Poetry Monday: Eli Clare

Eli Clare has a book of poetry coming out through Homofactus Press. The Marrow's Telling: Words in Motion. Here's testimonials on the new book from some other talented people, plus info on ordering and an excerpt from a poem in the collection.

Back in April, I linked to a speech Clare gave about disability rights and transgender issues. This is one of the amazing poems included in that speech to illustrate the points made:

HOW TO TALK TO A NEW LOVER ABOUT CEREBRAL PALSY
by Eli Clare

Tell her: Complete strangers
have patted my head, kissed
my cheek, called me courageous.

Tell this story more than once, ask
her to hold you, rock you
against her body, breast to back,

her arms curving round, only
you flinch unchosen, right arm trembles.
Don’t use the word spastic.

In Europe after centuries
of death by exposure
and drowning,
they banished us
to the streets.

Let her feel the tension burn down your arms,
tremors jump. Take it slow: when she asks
about the difference between CP and MS,

refrain from handing her an encyclopedia.
If you leave, know that you will ache.
Resist the urge to ignore your body. Tell her:

They taunted me retard, monkey,
defect. The words sank into my body.
The rocks and fists left bruises.

Gimps and crips, caps
in hand, we still
wander the streets but now
the options abound: telethons,
nursing homes, welfare lines.

Transgenderism and disability rights

Found via Trinity at The Strangest Alchemy, this post by Eli Clare, which is a transcript of Eli's keynote speech at the FORGE Forward Conference. Read it for the gorgeous poetry. Or the connections Eli's made between transgenderism and the disability rights movement.

Eli begins:

All my life as a genderqueer crip, I have puzzled my way through bodily difference, struggling with my own shame and love, other people’s pity and hatred. Yesterday I helped facilitate the Disability Gathering here at the conference. We spent the day, disabled people and our allies telling stories, laughing, crying, and sitting quiet. It reminded me of the incredible importance of community, how bodily difference means one thing in isolation and quite another when we come together, finding ourselves reflected in each other’s stories.

My first experience of queerness—of bodily difference—centered, not upon sexuality or gender, but upon disability. Early on I understood that my body was irrevocably different from my neighbors, classmates, playmates, siblings: shaky, off balance, speech hard to understand, a body that moved slow, wrists cocked at odd angles, muscles knotted with tremors. But really, I am telling a kind of lie, a half truth. Irrevocably different would have meant one thing. Bad, wrong, broken, in need of repair meant quite another. I heard these every day as my classmates called retard, monkey, defect, as nearly everyone I met gawked at me, as my parents grew impatient with my clumsiness. Irrevocably different would have been easy compared to this. I stored the taunting, gawking, isolation in my bones; they became the marrow, my first experience of bodily difference.

.... But really I want to delve beyond the rhetoric we often don’t pay attention to. Delve into the myriad of lived bodily differences here in this room tonight and think hard about three lessons I’ve learned from the disability rights movement. The first is about naming, the second, about coming out and disclosure, the third, about living in our familiar, ordinary bodies.

I could try and summarize what he talks about, or explain how brilliantly he manages to explain what has been a vague unarticulated barrier to my own fuller understanding of transgenderism, but I really need to think on it for awhile. I will say this much: the connections Eli makes between the lived bodily experiences of disability and transgenderism show implicitly why anti-trans hate is hating on us all.

Eyes on whose prize, part 2

It was during the transphobia/delink Twisty debates across feminist bloglandia last December that Kactus at Superbabymama happened to note that she'd added this blog and several others to her blogroll. In the comment discussion that followed, an anonymous commenter noted with some resignation that The Gimp Parade links to Heart at Women's Space/Margins, the radical feminist blogging community (if there is one) for several of the women who expressed such hateful transphobia on that ugly I Blame the Patriarchy thread.

My blogroll has since erased itself and I've been slowly adding back what I can remember, but at that time I tried to express whatever strategy it is I've employed for organizing my blogroll. This wouldn't be so important, except that I consider my blogroll the best, most exciting part of this blog because when I began this site in 2004 there weren't so many disability rights bloggers around. Check it out now -- the gimp blog section is joyfully unwieldy.

Here's that commentary on my blogrolling strategy:

I currently have links to both IBTP and Heart's blog, though I've thought many times in the past few months about deleting the link to Twisty. The fact that I just haven't taken the time to tweeze through my blogroll in a long time, despite adding new links I'm excited about, is one reason Twisty is still there.

Another reason she remains linked at my blog sidebar is because my blogrolling policy in so fuzzy and arbitrary in many ways already: it's divided into the crips and the nondisabled, national magazines about disability are mixed in with very small-audience disabled bloggers, Go Fug Yourself is right there in the list with Women's Space.

A few disability bloggers I seriously disagree with are listed simply because disability rights discussions of any kind and disabled bloggers are, frankly, hard to find, not sexy enough to be popular and we need to network and learn from our diverse experiences as disabled folks, if we can.

The final reason Twisty is still blogrolled is because of her recurring use of "fucktard" and some periodic objections to it in comments when she does use it. It's not news to me that all feminists are not my friends, with regard to disability politics, and I don't want to be oblivious of discussions that concern my interests. I have a hard time separating the outright offensive from the clueless, when both may be a part of the feminist movement that I, too, consider myself connected too. Ignorance on disability as it relates to feminism (or even generally) is just too heartbreakingly common. I confess I don't know where to draw the blogrolling line.

Heart's blog stays on my blogroll. I don't find her to be particularly knowledgeable about disability rights and politics, but in many other ways I believe her to be a great resource and committed to a level of diversity found on few white, nondisabled feminist blogs.

I don't mean any of the above to excuse the hate spewed on trans folk in the comments at IBTP. I would like to point out though, that despite Twisty's smart-ass comment in her own out-of-control thread, it's entirely possible that her recent health issues kept her offline for a few days and she didn't want to invoke another round of tiresome sympathy by mentioning it. Instead of being the sad cancer patient, she was "controversial" and mean-spirited instead. I believe that's within the realm of behavior she might display. Just sayin'.

Regarding trans hate and radical feminism specifically, I've been trying to connect the dots to ableism and write about it for quite a while now, but haven't been able to put what I know is part of the same issue of feminism, essentialism, bodily truths, and social constructionism together from a disability perspective just yet. I'm so glad Brownfemipower mentioned disabled women in her discussion if this. It is connected.

Aside from the obnoxious use of "tweeze" and the clearly inaccurate characterization of Women's Space being "committed to a level of diversity found on few white, nondisabled feminist blogs" I stand by my rationale. It'd be more accurate to say that Women's Space touches on diverse issues of difference concerning women more regularly than many other feminist spaces, but that's not the same as full commitment, particularly if you include the atmosphere created by regular participants over there.

Anonymous' response to me:

I used to read your blog every post. It hurt me so much though when I finally got around to exploring your site more. For me it's like, I don't know why you've linked to so-and-so. Is it because that's what you truly feel? Are you just trying to provide a wide variety of viewpoints? I don't know.

I do know it scares the hell out of me when I see Margins or Questioning Transgender or Genderville or some other hate site. Even if it's not a direct link.

I'm sure you can somewhat sympathize because ableist sites are just a dime a dozen because so few people even realize it exists. Otherwise good sites, too. Nice folk. Just not aware.

I just want you to know that I know you're doing good work. You've helped me out more than once. But I just can't visit your site anymore because I'm afraid. That's my issue. I'm oversensitive.

Well, Anonymous ain't oversensitive, and blogroll strategy aside, this has really made me think hard since then about my reactions to hate speech, generally, and my disposition against the ableism I encounter.

At the time I responded with this:

The hatred and fear people have about disability and disabled folks is most often expressed through silence or invisibility. In public policy it has historically been through institutionalizing disabled people and making us invisible, but the average person/blogger/commenter simply ignores us instead of raging out loud as is done with hate speech and transphobia.

As a blogroll owner, how do I delink to protest hatred or fear of people like myself if it's expressed by ignoring disabled issues and people? If the common factor of ignorance and cluelessness represents itself as silence too, who do I decide to give up on, in terms of disability issues? And since I do believe transphobia is related to fear and hatred of disabled folks, I don't imagine that where one is expressed the other doesn't also exist. The more I learn, the more I'm sure this is true.

If I made the practice of discounting disabled people's opinions a criteria for who is delinked from my site, I'd have had to remove several of my favorite mainstream feminist spaces in these weeks since Ashley X's story has hit international news. Even if I limited my delisting to blogs where parents of disabled children who disagree with the Ashley Treatment were dismissed out-of-hand, there'd be significant changes.

But back to what's been weighing on me about my own reactions to transphobia, ableism, racism, and other obvious signs of hatred of difference.

What I'd call my formative years as a person with a disability and the need for a wheelchair began in 1983 when I was 15. The Americans with Disabilities Act wasn't passed until 1990, so as I learned about disability in America, I learned that I could not ever count on physical access to public places. The Rehab Act of 1973 was meant to create access in government buildings, but as a high schooler I learned that I could never take it for granted that the pizza joint, movie theater, concert hall, museum, or restaurant my family or friends and I headed to on any given day would actually be a place I could enter. If I could enter, there was still the real likelihood that the outing would end abruptly when I needed to pee and could not access the public restrooms.

Spontaneity increased the likelihood that right there at the front door of the inaccessible building we'd anticipated entering, I and whomever I was with would have to turn away and find someplace else we could go. Calling ahead to ask about accessibility rarely changed the outcome, since nondisabled workers frequently failed to remember some stairs or that the restroom door was just 19 inches wide and in the basement anyway. Sometimes I could be carried inside. Sometimes we could use the kitchen entrance. In some movie theaters lacking dedicated places for wheelchair users to park, I could wedge in next to the smelly garbage can. Once at a Georgetown bar, my friends and I walked the dark and gummy back alley to a delivery ramp that led directly into the cozy back room but the ramp was at a 45-degree slant requiring several of my friends to push my scooter while I accelerated, so I arrived amongst the dinner tables like a bullet shot out of a gun. I'd been in the front of the bar -- an entryway with tables and too-high stools -- and basically been told to leave and try the back door.

When I wasn't alone, there was often some way to make it all work, but only rarely did I ever go anywhere that the building just allowed me in. And there's no immediate recourse to structural inaccessibility. No amount of argument with the manager widens the bathroom stall door or eliminates the need for an elevator. No phonecall or letter made the next day alleviates the problem, either. Pre-ADA, no one was compelled to fix access anyway. They could legally shrug and turn away -- and some did.

There were occasions when the event we'd hoped to attend was prepaid, important, or too exciting for everyone with me to miss, and so I went home or waited somewhere alone while others climbed the stairs without me. I did and do have dedicated friends. My best friend in high school once held me piggy-back through an entire concert so that I could see the band instead of sitting in my chair looking at other people's butts. My brother and father carried me more than once into the melee of the Indianapolis 500, blocks away from our car and up into the bleachers without my wheelchair. Schoolmates carried me on and off the commuter train for the history class fieldtrip into Chicago to see Brian Dennehy perform the play Galileo.

I had a happy and remarkably integrated adolescence because of the love and loyalty of the people around me, but that level of daily exclusion, that impenetrable kind of exclusion that is only fixed with sledgehammers and new elevators IF someone who owned the building decided someday to bother (not on my account, and not when I was waiting at the door) did its part to shape who I am and how I react to discrimination and disregard. I learned emotional ambivalence, the skill of being water off the duck's back, so that I could meet this isolating uncertainty every day.

It's been my defense mechanism, to shrug and say, "oh well." It's sometimes been accompanied by activism and calls demanding access, but mostly only after returning home in defeat. I don't know how other people with disabilities have coped. I don't know how people of color during Jim Crow handled their rage about the back of the bus and the separate drinking fountains, though there is something to be said for being able to get on the bus. I do know something of how women handle the rampant sexism in our culture. These are all relatively quiet violences to the soul.

When the hatred is clearly spoken or made physical, those are different more urgent situations to address. And I'm unfamiliar with them. I spent my youth anesthetizing myself just enough to stand the daily less-violent silent injustices, and I think it means I tend to underact when the hatred is more open. Open hatred is rarely directed at me, because I'm straight, white, upper-middle-class background, educated, and because ableism usually looks different than the racism or transphobia that leads to sudden violence and death. Which isn't to say that the nondisabled person who states, "I'd rather be dead than live like you do," isn't speaking hate -- but almost nobody calls it that and we've all been taught that such a statement is personal preference rather than code for "your life isn't worth as much as mine."

I think my reactions to hatred have sometimes puzzled my friends, the radical feminists ready for a fight, the women of color, lesbian, gay and transgender folk who live with their families under threat of much quicker physical violence than I ever have. I see that and know I need to change and join the greater fight for them and myself a bit differently. How much has the ADA actually changed and how much of my defenses can I afford to dismantle? Does there really need to be a balance between helping myself stay sane and reacting appropriately? It shouldn't be that way.

Eyes on whose prize

I want to speak my own truth, and honor the words of others when they speak theirs. I want to be an ally, but I don't want to get in the way. I want to make the connections between my experiences and other people's in ways that broaden my understanding and avoid the narrowing of concerns into little camps of people struggling for recognition. I want to interject disability issues into conversations where they seem unspoken or invisible, and I don't want to feel selfish for doing it. And I want other people to do the same, so I can see where I've centered my own concerns and marginalized someone else's. I want to see how the whole big mess fits together.

Wanting so much usually keeps me rather quiet, outside of the small community of disability blogs that have become a comfort zone for me. And the comfort has been needed lately when the Ashley Treatment -- a story so fundamentally about attitudes on bodily and mental difference and disability -- continues to be debated everywhere. Only on sites dedicated to bodily and mental difference specifically, have I seen any real re-centering of that debate away from ableist tendencies to make allowances for behavior or words that dehumanize the less than normal body. I've felt myself turning in protectively to my dis or dis-cool friends: Penny, Connie and Steve, WCD, Amanda, I'mFunnyToo, David. . . .

It's no coincidence I feel safest among those who also have an obvious stake in whether or not physical or mental ability is used to determine how we treat people. It's no coincidence that our widely disparate experiences of disability arrive at the same political sympathies. And I suppose it's no coincidence that when we're discounted as irrelevant or fanatical about the topic at hand, we're all discounted together.

And today, Kevin at Slant Truth reminds me that this is how the system of oppressions works, and that it's happening elsewhere and isolation isn't the right response:

I will come out proud and say that I am supportive of the Trans community and will work from here on out for their full personhood. The hate I have seen lately is beyond my comprehension. I reject it all. Fuck you if you aren’t down.

Oh, I've more to say on this, now that I've resolved to begin. But I wanted to get this much out there now.