I am not optimistic. Or I am. I stagger in my head. I see young poets devoid of activist politics–for poets, read, artists in general. The trees surrounding the arts colony are dying from acid rain but the young writers talk about the fetishization of body parts–self-fetishization. I listen over pork chops, thinking, “you’re so perfect for the 80’s”; thinking, “the universities created you!”; feeling phlegmatic, pinched, tired beneath my shirt.
Who wouldn’t feel weary? The Associated Writing Programs conference–the big conclave of college and university creative writing faculty and students has almost nothing to do with human rights–don’t expect help in the world struggle from the MFA classes. Neo-liberalism creates and extends a cotton batting, a social insulation borne of anemic performance art. Ideas are better than action. This is the aestheticized anodyne to progressive politics. True political life hurts. Who would choose to hurt when thinking about hurt is so much easier? Let’s historicize hurt. Let’s make hurt as small as a speck in a rat’s retina.
On Facebook I see artists and university professors advertising sabbaticals, the imported cheeses they eat, a new outfit, a sled called “Rosebud”–you name it.
If activist optimism is to survive the issue is still “the streets”–the question is: can you be optimistic in the streets?
As a writer with a disability I’m optimistic because of the following street wise people, groups, and initiatives, offered here in no special order. These are some of the folk who refresh me, keep the nerve of optimism sufficiently tickled to continue firing:
ADAPT is a national grass-roots community that organizes disability rights activists to engage in nonviolent direct action, including civil disobedience, to assure the civil and human rights of people with disabilities to live in freedom. http://www.adapt.org
Ynestra King (author of Dangerous Intersections: Feminism, Population, and the Environment who wrote about the arrest of wheelchair users protesting the lack of accessible taxi cabs in New York:
What ensued was an hour’s standoff, as they tried to figure out what to do with us. While they had a small army’s worth of hardware, vehicles and personnel on the scene, as we waited it became apparent that the NYPD did not have a wheelchair-accessible paddy wagon! After a long standoff and more arrivals of higher-ups from the mayor’s staff and the police department — and lots of phone calls to parties unseen — a decision was made to commandeer Access-a-Ride vehicles to take us to jail. (Access-a-Ride is the problematic New York City paratransit service for people with disabilities, often referred to by users as “Acc-stress a Ride.”) To their credit, the regular drivers of the hijacked vehicles told the higher-ups that they “wanted no part of this,” and so supervisors on site for the mayor’s party were forced to step in and operate the lifts and drive us to the police precinct.
Simi Linton: activist, writer, film maker, community organizer, scholar, raconteur. See her video remarks here at the GIMP Project. Her new film Invitation to the Dance, co-produced with Christian Keller
Bill Peace (also known as “Bad Cripple”): anthropologist, bio-ethicist, disability rights activist, public intellectual, wheel chair athlete, and a cogent contrarian. His blog is a must read if you care about human rights. Read his piece entitled: “Oscar Pistorius, Helen Keller, and the Problem with Role Models”
Anne Finger whose books include Call me Ahab; Elegy for a Disease; Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy, and Birth. Anne is a writer who never forgets the human rights issues that surround each embodiment. Her essay “Walking to Abbsanta” in the Seneca Review’s issue on the “lyric body” is astonishing–a tribute to Antonio Gramsci. The essay reverberates, troubles, sweats, as the fascist view of the abnormal body remains today and still haunts the public nerve.
Ralph Savarese who is working on neuro-diversity and the poetics of autism, and who knocks down barriers for non-speaking people nearly every day.
This is such a partial list–there are so many more writers and scholars whose daily actions defy the abstracted and isolated world of post-post-neo-liberal containments. But this is a morning’s refreshment.
Planet of the Blind 