Alland / Barokka / Sluman Stairs and Whispers

D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-911027-30-0
Verlag: Nine Arches Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 264 Seiten

Sandra Alland, Khairani Barokka and Daniel Sluman co-edit Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back, a ground-breaking anthology examining the poetics of disabled and D/deaf cultures. With contributions that span Vispo to Surrealism, and range from hard-hitting political commentary to intimate lyrical pieces - these poets refuse to perform or inspire according to tired old narratives. Five years after the seminal U.S. anthology, Beauty is a Verb, Nine Arches Press brings you its exciting UK progeny: Stairs and Whispers. The first of its kind and packed with fierce poetry, essays, photos and links to accessible online videos, this book showcases a diversity of styles, opinions, and survival strategies for a world that often works to shut us down.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Alland, Sandra

Barokka, Khairani

Sluman, Daniel

Leseproben

Nothing About Us Without Us, No One Left Behind

Sandra Alland

Writing *to* disabled people has all sorts of implications, not just topic and diction but orientation, the things you don’t explain but just let float out there. When I consciously undertook writing poems with a crip audience in mind, I let go of the myth of universality.

– Jim Ferris, Poetry magazine, 2014

We cannot comprehend ableism without grasping its interrelations with heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism. Each system benefits from extracting profits and status from the subjugated ‘other’.

– Patty Berne, Skin, Tooth, and Bone – The Basis of Movement is Our People: A Disability Justice Primer, Sins Invalid, 2016

Writing to Disabled, Crip and/or D/deaf Communities

In 2014, I was approached by Markie Burnhope, Daniel Sluman and Nine Arches editor, Jane Commane, to be co-editor of an anthology of disabled and D/deaf poets. Markie, Daniel and I began a beautiful conversation about what it means to be a disabled writer, and what disability poetics is and isn’t, and hasn’t yet become. Sadly, Markie left the editorial team because of health issues, but she has remained a vital part of the project. In 2016, Daniel and I continued and reshaped our conversations with a brilliant new co-editor, Khairani Barokka. Together we three selected poems and moulded them into a book.

From the get-go it was clear that many non-disabled people would immediately frame ‘disability’ as something specific in their minds, and that even some disabled people might have internalised non-disabled and hearing ideas about disabled and D/deaf identities, experiences, cultures – and poetry.

We made it clear in our call-out that the book was not for writing about our communities, but writing by our communities. The non-disabled people who objected to this and wanted to be published were few, but yes, it happened, and yes, those people felt entitled to proclaim their right to our spaces and stories. Dismantling ableism and privilege is a long process indeed.

In the call-out, written by Markie, Daniel and me, we attempted to define disability as broadly as possible, not based on narrow assumptions and medicalised notions of ‘impairment’, and moving towards intersectional ideas of disability justice in a UK1 framework:

We plan to draw on the context of anti-Atos/Welfare Reform and NHS privatisation activism, whose leading lights (particularly on online social networks) have been women, including trans women, queer women and/or women of colour – a clear antithesis to the systemic norm. In both poetry and prose we plan to explore, creatively and critically, other bodily identities and oppressions that intersect with disability to create what poet and activist Eli Clare called ‘marked bodies’. Racialised bodies, gender non-conforming bodies, bodies ‘marked’ by class or religion.

As editors we are committed to the social model of disability (with contributions from other radical socio-political models), which means we are casting a wide net in our call for poets who self-identify as disabled, people with disabilities, crip, D/deaf, or any variation thereof, and who may consider their impairments and/or their disabled or D/deaf identity a key part of their thematic, conceptual and aesthetic practice… We also aim to include D/deaf writers/performers who do not identify as disabled…

I was over the moon at the possibility of helping bring into the (UK) world something as important as a collected work by disabled and D/deaf poets; in fact it made me a bit weepy. Why? Because I know thousands of brilliant, innovative and talented disabled, D/deaf and/or crip writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians and performers – but most non-disabled people would struggle to name one of them.

At this moment in time (and place), writers and performers from our communities are particularly absent from the main stage. The primary reason is the same old reason, and overlaps with the reasons all marginalised people are absent – people who are trans, gender diverse, black, racialised, queer, working class and/or from other marginalised groups are all familiar with being left out of the publishing, performance and promotion of literature. It’s plain old oppression in a white supremacist, classist, heterosexist, cissexist, (trans)misogynist and ableist world.

Non-disabled people are generally not interested in our stories, unless of course they’re telling them. Unless our bodies and minds are performing the struggle of the noble, pitiable crip, or the deformed villain whose evil manifests itself in disability, or the supercrip who overcomes their disability to attain a place in the ‘normal’ world (often by engaging in a cis/hetero- and romance-normative relationship). Unless we act as foils for the development of a non-disabled character. Unless we are so very grateful.

And sometimes, unless we are otherwise acceptable as white and middle class.

Our absence as disabled and D/deaf people in some ways also has to do with writing communities in the United Kingdom being arguably somewhat behind the United States2 in terms of organising around disability poetics. And it has to do with the recent prominence of a specific kind of spoken word and performance poetry – and a neoliberal and capitalist focus on writers being slick and attractive packages who will sell books on tour.

If you search online about how to submit a manuscript to publishers or agents, you’ll find that even smaller and independent publishers are now citing the ability to tour and read your work aloud (and they mean with flair) as requirements of submitting a book. This ableist idea of ‘writing’ is now embedded in publishing because it’s also embedded in funding, controlled by arts councils, charities and others who experience (and sometimes exert) more and more pressure to promote neoliberal tourism and agendas for international trade and profit.

Difficulties in finding publishers and performance opportunities are multiplied for disabled or D/deaf poets who are, for example, also indigenous, Muslim, intersex, non-binary, bisexual, subjected to fattism or sizeism, older, working poor and/or migrants and asylum seekers not from white-majority English-speaking colonies and ex-colonies. Part of the promotion of ‘good literature’ at home and abroad depends on tropes of the UK being a democratic, freedom-loving place, and many people from marginalised communities do not tell this story.

Writing by disabled and D/deaf people is foundational to this anthology, but also writing to – there is resistance and strength in refusing to seek the normative world’s approval, in creating our own stories in our own ways, and in telling them to each other in our own spaces (whether that be in person, in print, or online). In many cases and historically, our disabled and D/deaf co-conspirators might have been the only ones listening, watching, reading or touching us. They are the ones who have given us value. They are our main concern.

When you can’t even get into the room, how do you participate? And then the question eventually becomes, do you want to participate in that particular room – or do you prefer to make a new room, and let others come to you on your terms?

Access: Leave No One Behind

But let’s start with that room – because, to be frank, one cannot survive on love alone, and we often need access to that room to survive.

Most poetry readings are held in inaccessible spaces; there’s no step-free entrance to the building, the reading or slam is in the basement, there’s no British Sign Language interpreting or captions offered, and/or there are no single and accessible gender-neutral toilets. Despite these being the most basic of access requirements, most non-disabled people who lead reading series or festivals still don’t commit to providing them. As a writer seeking to be published, you’re generally required to read or perform publicly – but you can’t.

The barriers to disabled and D/deaf poets participating in reading and publishing go far beyond the wheelchair-accessible building. Fewer even than accessible spaces for audiences are accessible stages; it seems not to occur to most venues and organisers that a disabled person might be behind the mic. Other considerations include: freedom from loud and distracting background noise and fluorescent or flashing lights; hearing loops, speech-to-text, lip-speaking and deaf-blind interpreting; a location that can be reached by affordable and accessible public transit; and provision of large print, Braille, audio description, easy English, comfortable chairs, quiet space outside of the main reading space, a scent-free environment, and relaxed performances.

And then there’s the being invited in the first place. Because the main barrier tends to be in the imagination, in the fact that most non-disabled and hearing people don’t even think about reading, watching or listening to disabled and D/deaf writers. They don’t imagine our existence at all, except perhaps as bad metaphors for their own work.

The spoken word scene, for example, often demands that writers do not read from the page;...