Unit 8Section 1 Exercise 3The Culture of Disability: Looking

Kevin Connolly is a 22-year-old born without legs. http://www.kevinmichaelconnolly.com/ In a recent photographic  exhibit, he showed photos selected from over 32,000 he had taken during a world tour, traveling with his torso resting on a skateboard. The photos are all of people looking, staring or sneaking peeks at him. The collection is a powerful example of the visual ‘otherness’ disability confers, and that the arresting effect of the disabled body has a greater impact on others, in some ways, than on the affected person’s self. Physicians are not exempt from this sort of shock, nor on a lesser scale, from the discomfort and biases. To see oneself looking, as Connolly’s exhibit encourages, is a first step towards self-awareness. As Szymborka’s poem shows, self-consciousness is necessary because the usual assumptions about basic cultural acts such as communicating and language use do not hold in the setting of disability.

But one caveat: self-consciousness is also awkward and inhibiting. Thus other steps include engaging in dialogue with disabled persons to learn from them about their experiences and their needs. The materials you have come across so far in this exercise explore some of this self-consciousness in both the positive and awkward senses, with both contributing to an awareness of cultural difference. Keep the double meaning of self-consciousness in mind as you proceed through the remainder of Exercise 1.

The Kindness of the Blind, by Wislava Szymborska (Unit 3 Revisited)

A poet is reading to the blind.
He did not suspect it was so hard.
His voice is breaking.
His hands are shaking.
He feels that here each sentence
is put to the test of the dark.
It will have to fend for itself,
without the lights or colors.
A perilous adventure
for the stars in his poems,
for the dawn, the rainbow, the clouds, neon lights, the moon,
for the fish until now so silver under water,
and the hawk so silently in the sky.
He is reading—for it is too late to stop—
of a boy in a jacket yellow in the green meadow,
of red rooftops easy to spot in the valley,
the restless numbers on the players’ shirts,
and a nude stranger in the door cracked open.
He would like to pass over—though it’s not an option—
all those saints on the cathedral’s ceiling,
that farewell wave from the train window,
the microscope lens, ray of light in the gem,
video screens, and mirrors, and the album with faces.
Yet great is the kindness of the blind,
great their compassion and generosity.
They listen, smile and clap.
One of them even approaches
with a book held topsy-turvy
to ask for an invisible autograph.

Study Questions

1. What does this poem say about the assumptions we make? Where do these assumptions reside? In other words, what prevents us from being aware of them?

2. What does the title mean? In the setting of disability, who takes care of whom? What can we learn from this poem to improve communication with such patients?