On Blindness in Poetry

By Reja-e Busailah

I am told that I lost my eyesight during the seventh month of my life. I was educated in boarding schools, in schools specially for the blind, and in public schools. I taught the blind when I was still living in Palestine, where I was born in 1929, when I lived in New York City, when I worked in Kuwait; and I hold a master’s degree in special education. Still, I should be embarrassed to admit that studying in a scholarly fashion the phenomenon of blindness (“disability”) has never seriously interested me. I have a Ph.D. in English Literature from New York University, and I taught literature for some thirty years. I am now a retired professor emeritus. I have enjoyed poetry all my life, writing it in Arabic when a child and later in English. I may say I have used poetry to react to all things that have interested me including, of course, the phenomenon of blindness, not academically, but as a poet. I have lived with blindness all my life, and have become accustomed to the ways and means, so to speak, of the phenomenon. To a large extent this “disability”, then, is only one of the phenomena of ordinary life, to be dealt with as an aspect of life, with, if you like, what most sighted people would judge with special consideration. I have lived so long with the phenomenon. I do not consider it special.

Reja-e Busailah with his latest publication Poems of a Palestinian Boyhood.

As I have said, I am a poet. I am a poet first and foremost, and my poetry is a reaction to as many phenomena of life as I am aware of: personal and general, emotional, social, political, and so forth. Needless to say that all these phenomena interact and influence each other. They give to each other and take from each other. My poetry deals with all of this and more. I write poems about blindness with as much comfort as I would write poems about “the honeysuckle, that divine commoner”, the call of a bird, the behavior of a politician, or the face of a girl as conveyed to me by her voice. Yet they are poems which, in a sense, focus on a specific phenomenon, the phenomenon of blindness, some directly, some not so directly, while still others deal with the theme from quite a distance. Moreover, these poems are all taken from a manuscript, Poems Out of Sight. Blindness, in one way or another, to assert once more, is in each of my poems, though none of them was written with the purpose of exploring the theme. They were written only in response to the dictation of the circumstance prevailing about the time of the writing.

Let me comment on a specific aspect of the many consequences of blindness. Much of the experience an ordinary blind person gets is through the ear, through sound and through the complexity of sound which produces the word. Space does not allow here for an at length discussion of touch. The blind person hears of a vast field and of a limitless sky, and the acquisition of this experience does not stop with hearing. The blind person has been given the word, and words are pregnant with concreteness and an infinity of growth, concepts, and connotations. Thus a word becomes the repository and vehicle of our intellectual growth, of civilization itself. A blind person, then, has the benefit of the word. Blind people are capable of participating in most of the social activities of the sighted. You find them engaged in all sorts of activities theoretical and practical, scientific, technical, and philosophical, in education, in politics, and so forth. I cannot forget the two blind men in Kuwait who came to learn Braille, the three R’s and so forth while still keeping their job of earning their daily living. After class or before it, they would swim to anchored ships to bring ashore in large leather sacks the sweet water the country needed then. This is why segregating the blind from the rest of society is a bad mistake. Integrating them with the rest of society is very beneficial to both.

Reja-e Busailah reading poetry for his YouTube channel.

Let me select only a few of the manifestations of the interaction between blindness and the world of sight or society as I have experienced it in action and in reflection. I will present the examples of these manifestations only as they are treated in my poetry. Blindness in the poems is not primarily the focus. The focus is on the poem and only an aspect of the phenomenon is used or mentioned, sometimes seriously, sometimes humorously, and so forth.

It has long been held that blindness is a mystery with supernatural roots and origins. Blindness is a curse or a blessing from God or from some mysterious power. Two superstitions emanate from this in “The Four Branches”: the husband who opens the day with rage and anger on glimpsing a blind person crossing his way, and the wife who ends the day pleased and contented because the blind person is the first to enter her store, which brings her so much business this day long. The blind person is aware only of

the morning greeting
of the sapling of a child
[which] reaches the blind ears,
hesitant yet resolute,
unaware of the cares of sight,
innocent of the confusion
on the awakening of the soul.

In “Journey of a Curse”, this attitude is given a clearer expression. The blind child throws a rock at the old man, who responds by

he panted up the hill,
he paused at what he saw,
he cursed under his breath:
“No wonder God smote you blind!”
He spat on his left,
his footsteps echoed into the dusk.

At the end of the poem, though, the blind boy has acquired some education, and is able to repeat to his interlocutors:

“When man is good,
he is higher than the angels;
when he is not good,
he is lower than the beasts.”
The couple listened with wonder and humility,
“God blessed the blind for reasons
man’s ken may never probe!”

In “Virgil and Beatrice”, the emphasis is on something that happens pretty regularly everywhere, and on the humor with which it is treated:

So normal was that day,
“normal,” you know what I mean
that you couldn’t but think of the cliché
which pops up into the blind mind’s remembrance
upon such a day:

“Does your dog bite?”
“You bet he does.
Virgie would love to have a hunk
of your flesh for his dinner!”
After all, if it had to be so,
let it be him, not me!
I would be lying,
if it were the reverse.

Or upon another such day:
“What’s your dog’s name?...
Isn’t he adorable?...
He’s your best friend, isn’t he?”

“To tell you the truth, he isn’t.”
This bemused the poor woman,
shocked her into a strange silence,
staring as a blind man thought
until he enlightened:
“Betty is my best friend,”
touching his wife’s arm.
After all, wasn’t she the one
who was going to pacify his hunger that night?

“To Whom” is a commentary on factual events pretty common in life and quite similar in sound, and shall I say, looks too. The poem concentrates on violence. The blind child is a member, an essential member, of a community similar in fate and the workings of fate. The dog is helpless while being clubbed to death because he is tied. The blind child (actually the author) is lashed and lashed until his feet are bloodied and swollen when he is thrown on his back with his feet gripped tight. The girl is also held down on her back with the boots of two men on her hands, “that the third may thrust and thrust and thrust,” while the AK-47 is impatiently waiting to complete the job. Now, the fate of these three is the same as the fate of Palestine when Great Britain for thirty years held the people violently down in order to give the country to the foreigners. And this she did with great success, accompanied by dark horrors either unknown or wantonly ignored.

The speaker knows (mentally) that his wife sees with her eyes in the poem “Her Eyes.” But he does not see. How does he circumvent the frustration?

If the sound of her voice is the spark
which puts out the old stars, which inflames the dawn
and makes thirstier with the dew the beams of the sun
forever young
forever old;
if the sound of her voice is the start
which ripples through the day
hour by sparkling hour
and tipples in the bright and the red
before it comes ashore;
if the sound of her voice is the birth and the breath
and the pulse in the soul
and the spirit of the pulse—
I wonder what is left for the light of her eyes!

Far-fetched? Maybe, but there is an adequate substitution for the absence of sight, however subjective or arbitrary it may be. Sound, or the word here, has supplanted sight. In “Two Airs”, you may say the picture is reversed. The author would perhaps paint the sound of the cardinal were he not blind. Instead he imagines a parallel to the sound of the cardinal. Here the two songs of the bird resemble two objects, the carnation standing on its stem and a flourishing bell:

Two airs of a cardinal
(he has quite a few in his repertoire)
a cardinal who is either fully oblivious
to the world, or wholly of it.
Like children scaling up and down a fragrant dream,
one air scales up
the other scales down
the length of a white carnation
standing on its stem,
An air flushed starting downward
from the brim of a cup of sunlight,
another blushing as it flourishes
upward towards bell’s bloom.

Again, this may sound too far away from the “disability” blindness. All the same, blindness remains related to the poem. “A Note on Touch” best exemplifies the highly subjective, arbitrarily subjective, treatment of something physical with imagery acceptable perhaps only to its author. One aim is to reject the attitude among the sighted that touch replaces vision. Space is too narrow for discussing the poem at length.

The face of the sick child shocks the mother,
she sees it as a hard-boiled egg!
The child runs a blind hand
over the face of the peeled egg,
it is smooth and soft, it is delightful:

Touch, therefore, when shielded from the representations
of the sense of light,
grows its own garden of realities,
solid facts
as a matter of fact,

anchored outside the domain of vision.
The fallacy, therefore, of assuming
that hand and eye are relatives
only breeds the falsehood that the dynamics
of, say, a fish’s mouth

in either’s hold are similar
if not the same;
(but let us first dispose by way of footnote
of the man who out of touch with sight
once marveled greatly at the marble mouth1

all misled by its smoothness from its severity,
or of the goddess of beauty who short-touchedly
mated with a bandy-legged bore2):
to the touch pure and free
the mouth of that primary beast

becomes a mermaid’s
transported into a summer’s nigh-haze
composed of mist-moistened sun,
and a vase in her hand
gleaming through the morning

the special mouth beaming
as on a crystal range
the clarinet’s scale in bloom—
visual sensibility tamed fantastic
if you like by the alchemy of touch.

Blindness then is the deprivation of sight. In such poems as we have just mentioned mixed imagery is resorted to, not perversely, but in reaction to the pressure of necessity. The visual experience which is absent here is expressed by, or translated into, the experiences of the remaining faculties. It is hoped that this arbitrariness is still compensated for by these new experiences. But it is the reader who will have the ultimate judgement on the treatment of the theme in the poems as well as their artistic quality.

The “disability” of blindness, then, occupies much more of the human concern than do other disabilities. As we have seen, this is due to the nature of the impairment of the disability. It so lends itself to varieties of interpretations, expansions, modifications, and so forth. No wonder, then, that Jose Saramago devotes a whole novel to blindness as a metaphor in which a whole city goes blind.

Reja-e Busailah accepting the Palestine Book Award for Best Memoir 2018 in London.

Reja-e Busailah’s latest publications are In the Land of My Birth: A Palestinian Boyhood (Institute for Palestine Studies 2017), winner of the Palestine Book Award (2018) and Poems of a Palestinian Boyhood (Smokestack Books 2019). He enjoys sharing his poetry with others especially reading his poetry on his YouTube channel. 

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Recommended citation
Reja-e Busailah (2019): On Blindness in Poetry. In: Public Disability History 4 (2019) 10.

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Dis/ability History as a Subject of Teaching and Learning: A Lab Report

by Cordula Nolte & Sabine Horn

Dis/ability History as a Subject of Teaching and Learning: A Lab Report
[german version]

In recent years, we have seen many processes set in motion that share an aim to widen participation in society: inclusive schools and lessons, disabled access to public buildings, the media and educational and cultural events, dis/ability studies and dis/ability history as new, international research fields that have now also made their way into the German academic system. Hitherto, however, there has been little overlap between inclusive practice at schools and university-based dis/ability research in historical subjects such as history, archaeology, art history, literary history and language history. The obvious idea of linking the inclusion practised in history lessons with dis/ability as a topic, for example, has only been discussed occasionally in didactics, even though this approach would constitute “inclusive learning” in a double sense, both in regard to the learning environment and in regard to the topic of learning. History teaching has not embraced dis/ability history yet, despite this programme’s ability to link a range of different school subjects. By contrast, formats that convey knowledge and science outside school settings are already tapping into dis/ability studies’ and dis/ability history’s potential to establish creative cooperative endeavours, as blogs, podcasts, performances and exhibitions such as the participative projects LeibEigenschaften (Bremen 2012) and Touchdown (Bonn 2016/17) show.

The historical sciences at Bremen University recently used the findings of the interdisciplinary network “Homo debilis. Dis/ability in der Vormoderne” (“Dis/ability in the Premodern Era”) to test ways in which current research approaches could be translated into new teaching concepts. The university’s history didactics and historical science departments both agree on what up-to-date teaching programmes should aim for: both teacher training and MA students should engage with the socially topical and scientifically innovative theme of dis/ability. In doing so, students should explore this field as independently as possible, in line with the ideal of learning through research. They should prepare their findings either to be shared in school lessons or to be disseminated through scientific communication outside school, developing suitable formats for conveying their work to different public spheres and audiences. This will provide students with competencies that are key in a wide range of different jobs.

These reflections formed the basis of an experiment. A pilot module (“Dis/ability History - A New Perspective in the Historical Sciences”) consisting of two closely intertwined seminars was taught in cooperation between historical science and history didactics, further supported by a survey carried out by the inclusive pedagogy department. The historical science seminar taught the basic content and methods of dis/ability studies and dis/ability history from an interdisciplinary perspective and spanning various historical time periods. The aim here was to show first and foremost that abilities and disabilities are fluid phenomena that change over the course of history. Different concepts, ascriptions and practices existed and continue to exist in different cultures, social milieus and discourse communities. At the same time, the examples of selected thematic fields such as work, family relations and religion showed vividly how useful a tool the analytical category of dis/ability is: dis/ability – especially in conjunction with other categories such as gender – is a convenient lens through which to focus both on society as a whole and on its various facets. In the historical science seminar, the students developed their own topics and questions, which they aimed to research and prepare for selected target audiences (such as school classes, teachers, interested “laypeople” such as museum visitors or film audiences, or recipients with specific disabilities such as reading difficulties).

Screenshot of one of the explanatory videos.

The result was a whole gamut of multilayered, original work. In their projects, the students enquire into the ways science fiction films negotiate “normality”, “being different” and “special abilities”, examining the scenario of a society made up of mutants and non-mutants. They investigate the implications of epithets and nicknames such as “the mute” or “the beardless”, from which some contemporary family names derive, in various medieval cultural spheres. They discuss ways in which medieval texts’ and images’ contradictory information on the compatibility of “dis/ability and rulership” can be used in school teaching, also touching upon the expectations we have of politicians and those exercising power today. They cast light upon the beginnings of a psychiatric institution near Bremen, using an individual patient record to show how diagnoses such as “moral idiocy” or “hysteria” were constructed around 1900. They discuss the functions and significance of prostheses in past, contemporary and future societies, from wooden legs to cyborgs. They portray the American writer Helen Keller as a political activist. They dispel myths about the supposed causes of autism. And they enquire into the contemporary challenges of the inclusive school system by critically outlining the development of special schools.

Screenshot of one of the explanatory videos.

The history didactics seminar, where these projects were developed, served as the module’s real “laboratory”. It was decided that the students’ final “product” would be a blog page containing not only text but an explanatory video about the respective topic selected. This rendered the research findings more visible. At the same time, this public exposure encouraged the students to focus on presenting their findings to their target addressees in a manner appropriate to that audience. Beyond the topic of dis/ability, it has been useful for students to engage analytically with the innovative medium of the explanatory video (which also competes with classic lesson formats). Questions concerning the videos’ function (introducing viewers to a topic, enlarging upon or discussing it) and technical possibilities on the one hand and appropriate forms of expression on the other hand were the subject of intense debate.

Initially, all of the students saw developing a blog page with an explanatory video as an unusual, challenging and time-consuming form of “exam”. In the end, however, they were all pleased to have produced something that makes scholarly research more accessible to wider circles. The work presented gave rise to further discussion at the well-attended blog release party.

The project detailed in this report was funded as part of the federal and state governments’ joint “Teacher Training Quality Initiative” by funds of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, funding code 01JA1612. The content of this publication reflects the views of the authors.
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Cordula Nolte is professor for Medieval History at the University of Bremen. Sabine Horn is leader of the Department for History Didactics at the University of Bremen.

Recommended citation:
Cordula Nolte / Sabine Horn (2019): Dis/ability History as a Subject of Teaching and Learning: A Lab Report. In: Public Disability History 4 (2019) 2.

 

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Dis/ability History als Lehr- und Lerngegenstand: ein Bericht aus dem Labor

Inklusive Schul- und Unterrichtsformen, barrierefreie Zugänge zu öffentlichen Bauten, zu Medien und zu Bildungs- und Kulturangeboten, Dis/ability Studies und Dis/ability History als neue, internationale Forschungsfelder auch im deutschen Wissenschaftssystem: In den vergangenen Jahren sind viele Prozesse in Gang gekommen, deren gemeinsames Leitmotiv die Gestaltung gesellschaftlicher Teilhabe ist. Allerdings berühren sich schulische Inklusionspraxis und universitäre Dis/ability-Forschung in den historischen Fächern wie Geschichtswissenschaft, Archäologie, Kunstgeschichte, Literatur- und Sprachgeschichte bisher recht selten. Der naheliegende Gedanke, zum Beispiel im Geschichtsunterricht praktizierte Inklusion mit der inhaltlichen Thematisierung von Dis/ability zu verknüpfen und somit „inklusiven Unterricht“ im doppelten Sinn zu gestalten, nämlich hinsichtlich der Lernumgebung und hinsichtlich des Lerngegenstandes, wurde in der Didaktik erst vereinzelt diskutiert. Überhaupt ist Dis/ability History als ein Programm, das sich ideal für die Verknüpfung mehrerer Schulfächer eignet, noch nicht im Geschichtsunterricht und in verwandten Fächern angekommen. In außerschulischen Formaten der Wissens- und Wissenschaftsvermittlung wird das Potential von Dis/ability Studies und Dis/ability History hingegen schon kreativ für Kooperationen genutzt, das zeigen Blogs, Podcasts, Performances und Ausstellungen wie etwa die partizipativen Projekte LeibEigenschaften (Bremen 2012) und Touchdown (Bonn 2016/17).

Ausgehend von den Erträgen des interdisziplinären Netzwerks „Homo debilis. Dis/ability in der Vormoderne“ wurde in der Geschichtswissenschaft an der Universität Bremen kürzlich erprobt, wie aktuelle Forschungsansätze in neuartige Lehrkonzepte überführt werden können. Die dortige Fachdidaktik und Fachwissenschaft sind sich einig über die Ziele zeitgemäßer Lehrprogramme: Lehramts- und Masterstudierende sollen sich mit dem gesellschaftlich aktuellen und wissenschaftlich innovativen Themenfeld Dis/ability auseinandersetzen und dabei, dem Ideal des forschenden Lernens entsprechend, möglichst auch selbstständige Erkundungen unternehmen. Sie sollen die Erträge für den Schulunterricht oder für die außerschulische Wissenschaftskommunikation aufbereiten, das heißt geeignete Vermittlungsformate für verschiedene Öffentlichkeiten und Publikumskreise erarbeiten und somit wichtige Kompetenzen für verschiedenste Berufsfelder erwerben.

Aus diesen Überlegungen heraus wurde ein Experiment unternommen. Als eine Kooperation von Fachwissenschaft und Fachdidaktik der Geschichtswissenschaft, flankiert von einer Erhebung seitens der Inklusiven Pädagogik, fand ein aus zwei eng verzahnten Seminaren bestehendes Pilotmodul (Dis/ability History - eine neue Perspektive der Geschichtswissenschaft) statt. Das fachwissenschaftliche Seminar vermittelte inhaltliche und methodische Grundlagen von Dis/ability Studies und Dis/ability History, und zwar in epochenübergreifender und interdisziplinärer Perspektive. Hier ging es vor allem darum zu zeigen, dass es sich bei „Behinderung“ und „Nichtbehinderung“, Abilities und Disabilities um fluide, historisch wandelbare Phänomene handelt. In verschiedenen Kulturkreisen, sozialen Milieus und Diskursgemeinschaften bestanden und bestehen unterschiedliche Konzepte, Zuschreibungen und Praktiken. Zugleich erfuhren die Studierenden anschaulich anhand exemplarisch gewählter Themenfelder wie Arbeit, Familienbeziehungen und Religion, welch brauchbares Instrument die analytische Kategorie Dis/ability ist: Dis/ability ist eine geeignete Linse, zumal in Verknüpfung mit weiteren Kategorien wie etwa Gender, um das gesellschaftliche Ganze mit seinen vielfältigen Facetten in den Blick zu nehmen. In dem fachwissenschaftlichen Seminar entwickelten die Studierenden eigene Themen und Fragestellungen, die sie erforschen und für ausgewählte Adressatenkreise (beispielsweise Schulklassen, Lehrerinnen und Lehrer, interessierte „Laien“ als Museumsbesucher oder Filmpublikum, Rezipienten mit spezifischen Beeinträchtigungen wie etwa Leseschwäche) aufbereiten wollten.

Screenshot aus einem der Erklärvideos.

Daraus entstand eine Reihe vielschichtiger, origineller Werke. In ihren Arbeiten fragen die Studierenden danach, inwieweit Science Fiction-Filme den Umgang mit „Normalität“ und „Anderssein“ sowie mit „besonderen Fähigkeiten“ im Szenario einer aus Mutanten und Nichtmutanten bestehenden Gesellschaft verhandeln. Sie untersuchen die Implikationen von Beinamen bzw. Spitznamen wie „die Stumme“ oder „der Bartlose“, auf die manche heutige Familiennamen zurückgehen, in verschiedenen mittelalterlichen Kulturkreisen. Sie erörtern, wie man im Schulunterricht die widersprüchlichen Informationen mittelalterlicher Texte und Bilder zur Vereinbarkeit von „Dis/ability und Herrschaft“ behandeln und dabei heutige Ansprüche an Politiker und Machtausübende thematisieren kann. Sie beleuchten die Anfänge einer psychiatrischen Einrichtung nahe Bremen und zeigen anhand einer individuellen Patientenakte, wie dort um 1900 Diagnosen wie „moralische Idiotie“ oder „Hysterie“ konstruiert wurden. Sie diskutieren die Funktionen und Bedeutungen von Prothesen in vergangenen, heutigen und künftigen Gesellschaften, vom hölzernen Stelzfuß bis zum Cyborg. Sie porträtieren die amerikanische Schriftstellerin Helen Keller als politische Aktivistin. Sie räumen mit Mythen über die angeblichen Ursachen von Autismus auf. Und sie fragen nach heutigen Herausforderungen eines inklusiven Schulsystems, indem sie die Entwicklung der Förderschule kritisch nachzeichnen.

Screenshot aus einem der Erklävideos.

Als eigentliches Labor, in dem diese Projekte erarbeitet wurden, diente das fachdidaktische Seminar. Festgelegt wurde als Produkt die Erstellung einer Blogseite, die neben der textuellen Darstellung ein Erklärvideo zu dem gewählten Thema enthält. Hierdurch wurde die Visibilität der Forschungsergebnisse erhöht. Zugleich sahen die Studierenden aufgrund dieser Öffentlichkeit angeregt, sich mit der Adressatenangemessenheit der Präsentation ihrer Ergebnisse auseinander zu setzen. Jenseits des Themenfeldes Dis/ability hat es sich als sinnvoll erwiesen, dass sich die Studierenden mit dem innovativen (resp. mit dem klassischen Unterricht teilweise konkurrierenden) Medium Erklärvideo analytisch auseinandersetzten. Die Fragen nach der Funktion der Videos (Einführung in ein spezielles Thema, dessen Vertiefung oder Diskussion), nach technischen Möglichkeiten auf der einen Seite und angemessenen Ausdrucksformen auf der anderen wurden hier ebenfalls intensiv diskutiert.

Eine Blogseite mit einem Erklärvideo zu entwickeln, nahmen alle Studierenden anfangs als eine ungewohnte, anspruchsvolle und aufwändige „Prüfungsform“ wahr. Am Ende waren alle zufrieden etwas geschaffen zu haben, das Wissenschaft für breitere Kreise zugänglich macht. Bei der gut besuchten Blog Release Party regten die vorgestellten Werke zu weiteren Diskussionen an.

Das diesem Bericht zugrundeliegende Vorhaben wurde im Rahmen der gemeinsamen „Qualitätsoffensive Lehrerbildung“ von Bund und Ländern mit Mitteln des Bundesministeriums für Bildung und Forschung unter dem Förderkennzeichen 01JA1612 gefördert. Die Verantwortung für den Inhalt dieser Veröffentlichung liegt bei den Autorinnen.
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Cordula Nolte ist Professorin für die Geschichte des Mittelalters an der Universität Bremen. Sabine Horn ist Leiterin der Abteilung für Geschichtsdidaktik an der Universität Bremen.

Empfohlene Zitation:
Cordula Nolte / Sabine Horn (2019): Dis/ability History as a Subject of Teaching and Learning: A Lab Report. In: Public Disability History 4 (2019) 2.

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Reclaiming Our History? Creative Responses to the Nazi Persecution of Disabled People, Part II

by Emmeline Burdett¹

My previous post looked at the ways in which organisations and individuals within the British disability movement have used references to, and symbols connected with, the Nazi persecution of disabled people. I argued that early references were intended both to encourage a sense of common identity amongst disabled people, and to demonstrate that they were an oppressed minority. This latter interpretation was radically different from the traditional view of disabled people as suffering exclusively from their impairments. In this post, I am going to discuss Tanvir Bush’s forthcoming novel CULL, and Liz Crow’s 2008 documentary, exhibition, and art installation, Resistance. In their different ways, both of these engage creatively with the Nazi persecution of disabled people and ask what relevance this has today.

Although Bush’s novel Cull is not due to be published until January 2019, she has written an as-yet unpublished article in which she explains the novel’s themes and how the Nazi analogy is used in it. Similarly, Crow’s website contains a number of articles shedding light on various aspects of the creation of Resistance. As Bush explains,

"CULL is a dark, satirical novel that hypothetically asks what could happen if the UK government sanctioned state-sponsored euthanasia as a social cost-cutting exercise?"²

‘Grave and systemic violations of disabled people’s rights’.
Bush explains in an afterword that she was inspired by the publication, in November 2016, of a United Nations report which found that the UK government was responsible for ‘grave and systematic violations of the rights of disabled people in the UK’³. The majority of the violations cited involved the UK government’s cuts to disability benefits and its relentless drive to get disabled people into work and ensure that benefits were not a so-called ‘lifestyle choice’⁴. The UN reiterated its findings in 2017, and Theresia Degener, the head of the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) stated that the government’s ‘fitness to work’ tests ‘totally neglected the vulnerable situation people with disabilities find themselves in’⁵.

Liz Crow in her wheelchair dressed as a Nazi

Liz Crow’s Resistance was motivated in part by similar concerns:

"For disabled people, we find ourselves in the midst of a new system of benefits that has been charged with contributing to the deaths of thirty-two disabled people every week, a tabloid press campaign that is portraying disabled people as fraudsters and scroungers … an associated hardening of public attitudes towards disabled people, and a chilling rise in hate crime. Within these events are knife-edge judgments of our place in the world, a step away from whether we even deserve to exist at all."⁶

Despite these similarities, Crow and Bush take very different approaches to the question of the Nazi persecution of disabled people. Crow tackles it directly, whilst Bush alludes to it, and explores how cavalier dismissals of the value of life may come to develop, and then to become virtually unquestioned ‘facts’. Crow’s installation comprises two short films – one scripted by Crow herself, and telling the story of Elise Blick, a character inspired by an account given by Hugh Gregory Gallagher in By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians, and the Licence to Kill in the Third Reich, his 1990 book about the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme.

Elise makes her bid for freedom © Roaring Girl Productions

Gallagher had mentioned a woman whom he referred to as ‘EB’, a patient at an institution in Nazi Germany, who was employed there as a cleaner. Gallagher wrote that ‘EB’ made a bid for escape, going around rather than inside the bus which had arrived to take her to her death.⁷ By the time of her posthumous arrival in Liz Crow’s Resistance, ‘EB’ had morphed into the pivotal character of Elise Blick. As Crow shows, the character’s surname was chosen quite deliberately: 

"EB became Elise Blick, her last name translated from the German for to look, to see. Elise does not speak and the staff assume she does not comprehend, but she watches as the buses filled with patients leave and return empty."⁸

The Importance of Names.

‘Resistance’ is a fictional film, but, being inspired by real events, it offers an interpretation which is radically different from that to be found in the overwhelming majority of history books about the Third Reich. In doing so, it further answers Paul van Trigt's question about whether the investigation of historical violence against disabled people can lead to the emancipation of disabled people.

Elise and her broom outside the institution © Roaring Girl Productions

Crow’s film does – taking its cue from Gallagher’s By Trust Betrayed, it brings the possibility of disabled resistance to a much wider audience, and – crucially – shows disabled people valuing their lives and wanting them to continue. Crow further took the decision to name all the disabled characters in Resistance, while leaving the institution staff anonymous – a further act of reclamation, showing that the people who were killed are more worthy of remembrance, than those who facilitated their murder.

Frontcover of Bush’s novel CULL

Names are also of importance in Tanvir Bush’s novel CULL. Bush includes various references to the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme and to the ideas and persons which helped to facilitate it. Two of her characters – a celebrated physician and his daughter, a rising politician – have the surname Binding. This is a reference to Karl Binding, who, with his colleague Alfred Hoche, wrote Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens (The Granting of Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life), published in Leipzig in 1920. Bush describes this tract as ‘the blueprint for the Aktion T-4 Plan and the staunch defence of many of the doctors.’⁹ There is also an incidental character called Dr Julian Hallywooden, whose unusual surname came about because it refers to Julius Hallervorden, the German neuroscientist whose glittering research career was not impeded by his having participated in the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme.  Bush states that her aim in doing this was not to test her reader’s historical knowledge, but that "readers who made the connections might receive a jolt of pleasure, like finding a key clue to a crossword"¹⁰. 

The grey ‘murder-box’ bus © Roaring Girl Productions

Bush’s image of finding a key clue in a crossword is apposite, but I wonder if instead of receiving a jolt of pleasure, a reader might be motivated to think more deeply about why Bush had chosen to allude to persons instrumental in the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme. The decision was clearly taken to make a point. The same is true of the grey Community Transport ambulance which makes its first appearance at the beginning of the novel, and which Bush writes is "based on the very ones in Germany that had picked up the disabled children and adults for euthanasia … in the 1930s"¹¹.

That Bush’s novel is set in modern-day Britain, but alludes to the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme, is particularly striking, showing that there are things for every society – not just Germany – to consider. In fact, both Bush and Crow make this explicit. Bush’s novel shows how policies which make life avoidably harder for disabled people facilitate lack of understanding, foster the growth of stereotypes and hate crime, and allow a cavalier attitude towards the value of disabled lives. The novel also shows that these attitudes would be much harder to sustain without a complicit media, and of functionaries who either actively believe that people from targeted groups are merely representatives of types, or who simply do as they are told without question.¹²

Bush’s novel, then, advocates constant vigilance, and an awareness that seemingly small violations can often be part of something bigger. By contrast, Crow emphasises the need to create a society which is so strongly united that attempts to sow division are doomed to failure. The companion film to her ‘Resistance’ drama begins with two of the actors from the film discussing what visiting the death centres and portraying victims of the ‘euthanasia’ programme meant for them as disabled people. Then it moves on to

"A soundtrack of voices, disabled and not, talking about their experiences of discrimination … they speak of practical and emotional cost, but also describe the elation of being included. Audiences glimpse a starting-point for making that inclusion a reality and are shown the possibility of their own role in this."¹³

The differing approaches of these two works, and the different solutions they offer, makes the idea of seeing them as companion pieces, with each illuminating aspects of the other, attractive. They also demonstrate beyond doubt that the subject of the Nazi persecution of disabled people is one to which is still relevant, and also one to which disabled people are continuing to bring new and important insights.

Emmeline Burdett (emmelineburdett@gmail.com) is an independent researcher.

___________________

^{[1] I would like to thank Pieter Verstraete for his comments on a previous version of this post.
[2] Tanvir Naomi Bush, unpublished article explaining the genesis of CULL, 1.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Quoted in ibid, 2.
[6] Liz Crow, ‘Resistance: The Art of Change’, www.roaring-girl.com/ wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Resistance-The-Art-of-Change.pdf , 4.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid,14
[9] Bush, 5.
[10] Ibid, 7.
[11] Ibid, 8.
[12] Ibid, 4.
[13] Crow, ‘Resistance: The Art of Change’, www.roaring-girl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Resistance-The-Art-of-Change.pdf.}

Recommended Citation:
Emmeline Burdett (2018): Reclaiming Our History? Creative Responses to the Nazi Persecution of Disabled People, Part II. In: Public Disability History 3 (2018) 15.

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Emancipation and violence against people with disabilities in the past

By Paul van Trigt¹

In a recent tweet a psychologist was asking professionals and families to help clients with an intellectual disability to report to the committee of the Dutch government that investigates violence against youth in the postwar period.² The person that drew my attention to this tweet was critical: should the psychologist not ask the committee to communicate in a more effective and accessible way? And do people with intellectual disabilities really need help to report? This example shows in a nutshell the problematic position of persons with disabilities in the current investigation of violence against youth with a disability in the postwar Netherlands: the research seems – at least partly - to happen ‘about us, without us’. In this blog, I do not want to evaluate the still ongoing Dutch research, but to share some general considerations that transcend the Dutch case and that are hopefully relevant when it comes to dealing with the growing attention nowadays for violence against marginalized groups including people with disabilities in the past.

I want to take my starting point in what Cathy Kudlick wrote a couple of years ago, namely that disability history ‘will always come back to two core political ideas, both rooted in the disability rights movement: a need to challenge the prevailing assumptions about disability, and the importance of granting people with disabilities historical agency’. Kudlick’s statement challenges the current approach to violence against and abuse of people with disabilities in the past with the argument, that research about violence does not automatically undermine prevailing assumptions about disability or takes the voice of people with disabilities seriously. The following question can therefore be asked: does historical research of violence serve the emancipation of people with disabilities? I have no clear-cut answer to the question, but I think the following issues have to be considered.

Recently, 'broeder Tuck' (translated brother Tuck, alias Jeroen Zwart) passed away. As a disability activist he was always dressed like a monk, referring to the history of religious care for people with disabilities. With his nickname he toke the name of a monk that together with Robin Hood stood up for the poor. Therefore he was an excellent example of how disability activism can be related to the past without reinforcing prevailing assumptions about disability (Copyright Jan Troost)

 

In the first place, the attention to violence against people with disabilities in the last decades is part of a broader interest in violence against marginalized groups in the past. Historians like François Hartog increasingly tend to interpret this new interest in violent pasts as part of what they call a ‘new time regime’. The hypothesis is that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War marked the end of the so-called modern time regime in which present and past were seen in terms of the future. The new regime that became dominant since then, subordinates the past and future to the present: ‘while the future has lost much of its luminosity, the past has more and more invaded our consciousness’. Especially ‘traumatic pasts’ like the history of slavery receive increasingly attention in (Western) societies and are approached with current standards like human rights, from postcolonial perspectives and from the viewpoint of ‘victims’.³ The new time regime is however not evitable. Whereas John Torpey argues that the changing time regime has replaced the ‘traditional rallying cry of historical militant labour – “don’t mourn, organize”’ by ‘organize to mourn’, Berber Bevernage has shown in the context of transitional justice that the future still can be leading: ‘the political function of the truth commission is first and foremost directed at managing a break with the past’. Torpey is thus critical about the disappearing visions of the future, but Bevernage asks if the vision of the future of truth commissions and their ‘turn to history in order to pacify the past may not also come at the cost of memory and justice’.⁴ So, I would suggest that it is not self-evident that the investigations as initiated by the government serve the emancipation of people with disabilities and that, at least, in every specific context reflection on this by different stakeholders is needed.

Related to that, my second consideration is in particular directed to historians: their professional practice did namely not necessarily serve the victims or survivors. Historians (including myself) namely unconsciously often follow a modern time regime in which they see it as their task to ‘historicize’, to recognize the characteristics of every era and to make distinctions between era’s and consequently between the present and the past. As argued by Bevernage, these distinctions are not set in stone and object of debate and negotiation. When it comes to historical injustice, historicizing can be helpful but also dangerous: it can be misused to close the past too early and even to legitimize impunity.⁵ Historians have to be aware of this. Moreover, scientific-historical research usually presumes a distance between the historian in the present and his object in the past. Piet de Rooy has pointed out in his response to the research report about abuse in the Dutch Catholic institutions, that historical research should be directed by analysis, not by condemnation. Therefore one could ask if historians are capable of giving recognition, let alone ‘full satisfaction to traumatised victims’?⁶

Brother Tuck was involved in recent disability protests in the Netherlands, directed against austerity measures of the Dutch government and aimed at implementation of the UNCRPD - to which his blue UN helmet referred. (Copyright Charlie Loos)

My third and last consideration is that research about violence in the past makes clear that the perspective of the survivors of violence, to put it kindly, not always is taken into account.⁷ Survivors were often not approached as ‘genuine partners in conversation’, as Henry Greenspan has argued for, but as passive victims.⁸ Here is a form of inequality at work, of which scholars today become increasingly aware - as can for example be illustrated by a quote of anthropologist Joel Robbens: ‘it has often been the suffering subject who replaced the savage one as a privileged object of our attention’.⁹ Research about (sexual) violence in institutions in the past, despite good intentions, runs the risk to (re)present people with disabilities only as suffering subjects, or even suffering objects. Therefore, the insights of (new) disability historians are more than ever needed to complicate the results of such research. Rosemary Garland-Thomson for instance, has developed a helpful ‘taxonomy of four primary visual rhetorics of disability’.¹⁰ She makes a distinction between wondrous, sentimental, exotic, and realistic images that complicates a restrictive terminology as being either positive or negative. In particular relevant seems the alternative and by Walter Benjamin inspired conceptualization of time as proposed by Verstraete, who has argued that disability history cannot be understood as ‘a steady and linear progression’: ‘even the best intended solutions might have some less desirable side-effects that were not foreseen’.¹¹ This sounds perhaps as a pessimistic note to end with, but that is not necessarily the case. In this understanding of time is not only recognized that human possibilities are limited, but also that bad things can turn to the better. In my current research, consisting of making a genealogy of the CRPD, I see a lot of paternalistic humanitarianism in the disability policies at the UN level, but in the course of time people with disabilities became more and more subjects and agents of international law. So, hopefully the ‘storm blowing from paradise’ (Benjamin) makes the current attention to disabled pasts into something that serves the emancipation of people with disabilities in present and future.

About the author:
Paul van Trigt is postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-project Rethinking Disability: the Impact of the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) in Global Perspective at the Institute of History, Leiden University (www.rethinkingdisability.net). He has published about the modern history of the welfare state, human rights, disability and religion. His monograph Blind in een gidsland (Blind in a guiding country) was published in 2013, he also edited and contributed to a special issue of the journal Social Inclusion about disability and ‘being human’ (https://www.cogitatiopress.com/socialinclusion/issue/view/54).

References:
¹ I want to thank the editors and Corrie Tijsseling for their comments on an earlier version of the blog text. ^↩
2 See for information about the Dutch investigations: https://www.commissiegeweldjeugdzorg.nl ^↩
3 Aleida Assmann, ‘Transformations of the Modern Time Regime’, in: Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking up time: negotiating the borders between present, past and future (Göttingen 2013) 39-56: 41. Digital available here: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/36b1/ac544a01bae663f57d9d16087fd7a6e9f74c.pdf ^↩
4 Berber Bevernage, ‘Writing the Past Out of the Present: History and the Politics of Time in Transitional Justice’, History Workshop Journal 69 (2010) 111-131: 118 and 125. ^↩
5 Bevernage, ‘”Always historicize.” Over de ethische en politieke implicaties van een “historische” houding in de context van waarheids- en historische commissies’, Groniek 194 (2013) 17-36. Digital available here: https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/5765496/file/5910517.pdf ^↩
6 Piet de Rooy, ‘Verklaren en veroordelen. Enige opmerkingen over recent onderzoek naar seksueel misbruik’, BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review 129, 1 (2014) 77-87. Digital available: https://www.bmgn-lchr.nl/articles/abstract/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.9447 ^↩
7 Henry Greenspan, ‘Afterword’, in: Steven High (ed.), Beyond Testimony and Trauma. Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence (Vancouver Toronto 2015) 351-356: 351. ^↩
8 Quoted by Sten High, ‘Introduction’, in: idem, Beyond Testimony, 3-28: 15. ^↩
9 Joel Robbins, ‘Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (2013) 447-462: 450. ^↩
10 Rosemary Garland-Thomson, ‘The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography’, in: Sharon L. Snyder (ed.) Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (New York 2002) 56-75. Digital available here: http://thowe.pbworks.com/f/politics.of.staring.pdf ^↩
11 Pieter Verstraete, In the shadow of disability. Reconnecting History, Identity and Politics (Opladen Berlin Toronto 2012) 52-54. Cf. Sebastian Barsch, Anne Klein and Pieter Verstraete, ‘The need for imperfection. Disability histories in Europe’, in: idem (eds.), The imperfect Historian. Disability Histories in Europe (Frankfurt am Main 2013) 7-13. ^↩

Recommended Citation:
Paul van Trigt (2018): Emancipation and violence against people with disabilities in the past. In: Public Disability History 3 (2018) 5.

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#CRIPTHEVOTE and Beyond

by Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp
Department of Anthropology & Center for Disability Studies, New York University

In the spirit of this blog’s dedication to “disability histories for the present,” we use this post to reflect on the future of disability publics in the United States, more than a quarter century after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, and in the wake of the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the presidency. As groundbreaking legislation, the ADA was necessary but not sufficient to undergird the actual transformations required for people with disabilities to be fully recognized as American citizens, whether in schools, movie theaters, on the internet, or in the voting booth.

In a 2016 essay inaugurating Disability, a series of weekly essays in The New York Times written by and about people living with disabilities, scholar-activist Rosemarie Garland Thomson wrote about the expansion in numbers and recognition of people with disabilities, pointing out that “disability is everywhere once you start noticing it.”

The National Organization on Disability says there are 56 million disabled people. Indeed, people with disabilities are the largest minority group in the United States, and as new disability categories such as neurodiversity, psychiatric disabilities, disabilities of aging and learning disabilities emerge and grow, so does that percentage.

(Garland-Thomson 2016, p. SR1)

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