murphy explains:
“The kind of culture the handicapped American must face is just as much a part of the environs of his disability as his wheelchair. It hardly needs saying that the disabled, individually and as a group, contravene all the values of youth, virility, activity, and physical beauty that Americans cherish however little most individuals may embody them. Most handicapped people, myself included, sense that others resent them for this reason: we are the subverters of an American ideal, we become ugly and repulsive to the able-bodied. We represent a fearsome possibility” (1995, p. 143).
Disabled Literature—Disabled Individuals in American Literature: Reflecting Culture(s) Miles Beauchamp, Ph.D. & Wendy V. Chung
Is Disability Real or a Construct?
As with Gender Studies, there is a disagreement on what is disability. Among disability theorists there are largely two different groups: a) researchers from an Anglican tradition who believe that disability is real, who go with a practical explanation and are more activism based. (Renu Addlakha and Meenu, Miles Beauchamp, Ph.D. & Wendy V. Chung Bhambhani and others belong to this tradition) b) French post-structuralist disability thinkers and Americans and those influenced by them who focus on the non-normative and non-essential nature of disable subjecthood, such as how consciousness of a leprosy patient could be inseparable from the disintegrating body, how their sense of subjecthood is corporeal and how that is manifested in language (“Self-mortification and the Stigma of Leprosy in Northern India” by Ronald F. Barrett). Erving Goffman, Robert F. Murphy, George Taleporos, Marita P. McCabe, Matthew Kohrman, Renu Addlakha, Carol Thomas, Tanya Titchkosky, Russel P. Shuttleworth, Dan Goodley and Mark Rapley, Anne Wilson and Peter Beresford, Shelley Tremain, Rebecca Schneider are good example of this camp.
To read further: Disability and Society: A Reader; Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory
Disability is a corporeal experience; in an ontological sense, it determines how you ‘exist’. But it is also a construct since it adapts to the infrastructural flaws of the environment or the inequalities produced by normative bias of structures, such as building constructions, roads, prejudices in language and so on. If the world changes then disability could change as well. You might have in future a world where there are no constraints and you could exists as anyone else with a normative body. We could even do away with terms like disability, differently abled and non-normative bodies. White it is true that the infrastructural changes might happen to make the world disabled friendly it has to accepted that changes in language are extremely difficult. That is an unseen future, we don’t know if such a dream would be realized. So these binaries might continue to function, though in an egalitarian manner.
So what is disability? It is both.
Not All Disabilities are Same
A person with motor disability experiences the world quite differently from a person with visual disability. Differently abled people form their ingroups based on the kind of disability they have. So it is wrong to clump them together as one singular kind of people. We need to recognise the differences within and between the differently abled.
Disability as a Trope
A major issue for the disabled body to be experienced as such in literature, whether in writing or reading, is that readers tend to treat disability as a trope.
Disability as such is untranslatable, non-communicable and so readers tend to take it as a trope for something similar in their experiences as a normative bodied person, then put themselves in the shoes of the disabled person and finally feel one with the character. Here they are neither empathising with the disabled nor treating the disabled as an object; rather they create an in-between space, like a room of mirrors - yes they are seeing the disabled personhood but only in reflected reflections like Bruce Lee in the climactic fight of ‘Enter the Dragon”.
Literature or any form of language expression is entitled to the curse of metaphysics and it cannot escape constantly transforming the corporeality of human experiences into something accessible to the mind, such as an abstraction or a simple or complex feeling. Even this abstract thought or feeling is feeling, it is an objet petit a, - an unattainable object of desire, as Lacan puts it.
Also it is convenient to use disability as a trope for the writers - it then becomes a ‘convenient Other’, standing for things a normative bodied characters cannot. The disabled beggars in Jeyamohan’s “Ezham Ulagam” are imperfect beings, broken people, but it is their brokenness that lends them a sense of spirituality, greatness beyond their physical limitations. To imply this he places them in the environs of temple premises and their act of begging he connects, quite subconsciously, with Bhakti literature, where begging is an act of pleading for God’s kindness, love and grace. You find Akkamahadevi and others claiming that they dont mind disfiguring themselves for the love of the lord. Jeyamohan thus uses disability to create a moral revulsion and fear among readers and then spiritualises them as well, thus making them into ‘convenient Others’.
In S. Ramakrishnan’s fiction, esp. novels such as Nimitham and Thuyil, disability is used as a trope for the marginalized and to accentuate a sense of loss, a general feeling of helplessness and despondency.
In much of Tamil Eelam fiction about the civil war, fatalities and losses as well as migration the disability functions as a trope for the loss of the mother land. A physically broken person is an uprooted individual without a country in their fiction.
In my novel “Rasigan” I signified the deterioration in the character of a little magazine activist by making him into a disabled person in the final stage of his life.
So turning disability which is a corporeal existence into a matter of signification is as much a problem of reading as well as writing.
Another reason could be that portraying disability in a regular / normative fictional world would seem too shocking, inappropriate, jarring or even morbid for most readers. For example if your character is an elected representative, a loving wife, a handsome and caring husband, a school or college student or even a small child, they don’t easily fit into the world of realistic fiction. One problem is the disabled bodies are not visible as the normative bodied ones are. Another is that the readers would not easily accept that, say, a woman with leucoderma is quite pretty. She could be pretty but for the readers it is difficult to digest as their first response is one of revulsion and then pity. This derives from their own fear of becoming physically non-normative in future. People find it difficult to imagine such scenarios as normal and so they need to detach themselves from such images. They use pity to tide over the depressive mood of considering that a non-normative body could exist in the same way as a normative one and that life is similarly experienced by both.
So the challenges in front of writing the differently-abled are the same as those before literature as well - to face the corporeal existence as such without transcending it using abstraction, romanticising, and in the process turning real people into bodiless abstractions, into intellectual projections or emotion-driven subjecthoods.
Tamil Writers and Disability
Venkat Ram’s Kaathukal, Jeyamohan’s Ezham Ulagam, Sarmila Saith’s Ummath, R.Abilash’s Kaalkal , a few short stories by Sundara Ramasamy, Sujatha, Ashokamitran
My Favorite Tamil Books on Differently Abled?
Then Seerudayan’s Nirangalin Ulagam, Muthu Meenal’s Mul and the recent wheelchair poems of Manushya Puthiran
Why is Disability Literature Important?
Because it challenges the metaphysical, transcendental tendency of mainstream literature.
And because it increases the negotiating power of the differently abled / disability activists, makes people more accommodating towards the differently abled forced to live in a largely inaccessible world.
In a way, the purpose of disability literature is similar to feminist literature - to make literature more corporeal and less abstract and to seek equality in an unfair world.
This could be reason why when writing disabled characters assigning the feminine gender would be a good idea - it makes them more vibrant and lively, unlike male differently abled who turn out to be rigid. In future gender studies and disability studies could work together.
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